Design Thinking for Educators

Design Thinking Process Articles

This is an image that a muralist painted of my workshop on design thinking.
Design Thinking workshop from ECIS

Learn about the design process and improve your ability to lead with skill. Using almost any method for organisation management and initiative development will improve productivity, increase efficiency and set your school on a path to success. Once you have a grasp of the basic process for your professional work, take the next step and skill up. Gain new tools to go beyond how you organise so you can improve what you do.

Design Process / Design Thinking

  1. Define the Problem (Verification vs. Validation)
  2. Collect Information (Nodes and Links)
  3. Brainstorm and Analyze (Modeling or Ideation)
  4. Develop Solutions (Prototyping)
  5. Solicit Feedback (Closed Loop)
  6. Improve Your Design (Iterations, Iterations, Iterations!)

Skills for Educators who use Design Thinking

Time to skill up! The design process itself is wonderful and serves designers, many schools and businesses very well to organise their collective work. Yet, it is only the beginning of the story. After knowing how to use the design process as a school or as a team of teachers, we still need to learn about what to do. What we do to design a better school means we use skills and tools to take our students, classrooms, school community further.

  1. Hostile Design is in Our Schools
  2. Curb Cuts To Help More Than Just the Neediest Students
  3. A New Universal Design in Education