Elsevier

Thinking Skills and Creativity

Volume 26, December 2017, Pages 140-153
Thinking Skills and Creativity

Design thinking: A creative approach to educational problems of practice

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2017.10.001Get rights and content

Abstract

The problems educators face in professional practice are complex, varied, and difficult to address. These issues range across teaching and learning topics, to social or community issues, classroom climate issues and countless others. Such problems are multifaceted, cross-disciplinary, human-centered, and rarely solved through simple or linear solutions. Grappling with them requires educators to think creatively about educational problems of practice. But given the challenges and expectations facing teachers, creativity is often seen as leisure in teaching practice. While creativity is considered a core 21st century thinking skill, many people are hesitant to self-identify as “creative,” or are uncomfortable with intellectual risk-taking and open-endedness. We suggest that design thinking may provide an accessible structure for teachers and teacher educators to think creatively in dealing with educational problems of practice. We examine a qualitative study of a graduate teaching course framed around using design thinking to creatively approach educational problems of practice. We discuss thematic takeaways that teachers experienced in learning about and using design thinking skills to approach educational problems of practice. Implications suggest that design thinking skills may provide habits of mind that benefit teachers in creative problem navigating.

Introduction

The problems educators face in practice are complex, diverse, and often difficult to address. These issues range across teaching and learning topics–such as lesson and curriculum development, student motivation and engagement or disciplinary issues–to concerns around school climate, relationships with parents or community, and others. Such problems of practice are multifaceted, cross-disciplinary, human-centered, and rarely solved through simple, linear solutions (Bullough, 2012). Grappling with them requires that educators think creatively about educational problems of practice.

Creativity is a core 21st century thinking skill for students (Mishra & Mehta, 2017). We suggest that it is also vital for educators; yet given the challenges and expectations facing teachers, creativity is often seen as classroom leisure (Berliner & Glass, 2014; Root-Bernstein & Root-Bernstein, 2017). For many, creativity remains a sought-after, yet daunting and intimidating skill (Williams, 2002). In the face of creative thinking or problem solving, many people are reluctant to self-identify as “creative,” or are uncomfortable with intellectual risk-taking and open-endedness (Weisberg, 1986). Because the open-endedness of creative work is challenging, people need a flexible structure to guide creativity, as a way to “intentionally work through getting stuck” (Watson, 2015, p. 16).

It has been argued that design thinking provides a flexible, accessible structure to guide educators (Rauth, Köppen, Jobst, & Meinel, 2010) and scaffold their creativity in dealing with problems of practice. Just as creativity is a key 21st century skill (Robinson, 2011), Pendleton-Jullian and Brown (2015) assert that design thinking skills are core literacies for 21st century creativity. While design thinking has most often been used in business or product/service design, it has increasingly received attention in education. However, the relative newness of design thinking in teaching and education means there is much that we do not know. While there is much discourse, there is a still a dearth of educational research on the subject. To begin to address and consider these ideas, we share a qualitative study of a graduate teaching course, about using design thinking to creatively approach educational problems of practice, along with process and creativity themes about educators’ experiences in using design thinking for problems of practice.

Section snippets

Dissolving creativity myths

Creative thinking is often mythologized as an inherent trait, rather than a developed habit of mind or approach (Cropley, 2016). Stretching back to Plato’s belief in the muse, there has been a mysterious element to creativity and a common assumption that only rare or exceptional people have creative insights (Starko, 2005). Sternberg and Lubart (1991) note that people today continue to presume that creativity is spiritual, or simply inherent in nature, and cannot be developed or enhanced.

Everyone designs: design thinking, creativity, and education

A basic, often-cited definition of creativity describes it as the process of creating ideas, artifacts, processes, and solutions, that are novel and effective (Cropley, 2003; Fox & Fox, 2000; Oldham and Cummings, 1996, Zhou and George, 2001). Design is the creative process of intentionally developing something that does not yet exist. Thus, both analytical thinking and divergent creative thinking are key to design processes (Kelley & Kelley, 2013). Design lies at the intersection of art and

The stanford design thinking model and the course design

The Stanford model has five phases or stages of design thinking, also referred to as modes, which are worked through towards problem solutions or resolutions. These five modes are: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. While we describe them in linear fashion, design thinking is actually an iterative process. Designers, teachers, and others can cycle through the process or re-enter modes as needed, to understand or explore problems and solutions.

The first mode is Empathize. Empathy is

Methods

This study explored design thinking as a framework for teacher education, through an in-depth qualitative analysis of an illustrative example of a teacher education course framed by the Stanford design thinking model. We sought to understand the following questions:

  • 1.

    How do teachers and other educational professionals experience the process of design thinking and how does it impact their teaching and thinking practices?

  • 2.

    What do they take away from design thinking, for approaching their teaching

Results and findings: experience of teachers using design thinking

Given our focus on process themes and students’ voices, we could not fully describe the range of teachers’ contexts and problems of practice. While these data points show up through the themes and comments, we also provide an overall depiction of the participants’ work in Appendix A. For more about each participant’s teaching, work context, and problem of practice topic, see the Appendix A table. Below we explore and exemplify themes within each mode of design thinking via direct quotes and

Summary of findings

Our research examined a group of educators’ experiences in working with design thinking processes–to understand the creative takeaways that emerged. There were themes that occurred in each of the fives modes of the process to characterize their experiences.

For the Empathize phase, many found empathy to be a powerful new strategy for understanding students. As a strategy for problem solving, it led them to question, recognize, and challenge their own assumptions–often with surprises. Moreover,

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