Acknowledging that empowering today’s learner to find innovative and enriching experiences brings about a deeper desire within them to learn and develop skills, this book showcases a combination of innovative educational practices and creative pedagogy techniques to demonstrate how educators can kick-start learning success.

A teacher’s guide to empowering students with modern thinking skills that will help them throughout life. Design thinking is a wonderful teaching strategy to inspire your students and boost creativity and problem solving. With tips and techniques for teachers K through 12, this book provides all the resources you need to implement Design Thinking concepts and activities in your classroom right away. These new techniques will empower your students with the modern thinking skills needed to succeed as they progress in school and beyond. These easy-to-use exercises are specifically designed to help students learn lifelong skills like creative problem solving, idea generation, prototype construction, and more. From kindergarten to high school, this book is the perfect resource for successfully implementing Design Thinking into your classroom.

Design thinking is a human-centered problem-solving process that organizations can use to address wicked and complex problems of practice. Within the PK-12 space, design thinking has been employed to engage educators in an innovative approach to address challenges like curriculum redesign, instructional engagement, and designing physical spaces. The use of design thinking in the PK-12 space is a result of the evolution of an organizational improvement process that puts people at the center of problem-solving initiatives. Design thinking is seen as both a process and a mindset that enables people to look at problems in new ways and address these problems through creative approaches. In this book we share case studies of PK-12 schools and other educational organizations that have used design thinking, as well as research studies that have studied aspects of design thinking in the PK-12 space. We have brought together a variety of research-based and illustrative case studies around design thinking in PK-12 education that explore the development and implementation of design thinking in practice.

This book addresses the contributions of design thinking to higher education and explores the benefits and challenges of design thinking discourses and practices in interdisciplinary contexts. With a particular focus on Australia, the USA and UK, the book examines the value and drawbacks of employing design thinking in different disciplines and contexts, and also considers its future.

School innovation expert John B. Nash demonstrates how design thinking can be adapted successfully by busy school leaders seeking student-centered solutions to a range of challenges. Based on a decade of work teaching school leaders nationally and internationally, Design Thinking in Schools shows how leaders can adopt a design thinking mindset to uncover problems and harness the ideas and energy of students and other stakeholders to create unique, effective solutions within a single semester or school year. The book is a step-by-step guide that offers critical guidance and field‐tested tools for choosing design teams, developing prototypes, and selecting promising ideas to take to scale. It includes rich examples of educators at the elementary, middle, and high school level who have used design thinking to find creative solutions for improving student engagement, school climate, and parent-teacher conferences, among many other challenges. Nash illustrates how school leaders can use the design thinking process to access a range of student voices for a diversity of opinions and feedback on topics that better inform school change. Lively and inspiring, Design Thinking in Schools is a critical resource for school leaders seeking to leverage the untapped wealth of knowledge and experience contained within their own buildings to make schools innovative places of learning.

To the ambitious educator: 1. Are you passionate about bringing ‘innovation’ in ‘teaching’ but do not know how? 2. Do you wish to be an ‘Eduventor’? 3. Do you believe that ‘innovation in education’ will transform your ‘knowledge’ and make you agile? 4. Is utopia what you’re looking for from your surroundings? 5. Do you take criticism for your unique ideas and thought process confidently? 6. Do you wish to work with purpose higher than the self? 7. Will you convince your ego earnestly and go the extra mile by reinventing yourself every time you’re humiliated? 8. Do you question the traditional? If your answer is yes, then Design Thinking for Educators is meant for you!

“Everybody loves an innovation, an idea that sells.“ But how do we arrive at such ideas that sell? And is it possible to learn how to become an innovator? Over the years Design Thinking – a program originally developed in the engineering department of Stanford University and offered by the two D-schools at the Hasso Plattner Institutes in Stanford and in Potsdam – has proved to be really successful in educating innovators. It blends an end-user focus with multidisciplinary collaboration and iterative improvement to produce innovative products, systems, and services. Design Thinking creates a vibrant interactive environment that promotes learning through rapid conceptual prototyping. In 2008, the HPI-Stanford Design Thinking Research Program was initiated, a venture that encourages multidisciplinary teams to investigate various phenomena of innovation in its technical, business, and human aspects. The researchers are guided by two general questions: 1. What are people really thinking and doing when they are engaged in creative design innovation? How can new frameworks, tools, systems, and methods augment, capture, and reuse successful practices? 2. What is the impact on technology, business, and human performance when design thinking is practiced? How do the tools, systems, and methods really work to get the innovation you want when you want it? How do they fail? In this book, the researchers take a system’s view that begins with a demand for deep, evidence-based understanding of design thinking phenomena. They continue with an exploration of tools which can help improve the adaptive expertise needed for design thinking. The final part of the book concerns design thinking in information technology and its relevance for business process modeling and agile software development, i.e. real world creation and deployment of products, services, and enterprise systems.