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![[PDF] Thinking & acting like a designer: How design thinking supports innovation in K-12 education | :: The 4th Era :: | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/1N5gbB-s78kmmrEonqZOYTl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
The needs of the twenty-first century demand new approaches to learning. Today, student success requires skills for collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and problem solving, and these skills are increasingly becoming a focus in both K-12 and higher education settings. But twenty-first century learning needs to be much more if we are to expect young people to both navigate an unknown and complex future and meet the challenges that accompany it.
We need change-makers, people who will redefine problems, inspire new ideas, take informed risks, and never stop learning. Change-makers implement and evolve solutions that aim to better the individual and the whole, be it a classroom, a school, a community, or a society. This is the approach of a designer and the focus of this publication.
Design touches all aspects of our world. As this publication shows, designers work to impact the human experience, and they generally do this with particular mindsets that encourage looking at challenges as opportunities for design. Four mindsets typically guide the behavior of a designer: human-centered, collaborative, optimistic, and experimental. Designers also often act in a particular way, following a process that helps them generate and evolve ideas, beginning with problem-defining and empathy, using synthesis and prototyping to develop strategic ideas, and ending with implementation.
Taken together, how designers think and act make for design thinking, a human-centered approach to creative thinking and problem solving. Thinking and acting as a designer and, in turn, employing design thinking are powerful ways to encourage people to become change-makers in education.
Via Edumorfosis, John Evans
