Education Week - February 12, 2020 - 28

OPINION

INSIDE

Teachers, Especially
White Ones, Need AntiRacist Therapy

Phonics Is Just One Part
Of a Whole

Does Studying Student
Data Really Raise Test
Scores?

Letters to
the Editor

Aynklo for Education Week

The Problem With Design
Thinking (and How to Fix It)
By Katherine Burd
BURD teaches English at an independent school in New
York City. She is also an affiliate instructor in University of
Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education and a director at
The Athena Project, a web-based professional-development
startup that connects teachers of the humanities around
shared areas of interest.

did not expect to begin my sixth year of teaching
standing baffled before a folding table covered
with tin foil, pipe cleaners, and mysterious minimotors, but I suppose that I shouldn't have been
surprised. Tinkering is a hallmark of a "design
thinking workshop," and design thinking is in
fashion.
I understood the basic techniques of design thinking;
this was, after all, my third design-thinking workshop as an
independent school teacher. The task of the day: "build a
board game for your peers." As PhDs tinkered with copper
foil in MIT-designed "smart" notebooks and 30-year veterans
made pipe-cleaner game tokens, I noticed a set of naysayers
gather around one table, hands idle and jaws flapping: the
English department-those familiar crossed-arm Luddites.
Schools, especially well-resourced schools, love design
thinking these days, but the tech-world language and startup
buzz that frames it make the whole process easy to write
off. Whether enthusiastic about or resistant to the elements
of play in a workshop, most teachers leave design-thinking
workshops with a conundrum: How could this actually change
my teaching for the better?
Education is notoriously slow to adapt to the "new," and that
adaptation often falls along socioeconomic lines. Students
at schools with more resources can receive the benefits

of research and innovation decades ahead of those at less
privileged schools. At independent schools especially, the
curricular freedom to implement findings of popular recent
texts (like Neuroteach or Make It Stick) and the resources to
build new spaces (like separate design labs equipped with raw
materials and devoted design-thinking instructors) allow them
to offer what most schools can't, and to do it faster.
And because design labs, like the workshops that train
teachers, encourage students to take on "real world"
problems-too much trash on a local beach, say, or not
enough textbooks for middle school students at that school
down the road-the students who are empowered to take on
these problems are often the least affected by them. In my
experience, "design thinking" as it works now reproduces a
system of patronage and salvation: Students with access to
design-thinking resources take on the position of rescuer, a
position that reinforces existing class barriers.
Design thinking need not be a show pony for schools with
money, demonstrated with flashy products from expensive
"makerspaces." The Stanford Design Lab, a leading group
in the design education field, breaks down design thinking
into five steps: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and
test. Each of these buzzwords represents a concept already
broadly known in the field of teaching. Teachers of writing,
for example, could find significant overlap with the basic
tenets of effective writing instruction, which ask students to
establish their intended audience's needs; define what needs
to be communicated; seek evidence, examples, and new ideas
to answer the given question; build a prototype (as in, write a
paper); and, finally, edit based on feedback.
Creators and presenters of design thinking don't seem to
know how well design-thinking processes align with what
teachers already do. In my experience, workshop coordinators

28 | EDUCATION WEEK | February 12, 2020 | www.edweek.org/go/opinion

usually haven't gone through teacher-training programs or
spent years in secondary school classrooms. They often lack
empathy-a core tenet of their own process-when they share
it with groups of teachers. Instead, they alienate teachers,
especially those whose non-STEM fields their workshops tend
to treat as archaic (like English).
Any process introduced to "shake things up" in the
classroom insinuates that teachers don't already seek ways
to better engage their students on a daily basis. Design
thinking does not offer teachers a groundbreaking way to
think about their practice, but it could offer a way to frame and
find consistency within the jumble of evidence-based best
practices with which teachers are already familiar. If properly
harnessed, this attitude could be transformative within a
school.
The process could offer an opportunity to help schools offer
more uniformly compelling tasks to their students, costfree. Design-thinking workshop leaders, starting with major
organizations like the Stanford Design Lab and trickling down
to local groups, should pay more attention to conveying these
ideas in the language that teachers already speak rather than
importing language from the tech sector. This adjustment
could help these ideas translate to teacher practice in standard
disciplines-and not just at schools with the resources to build
shiny new design labs. If presented in relatable language,
design thinking could help teachers structure and streamline
lessons to push students toward critical thinking, authentic
real-world problem-solving, and, perhaps most important,
actual enjoyment.
To be truly revolutionary, design-thinking training must
adjust itself to be valuable to those who stand to benefit
the most from its innovations. This means, ironically,
abandoning the flashy branding it was built around. To
accomplish successful curriculum overhaul, most teachers and
administrators know that rigid public standards badly need
to evolve. Yet some new structure, based on best practices in
education, must enter into that vacuum to ensure consistent
education and opportunities for growth across the country.
Design-thinking principles can offer that structure for already
existing teaching best practices. Teachers already try to, or
wish they had the freedom to try to, implement many such
practices. If its leaders organized around this opportunity,
perhaps our elected leaders could, too. n

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Education Week - February 12, 2020

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