Design Thinking in Education - slowing down to speed up

I am enjoying the opportunity to have a foot in both camps, so to speak, one foot as a teacher and one as a facilitator. I feel this gives me a great perspective when looking to extend my own knowledge.

Today I rocked up to a Design Thinking in Education seminar as a time poor teacher with a full day of commitments ahead of me. I quickly became disillusioned with the session as I was wanting the 101 ideas for Design Thinking to use back in the class. Luckily my growth mindset kicked in and enabled me to get over myself and engage in the learning opportunity provided.

A couple of statements from the presenter really reinforced this

• We need to slow down the process in order to speed up the thinking
• Urgency doesn't get us anywhere

These statements were very timely and made me reflect on my work with a cluster, where I am constantly pushing to get to the actions, to be able to see and do something tangible. Luckily in that cluster I have a very sensible colleague in the form of Rebbecca Sweeney who is staunch in slowing down the process to ensure deeper thinking. I now have more clarity around the value of this approach.

I may be time poor however, I also have to put some skin in the game if I wish to develop my own knowledge around Design Thinking and reflect on this which is the reason for this blog post.

“We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience.” 

― John Dewey

Another statement that resonated with me especially with my knowledge of the Golden Circles was 

• Have a purpose to your inquiry - my why

The purpose of attending the session today was to deepen my understanding of Design Thinking. I went in with the expectation of having some magic bullet shot into my head that would give me all the answers. This was never going to happen, however by changing my mindset about this during the session enabled me to develop a deeper understanding of Design Thinking. Reflecting now I think the 101 Design Tools for the class session I imagined would have lead to a shallow understanding of Design Thinking. 

I had already seen Design Thinking in action a couple of times and have a resource to read as well as connecting with another colleague to unpack Design Thinking some more. So in the big picture today was just another piece in the puzzle of developing my learning around Design Thinking. I would have loved to have attended the morning workshop after the seminar to continue to unpack Design Thinking.

Overall a very valuable session for me.