Before becoming a teacher and eventually an instructional coach, I worked as an engineer. My time in engineering left me with an appreciation for what is now being called “design thinking.”

Design is about accepting failure as an opportunity to grow and iterating through to a better solution. One resource defines design thinking as “…a proven and repeatable problem-solving protocol that any business or profession can employ to achieve extraordinary results.” Using a design thinking approach in the classroom helps students develop the skills to think, analyze, and solve problems. Recently, though, I have been struck by the power that design thinking processes hold to scaffold student thinking.

Thinking Hats approach

I sat down recently with Sharrell Howard, an engineering teacher at a new innovative school in Charlotte, to plan a lesson that would guide students through analyzing their brainstormed ideas where I would model a student-centered instructional strategy. Students were learning how to use reverse engineering to analyze a design and then improve it. We reflected that students do not come to us knowing how to think the way we want them to think. We expect them to analyze, evaluate, and create; however these thoughts are complex and are do not necessarily come naturally to them.

We decided to use the Thinking Hats, an approach to giving feedback (a critical step in any design process). The process involves separating the types of feedback (or thinking) into different categories called Thinking Hats. Each of these categories is given a color that typifies the type of thinking. We used:

• Orange – factual feedback (what are key features?)
• Red – feeling feedback (what feelings are evoked?)
• Yellow – sunny (positive) feedback (what is good?)
• Purple – critical feedback (what could be improved?)
• Green – creative feedback (what other ideas do we have?)
• Blue – summarizing feedback (which is the best design and how do we know?)

I led students through each hat while Ms. Howard collected data on how well the process supported students’ analyzing their designs. When asked after the lesson, one student said that “We usually only look at what is good about our designs. This helped us to look at what was bad so that we could improve.” Another student wrote, “”The thinking hats helped me to think of the design as a whole and really, truly, honestly come up with the best possible idea.”

Design thinking beyond the engineering classroom

So, sure, this was an engineering classroom with students engaged in a design project. However, we can use a similar process in any class to support students thinking more deeply about content.

Besides the Thinking Hats described above, my favorite “design thinking” strategy is using a reverse engineering approach to engage students in critically thinking about a text or any “design” that students may encounter in your curriculum. It starts with the assumption that every text, artifact, etc., is a design. Similar to a mechanical device, we can take it apart and explore its components. As we explore its components and how they fit together, we better understand how they work together for an intended outcome.

Isaac Lake, director of school services here at NC New Schools and a former English teacher, developed six questions that lead students through this process with a piece of literature.

• What’s this thing supposed to do?
• How is it designed to do that?
• What are the component parts?
• How do they work together?
• How well do they work together?
• Is it a good design?

Engaging students to analyze a text or artifact in this way teaches students a thought process they can use when analyzing anything from a poem to a law to a mathematical proof or scientific process. We not only help students learn the information locked within the “design”; we also give them a tool they can use to unlock meaning in any scenario.