Revisiting Design Thinking

A while ago, I posted a blog post about Design Thinking. To jog your memory, this was a blog post about a mini-conference that I went to and learned about a process by which people think creatively. I wanted to revisit this idea in order to tell you about something I tried in an undergraduate English composition course.

A professor wrote to me last week on Monday and asked if I could teach for him that coming Thursday. I had already had the students in the class for a 1.5 hour session a few weeks back, so I thought at first that the instructor wanted to just use the room for "research time." In fact, the professor wanted a second session for the entire 1.5 hours. Let me just say, this is pretty much unprecedented in my experience teaching in the library at ECU. I started to prep and noticed that I did not really have enough to fill the time with. I got to thinking and suddenly I thought about that Design Thinking exercise and wondered if it was something that I could modify for the class. The session was supposed to take 45 minutes.

Now let me tell you. I love active learning. But a 45-minute active learning exercise is not part of my normal repertoire. I would say that you need a little more buy-in from the instructor than I had for this. The professor I was working with was possibly a little more old-school, and for this reason, along with the fact that we did not communicate much before the session, I felt like it could have gone a bit better.

I first started out with them talking about their assignment. The paper was a simple issue paper. What is a problem in the world? Why is it a problem? How would you solve it? Since most people did not have a topic in mind, I showed them the Issues and Controversies database. I then gave them some time to look around at the topics in that database to see if they could find something that worked for them. This took about 10-15 minutes, but I think I could have kept it shorter.

I pitched my sample topic to them, which was PTSD in soldiers coming back from Afghanistan. We talked a little bit about websites that could be used, and I showed them the topic in Issues and Controversies.Next, I modeled searching in a subject-specific database. I chose SOCIndex because it is not as Psychology-heavy as some of the other databases, and after all, this is a freshman class.

Then I had them start the design thinking exercise. I explained design thinking and told them how it would work. They had to interview each other twice, make some insights, design a search strategy, and locate sources and email them. After the first interview, I had each student in the 25 person class tell me their topic. I gave them each 4 minutes for each item on the worksheet, but I think this could have easily been cut down to 2 or 3. I also gave them time to search for some articles--but here is the flip--they were searching on their partner's topic. I had hoped to have enough time to get through this and give them time at the end to search for their own topic, but we ran out of time.

Image from PowerPoint, below

If I did this again, I would make sure that the professor was on board first and that he or she understood what I was trying to do. I would also probably cut the second interview and just have them talk about whether the topic they had told their partner about seemed too broad or too narrow. I would only have given them 2-3 minutes for each item instead of 4.

For your use, here is the blank worksheet, a completed worksheet to use as an example, and a PowerPoint that you can use to teach this, if you wish to use this and try it in a class. I still feel like this was a successful attempt at doing a large-scale active learning exercise.