Design Thinking Lesson 7 of 7: Share & Reflect

Rewrite the following six steps on the board if necessary: Step 1 Empathize, Step 2 Define, Step 3 Ideate, Step 4 Prototype, Step 5 Test, Step 6 Make, Step 7 Share and Reflect.

Looking back to the “sharing” plan you made in lesson 1, help students execute their ideas. For a small design challenge, you could organize a classroom “show and tell” where students briefly describe their product, their final building procedure, and the experiences and challenges they overcame during the design process. For larger design challenges, you may be helping students pull off something ambitious, like running a workshop where they teach a younger class how to recreate their prototype, or a field trip day where they learn from a biologist how and where to install their birdhouses, etc.

You could support students in marketing and selling their products. Collaborate with a business ed teacher and help your students calculate materials and overhead costs, etc., to determine each product’s sale price. Design advertising, then sell the products at a local craft market or open an online store. Donate the profits to a local organization that needs contributions.

You can combine the idea of sharing and reflecting by having students make how-to tutorials; this not only gets them to review and articulate the steps they wrote to build it, but also share the final product with the world. Show them the Skills Ready website, specifically the “How to Share your Work” project, so they can use the template to record the tools, materials, and procedure steps they used. They can even submit their project to be reviewed for publishing on the website!

Review the “success determinants” and “parameters” of the design challenge with the class and write them down in the table in the design thinking template. Have students complete the self evaluation, where they assess their work and put a check mark in the table beside each item their project achieved successfully.

Have them find a partner in the class and give each other a peer evaluation on the same assessment table.

Give students time to fill out the answers to (some or all of) the following questions (found in the design thinking template):

Which success determinants or parameters did you have trouble achieving, and why?

In a few sentences, describe the difficulties you faced and what you did to try to overcome them.

What are two things that you would change about the process next time to make things work more smoothly for you?

Think about the collaboration with peers and anyone else you worked with during the design process. In one or two sentences, describe your favourite positive interaction you had.

In one or two sentences, express something that you want to do differently next time with regards to collaboration or communication with others.

Describe what the 3.0 version of this product would look like if you had the opportunity to redesign it.

What new design opportunities can you see now that you’ve built your product?

End the unit with a class discussion on how “mistakes” offer learning opportunities. Ask students to think-pair-share a short story of a “mistake” that happened during their design process, and what they learned because of it. Discuss how this process is valuable to the group as a whole, and how learning from other peoples’ experiences can be an important part of people sharing their stories.