In late June, the CFBC team hosted a hands-on workshop for twenty-four Bachelor of Education students at the University of Victoria.
In the past, students in the K – 12 system were introduced to new tools & skills by watching and then replicating an exact copy of a project.
Remember that shelf/clock/stool you made and gave to your auntie? We do!
In 2019, the new BC curriculum was introduced with a highlight on Design Thinking best practices. Design Thinking helps to build a student’s natural curiosity, inventiveness, and desire to create and work in practical ways.
The goal of this workshop was to offer this group of new teachers the confidence and resources to successfully incorporate design thinking into their lesson plans and be able to incorporate the practice across a wide range of subject areas.
The process to create a project using design thinking begins with having the students use empathy – a human-centred approach – to discover what the end user’s needs will be. They then follow a design-build process to create their project to meet user needs.
This teaching method is rewarding and fun, but provides challenges for implementation, such as: How can I teach tool use safely; How can I find and provide the tools and materials necessary when my school is on such a tight budget; What would a design thinking lesson in my subject area even look like? These topics and more were handled during the workshop and at the end of the day, participants left with new hand tool skills and resources to take with them into the classroom.
A step-by-step breakdown of the Design Thinking process can be found on Projects.SkillsReady.ca: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test, Make, Share & Reflect.
