Effective collaboration requires skills like trust, active listening, negotiation, communication, accepting criticism, ignoring distractions, taking turns, empathy, focus … and the list goes on! By incorporating chances to refine these skills into your classroom culture and by making collaboration part of the norm, you can set up students for more successful collaboration during design challenges. You could establish a set of norms for collaboration (such as the ones discussed) and actively teach students about them, incorporating them into all collaborative efforts.
Beyond establishing norms for collaboration, you have some decisions to make. Will students be allowed to choose their own groups? If not, will you group them by ability, work style or some other criterion? Will you group them homogeneously or heterogeneously? What structures or tools will you put in place to help the group be productive? How will students be held individually accountable and will individual work be built into the project? How will conflicts be resolved? How will the norms for behavior in the collaborative group be taught?
The answers to many of these questions will depend upon your classroom context and your current collaborative learning practices. See the following resources if you would like more ideas:
Empathy Empathy is an important part of design thinking. Empathy may be a challenge for young children (up to age 7) who are still at an egocentric developmental stage. It might even be a challenge for older children and teenagers who understand that other points of view exist, but may have trouble understanding how to take on those points of view.
Empathy is a skill that can be developed in students. You can help kids learn empathy in how they interact with each other in your classroom. Another way to help students develop the ability to walk in someone else’s shoes is to design learning activities that require students to take on another's perspective. For example, students could re-write short stories, passages or fairy tales from another character's perspective. Older students could have to take on a character in a debate. For specific tips, see Developing Empathy in the Classroom by Bob Sornson. Empathy is an important part of design thinking, but it benefits learners in other ways, too. Point of View Point of view can be taught through character analyses of stories or through discussions of various people within a problem. Students should be encouraged to step outside of their comfort zone and analyze problems from various backgrounds. Help students see what experiences in an individual’s life may lead them to have different opinions on certain matters.
Growth Mindset Part of building a successful culture conducive to the work necessary in design thinking is teaching students to have a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset. This essentially means that students understand that there is never an end to the learning process and that intelligence - or “how smart someone is” - is by no means fixed.
A growth mindset is essential in design thinking because students are going to need to know how to move past difficulties and think creatively and critically. Often, when students with a fixed mindset reach an obstacle, they give up, believing that there is nowhere else for them to go. If these students instead understand that there is always another path to take, they are more likely to succeed. Students will embrace the challenge and will continue to reach the high expectations set for the learning environment.
Risk Taking Taking risks is scary. It may mean failure. However, when students approach these risks with the mindset that you can learn from EVERY experience, no matter the outcome, success is inherently more likely. In this post, 5 Ways Design Thinking Can Empower Your Students, author and teacher AJ Juliani talks about putting up an “Epic Failure” board, which is a great way to celebrate and recognize risk-taking.
Additionally, students need to be encouraged to ask questions, which can feel risky, too! But this is essential. These questions may lead students to new understandings and help to advance the culture forward.