Design Thinking
Couch (2018) asserts that nearly all school systems, charter, private, and public, are experiencing this sense of perpetual change and responding by attempting to repair or replace components. Couch further asserts we are attempting to do the impossible, catch-up to technology. Instead, Couch asserts, as does Christensen, Horn, Magana, and many others, we need to rewire our system. Couch argues:
Rewiring education means meeting the biggest challenges we face in education today: how to use learning research
and current technology to personalize learning experiences in ways that better meet the needs of today’s students.
It asks us to think differently about how we motivate, train, develop, measure, and evaluate our children and the
extraordinary people who teach them. And it means understanding and unlocking the unlimited potential for children
to learn and succeed. (Couch, J. Kindle Locations 357-361)
While Couch argues for the how, Gardner (2008) asserts the “why.” Gardner’s Five Minds of the Future (2008)presents an in-depth view of how current technology and globalization affect the ways successful and thriving citizens of the very near future must employ their brains. Gardener theorizes that individuals with minds cultivated to be disciplined, synthesizing, creative, respectful and ethical will thrive in the eras to come. Without explicitly stating, Gardner stresses that current practices in education are not effective in training individuals presently and could be seen as counterproductive in upcoming eras. To clarify this point, Gardner creates a mental timeline from the life before the invention of the printing press and the need for individuals of the past to remember extensive amounts of information by way of verbal transfer, to the mass amount of information that is visually presented today with no real need, to mentally store. Instead, due to technological advances, we must make meaning of and organize this mass amount of information in an effective fashion. In other words, in order to affect the life-gap of tomorrow, education today needs to shift from information dispensing stations to transformative places of sagacious and creative knowledge construction. The research above has proven a catalyst to design thinking.
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