Chapter 6: Design Thinking Implementation in Rural Georgia: A Tale of Two Cases

This chapter will share the outcomes of a yearlong program designed to support teachers in rural Georgia by providing them the knowledge, skills, and understanding of design thinking. Following a weeklong professional development experience, teachers were observed and assessed regarding the implementation of design thinking in their elementary classrooms.

Within our approach, we simply defined design thinking as iterative problem solving. However, we provided a more thorough definition which involves the following opportunities for learners: emphasizing with and understanding a problem, conducting research, brainstorming ideas that could serve as solutions to the problem, consolidating those ideas into a design plan, prototyping that design, redesigning that prototype, and sharing their progress, as well as what they learned (Razzouk & Shute, 2012). Design thinking is often connected to highly sought after 21st Century Skills, such as creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication (Hawryszkiewycz et al., 2015; Noel & Liub, 2017).