Chapter 4: Celebration of Learning: An Elementary School’s Design Thinking Journey

The purpose of this chapter is to share the story of one school’s journey to integrate design thinking as an important part of teaching and learning. In this practitioner piece, we share how design-thinking was integrated into the school culture and the successes and challenges the along the way .

“Everyone has the capacity to be creative” (Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, 2021). Design thinking is important for K–12 education (Royalty et al., 2014). According to the world renowned Stanford University d.school, design thinking is “a methodology for creative problem solving” that can act as a framework to guide students’ work (http://dschool.stanford.edu). This framework can be important for students’ experiences with engineering (Zhou et al., 2020), science, and interdisciplinary science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) (Hathcock et al., 2015). Moreover, design thinking can be situated within hands-on, problem-based learning. While there are many different design thinking models (Watson, 2015), creativity is threaded throughout the process (Henriksen et al., 2017b). Other common model components include steps similar to asking/imagining, planning, creating design, testing of design, and improvements. Indeed, “design thinking could start even from a young age” (Koh et al., 2015).