Have you ever found yourself faced with a complex challenge or problem to solve? It could be a problem that you don’t thoroughly understand yet, or perhaps a problem involving a “moving target” as the situation evolves. It might be the type of problem that impacts several groups of people within your education community.
If these scenarios sound familiar to you, know that you’re not alone. In the world of education, we often face challenges like these. Some are large-scale — such as redesigning your district’s curricula — others are challenges we may tackle on a daily basis — such as tweaking a lesson plan.
In this article, we’ll walk you through the first phase of design thinking called “immersion” and show you how you can use it to start solving your toughest educational challenges.
No matter what scale of challenge you are up against, the process of human-centered design thinking can help you find a meaningful solution. Especially when dealing with more complex challenges, this approach will not only help bring structure to an otherwise ambiguous feat but will also be more likely to lead you to a positive outcome.
You could spend months or even years studying the concept of “design thinking,” but to give you a quick primer, we define this process as:
An iterative approach to solving a complex challenge while keeping the individuals impacted by the challenge at the center of the solution (that’s where the “human-centered” part comes in).
The design-thinking process consists of a series of phases that help you determine a solution. You may hear experts using different names to refer to these phases, but in this article, we’ll refer to them as follows:
Where you set the stage for a successful project by clearly defining your objective. In this stage, you will need to compile a list of what you do know and what you don’t know about the challenge at hand.
Where you take the time to answer questions about what you don’t know. You can do this by learning about the needs of people in your education community impacted by your solution.
Where you brainstorm a wide variety of solutions to meet your education community’s needs and then prioritize the most promising solutions.
Where you get feedback from your education community about the solutions you’ve developed and make iterative changes to create an even more effective solution.
Although we depict these stages in a linear fashion above, it’s important to note that these phases may not always follow such a straightforward progression. As you work toward a solution, it’s common to stumble upon opportunities to tweak or improve your process, which may cause you to restart any given phase.
Over the next series of articles, we’ll take you through the phases of the design-thinking process, beginning first with immersion. We’ll explore how you can practice immersion in your daily work — no matter how big or small the challenge — and share some recent examples of how we have used this process to design learning innovations for Michigan schools.
We hope the information shared here will help you develop innovative solutions that positively impact your education community back home!
When solving a complex challenge, your instinct may be first to understand what the people affected by the solution want and need. But design-thinking experts know it’s critical to back up a step first. Before we empathize with our community, we first need to know what questions we should even be asking.
If I had an hour to solve a problem, and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask. For once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.
Albert Einstein once said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask. For once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”
As Einstein explains here, knowing the proper questions to ask is 95% of the battle when it comes to researching solutions. You can’t just show up and ask people to talk and expect to walk away with focused insights.
Consider the stereotypical therapist scenario where a patient is lying on the couch talking freely about their past. In this situation, the therapist isn’t just blindly listening to their patient. Instead, they are trained to guide the conversation with curated questions that elicit emotional and functional insights into the patient’s problems.
It’s ok to let people share openly about their situation, but to craft an efficient “discovery activity,” you must first have a well-defined plan with specific learning goals.
To discover these insights, you must immerse yourself in three aspects of your challenge:
It’s often straightforward — though not necessarily easy — to define your objective and make a list of what you already know about a given challenge. It can be more difficult to formalize a list of your knowledge gaps. How do you know what you don’t know?
To discover your knowledge gaps, you’ll want to first start by creating hypotheses about where you think opportunities exist to solve a problem. When coming up with hypotheses, it’s essential to keep a future-focused lens so that the solutions you come up with are relevant for where you’re headed (vs. where you’ve already been).
These hypotheses will naturally reveal gaps in your knowledge. For example:
Identifying these knowledge gaps will help us form the right questions to understand what is truly valuable to our community.
The process of creating hypotheses can inform your knowledge gaps. To get started, try the following four steps:
Get started by reviewing the information and data you currently have available around the challenge you’re facing. As you go through this process, consider how this information may be impacted by trends in education that are shaping the industry’s future.
Example in action: Grouping solutions into categories
For example, our research team recently identified the need to re-evaluate our learning solutions — both those already being used by schools and those in various stages of development— to create a future set of solutions that will be relevant and impactful in a pandemic-affected world.
We started by compiling our current research and knowledge around effective blended and online learning practices; however, we made sure to consider this knowledge through a pandemic lens. We recognized that while some in our education community may be ready to snap back to the “way things used to be,” others had established a new baseline “normal” that they would likely carry into the future.
Through this lens, our examination led us to identify four categories of solutions that might have a significant impact on Michigan’s education community:
Apply this step: Analyze your data and forecast trends
To start addressing your challenge, tap into any data or research you or your district have regarding this challenge. This data could include results from surveys to your community, effective practices that people are using, case studies of failed approaches, etc.
As you review this information, think about the trends you see happening in your district and the broader education industry. Consider how these shifts may open the opportunity to solve your problem in new ways. Next, it’s time to think about the resources you have available to make new solutions come to life.
Beyond the knowledge you already possess, you’ll also need to dedicate time to understanding the tools and talents available to deliver on your (eventual) solutions. You’ll need to assess the tools and technology at your disposal and which assets are missing.
You also have to be honest about what expertise you or your team already have and what types of expertise you’re missing. As you become more informed about what your community needs in the following stages of the design-thinking process, you will be able to identify which tasks are essential and then prioritize how you’ll need to grow your talents and tools
Example in action: Designing an online tutoring service
For example, our research team recently identified the need to re-evaluate our learning solutions — both those already being used by schools and those in various stages of development— to create a future set of solutions that will be relevant and impactful in a pandemic-affected world.
We started by compiling our current research and knowledge around effective blended and online learning practices; however, we made sure to consider this knowledge through a pandemic lens. We recognized that while some in our education community may be ready to snap back to the “way things used to be,” others had established a new baseline “normal” that they would likely carry into the future.
Through this lens, our examination led us to identify four categories of solutions that might have a significant impact on Michigan’s education community:
Our team applied this step by reassessing our education solutions. We explored solutions across the four key categories to better understand the needs they might fulfill. At the same time, we took a critical look at our resources to investigate whether or not we had the right talent and technologies to execute these solutions.
For example, one of the solutions we examined as part of our “Engagement & communication tools” category focused on providing an online tutoring resource to students. To be effective, we identified that this solution would need to be personalized to students and provide them with just-in-time support.
This realization allowed us to start thinking through which types of staffing and technology might play a role in making such a solution a reality and compare these needs to our currently available resources.
Apply this step: Consider local tools, experts, & partners
As you think through your challenge, consider any specific resources you can tap into to bring your solution to life. These resources might include a digital tool your district uses, a co-worker who is a subject matter expert in a relevant area, or an external partner with whom your district has collaborated.
Understanding the resources at your disposal will provide depth as you move to the next step of hypothesizing where your opportunities lie. If you see a gap in the resources available in this step, you may inadvertently uncover new areas of opportunity.
Your next step will be to create a brief description of a new area of opportunity that may exist to solve your challenge (a hypothesis). Keep in mind that, at this point, your hypothesis will simply be an anecdotally supported statement. Although it may have sprung from an insight, your hypothesis isn’t based on hard facts yet but is instead derived from personal experience or something you believe is possible.
Try starting your hypothesis with, “I think there’s an opportunity to…” or “I think there’s a need for…”.
Example in action: Creating a hypothesis for an online tutoring service
For our initiative, we approached hypothesis generation by reviewing the four categories of objectives through the lens of our new, pandemic-affected world.
This process allowed our team to form hypotheses about innovation opportunities that have changed or stayed the same since we initially conceived our solutions. It also allowed us to create hypotheses about new opportunities that now exist or may emerge in the future.
Going back to our example of designing an online tutoring resource for students, we reviewed all the information we had gathered to develop the following hypothesis:
We think there’s an opportunity to offer an online “space” to host tutoring sessions that will account for different learning preferences and various types of course topics.
Apply this step: Reflect on the data you gathered in previous steps
As you start developing your hypotheses, remember to draw on all the information you have gathered so far in the immersion process. This data should include any best practices you have compiled, lessons learned regarding failed solutions, the direction your district or the industry is heading, and internal resources you have available (or recognize that you currently lack). The lessons you learned in these steps will help you to generate your hypotheses.
The final step in this process is where we get to the point of identifying what we don’t know. Start by looking at your hypotheses and determining the type of information that will help you validate (or disprove) your hypotheses. How might this information be obtained? These are your knowledge gaps.
Example in action: Knowledge gaps for an online tutoring service
Using the hypotheses we developed for our tutoring service initiative, we created a list of knowledge gaps in our current research that needed to be answered before determining if this concept was indeed a valid opportunity.
This process yielded the following questions:
We recognized that not everyone in our community could answer each of the questions we wanted to ask. As we planned to move into the discovery phase of the design-thinking process, we knew that some questions would have to be posed to administrators or teachers while others would be more relevant to students and their parents.
Apply this step: Ask how and why questions
When you’re ready to start creating your list of knowledge gaps, think about asking how- and why-based questions around each aspect of your hypothesis. By choosing how- and why-based questions, you help ensure that the information you collect will provide the answers you need to validate, eliminate, or revise your hypothesis.
Now that you have a list of your knowledge gaps, you are ready to translate these gaps into actual questions and conduct research to start answering them.
Completing the immersion phase will put you on the right track to solve the complex challenges you routinely face in your role as an educator. As you continue through the design-thinking process, the structure provided by each phase will help you turn what might otherwise seem like an overwhelming task into a highly intentional, step-by-step process. This approach will ultimately help you develop meaningful solutions that will have a positive impact on your community.
You may be tempted to skip this first phase of immersion and jump right into asking questions to try to solve the problem at hand. Remember, however, as Einstein said, it’s critical first to ensure you’re asking the right questions. Once you know what problem you’re trying to solve, you’ll then be able to start working toward a solution with greater odds of success.
In the following article in this series, we’ll dive into how to transform your list of knowledge gaps into a list of insights that will inform your future solutions.
Our research over the last decade examines and explores educational practices in digital learning, including what works well now and what may be more relevant in the future.
Topics explored include:
You can check out all of the research produced by the MVLRI team in our publications archive and on our blog.
