Abstract:

Educational challenges are increasingly multifaceted, complex, and cross-disciplinary. Students must develop the capacity to think creatively and navigate ambiguity, yet educational approaches remain anchored in the transmission of knowledge rather than the fostering of individual potential. Design thinking has emerged as a promising response. Grounded in constructivist learning principles, it provides a human-centred, iterative, and collaborative methodology for engaging with complex problems through exploration, experimentation, and reflection. However, despite growing interest in its educational application, many educators struggle to translate design thinking into actionable teaching practices. Without structured support, it is adopted in an ad hoc manner, limiting its potential as a pedagogical framework capable of transforming learning experiences.

This paper addresses this gap by presenting a structured framework that operationalises the design thinking process for educational practice. Each of the five core phases, empathise, define, ideate, prototype, and test, is supported by a mapped set of practical tools that educators can select and apply when designing and facilitating learning experiences. The modular framework allows educators to adapt it to their institutional context, subject area, and learner profile, rather than prescribing a single fixed sequence. It positions educators as designers of learning experiences that foster student exploration, collaboration, and problem-solving.

The framework was developed through an iterative co-design process grounded in a structured needs analysis across six schools in three countries. Focus groups with 35 teachers, averaging 70 minutes per session, were followed by surveys administered to 100 teachers and 257 students. Findings consistently identified student motivation, theory-to-practice transfer, and the absence of structured innovation processes as the most pressing barriers to effective teaching and directly informed the tool selection embedded in the framework. The framework was subsequently tested through three iterative pilot cycles between January and September 2025, engaging 329 students and nine industry and civil society organisations across 23 real-world challenges.

Pre- and post-trial surveys, using a five-point scale to measure confidence across eight skills and eight design activities, revealed consistent positive trends across all three cycles and all participating schools. Student confidence in creative thinking, problem-solving, communication, and teamwork increased throughout, with the strongest gains emerging by the third iteration as the framework matured through successive refinement. Teacher capacity for facilitating innovation-driven, student-led processes also increased across the pilot. These findings indicate that appropriately scaffolded, iteratively refined support structures can bridge the theory-to-practice gap in design thinking education, offering a replicable model for educators and institutions seeking to embed experiential, collaborative pedagogy in real-world teaching practice.

Keywords:

Design thinking, experiential learning, pedagogical scaffolding, co-design, innovation framework.