Abstract:

Design thinking is an approach that can help teachers grapple with solving problems of practice in a creative way. It is important to empower teachers’ adaptability suited to their own context. Yet, teaching educators to become designers rather than merely implementers of learning experiences is a challenging process. COVID-19 required the sudden transition of a five day in-person design thinking workshop for teachers to a virtual, twice weekly synchronous session experience lasting six weeks, with assignments completed asynchronously each week.

We supported the transition to this virtual synchronous/asynchronous format by developing resources containing activities that provided scaffolding for each mode of delivery. Whereas activities deployed in synchronous sessions could be highly facilitated, those utilized during asynchronous time needed greater scaffolding to ensure learner understanding. We focused our activities on three evidence-based practices known to support learning—collaboration, authentic learning, and learning from failure. We embodied each of these practices in activities deployed synchronously as well as asynchronously.

Our research focused on how effectively these resources supported teacher learning after workshop conversion to a virtual format. We collected reflections and final project data from consented workshop participants. We also conducted individual interviews with six workshop participants as well as a focus group interview with workshop facilitators to gain their impressions of the resources.

Analysis of our data revealed important considerations for improvement and future use of the resources. Regarding collaboration, our synchronous Question Burst activity (Gregersen, 2018) provided opportunity for collaboration during and after the session; interview participants agreed that this structured peer feedback was beneficial. However, the asynchronous resource to facilitate collaboration—a prototyping worksheet— presented difficulty for participants. Workshop facilitators felt that more scaffolding, i.e., modeling worksheet use in the synchronous session, would yield better internalization of concepts for learners. Our synchronous session on the prototyping process emphasized the importance of determining authenticity, or relevance of a lesson design to learners by obtaining feedback during the trialing phase of the design thinking process. This session also sought to normalize failures experienced during this phase, stressing the value of learning from iterative attempts to improve design. Interviewed participants agreed that these important principles were clear to them. Similarly, participants’ asynchronous weekly reflections helped them incorporate these three practices into their thinking as designers.

We conclude that our resources focused on practices that were indeed valuable to teachers’ learning in the adapted virtual format. In particular, participants and facilitators recommended that collaboration be increased in future workshop iterations. Moving from in-person to remote learning modes requires extra attention to scaffolding and repetition in order to achieve similar goals. Synchronous activities must carefully align with, and prepare participants for asynchronous work.

Keywords:

Design thinking, Virtual learning, Professional development.