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00:00:03 

[Mike Rowley] 

Okay, so, well, I've already introduced myself, so I think we can move on from that. We are talking about reimagining projects with design thinking and especially for the engaged teen learner. So that's going to be a word that we talk about a lot in this session, which is engagement. I think we can all agree as teachers that if you can get that engagement, if you can get the students into what you're teaching, most of the battle is won. Your class will probably go very well if, if you get that engagement. 

But we also know, I'm sure that it's not so easy to get, can be a challenge. So something I'm going to show you today is one way of increasing that engagement. And we're going to be really focusing on these two things. So project based learning is one element. If we think about it. 

00:00:51 

This is the activity that we're going to be doing in the class. This is when we do a project with our class, which could be one class or two or three classes, but some sort of special project quite similar to what Amanda mentioned, perhaps about doing the counter media video, for example. That would be a brilliant project to do. And then we're going to talk about design thinking, which is the approach more like the methodology. So these two things combine beautifully. 

And hopefully today I'm going to give you a few practical ideas of how these combine very well and how you can do this in class. Also, I'm going to be showing you some real examples of material that use this methodology and also a template that I hope you can take and try next week in your classes or maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow's Friday, so still got time. Even this week you could even start thinking about this. Let's get into it. 

00:01:45 

We're going to start by talking about project based learning, first of all. So I love project based learning because for me as a teacher, it allows me to put many different things that I love to have in my classroom. Let's go through some of those things. These are not all of them, but some of them. First one is universal design for learning. 

Now, UDL as we call it, is something that we're seeing more and more now in course books. And it's something that most people agree works very well in basically teaching students to think about how they learn, right? Asking them questions, how do you learn? How do you learn better? I remember when I was at school in England in the 80s and 90s, nobody asked me questions like that, you know, how do you learn better, Mike? 

00:02:32 

You know, how do you remember things better? How Are you enjoying this? How are you progressing? Nobody ever asked me that. And I think it's wonderful that we're starting to implement this. 

Project based learning is a brilliant opportunity to do that, and I'll talk a bit more about that later on. Obviously, critical thinking, as Amanda also talked about a lot in her session, critical thinking can also be brought to the fore with project based learning. It's a brilliant opportunity to encourage critical thinking, not just from the student, but also from the teacher point of view, the way that we think as teachers when we're planning our lessons and our courses. This is a brilliant way of getting that in, and we'll be talking about that in more detail today. Also brilliant for the flipped classroom. 

00:03:20 

Now, this is where we can give some material, some media, some reading or listening or videos, or some kind of preparation before the class. Obviously, project based learning is ideal for this, right? So a brilliant way to have your students research something before the class begins and then you're ready to go when the project starts. I love doing this in my classes. So flipped classroom, absolutely perfect for project based learning. 

It also encourages, let's say, the discovery method. Right. Hopefully the students will be practicing some language that you've recently told them or shown them or taught them, and they might just have that amazing moment where they discover how something works. They'll use a phrase and be like, oh, that, yeah, okay, I get how it works. Now, obviously we're looking for that all the time, but project based learning is amazing for having that discovery method sort of pop up as the project progresses. 

00:04:12 

Really, really nice when that happens. I love it. The next point, confidence building. Not for the learner, but I mean, also for the teacher. I think if we take on a project, it can be a bit daunting, and we're going to talk about those challenges shortly. 

But I think confidence building also for ourselves as teachers can happen in project based learning. Sometimes the satisfaction having something so tangible a result, a real finished project, like the video that Amanda showed, Right? Absolutely amazing. And I think that's a really great thing to do, not just for the learner, but also for U.S. teachers. And then of course, the final one are global skills. 

Now, global skills are something that we are talking a lot more about in ELT these days and for good reason. You know, we're talking about citizenship, you know, thinking about sort of social responsibility and intercultural skills. And of course, in projects, we have an absolutely amazing opportunity to implement that too. So I think we can agree for the teacher, project based learning can be really fun. But also extremely useful and effective as well. 

00:05:19 

What about for the learner? Okay, a lot of these will overlap. Of course a lot of the benefits for the teacher are very similar the student. But let's have a look at them. First and foremost, I think the project based learning approach is very task based. 

So there's an objective and this can really help get the engagement up. You know, there's a mission, there's an objective to do, it's very tangible as I mentioned already. And I, I think that can really help increase engagement, which we love. Critical thinking, of course, this is something where, you know, we can implement this for the student too and get them really thinking differently about something. And when I mention design thinking later, of course that's going to really tie in with this point. 

Purpose. It gives us a purpose to the class. You know, I think it's really fun to design a project for your class. Takes time for sure. It's not quick, it's not easy, but once you've designed a good one, I think having that purpose to the class again will just really help motivating your learners. 

00:06:23 

Differentiation, of course, this allows us to have different types. You know, I remember when I first started teaching, people used to talk about dynamic classes and I used to wonder, what does that mean? What is a dynamic class? And I think really what it means is that the class has different parts and different phases and different input. And I think that's what makes an interesting class. 

You could have some reading, but then some listening, then some production, then some more input, then perhaps a bit micro analysis of language and then macro. Obviously in project based learning we have lots of, lots of opportunities to differentiate the way we're delivering that input and our teaching as well. Confidence building. As I already mentioned, of course this is great for the learner as well. And it links to my final point here as well, which is self efficacy. 

00:07:11 

Now this came out of a study decades ago in Canada, I believe, and basically the idea of self efficacy is that feeling of being able to do something. It's when a learner can say, I can do this, I can actually, I know I can do this. I trust in myself. Of course that's very similar to confidence. But self efficacy is really having that your own authority to do something. 

And I think when you do a project you've got a great opportunity to really promote that. And essentially self efficacy will increase engagement. It's almost automatic, which again, we love engagement. That's what we kind of want to get to. Someone said self agency. 

Absolutely. As well, it's a really, really good way to empower the lear if we do it right. So let's talk about project based learning in a bit more detail. How and where does it fit into your course? Now, we had a question on this in the last session. 

00:08:03 

They said, well, could this be over the whole year? You know, could this be once a month? You know, where does it fit? Now, obviously, it's up to you. You could do a year long project, but you could also do one at the end of the unit. 

Now, in most of the course books that we work in, Macmillan, for example, we tend to have them at the end of the unit. And I think with good reason. It gives us an opportunity to review, obviously, the language that we've been learning in the pages previously. And hopefully the students will kind of use those themes and topics and ideas, new language vocabulary toward the end of that unit to kind of like finish the unit. And I think that that really works well. 

But there's no wrong or right answer here. I think you could have a year long project as well and it would work very, very nicely. You'd have to manage it very well, keep the motivation up, be a good challenge. But my 10, my recommendation would be to do it sort of at the end of the unit. As you know, a lot of the course books and the one we're going to see today as well have. 

00:09:02 

So I would ask yourself these questions, very simple questions, but very fundamental. And please put your answers in the chat. I'm looking at what you're saying here. It's great. Fantastic participation. 

So, so, yes, you're like a good class. It's fantastic. This is what we want. The first question is, have you tried project based learning? You know, maybe you haven't tried it before. 

Maybe it's a bit intimidating. Has it been good? Has it been a disaster? I know I've done one before that was a complete disaster. You know, I didn't plan it well. 

We've all been there, guys, let's be honest. But when you do it well, wow, it really works. It is challenging. Yes. Careful planning. 

Good. Okay. Lots of people saying challenge. When working in groups, some students take advantage of the others. Yeah, we're going to talk about this. 

That's a really good one. Yeah, Interdisciplinary. Yeah, Exact differentiation. Fantastic. Works well if it's planned well. 

Yes, yes. Wonderful. Okay, we're going to talk about the challenges in a minute, so we'll come to some of those. But these are great ideas, guys. I hope you're all checking in the chat as well. 

00:10:10 

The second question to ask yourself, of course, is how will the learners benefit? Right. This must be something relevant to them. It must be something important to them, especially for teen learners. Right. 

I think teen learners, their personality, their likes, their opinions are really starting to take hold in their character and I think that's something really important to consider. It has to be something which really kind of captures their imagination and obviously motivate them and get that engagement in the class. Yeah. Someone said there they're able to see their strengths and what they're good at. That's it exactly. 

And that's brilliant. Now the final question we're going to talk about in more detail. What challenges does it bring? Now some of you already mentioned a few of these, which is great. So the challenges, okay, let's be honest, right? 

00:10:57 

Doing a project based learning, it's not something you want to do every single week. I mean that would be a real challenge. It might work well, but I think it'd be very, very hard. Let's have a look at some of the challenges that I've got here and we'll talk about them. It's difficult to assess. 

Yes, can be. Absolutely. Yeah. I'm reading your comments. They're really good. 

So the first challenge I can, I think, of course is preparation. As somebody mentioned, it's a lot more preparation than let's say, a regular, you know, more traditional class, let's say. I think running a project with a group definitely takes more preparation. You'll probably end up looking like this person in the photograph papers everywh. Trying to make, you know, clarity out of the chaos, but it's worth it. 

The next challenge. Now someone mentioned this about participation. Yes. Your control over the roles of all of the students. Now I understand guys that this could be a real challenge. 

If you've got groups with 30, 35 students. This is going to take absolute maximum effort on the teacher's part. Right. But I know it can work. I've seen this in action and it can. 

00:12:03 

We have to think about the role of every single student in that classroom so that we can make sure that everybody is participating and they have the chance to participate. So as a, as a teacher, we have to be very proactive and very active as well in the class while doing a project. That's definitely a challenge. As I mentioned before, the purpose we have to have something that really interests them, something that's relevant to them and important to them as well. Someone said here, not really, it's more effective in large classes. 

Yeah, I agree. That's Exactly. I've seen it in action. It can work. I'm glad. 

That's good. Now, of course, we also have to consider that there is language learning happening, right? Of course, we don't want them just speaking in their first language. We want them to be learning language. That's why we're here at the end of the day. 

00:12:48 

So that's something also we have to consider. And it is absolutely a challenge. And then the last one, and this is the one we're really gonna be focusing on today because we're talking about a template that you can use and that's the structure. The structure of the project is vital in Waterstone because if you don't structure, it will fall apart completely. And this is where the second part of the presentation of my session today, we'll talk about, and that's design thinking. 

So if you haven't heard of design thinking before, do not worry. It's a very simple concept, but it's a beautiful process to approach a solution, to find a solution, to approach a problem, to do a project, to design something, but not necessarily design. It's basically an approach. It's basically a methodology. Now, design thinking came out of this guy, Herbert Simon, back in 1969. 

00:13:45 

This was sort of first mentioned at MIT, then it was developed by a company called IDO, and then Stanford University. And this quote kind of summarizes it design as changing existing situations into preferred ones. So the way I would explain it, and I'm going to go into more detail here, but design thinking is essentially being very intentional and very conscious about how you're approaching a problem. So let's have a look at a small diagram to kind of demonstrate what this is. What happened was that this philosophy was starting to be talked about. 

People were using it in companies and design, but also problem solving. And essentially Stanford and ido, this company, they made it into five steps. 

Before we look at the five steps, let's talk about what it is not. So this is something I think is interesting. This is the opposite of what design thinking is. It's not unstructured. Right. 

It's not just a random kind of brainstorming and you know, get some ideas. And it's not just about design. Right. Even though it has it in the title, it's not about graphic design or anything like that. It's not about esthetics and it's not just for creative people. 

00:14:56 

It's not about subject of opinion either. It's definitely not a shortcut or guesswork or risk averse. Design thinking is none of these things, it's almost the opposite. And now I'm going to show you a diagram which really shows what, what it is. 

Before I do that, I'm going to read this quote. Sorry. So before we get into design thinking and project based learning, I want you to think about this quote which I really, really like from Prabhjot Singh, Director of System Design at the Earth Institute. And I think this is something we should remember in all of our teaching, not just in projects. He said we spend a lot of time designing the bridge, but not enough time thinking about the people who are crossing it. 

00:15:38 

Now I love this because it's also about learner centric teaching. It's about thinking about the student first and what they really need and adapting our teaching to, to our class. Not easy, I know, but definitely more effective than prescriptive teaching, which is just like, look at this, open the page, do this activity right. That was like my math class at school. And I think this also links perfectly to design thinking because it is a, it's all about thinking about the final user, the person who will experience the project and designing your ideas around that project audience. 

And that's a really different approach. So thinking about the people crossing the bridge, not the design of the bridge itself only. So here we have it now. Design thinking in five steps. As you can see, we've got five steps in a circle. 

The first one is Empathize, the second one is Define, the third is ideate, then prototype, and finally test. Now this is in a circle because you can go back. And that's something that we first of all need to stress to the students. This is not a checklist. It's not one by one. 

00:16:55 

The idea is that you would start here, you will move, but if necessary go back. And that's something that is a real, really important part of critical thinking. The ability to say, maybe I'm not correct here. Maybe we should go back and try this part again. And that's great design thinking. 

Now the different steps. And I am going to show you a practical example of this in a classroom. So don't worry if it looks a bit overwhelming at the moment. But the first step, empathize, is all about listening. It's about observing, interviewing, learning about the audience.

00:17:30 

So let's say, for example, one of the examples I'm going to show you is the project is designing an after school activity program. Okay, let's imagine that's the project. So the, the learners are going to design an after school activity program. Their first step would be to think about who is the audience. So this would be the students at the school, and they would have to listen to those people, ask questions, learn about the audience, observe, interview them. 

Now, I had a group once that was a smaller group, and we didn't have anybody to ask. We had our imaginary audience, and we used artificial intelligence to create the role of the audience. This is one way you could get around it. So, for example, we asked the AI to be the audience and to make objections to our proposal, to our idea. And I thought it worked really well with the group because they were getting very difficult questions from the AI, as if they were the audience. 

00:18:31 

And say, for example, what about transport back home? How do we get the bus home if we're staying late after school? What about the. The basketball court? There's a big hole in it. 

That's a problem, right? Difficult challenges. The idea is that we're facing them right at the beginning in design thinking. That's the idea. We need to empathize first with the real problem, and then we can move on to defining. 

Now, if you don't have AI in your classroom, which I totally understand, you could also be that role yourself as the teacher. You could prepare a bunch of objections. You know, you could say, what about this? Or what about the public transport home? What about, you know, equipment?  

00:19:12 

Do you have to pay for this? Right. Lots of objections. And, you know, this is a really good way to sort of get the thing started with step one. Step two, very simple, is about them refining their point of view. 

So they say, okay, we've got the problem now. How are we going to frame the solution? Right? So after school's activity, maybe they have to make some adjustments in their ideas, but they're really going to be evaluating the information they learned in step one. So in define, they're framing the point of view, they're questioning assumptions, right? 

And they're looking for patterns and insights and trying to find kind of like where we're going to start with this project. So now the project's getting underway. But what's interesting, guys, if you notice is. Oops. Is that we don't do any brainstorming until step three. 

00:20:00 

Now, this is what I really love about design thinking. It's collecting information first, empathizing, defining, and then brainstorming. If you brainstorm at the beginning, you're probably going to waste a lot of time and a lot of ideas will not be relevant because you haven't thought about the audience yet or your own point of view. So if you ideate in the third stage, you're going to absolutely come up with much more idea, many more ideas and much better ideas as well. And then the final two stages, 4 and 5 are kind of similar in a way. 

But prototype is where we test it quickly. Now there's a really nice phrase here which is think big, act small and fail fast. What we're trying to do here is to teach our learners that it's okay to fail, but do it fast so you can learn and adjust. That's like life, right? They're going to have to learn this, especially teen learners in the next five or, you know, six, seven years. 

00:20:57 

They're going to be working in companies and they're going to have to really learn how to do this in the real world. So these are absolutely amazing. They, you know, amazing tips for, for real life, global skills as well. Someone's asked me to enlarge this. I'm not sure I can. 

I'm really sorry. While I'm presenting, it's difficult to enlarge it. But I will bring back to this slide at the end so you can take a screenshot hopefully. Now the testing stage at the end is where you actually do your presentation. This would be for example in Amanda's example, which is brilliant. 

00:21:28 

I can use that where you have the student doing the video. You know, that's where you would test that with an audience and get that constructive feedback. So absolutely amazing opportunity to promote good constructive feedback, positive language and you know, you are going to have a project that is much more refined than just brainstorm on the board and let's go for it. I will come back to this diagram later guys. Don't worry. 

If you would like to see it again. Now I want you to imagine you're going to do a project but you've had no time and you wrote your lesson plan on a post it note like this. We're going to stay with the same example of after school activities. And look, I've done this before, okay, I'm guilty. I'm sure everyone else has as well. 

00:22:14 

Where we've had no time, we've had to with a pen and paper just quickly write the plan and of course it doesn't go well. Now these steps are all important. Making groups, absolutely right. Monitoring and helping, all of these steps are important. But if I did my project based learning based on this plan, I'm pretty sure it'll be chaos essentially. 

Right? If I give them the materials and I say you're going to make a poster about after school activities, go for it right, what are we doing here? Right. You will have a complete disaster. So by taking a design thinking approach, you're going to be going very carefully through those five steps and controlling, you know, how much information and material the students have before moving on to the next step. 

00:22:59 

So what if we change this post it note to be more, you know, design thinking friendly. 

Now here what I've done very simply as well, this is just another post it note, of course, but I have framed it now around with design thinking in mind. So what I've done very simply is put the five steps I've got, empathize, define, ideate and then I'm writing actually what those mean. So for example, here I'm going to put the groups, put the class into groups. We're going to have the key questions on the whiteboard from the audience. Again, you could use AI or yourself for that too. 

Have them answer those questions and share ideas. Right. Then of course, identifying the key issue. Then of course, brainstorming, stressing there's no silly ideas. Have them really kind of open their mind because it's a cycle, they can repeat the cycle. 

00:23:49 

They make a mistake, it's fine. That's part of learning and that's part of design thinking. Then you go through to prototype and then of course, testing. So I'm going to give you some ideas later on how to make those kind of pop in the class. But here are some questions to ask yourself to think about. 

Can I extract 100% from the materials I'm using? That's an interesting question always to ask yourself. What are the steps we can follow? Right. Thinking about the different parts of the design thinking circle. 

Is there a circle to the process? Is there opportunity for critical thinking, for differentiation? Right. Is there an opportunity for udl? This is where you're going to add those excellent bits that I mentioned in the first slide into your project based learning. 

00:24:37 

Now I'd like to show you kind of a real example of this. So in the next slide I'm going to show you a book. This is an upcoming course from Macmillan called Global Innovators. And what I love about this is, but I didn't work on this by the way. So this is just a fantastic example really of how design thinking can work in a project. 

So the first one I'm going to show you here very briefly is the after school activities program. And as you can see, we have the five stages of design thinking implemented into this project. It's absolutely fantastic. I'm going to show you another one and then I'm going to go through that in more detail. So let's have a look at this project. 

00:25:18 

This one is about designing a news service. Okay, cool topic, right? That's really interesting. And we've got the five steps of design thinking. Perfect. 

Let's go through them one by one. I'm going to show you how this would work in a class. 

So the first phase, of course, is empathize. Now, what I love about this, guys, is there's a brilliant opportunity here to create anticipation and engagement in your class. Because steps two and three are. Watch the video. Does it mention any of your ideas? 

Now, if you tell the class, before we watch the video, I want you to answer these questions and see if you come up with the same topics that are mentioned in the video when you say to them afterwards. Right, are you ready to watch the video now? Do you want to check what you've got? Once you've shared ideas and everything, they're going to be much more likely to be interested. And yes, someone said predicting they're going to be much more interested in watching that video. 

Now imagine I go into the class and I say, right, guys, first we're going to watch this video. Okay, ready, play. Right. They don't care what the video is. They don't know what it is. 

00:26:26 

They're not engaged. So by using these design thinking questions, they're actually trying to predict what's in the video and that will increase engagement. Also here, I love this, an empathy map. This is getting them thinking about who the users are. You know, how do students currently get news at their school? 

What kind of problems do students experience trying to get news? Right? This is a really nice approach to the project. Get them started with ideas about who the audience are. 

Second stage is define. This is where brilliant language production can take place. So for example, here it says write one or two sentences that clearly define the problem, then choose the best definition. Now this is absolutely amazing for just classic language production. Having them write amazing concise sentences, right? 

And then vote on the best one. This is absolutely brilliant. You could do that within the groups or as a class as a whole. It would work absolutely amazingly. And it's the second step to the design thinking process. 

So a brilliant complement to what we're doing now. Look at that. The third step is when the brainstorming starts. So they haven't even brainstormed yet, but they've got a ton of ideas and insights right. Now once you've got those ideas, you've defined the problem, right? 

00:27:44 

For the news service in this example, that's when we're going to get them debating and agreeing after they brainstormed and obviously researched more. So this is about research, this is about brainstorming, debating, agreeing, and this is where you can really let them be free. Right? This is where it's, there's no silly ideas, you know, you can really express your opinion in any way. There's no, it's a safe space, right. 

And you know, hopefully one of these is going to come to the surface and going to become the main idea for that group of how they're going to design this project. Then we come to the next phase. Now, before we get to the prototype phase, I just want to have a look at this as well. This is a brilliant design thinking skill, which is the use of positive language. Now this is something I find very interesting, which is not just about being a good language speaker, but also being a good communicator. 

00:28:34 

You don't need to be C1 level to be a fantastic communicator, right? You can be A two. And if you're using more positive language, more proactive language, right. You will definitely advance more. And these are skills that we can really help young learners, teen learners with from from the very beginning. 

So instead of saying yes and sorry, the other way around, instead of saying yes, but change it to yes and very, very simple ideas. But this is a great opportunity to implement that stuff into your project based learning and your courses in general. And that design. Now community phase, they could be designing their poster, the information booklet, the slideshow, whatever it is you decide. And this is where the design actually comes to the fore. 

And of course they want to be testing it, seeing whether it's ok. This is the prototype phase after all. And then finally test and again it's, it's called test because they can fail and then try again. We want to encourage that as long as they learn from it, right? That's really, really important. 

00:29:36 

So when they're in the testing phase, this is where you can really get them sort of presenting their ideas. And in a moment I'm going to give you a nice idea for that to make it more interesting in the class. 

So how do we bring these things to life? I'm going to give you a couple of practical ideas to actually do some of the different stages in the classroom, right? So the first one, for example, as I already mentioned, have students produce, then predict and check their ideas. So before they do a listening, give them some clues, have them kind of guess what the video is about. That's a brilliant way to get engagement. 

They can listen to the video first without watching, and then guess what it's about and then watch it, see if they can predict what the video looks like. It's another way of getting really good engagement. This one I love. They can recreate the video. So, for example, imagine you divide the video in half. 

00:30:26 

You give one half to a group, the other half to another group. They have to reenact their half of the video and then they play it together and then compare to the original. I think that's an absolutely amazing way to get them really engaged in what the video says and what they're trying to say in the message. It's a fantastic thing to do. I've done a lot of that in my experience. 

And recreating stuff is really, really fun. Obviously you can have a giant brainstorm on the whiteboard. Absolutely amazing. Encouraging communication skills, of course, you know, lots of feedback, listening, positive language, the speed presentation, peer review. This is a really fun one, guys. 

Instead of having them come to the front of the class and just say, okay, this is my poster for, like this. You can set up almost like a speed dating setup where everyone's in a circle on tables and they rotate and they have to present their news service in under a minute or something like that, or two minutes. And, you know, get them to move around really quickly and, you know, give feedback as fast as they can. So adding a little time element can be really interesting. Doing a shadow observation. 

00:31:28 

So in the empathize phase, you could have them just walk around the school or even just think and imagine without saying anything and. And say all in silence. Right. I know that can be tough, but it can be fun too. They can think about what the possible needs of their audience are, or they can go and observe what are the news in the school at the moment? 

Is it a bulletin board? Is there a website? Things like this. Now, also, don't be afraid to ask teams to come up with the worst, most dangerous, most expensive idea. This is another really good way to avoid failing slowly. 

Right? Have them think, right, what would be the worst idea? This will really produce a lot of interesting ideas and then they can flip that that. Well, if they do the opposite, maybe that's the best idea. Interesting critical thinking Again, give them 10 minutes to build a prototype, but without speaking. 

00:32:17 

And perhaps you could say, right, you're going to design the poster but with no pen, right? You've got to use Lego blocks. They'll be like, what? And you can't speak. Putting interesting restrictions on students is a brilliant way to catch them unawares. 

And they'll be like, oh, okay, they're on their toes, they're thinking, right? And then of course put a time limit on it. Five minutes, whatever it is. I like putting really silly time limits. So I'll say like, you've got three minutes and 40 seconds, something like that. 

It's really fun. And then the last one I really like as well. Don't be afraid to do this. Imagine six months from now and your project has completely failed. Why? 

This is a really nice reflective question, right? They can really think and reflect on what could have gone wrong if they do something the wrong way. So again, brilliant, brilliant critical thinking. So these are some of the ideas you can put into your project based learning to really make the class pop. 

00:33:08 

So finally the template here we've got the five areas of, of design thinking and basically in each one I've got some interesting questions that you can ask yourself and your learners. And I've got some language support sentence starters that you could have the learner start and then finish with their own ideas. So this is a really nice template that I think you could use in any project based learning class. And you are implementing design thinking if you follow these five steps and rotate through them. Right? 

This is kind of a template. And again, I'm going to bring it back to the final sort of diagram too. And you know, if you kind of come back to this as well, making sure you're covering all those ideas, you know, I think you'll find it very, very gratifying. I think it's a, it's a really fantastic thing to do. I was doing this recently with a class, as I mentioned, and it's amazing to see them, you know, not understand that. 

Brainstorming. Not yet. No, no design yet. We're thinking, we're analyzing, we're empathizing, defining. And honestly, the results are really great. 

00:34:11 

So I hope that some of the ideas today will give you the inspiration to kind of try this out in your next project. I think you will get a lot out of it. And also this is brilliant for finding solutions to problems in your life by the way as well. So you can use design thinking for your life too, not just teaching, but there we go. Thank you very much to everybody. 

Thank you for your participation. Brilliant. 

[Martín Sánchez] 

Thank you so much, Mike. That was really, really great. And I actually have one question from one of our participants and here she's asking if we can design, think or apply design thinking for online learning. 

[Mike Rowley] 

100%. Yeah. If it's online learning with a teacher. Of course. You could do a project online. 

00:35:00 

Absolutely. I mean, it would work perfectly well. In fact, you've got all the resources on the Internet. It would be even easier, actually, to be honest with you. But if you're on your own, if you wanted to set them a project, then, yeah, you'd have to teach the learner how to do design thinking and then give them autonomy to try it themselves. 

And, you know, if they were online learning on their own, of course they could do this. Absolutely. You know, I did this when I was designing this presentation to a certain extent. Right. I'm empathizing first with the audience. 

I'm thinking, right. These guys are teachers like me. I know what it's like to be in a classroom, projects. Oh, my God, it could be chaos. Right? 

00:35:37 

So you always start with the empathy phase before you start brainstorming and stuff. So, yeah, absolutely. It could look, it could work even on your own. You could do design thinking to find solutions for sure. 

[Martín Sánchez] 

Amazing. Thank you so much, Mike. This was really, really great. Now. Now I think that most of us know that we can actually apply design thinking in our craft rooms, in our life in general. 

[Mike Rowley] 

Yes. Yes, I agree. Yeah. I really do. Yeah. Yeah, it's brilliant. Okay. 

[Martín Sánchez] 

So, so, so much. Thank you so, so much. And so good to see you again. 

[Mike Rowley] 

Yeah. Nice to see you again, Martin, as always. And yeah, again, thank you for everybody. Everybody participating and being here today. Really appre. Good luck with your teaching, guys. 

I hope you enjoy it. And good luck with your next project. I hope it goes very well for you. Thank you. 

[Martín Sánchez] 

Thanks so much.