The Design Thinking Classroom: Using Design Thinking to Reimagine the Role and Practice of Educators

A Design-Oriented Approach That Can Best Serve Today's Students and Educators Alike

How can we make schools more relevant, engaging, and capable of supporting the development of skills and dispositions that will help students themselves design a life worth living?

Drawing from his ample experience in the classroom, as a school administrator, and as a designer, author David Jakes makes the case that design thinking offers an approach to education that is responsive, collaborative, and well-suited to the opportunities of the twenty-first century. Full of exercises and suggestions for how design thinking can change educators’ approach to classroom layout, virtual learning, assessment, and more, this book shows how we can make today's classrooms better places to teach and learn.

The Design Thinking Classroom helps create the conditions for K–12 teachers and school leaders to innovate and improve a new kind of educational experience. It’s a book for readers who are invested in rising to the challenges faced by modern institutions and a powerful argument for the ways design thinking can transform education.

Endorsements

“A book that implores education to be infinitely more human and humane, centering people in the design of their own learning and spaces.”—Diana Laufenberg

“At their core, every teacher is and has been a designer, whether they’ve realized it or not. David Jakes’s new book provides teachers with concrete principles for improving in their role as educator-designers, ensuring teachers are better equipped to develop the learning experiences every student deserves.”—Darren E. Draper

“Jakes counters traditional and stagnant viewpoints of P–16 education with practical opportunities for educators to enrich and improve their current practices in order to do what is right, just, and equitable for future generations of students.”—Jeremy S. Brueck

“David Jakes's insightful and practical book is a hope-filled, well-lit pathway for educators.”—Laura Walker Deisley