For the last year and a half, I've been framing my teaching and my learning around the explicit "design thinking" language shared by IDEO and Stanford's d.school.  This was an easy move because my practice was already there. I have been a design thinking teacher since 1996. I didn't know there was a language and maybe there wasn't in 1996, but I was doing it, along with scores of other committed teachers. We were committed to our students, not our principals or state standards. In design-thinking, Observe and Empathize sit at the center of design thinking and thats where you'll find great teachers.

I heard Steven Johnson say, "Chance favors the connected mind," during his TED talk in 2010. I believe design thinking helps create the "space" that fosters the connected mind. I would alter his sentiment this way, "innovation, imagination, and ingenuity favor the connected mind."

So, what is a connected mind? where is the connected mind? how do we create or facilitate the connected mind?

Read, Herb Childress's, "17 Reasons Football is Better than High School," or read up on Jane McGonigal's work on gaming and complex social solutions. They both offer wonderful insights on the connected mind, where to find it, how to cultivate it.

My job has always been to create the "space" that facilitates the connected mind. "Space" for a teacher is sometimes physical, but more often "procedural." What we do in class, is always more important than where we do these things.

Here's a photo of a flow chart (my version) from David Kelly's and Stanford's d.school (IDEO's) ideas on design thinking.

I'm constantly tweaking it to fit my vision and my practice.  But that's the easy (fun) part, because as I said, the core of my practice is already there.

I think there's something foundational in this approach to learning. In the best way, design thinking was reverse-engineered around learning.

I've already made changes to this mind-map.

I'll post those soon.