Helping Students Embrace Revision in Design Thinking Blog Post

This article is part of a longer series on design thinking, a flexible framework for empathy-driven creative work. Previous articles addressed awareness, inquiry, research, and prototyping. This article is about the Highlight and  Fix stage, where students revise their work.  The Critical Role of Revision I…

Research Is Critical for Student Design Projects Blog Post

This article is part of a longer series on design thinking, a flexible framework for empathy-driven creative work. You might want to check out other articles in the series first.  The Importance of Research in Design Thinking The LAUNCH process starts with awareness, where students…

Empowering Students with Voice and Choice Page

Empowering Students with Voice and Choice Subscribe to My Channel We want students to be creative, critical thinkers. We want them to rewrite the rules as life-long learners and critical thinking citizens. It's a mindset of self-direction and student ownership and it begins by empowering...

Making The Shift from Student Engagement to Student Empowerment Blog Post

We often focus on student engagement, but student empowerment is a step further. Here, we focus on the seven shifts toward student empowerment. Two years ago, I was a chaperone for my son’s fourth-grade field trip to a hands-on pioneer museum. Students learned how to…

Seven Strategies for Building Empathy in Students Blog Post

Subscribe to My Channel Subscribe to YouTube Channel A few days ago, my son said something that surprised me. He said, “Dad, we have the best cafeteria lady at our school.” And I said,  “Wait, what?” But then he went on to describe how this…

Taking Choice Menus to the Next Level for Student Ownership Blog Post

Recently, I asked my students (pre-service teachers who are currently in their practicum) about the ultimate goal of education. Some described the need for raising democratic citizens who will think critically about the world. A larger group described the need for preparing students for the global…

Seven Strategies for Improving Student Feedback Blog Post

We know feedback is important. But what happens when students ignore it? In this article and podcast, we explore how to integrate feedback into every part of the learning process so that students can increase in metacognition during their PBL and design thinking projects.  …

How Nature Inspires Better Design (and What This Means for Students) Blog Post

We want students to be makers and designers. But there’s a surprising source of inspiration for design: the natural world. This is the key idea behind biomimicry, which encourages engineers to pay close attention to nature in order to improve their designs. The following post…

10 Creative Risks to Take with Students This Year Blog Post

My daughter looks up from her cereal and says, “You know what day I can’t wait for?” “Um, your birthday?” She shakes her head. “Next Christmas?” She shakes her head again and then says, “The first day back to school. I can’t wait to see…

Five Ways to Boost Student Engagement with Flow Theory Blog Post

If we want students to develop a maker mindset, we need to empower them to hit a state of creative flow. Flow Theory explains what happens when we hit that place of “optimal experience,” where you are fully engaged, present, and focused. The following blog…