Design thinking refers to creative strategies designers utilize during the process of designing. Design thinking is also an approach that can be used to consider issues and resolve problems more broadly than within professional design practice, and has been applied in business and to social issues.  Design thinking in business uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity. (Wikipedia)

• Examples in Education: D School; Design For Change  
• Here is Design Thinking for Educators, offered by IDEO, an international design company.

There are various formulations of design cycle (see p. 2 of the pdf file for example).
Here is the one we will follow.

1. Lead with empathy.
2. Challenge assumptions.
3. Make experiments happen.
4. Share your process
5. (added) Form prototype. (source: https://www.edutopia.org/blog/design-thinking-empathy-challenge-discovery-sharing-susie-wise)

What is Design Thinking anyway?
“In short, design thinking is about applying the typical design cycle to new domains. The design cycle, moves, generally speaking, from (user centered) research to creative thinking to prototyping to testing and implementing or indeed going back to the beginning of the design cycle to start again. Very important here to note is that most proponents and users of design thinking use their own version of the cycle, paying relatively more attention to one or another stage, or indeed simplifying the stages or changing the language used to describe them.“(“Why you SHOULD use Design thinking approaches in education!” Posted on August 7, 2013 by EmerBeamer)

Controversies in its usage in education: 1) learned the form but not the spirit; 2) children not equipped with sufficient knowledge; 3) done with suspicion

In our class, we try it for its emphasis on a learning process that involves 1) empathy, 2) brainstorming, and 3) prototyping, testing and sharing. Creativity is encouraged as a means to an end, but not the end itself. 

The objective is: to learn English effectively to expand our knowledge, hone our critical thinking and improve our English correctness and idiomaticity.

Basic Requirements: 3 groups, respectively on the following three topics or with a combination of them:  

• on knowledge (film and essay as input),
• on critical thinking (essay and your own papers as input)
• on language (your own papers and other resources)        

Schedule