I first read about the Stanford School of Design (or d.school) back in 2011 (when this year's seniors were freshmen).
I've tried to slip in some of the d.school's "design thinking" concepts and strategies into the classroom ever since. I especially love their "bias to action" philosophy, being a leap-before-you-look type of guy.
Anyway, the d.school approach is chaotic in the mathematical sense, meaning that there's an underlying set of rules, values and a guiding structure but the goal of each interaction is to unleash creativity which eventually leads to unpredictable results.
Think of a well-paced musical jam session only instead of notes, you're trading ideas on how to build a low cost water filtration system for African villages, say.
This video shows a single crash course. It runs a little over an hour in length, but because they've recorded the full session, you can speed through the static passages.
The main things I think a teacher can borrow from this video are the strategies used to gather everybody's attention and how keep groups moving onto the next task and not be afraid to impose a little time pressure on the participants. It's also interesting to watch how the session leaders behave and keep busy in between the moments of whole group attention.
This particular session starts with a simple set of reciprocal interviews in which two participants ask each other to reflect on the gift-giving experience. The end goal is to generate some ideas on how to make gift-giving more rewarding to both the giver and recipient alike.
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