Steps

1. Pair your students up
2. Take a topic your class is working on and give each group 2 minutes to write down 20 questions about that topic.
3. Give them 10 minutes to sort and organize their questions into 3 groups.
4. Ask them to answer their questions.
5. Ask them to organize their answers into a presentation.

Rationale

Critical thinking hinges on the kinds of questions we ask. If you just give an answer when asked, it means you're just repeating what you know without much thought. But if you respond to a question by asking more questions, it shows you're really thinking it through. This approach means you're not just taking information at face value; you're digging deeper, challenging assumptions, and exploring the topic more thoroughly. It's a clear sign of engaging with the material on a deeper level.

Source Frank Marsh (August 22, 2013)

How to empathize with your students?

To discover the needs of students through a deep understanding of their interests and concerns requires empathizing with them in order to gain insights that guide the design of the learning experience. Persona tool has been widely used in the field of marketing and, more recently, in education, as it facilitates understanding how users think, their desires, and habits.

The persona represented through the tool is a fictional character that describes the demographic characteristics and defines the personality of a group of users. Maria is one of the characters who was characterized as a result of various interviews with postgraduate students interested in training in: Design Thinking focused on Innovation for the Healthcare. She represents a group of students who share common characteristics.

Let's innovate in the classroom!

https://www.teachersguild.org

How to enhance the student experience?

The "journey map" is a graphic visualization tool for mapping the user experience of a product or service. It has a matrix structure where horizontally, it defines a timeline of the service process, and vertically, it gathers insights aligned with user actions: touchpoints, emotions, and pains. The bottom row serves as a space for collective construction of improvement opportunities in the user experience, considering the cause of the pains to mitigate them and understanding the reasons for joys to enhance them.

In this case, the student's experience has been mapped before, during, and after the pilot as a way to identify resources, timelines, needs, and more for pilot planning. I hope this tool helps you have a systemic view of the course from the student's perspective.

https://servicedesigntools.org/tools/journey-map

https://www.ideou.com/blogs/inspiration/designing-a-journey-map-consider-these-tips