David Jakes Designs

“I love how this book emphasizes ON THE FIRST PAGE that our students should be active, engaged participants in their communities. Deeper, hands-on learning experiences for schoolchildren don’t happen by magic or with wishful thinking. Jakes’ book is an extremely helpful guide for how to design these high-agency, high-impact learning activities. The book includes a strong emphasis on educator mindset and capacity-building and is full of practical scenarios and examples. I can’t recommend this book highly enough for educators who want to transform their traditional classrooms into design studios and make school different”

“In “The Design Thinking Classroom,” David Jakes provides a clear and articulate path beyond the current form of public P-16 education as a culture of compliance and discipline to a progressive pedagogical approach that is agile, responsive, and supportive of student needs. With insightful paths for developing educational experiences from a design thinking perspective, Jakes’ book is a must read for P-16 educators, administrators, elected school officials, and public policy makers who truly want to gain a vision of the mindsets, values, and characteristics our public schools should embody. As he unwraps the Educator-Designer mindset, he uses lessons learned from our educational past to clearly articulate a vision for schools and classrooms of the future. In an engaging and empowering voice, Jakes counters traditional and stagnant viewpoints of P-16 education with practical opportunities for educators to enrich and improve their current practices in order to do what is right, just, and equitable for future generations of students.”

“Finally! This is the book I’ve always needed. In The Design Thinking Classroom, David Jakes masterfully combines important principles used by contemporary design professionals with the framework, background, and processes educators need to improve the quality of the environments and learning experiences they create for students. Educator-Designer is a role we’ve always known we could undertake, but we’ve struggled to excel without an articulated structure for doing it right. David Jakes changes the field with his brilliant insight and helpful examples. ”

“Lifelong Learning is the “cliché du jour” in books on improving student outcomes. With well over a quarter century of experience in classrooms and schools, David Jakes knows better than to speak about the hard work of school change in simple clichés. Riffing off the term in more meaningful ways, Jakes describes the need for schools to create “Life-deep learning” and “Life-wide learning” experiences. Never merely suggestive, Jakes sketches out a pathway for such learning, and it begins with a new role for the teacher: The Educator-Designer.

Jakes’s newly imagined teacher is not driven merely by curriculum coverage or test prep. Instead, they evolve as they alter their mindsets, peer through new lenses, and develop more distinct focus about their role in the classroom. Urging us to question not only our methods but also the very physical space of our classroom, Jakes carves the shape of this new educator as one that is less about efficiency and more about authenticity, less about discrete details and more about skills development like observation, inquiry, and developing points of view. Jakes’ “Educator-Designer” is a bold vision of a teacher, one whose curriculum comes to life through the imposition of complex, real-world problems between the students and their nascent understanding of the world. Never simple or naive, Jakes’ book asks all of us involved in the work of education what we believe about how our children learn best, whether our current systems are designed to meet those beliefs, and what we can do when they are not.
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“David Jakes is a thoughtful educator reflecting on a lifelong career in educational spaces. Using his own personal evolution as the foundation for this book, Jakes provides the reader with a wide range of lenses, strategies and tools for implementing a design based pedagogy with insightful questions and limitless possibilities. At its core, Jakes has written a book that implores education to be infinitely more human and humane, centering people in the design of their own learning and spaces, both virtual and in the real.”

““The Design Thinking Classroom is a deeply heartful, human-centric and useful book that is an important read for everyone from that teacher who is just beginning their journey to a design-thinking classroom to the educator experienced in co-creation of learning who is looking to sharpen their skills and refresh their thinking. David uses his own journey as an educator to frame how design thinking can create schools that are more thoughtful, passionate and powerful places for us all.””

““As we exit one of the most difficult times in the history of education, David Jakes presents us with a provocation to truly change our educational systems for the better. Not only does this book push school officials to reflect and think deeper into the future, but also provides skills and examples on how to achieve it. What if…” ”

“David Jakes’ insightful and practical book, The Design Thinking Classroom, is a hope-filled, well-lit pathway for educators on the threshold of giving up or giving in. With a designer’s perspective and some new skills, we can reimagine life-wide and life-deep learning with our students and make good on our promise to help them launch lives of purpose and impact. We might well find it again for ourselves in the process. ”