Training the Trainers: Design Thinking 

This initiative is designed to help remedy one of the most glaring defects of educational systems in developing countries—namely their tendency to undermine critical and original thinking and suppress students’ creative potential.
From grade school up, the curriculum taught in schools throughout developing countries tends to be didactic and hierarchical, emphasizing singular, frequently pontificated, answers to given problems and issues.
Revamping the education curriculum, however, is both laborious, politically fraught, and subject to bureaucratic hurdles and setbacks. Instead, under this initiative, we propose to circumvent bureaucratic impediments by

1. Researching, writing, and publishing a textbook on design thinking tailored to junior and senior high school students.

2. Training instructors who will subsequently teach design thinking to youth. The training program could eventually be extended to college/university students.

The initiative is predicated on the notion that innovative problem solving and design thinking can be learned through repeated practice. Design thinking is a method of applying creativity to come up with novel solutions to tough problems. It is the process of immersing oneself in a problem, thinking creatively around opportunities and challenges, and iteratively prototyping entirely new solutions.
The training will help students to develop their creative thinking skills. These include the ability to generate solutions or alternative approaches that are more effective than those that already exist. The course will introduce a variety of tools and techniques that with repeated use will help students think more expansively, creatively, and effectively.