How One Teacher’s Students Taught Him the Power of Empathy Through an Old Backpack

How one teacher’s students taught him the power of empathy through an old backpack

One of the strategies we teach our clients when it comes to solving complex corporate challenges is design thinking.

The overall goal of this tried-and-true practice is to develop practical solutions in a new and unique way. There are five stages of design thinking: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. Of these, the empathize stage is the most important.

Without empathy, it’s impossible to know how effective the end result will be for the people involved.

Design thinking isn’t just for businesses

Each year, Ralph Keith’s students at Rock Spring Elementary in Rock Spring, Georgia, participate in a challenge called “How Might We Reinvent the Backpack?”

This activity is part of Bright Spark, Bridge Innovate's® social innovation, designed to ignite creative confidence with students and educators using design thinking.

He’s not surprised that students start fully engaging when the “empathy” stage of the challenge begins. It’s when the design process takes a turn and students must put themselves in someone else’s shoes.

Bright Spark inspires students and teachers to innovate

Bridge Innovate offers programs for students in fourth grade through college to use design thinking to build design skills such as empathy, problem-solving, prototyping and experimenting to create new solutions for a multitude of real-world problems.

But it’s not just students that benefit. Teachers who participate in Bright Spark and learn design thinking find new ways to collaborate with their classes, faculty, and staff to develop solutions for school-wide challenges.

And they also get the joy of watching their students learn about difficulties others may face in life and how to better empathize with each other.

Backpacks full of empathy

As part of the “How MIght We Reinvent the Backpack?” activity, Ralph instructed his students to trade backpacks so they could learn more about each other.

As you’ll hear in Ralph’s story, the unexpected happened and the greatest outcome of the challenge wasn’t even a product, but something so much more important.

When asked why he brought design thinking to his students, Ralph answered, I'm simply teaching the class I wish I could have taken when I was a student."