Design Thinking Approach to Placement Design: Workshop facilitator directions

The MentorTrain project wants to assist experienced mentors in designing detailed training- plans for specific placements. For this, the project consortium has developed a workshop format using “A Design-Thinking Approach for Defining Placements”.

Design thinking is a method for design of products of services that involves the following steps:

– Empathize: i.e. understanding the needs for the audience which is being addressed

– Define: i.e. constructing a point of view that is based on the needs of the users

– Ideate: i.e. brainstorm and come up with creative solutions – Prototype: i.e. build a representation of one or more of the ideas to show to others

– Test: i.e. return to the original user group and test the ideas for feedback

Within education, design thinking is already used extensively as part of instructional design. We believe that its shows significant promise if applied to the problem of designing meaningful apprenticeships, in particular by bringing together groups of experienced mentors from different companies and help them to collaborate. The result of this workshop is therefore to design a detailed ideal apprenticeship-profile for [Occupation X].

The full facilitator notes can be downloaded below (in different languages). The accompanying powerpoint slides are here:

MentorTrain Workshop Presentation 

Download the Handbook here in English, Spanish, Basque, Czech, Estonian or Slovenian: