Nowadays, we live among the impacts of permanent trends in all areas. One o, leading directly to an educational environment and being commonly spread, is the ability of unlearn. Have you ever taken the opportunity of trying this challenge? It could be an amazing experience from your own reflexion, as the person, as such, is in the centre of this process. The individual is, therefore, essential, moving beyond the traditional learning concept to place the student in the centre, or what is the same: Student-centered learning.

Unlearning and boosting the student’s role connects with the idea of change, and to change something you must do something different. It is quite easy to understand but not so easy to deploy. Then, let’s rethink the education into Design thinking or vice versa, and achieve transformative learning as a final step, without forgetting that day-to-day work is crucial. Why? Just because everyday efforts include intangible or not enough valued skills and so named ‘soft’ (as opposed to ‘hard’, knowledge) such as empathy, resilience, reliance, and communication. They can help everyone cope with difficult situations everywhere, anytime. And a fundamental way to implement them in one’s personal growth is through Design Thinking, mainly through the critical thinking and the creativity.

A creative environment is key in this process to stimulate the flow of experimentation. Experimenting means trying and failing, questioning and risking, creating… This brings us closer to experiential learning, that is to say, apprehending, perceiving, developing critical thinking and, ultimately, this is the opposite to the old and passive learning culture because the student is at the centre of learning. It might just be how we behave in life. But the old is not always outdated; the old means opportunity in this context because it brings to us the opportunity of taking advantage of the values from humanism to avoid being dehumanized by the prevailing technology. The result could be a society we would reject because we will not be able to recognize ourselves as human beings. But the good news is that we have time to avoid this. How? By promoting critical thinking among students to discern what is false and what is true in social media, axes on which the future of the society turn around today.

As true as social media are shaping our lives to a greater or lesser extent, it is also true that the COVID-19 pandemic is and will be part of us forever. The scale of its impact has accelerated the development of many companies or pressured them to solve changing situations and problems. For that reason, the dynamism and flexibility go hand-in-hand more than ever in this unprecedented scenario to provide stability, and the talent is the way to apply both. The capacity or speed of allocating talent to opportunities could lead everyone to achieve the results in the most effective way. In other words, it is key that everyone is part of a hub where a specific set of skills are required to develop specific activities.

Thus, a new paradigm for education and the subsequent professional development is not coming, it is already here to create value. The role of Design thinking is to improve the learning capacity of the students to guide them -in a practically creative way- to a be deep, critical thinkers. This, in these times when there are plenty of trends and influencers everywhere, it seems highly relevant. It is one of the reasons why it is worth rethinking education.