Grand Challenges part 2: The Deep Dive (post #11)

In the winter of 2015, we began collecting and analyzing the data to help us name and understand the big, system level impediments to training and retaining 100,000 excellent science, technology, engineering, and math teachers. As of fall 2016, we have nearly completed this research. Below we have described the steps we took to identify the grand challenges:

• Recognizing that many researchers and practitioners have worked on the challenges to training and retaining STEM teachers for many years, we conducted background research at the start of the work to ground ourselves in conversations already occurring. (Summary of sources consulted in this slide.)
• We held interviews with about 30 diverse stakeholders, including STEM teachers, principals, nonprofit leaders, researchers, policymakers, union representatives, and others. (Names and affiliations in this slide.)

We then used the data from the background research and stakeholder interviews to develop an initial set of six overarching challenge areas. We shared these topics, along with short descriptive paragraphs, with about 200 partners and allies at our 4th annual Summit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Over the two days of the Summit, we engaged partners in design thinking workshops to build out those six areas by identifying what topics were missing, naming inaccuracies, and fleshing out root causes.

Building on all that work, we developed the first draft of the grand challenges with seven overarching challenges areas, broken into nearly 100 root causes. We shared them with partners via an interactive map.

Throughout the summer and fall of 2015, we hosted workshops around the country to gather feedback on the challenges:

• 100+ teacher winners of the Presidential Awards for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching workshopped the challenges at the White House Celebration in July 2015 during a session led by 100Kin10. (See photos of the workshop below.) More than a hundred teacher leaders provided additional feedback on the challenges at a meeting hosted by the U.S. Department of Education that same month.

• We then gathered input from our partners and other allies at eight regional “Back-to-School Breakfasts” held in cities across the country. Attendees worked in small groups to together share feedback on a particular challenge area while also discussing the work their organization is doing to contribute to overcoming it.

In the fall of 2016, we engaged experts and thought leaders to ensure that we were approaching this work smartly, strategically, and thoroughly. Three advisory panels — a leadership advisory panel, a partner working group, and a teacher advisory panel — guided and informed this work. (You can find names and affiliations in this deck.) The leadership advisory panel met twice in person, supplemented by a half dozen virtual gatherings.

With the advisory panels’ leadership, we moved into the next phase of data collection. To unearth even more data, and to better understand the complexity of the challenges, we held about 55 more interviews with a wide range of stakeholders, including STEM teachers, STEM teacher candidates, STEM teacher preparation providers, STEM teacher PD providers, union leaders, principals, among others.

We shared a second, revised draft of the challenge map with partners and allies at the 2016 Summit held at NASA’s Space Center Houston in Houston, TX. This second version integrated all of the data collected in the past year. At the Summit, attendees again workshopped the challenges, this year with a greater focus on the work they are currently doing to overcome the identified areas of need as well as developing ideas for what they could do collaboratively with fellow partners. In addition to engaging partners directly in the work of overcoming the challenges, these sessions contributed to the ongoing research to refine the challenge map.

• To validate the data, we then conducted a large-scale survey with ten stakeholder groups, gathering feedback from ~1,500 STEM teachers and over 200 other stakeholders (including principles, STEM teacher candidates, STEM teacher preparation providers, STEM teacher PD providers, and union leaders).

As a final step in the research phase of this work, we commissioned white papers across the grand challenge topics. We invited top STEM and education researchers to nominate PhD and post-doc students to synthesize the most relevant research across the challenge areas. We now have 26 papers that summarize and analyze the research and outline bright spots (or examples of success or progress against each of these challenge areas).

Although written by academics, these papers are specifically targeted to a practitioner audience; they are brief (3–4 pages in length) and written in an accessible style.

The American Institutes of Research reviewed all the papers. You can see one of the white papers here.

With all of the above data in hand, we developed and shared a public draft of the grand challenges.

We do expect that we will update the grand challenges map on a regular basis moving forward, as we uncover more data, understand deeper nuances, and make progress against the root causes. For this reason, we see this current map as a living body, as opposed to a final one.

And where are we going with this?

I’ve reflected often in recent months on how different a project like this is by dint of it growing out of an active and engaged network versus being produced by a research institution or think tank. Because the map emerged from the collective work of hundreds of organizations, and because those organizations, catalyzed by 100Kin10, are in a position to tackle those challenges head-on, the grand challenges morphs from being a beautiful piece of analysis to a powerful tool for activation.

As such, our partners are in the midst of “tagging” their commitment against the grand challenge area they are most directly addressing. We currently have more than 150 partners already tagged. This map of our partners’ work will become a base point for the progress our network is making against the challenges and will enable partners to grasp the full extent of the system, to understand the role they play within it, to pinpoint holes of little-to-no action, and to identify potential collaborators in their work.

But to take action effectively, we need to know where to point the network. A system with 100+ root causes is overwhelming to the point of paralysis.

This past winter, we conducted the task of identifying the most strategic root cause issues — in other words, those that, if they are affected, reduced, or eliminated, have the greatest ability to make the biggest impact across the system. We were searching for the root causes that, if addressed, could have greater downstream effect than others, impacting a large number of nodes in the system.

We partnered with Eric Berlow, an ecologist and network scientist who is recognized for his creative approaches to complex problems (see an example of his work on a similar project called We The Data in this short video). He partnered with the team leading strategy at Intel and the founder of Kumu, and together they created a game that allowed us to query hundreds of people to look at the root causes and tell us, all things equal, what would happen to B if A increased. This is pointing the way to a short-list of root causes with outsized positive impact on the system as a whole. We’ll be revealing those this summer.

Ready to experience the grand challenges yourself? Play the Grand Challenges Mapper.