Digging deeper into our problem space

These last two weeks have been a spiral. We’ve completed so much and have plans for much more. At the end of our last sprint, we had met the team over at FAME Academy and were able to ask them many of our lingering questions after doing background research into this problem space.

Kickoff Highlights

A team photo taken during our kickoff-meeting. From Top-left to bottom-right: Swetha Kannan, Martina Tan, Alana Mittleman, Marlon Mejia, Leanne Liu, Raelin Mascara(Faculty advisor), Rachel Dzombik(Faculty advisor), Lisa Owens (FAME), Marion Key(FAME), Darryl Wiley(FAME).

During the kick-off meeting we were able to conduct a few activities that helped us further explore our problem space.

Concept Mapping — In this activity, we all took a moment to create our own web of connections that we associate with certain words like ‘educator’. It helped to see where our brains went to versus where the team at FAME took their maps because it filled in the gaps in our current understanding or ways of thinking

Envision the Future — We asked everyone towards the end of the meeting to draw a few pictures of what an ideal future for FAME and the Teacher’s academy could be. This helped those on the team consolidate what we’d learned over the course of the meeting and also informed us about what goals the team at FAME had and what they would consider ‘success’.

To share our ‘Envision the future’ storyboards with each other, we had participants hold the board up to the camera.

Rose, Thorn, Bud — At the very end of the meeting, we did a small reflection excercise where we asked everyone to list one thing they liked about the conversation(the ‘rose’), one thing that was tough or confusing about it(the ‘thorn’) and one idea they had from it that they wanted to take into the future (‘bud’). This helped us consolidate the most important threads of the conversation and helped further reinforce what the team at FAME took from it.

Overall, many of us had a positive impression of this meeting citing that it was helpful from a personal standpoint (to develop ties with our client) and from a professional one (to understand our problem space).

“… we made headway on the objectives that we had laid out for the kick-off: uncovering assumptions, skills we could exchange, and the desires and visions we had for the project. Above all, I was glad we could establish some rapport with our clients and get to know each other as people.” — Martina Tan

Research

Through what we learned during our kickoff event, we were able to come up with a more refined research approach in which we are investigating the current and future states of three areas: Teachers, FAME itself, and the education system, as a whole.

The table above descibes our research approach which is based in understanding the past and present of 3 distinct areas all related to Black teachers in Pittsburgh.

In this initial phase of research, we aim to understand the ‘current’ state of these three areas. To assist in this, we have prepared interview guides for participants who relate to each of these three topics. These guides will help inform our formal interviews.

Until then, we have focused on having informal interviews with friends, colleagues, and others in our personal networks that relate to this problem space. We were able to talk to:

1. Previous high school students from the Pittsburgh Area
2. People who had previous teaching experience in Pittsburgh
3. A person who’d worked in an education technologies startup in Pittsburgh

We’ve also done desk research into Black teachers in America to make sure we understand what is already out there on the subject.

“Diving into research this week has made me realize that I am terrified of making decisions. There are a lot of “what ifs” that makes me hesitate action… However, being on this team is pushing me to keep on moving.” — Leanne Liu

Recruitment

While consolidating our research, we wanted to start a larger recruitment effort to find those outside our personal networks who may be willing to talk to us.

To start off, we sent out a call for participants via LinkedIn. The post links to a Google Form that those interested can fill out if they are inclined.

Swetha Kannan on LinkedIn: Conducting research into the lived experience of Black teachers.

We’ve also employed a variety of other tactics such as, reaching out to specific people we would like to interview via LinkedIn, emailing, etc.

Luckily, we’ve had a lot of help in this front since many people related to the Human-Computer Interaction program in Carnegie Mellon University have been so generous with their time and resources; many people have been willing to share our post, pass around our Google Form.

The team at FAME have also been so supportive of what we’ve been doing these last few weeks(which we greatly appreciate!). They have agreed to help us spread the word to their networks to help connect us to others we may want to interview. The leadership at FAME are also able to give us interviews which we hope to schedule soon.

“It may come as no surprise to friends and colleagues alike that I need to remain busy. Whether it be a menial task like loading the dishwasher, or a more complex task like crafting a research guide alongside a teammate, I desire ways to stimulate my brain” — Marlon Mejia

Putting it all together

All our synthesis materials were hung together allowing us to better compare and draw out common themes.

After our first week of interviews, we sat down as a team to go over all the concept maps, drawings, and other synthesis materials we’d created over the course of our interviews.

We took some time to just individually read everything and draw our own conclusions. We then silently noted the observation on a sticky note and moved on. In the end, we were able to consolidate all our sticky notes, discuss our observations and identify a few common threads between all our research so far.

All of us take time to read through our notes and write down connections we see on sticky notes.

What we found was:

1. Diversity of teaching staff is different depending on level of certification
2. Student culture tends to affect teacher culture (and vice versa)
3. Even if students and teachers want change, it is often hard to convince administration
4. Many support systems are person-to-person. (A question we want to investigate: How scalable is this model?)

“Having a wall of our team office covered in whiteboards is far more valuable than I could have imagined... It is such that whenever I am in the team office I have a clearer understanding of the direction of our project and overall I feel more goal oriented.” — Alana Mittleman

Reflection and next steps

At the end of this sprint, the team gave a small written reflection to each other about what we felt during the last two weeks. This was where we could point out areas of improvement for the team, what went well, and what we wanted to personally work on.

There was an overwhelming sense this week that members of the team were feeling more comfortable with our research plan now that we were able to consolidate everything.

Many people also expressed their readiness to dive further into research and recruitment over the next few week. That falls perfectly in line with our immediate plans for the future. I, personally, am looking forward to our next consolidation session where we can make more sense of all the interviews we’ve done.

“After this sprint, I am eager to just get out there and DO. I’m confident that we’ve prepared as much as possible and now I just want to reach out to people, get as much interviews as we can, and really explore the problem space.” — Swetha Kannan