Paving the road ahead
The past two weeks have been an exciting time for the team as we have started to tackle the ideation and validation of our initial concepts while heading closer to our spring presentation. Our team has had to utilize a mixture of collaborative and individual work during this phase of our process, and it has led to a healthy balance of independence. From wrapping up our exploratory phase of research and moving into synthesizing and testing our ideas, we are coming to the end of this first part of our project and it is all starting to come together!
Wrapping up our exploration
Throughout this entire project, our team has prioritized collaborative activities during interviews to ensure that we are bringing our participants into the design process with us!
Our most recent round of interviews, formal interviews with Black educators from independent schools around Pittsburgh, have been a combination of co-creating individual journey maps with each participant (allowing us to walk through their own careers with them), as well as our standard approach of directed storytelling (allowing us to hear first-hand accounts of events).
After initially planning on conducting 5 interviews, we found ourselves shifting to 4 longer sessions with Black educators around the city of Pittsburgh. While time constraints played a part in this decision, we internally decided to scope our number down to ensure that we conducted substantial interviews, relying on quality over quantity as we began to round out the generative phase of our research.
Our approach of combining individual journey maps and directed storytelling methods into our interview sessions allowed us to not only better understand each individual’s own experience, but also provide our team with an incredible amount of insight into the lived experiences of our participants.
Creating and testing a shared understanding
Building our conceptual model
With the vast amount of findings gathered through our interview sessions, we attempted to create a collective model to represent the career a Black educator may have, and how FAME may intervene to create a more positive experience for aspiring educators. Our last Medium post broke down our new method of synthesis through interpretation notes, and this approach led to our team building a shared understanding of the educators we interviewed. (You can revisit our newly established method of interpretation in our previous Medium post!)
Breaking into pairs, our team revisited each finding from our 4 interviews before converting each note into a data point. Utilizing Miro (a digital whiteboard tool), we constructed a collective journey map that represented the current state of the Black educator’s journey in Pittsburgh independent schools, highlighting the “positive” and “negative” pivoting moments that they may experience.
“Creating this journey map was so rewarding, as we finally saw our floating ideas become visually concrete. Thus far, this has been my favorite part of the project!” — Leanne Liu
It is important to draw attention to our highlighting of “positive” and “negative” pivoting moments. With the background research we have conducted and the many conversations we have had prior to working directly with Black educators, we found ourselves initially focusing on the negative breakdowns in an educator’s experience that are caused by burnout, isolation, and the unique experience of feeling alienated. When working with our data and continuing to build the collective journey map, we realized the many layers present within an educator’s experience. This has allowed us to start reframing our problem so we don’t just ask, “How do we prevent Black teachers from leaving their job so quickly?”, but instead, also explore the metrics that teachers use to measure how “successful’’ their career is.
Validating with experts
This collective journey map was a direct result of our interviews and knowledge on the education space, but we decided to take it a step further! In the spirit of co-creation, we are collaborating on another journey map with participants that allows them to envision how FAME’s Teachers’ Academy could potentially impact the experience aspiring educators have when entering the field.
By initially presenting the collective journey map with participants, we are validating our own journey map of the experiences that a Black educator may have throughout their career. We then present them with a service blueprint of FAME, highlighting what FAME aims to be doing with their new program, before showing the blank journey map and working alongside them to ideate possible moments of intervention that may aid future educators. It is our hope that participants will potentially uncover new areas for exploration, while also evaluating whether their envisionment aligns with our own predictions.
“As opposed to simply creating an affinity diagram of our notes, the journey map was a smart way to visually organize the phases of a Black teacher’s career that we were already thinking about. Plus, it got us one step closer to having an artifact that would make sense to put in front of our clients and interviewees as we moved into validating these initial findings. I’m grateful that our team has been so proactive in utilizing these modeling techniques to summarize our research.” — Martina Tan
Using independence to collaborate!
As this semester starts to wrap up, it is almost time to showcase our work! It is no surprise that this first part of our project has flown by, as we have all been so engrossed with this work.
We are nearing our spring presentation, a lengthy event in which we present our work and learnings to our faculty, peers, donors, and most importantly, FAME! This milestone is an exciting time for us, so we are starting to prepare ahead of time.
Our team has elected to split up work, providing us all with the opportunity to take responsibility for a particular piece of the presentation. The process of delegation allows us to explore areas that we are either comfortable with, or that may be new to! More importantly, it allows us all to have a stake in the story we aim to tell.
“Starting the Spring deliverable has made me much more aware that the semester is about to come to a close. I feel like we have a good plan on how to use the remaining weeks until summer and I’m really excited about how we will present what we’ve learned so far. Having the team split up to take responsibility for one aspect of the deliverable also allows everyone to have the chance to take responsibility for our project in new ways” — Swetha Kannan
Our next steps & reflections
The end of the semester continues to creep closer to us, but it feels as if we are just getting started.
The next few weeks will be focused on finishing our validation testing and getting ready for our spring presentation. Collecting and presenting our many learnings and findings throughout our project may be a daunting task, but it is one that we are all excited for!
“Considering the relationship we have built with FAME, and how passionate we all are about this problem space, it is both exciting and daunting to present all of our work! I look forward to the feedback and insights we will gain from our presentation so that we can head into the summer even more informed. It’s like we are just getting started!” — Marlon Mejia
While our validation testing and spring presentation are incredibly important, the summer presents us with the opportunity to work alongside the first class of FAME Fellows. This is the time for us to continue working closer to our end goal of supporting Black educators, and it is an incredible feeling knowing we will be in the field with the FAME fellows soon! Alana has been working hard getting our team ready for the transition by creating a longitudinal study plan, which we will talk about in detail in our next post. 😉
“I am excited that I have an opportunity to apply my experience in psychology research to this capstone. Having run a longitudinal study for two years, there are many practices I think we can bring into our interactions with FAME Fellows. Most importantly, I think I will be able to help the team maximize the time we do have with these future educators.” — Alana Mittleman
