Case Study: Health and Human Services in Revere Public Schools

How might we provide teachers and support staff with adequate resources to address students’ diverse behavior and social needs?

Timeline: 10 weeks • Client: Garfield Elementary School Format: Team Research & Design (no assigned roles)

Summary: Garfield Elementary School was a school with a problem; they were seeing more and more socio-economic needs in their school and seeing more concerning behaviors. The school staff was split on how to address the issue; while teachers wanted more explicit guidance from the principal on how to manage students, the school principal felt teachers had the key tools to power through the challenges. By focusing on teachers as the levers of change, we saw that what they needed most was allocated time to develop in the way the principal expected and more connection with the changing community. Our proposed strategy offered teachers low-lift, medium-lift, and heavy-lift strategies to leverage underutilized resources and create more pockets of time to connect with students and families.

Welcome to Garfield Elementary School, an elementary school serving a diverse population of 700 students in pre-kindergarten through 5th grade. At the time of my work with them, Garfield, located in Revere, MA was experiencing an exponential increase in students whose families had recently immigrated to the U.S. They also felt they were observing greater behavioral, mental health, and economical challenges in students. Some veteran school staff associated these challenges with the changing demographics in the school.

So, what’s the problem?

School staff felt consumed by the growing social and emotional needs of students and the subsequent behavior challenges. Teachers were awaiting direction from leadership for the solution. Meanwhile, the principal felt that a previously instated social-emotional learning curriculum would provide the necessary guidance on how to help manage students’ emotions and resulting behaviors.

Harvard Graduate School of Education challenged our student team of 4 to use the design thinking model to address the challenges submitted by various Revere Public Schools.

Principals, teachers, counselors, oh my! Who is our user?

Our initial strategy was to define the user pain points, goals, and needs to ensure we were understanding the problem space from their perspective.

We didn’t yet know who we would design for, so we set out to understand the various users and roles in the school community. We did this using:

• User Interviews — Semi-structured interviews with 25 teachers, support staff, school and district leadership, and community members in order to understand the context from the various stakeholders at play.
• Direct Observation — 2 site visits to Garfield Elementary during school day to see interactions when students arrive, move throughout the day and depart from school with parents and families
• Desk Research — Researched best practices for addressing social-emotional challenges in schools
• Expert Interviews — Leveraged expertise from team members and Harvard professors in the fields of school management, classroom management, counseling, and family engagement

After our interviews with users and stakeholders, we created an empathy map with the school staff as the user and affinity map with our observations.

The theme of disconnection rose to the surface in our mapping and showed up:

• in the school staff: school leaders placed great faith in the social-emotional learning curriculum to improve urgent behavioral problems while teachers had great doubts
• in communicated expectations: teachers were expected to replicate the social-emotional learning curriculum but had little dedicated time and support to dedicate to their learning
• in student-teacher relations: teachers were expected to meet students' unique needs but had limited information on their background. Teachers also related the unknowns of diverse family backgrounds to surprising student behaviors in schools.

We were eager to jump into the ideation phase, but at this point, it became clear that we would not be able to address the school staff as one singular user. As such, we created point-of-view statements, stating user needs from the perspective of the groups we had interacted with; teachers, counselors, and school administrators.

Recognizing that teachers were the ones being most impacted by school expectations and student behaviors, we believed focusing on them would, in turn, be the most impactful.

Revisiting the school for another round of interviews with teachers and students, we built a better understanding of the classroom dynamic, what a teacher's workweek looked like, and their engagement with community partners and family members.

With more detailed information on the teacher experience, we were able to see two unique profiles represented at Garfield. We created two user personas to keep in mind their unique needs and behaviors as we designed a teacher-centered strategy.

Our teacher-centered strategy

Though there were areas of disconnect at Garfield, our observations and research showed there were also missed opportunities for connection, especially with students’ families and the changing Revere community.

One perfect example is, after hearing school staff in several interviews express there was never any opportunity to interact with parents, we were stunned to see a crowd of parents outside the school waiting outside the school for nearly an hour for their children to be dismissed. Our solutions focused on points like these where existing resources could be leveraged to address teachers’ pain points.

Our team proposed the following multi-tier solution with Garfield Elementary to directly address the areas of disconnect we observed:

• Intentional practices of building contextual understanding of students’ families and cultural backgrounds
• Pre-assigned time in school calendars and schedules for teachers and counseling staff to use the contextual understanding to develop strategies for in-school student support
• Intentional engagement in Revere community organizations in building supportive environment for students

We did not want to attempt to resolve the teacher problem of having limited time to incorporate a proposed solution with another solution that would be challenging to incorporate. However, we also knew that addressing student behavior was one that would not happen with one silver bullet.

As a result, we decided to provide our client with a menu of options of low-lift, medium-lift, and heavy-lift strategies for each proposed solution.

See our full presentation here.

What was the outcome?

School staff appreciated the various levels of solutions and the focus on community and family engagement given that parents daily physically surrounded the school and could provide the context teachers craved, and yet, teachers had not connected with them as potential partners in supporting their children.

We didn’t have an opportunity to go beyond proposing the solutions to Garfield, so next steps, I would implement and gather feedback on a small or medium lift family engagement solution to see if they created the positive change we sought.

Though teachers were the users charged with both managing student behavior and managing school-parent relationships, families and students were obviously missing voices in our conversations.

For next steps for this project, I would also interview students and families for their perspective on how teachers handle behavior issues and what could be improved.