Orientation
Let’s get oriented to our problem space and stakeholders!
What if you were to pick the skills you most wish you had for a career out of some magical collection of skills? What might that collection look like?
That question is what our capstone team, working with the South Fayette school district, is solving.
The first level goal of this project is to leverage technology to revolutionize the course catalog, but we don’t intend to just improve interaction with the old system. Instead, we hope to use a system change as an opportunity to influence systemic change in South Fayette’s community.
To Catch You Up…
Last time we wrote, we had just finished our kick off meeting. We presented our assumptions to our client and had some validated and others reworked. Together, we mapped out the student journey, the pain points along the way, and how the various people involved in the process affected both the route and the destination.
Secondary research was vital after this step, so we gathered information about an initial list of potential subject matter experts to consult and really focused on comparing analogous domains and developing our initial conceptual models. The analogous domains we chose included course catalogs from educational institutions of multiple levels, from middle school to university, and those offered by commercial services. Understanding how other designers have tackled this problem is an essential part of our first steps.
We stand on the shoulders of giants, and finding the tallest ones can only give us a better viewpoint for starting our own work.
Secondary research
For secondary research, we looked at analogous products and domains, including Duolingo, LinkedIn Learning, Skillshare, Coursera, and Stellic. We also compared course catalogs from other innovative high schools in the country. From this, we realized that experiential learning is generally lacking in high school education, which aligns with our client’s desire to teach more practical skills to students. The importance of experiential learning was echoed by experts in education at CMU, whom we consulted.
We also conducted more thorough research on the demographics and academic performance of South Fayette High School and how it compares with national statistics, which shows that South Fayette is exceptional in many aspects. With this information, we have a clearer idea of what we want to know from students and teachers once we receive clearance for a site visit, hopefully next week!
Co-Creation and Modeling
After our kick-off meeting and conducting more research about the problem space, we started to make conceptual models of what colleges may want an ideal applicant to be like or what high schoolers may perceive as the ideal candidate. We thought about the concepts from our parents’ generation where a student had to be well-rounded and well-versed in everything from academics to sports. Then we thought about our own time applying to college and what we heard or researched about during that time.
From our experience, we thought colleges wanted students who had a little experience in every subject but a specialty in a particular field that inspired or drove them to pursue specific majors. After that, we contemplated what current high schoolers might feel would be the ideal model and what that would look like. That’s something we want to delve into during our conceptual inquiries.
Meeting of the Minds
During this sprint, we also wanted to consult subject matter experts in the domains we are exploring. Our purpose in reaching out to experts was two-fold:
- To continue developing a mental model of “what is,” validating the assumptions we had already made and generating new ideas.
- To better understand the domain of educational design, how we might engage stakeholders, like teachers, to co-create solutions that inspire collective success.
Modeling “What is”
While we can’t directly work with students yet, we wanted to reach out to experts that might help us explore the true journey that these students will take after high school, in order to compare the students’ perceptions with life’s reality. In some ways we confirmed what we believed about college admissions — that elite colleges do want to see rigor through AP courses, but importantly, we extracted broader insights about the potential mindset of students leaving high school. One expert described the challenge of encouraging students to explore their interests once they reached college, helping them to build a sense of resiliency and self-identity through experience. We resonated with this, but wondered why that exploration isn’t happening in high schools (or so we think), when it seems like it would benefit students immensely to have these experiences earlier, or at all, if they choose a path other than higher education after high school. This encouraged us to broaden our horizons, seeking to understand what concepts, like exploration, might benefit a diverse range of students for any path they choose, and what barriers may be stopping them from embarking on this exploration.
Educational Design Supporting “What Could Be”
We are trying to see the silver lining in having to wait for our child protection clearances before interacting with direct stakeholders, like students. During this time, we’ve made it our mission to learn all we can about how the practice of design might be unique in educational contexts, so that we are ready to hit the ground running on our first site visit. Particularly, we are investigating strategies and considerations with regard to effectively engaging teachers and co-creating with students during the design process.
“Beliefs matter… once they [teachers] see it working with students, their beliefs will change,”
This quote from one of our experts beautifully summed up our hopes for working with teachers on this project, acknowledging that they are a passionate group who may be resistant to change — understandably so, given the demands of their work. Our expert highlighted that the key constraint in working with teachers is time — in order to design effective educational interventions we need to give teachers time: time to learn, time to contribute, time to reflect. Thus, how do we make space to welcome them into our initiative? One key strategy is being intentional about the way we prove to them that we value their time: offering incentives like meals or classroom supplies, and truly listening to their feedback and implementing it with credit. Further, intentionally designing implementation to allow teachers scaffolded opportunities to work with the system will be crucial. Finally, we can try to recruit a small number of teachers who are especially passionate about this type of work and cultivate strong working relationships with them, empowering them to serve as advocates for change, influencing the beliefs of their peers and other stakeholders.
Next steps
For our next steps, we will receive clearance to visit South Fayette High School and begin to interview the students, teachers, and administrators. We will introduce our team and project to the school through email and a creative poster. Furthermore, we will continue gathering information from other stakeholders and subject experts through semi-structured interviews. The purpose of our upcoming research efforts will be to validate our assumptions and models.
Xoxo,
Team South Fayette
This project is not intended to contribute to generalizable knowledge and is not human subjects research.
