Ideating for Goals, Guidance and Fun
As a recap to our last sprint.. we put on our designer-ly thinking hats to ideate towards encouraging self-motivated learning at South Fayette! Our next step was to cluster our ideas and put on 5 different thinking hats to assess the desirability, concerns, and feelings towards our ideas from the eyes of our 5 main stakeholders- the overachieving student, the misunderstood student, teachers, clients, and designers.
Based on a process of dot voting, the design directions we pursued this sprint were:
- Activities: Growth through small, low stakes activities over time
- Resilience: Testing rewards and growth from failure
- Mentorship: Finding the purpose behind finding
- Goal setting: Setting and breaking down goals into subgoals
- Self perception: Repeatedly seeing self-image through their strengths and core values
Our Ideas in Action- Goal Setting, Games, Reflection
Walking through these our ideas from different perspectives helped us have a productive discussion of design implications like:
- Students and teachers need to come to believe that reflection is an important activity
- Kids may need guidance for setting relatable, serious, actionable, good, goals
- Time could be a crucial consideration. When and how long?
- Need to consider different ways to visualize progress and ability
- Unsupervised time for students to talk could lead students to be mean or off topic
Our next step was to go to the school and test out our prototypes. We walked around the cafeteria to test with students individually and visited some classes to test out group activities. We also set up a participatory activity prompting them to identify with one of the seven lion learner characteristics and asking them why they chose it.
Let’s take a look at what we made and what we learned!
Through the idea of mini games, we learned the students need for social connection because they wanted to play them with their friends. However, it served as a cautionary reminder to not exclude students who are introverted and prefer small amounts of socialization.
The participatory activity of identifying as a Lion Learner trait showed us that students identify with values based on what they currently do or enjoy doing, rather than seeking out new things based on their strengths or weaknesses. A lot of associations were made on a surface level, lacking depth and reflection
When asking students to set goals and break them down into smaller tasks, we observed that some students’ subgoals about grades/academics were general things they “should” do, indicating guilt and self-judgement on this topic. The subgoals also often tended to be more broad than specific and actionable and students felt that feedback specific to their goals could lead them to get better.
Small activities conducted in class helped feel students connected with peers and motivated them to self reflect. For some students, the activity led to self depreciating thoughts as a result of the lack of a safe space due to other’s comments or perception of them. Overall smaller groups or private reflection were preferred. We also learned that not all teachers would be willing to facilitate these activities if they did not feel comfortable.
When asking for guidance to a chatbot, students aired on the side of asking about class and grades. We might need a way to better guide students to reflect on their soft skills. People have a general conception of the tone of an AI to be more formal than that of a friend, however they prefer a personal friendly tone to feel that the bot is more approachable. They appreciate the privacy and no consequence that AI allows.
What We Learned
Synthesizing our testing helped us learn some key takeaways:
- Explaining the underlying purpose: Students enjoy short activities but are curious to know the purpose of activities after experiencing them
- Ensuring inclusivity: We need to consider students and teachers with low social comfort
- Need for variety: Activities could get awkward or boring if not varied
- Broadening the possibility for goals: Students need to be nudged away from solely making grade focussed goals because thinking about soft skills does not come naturally
- Improving goal setting skills: Students need to improve on making realistic and actionable goals
- Making reflection more “fun”: Reflection needs to be disguised or made more appealing, because to some it is overdone and lost meaning
- Lion learner traits may not be all encompassing: Students can relate to some variation of lion learner traits, but only on a surface level
- Affinity towards a personal connection: Kids prefer a friendly tone for a conversational support platform because it feels more personal
Insights from Career Counselor
As a follow up to our visit during the senior exit interview, we spoke with Emily Sharro, the College & Career Counselor at South Fayette, who gave us insight into what graduating seniors feel can be improved about school. We learned that they hoped for more hands-on, group based learning which fell in line with the “autonomy” pillar of our design framework. They wished there were more community gatherings to increase a sense of unity, which confirmed the need for “relatedness” in our project.
Emily shared with us that the interview carries too much weight in terms of grades for being a 20 minute interview. She hopes to reframe the way their performance is captured in a pass/fail method or reducing the weight. We believe our solution could help add to the exit interview as a more gradual and holistic way to capture the student’s “competence” rather than a one shot attempt.
Emily shared with us the Mastery Transcript consortium which visualizes student progress beyond the traditional grade system.
As a team we are considering how this type of visualization could be helpful for students to keep track of their progress and for teachers to see a summarized view of.
This made us realize that it is logistically difficult to get new ideas implemented because they have trickle down effects, and, with anything new, it takes several years to weave into the existing routine of school. If we were to opt for a public forum for reflections, we would have to consider flagging concerning entries and handling liability. Our clients echoed the concern on the lack of resources to regulate high volumes of student content. Teachers may have to go through a learning curve on what to do if they are handed a summary of students’ soft skills. For activities, teachers will have more buy-in if they feel like they had a part in it and their voice is heard. This prompted us to initiate plans for co-designing with teachers.
Next Steps
As we head into our next round of prototyping, we are guiding our process by design considerations that were surfaced our testing with students and feedback from our clients.
- How much will our design be student centric vs needing support from admin/teachers?
- Could it be more powerful to put it in the hands of students and encourage quick adoption by making it meaningful to them?
- Instead of maintaining connections digitally, could we consider a digital platform to spark and develop new connections?
- How do we introduce this as non-confrontational change? We would frame it as adding to their toolbox rather than changing current processes?
- How could we build pockets of success that could build over time?
