The Importance of Syncing on Research Findings and Ideating Together

It’s hard to believe this is the last sprint of the semester, but here we are! Going into this sprint, the team had three major goals.

1. Syncing with our client on our latest research findings and problem re-framing
2. Better understanding non-high-achieving students at SF
3. Rapidly ideating different solutions that could bring our ideas to life

1. Syncing with our client on our latest research findings and problem re-framing

We were excited to talk to our clients, Matt and Jim, about our latest research findings and opportunities we identified. However, we were also a bit nervous because we felt like we would be challenging the portrait of the Lion Learner that had been proposed for us to design. We wanted to get their perspective on what our research had led us to identify, which is the importance of understanding the traits you are strong in and working with other people who are strong in different traits. We felt like this conflicted with our idea of the the Lion Learner model, which want students to possess all the traits outlined. However, through our meeting, we realized that Matt and Jim actually shared our approach to individual strengths and weaknesses. They offered some further insight from their years in this field on

The team meeting in Jim’s office at South Fayette High School, seated around posters and sticky notes.

We agreed that we want to enable students to better themselves (in the context of Lion Learner traits), set an intentional pathway for growth, and continually reflect. We will keep working with Matt, Jim, and hopefully other members of the South Fayette community as we prototype processes that could help us drive the change we have in mind.

Left: an idea for the different types of reflection that may make up a holistic system. Right: a visualization of of the growth that is experienced through reflective activities.

2. Better understanding non-high-achieving students at SF

Over the past week, we had a great first round of student interviews. From the students we talked to, here are some themes we found:

• Clubs / extracurriculars can be very impactful for students’ personal growth when they are done with more intrinsic motivation
• Students most liking teachers they have a personal relationship with (ie., can talk to about their day)
• Students don’t always feel comfortable asking questions because they may be taken as a sign that they’re not right for an advanced class

However, our participants for these interviews didn’t quite capture the diversity of the student body at SFHS. The students who interviewed with us were all high-achieving, and, while we got some great information from them, we wanted to make sure we weren’t neglecting other sides of student experiences. We went to the school to reach regular and low-performing students. We did a metaphor activity with these students to gauge how they feel about school. We also asked some students to describe themselves, their friends, and a struggle they’ve overcome in the past to understand their self-perception and relationships with friends.

Students chose which of these metaphors they most relate to in the context of school.

Off the bat, we found that some students chose metaphors describing negative experiences which we didn’t hear of among the honors students. On the bright side, students consistently described their friends positively! We need to do further analysis and synthesis with this data to properly understand the themes and how they builds upon what we’ve learned already.

3. Rapidly ideating different solutions that could bring our ideas to life

At the start of this sprint, we took a few days to ideate individually. We wanted to see what we each would envision unbiased of each other’s ideas. Surprisingly, our ideas had a lot of overlap. Our faculty encouraged us to ideate more diversely, which is when we decided to do a Crazy 8s session! We based our ideation on our HMW statements that lie across the three components of self-determination theory: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Our ideation on our opportunities that lie across the three components of self-determination theory.

Crazy 8s definitely brought up some unique potential solutions, which we categorized into the buckets on the image below.

Buckets of themes that came out of our team’s Crazy 8s session.

We also had the same Crazy 8s session with our clients after we shared the HMW opportunity statements with them. This was extremely helpful in understanding what’s important to them and what types of solutions they could see fitting in at the SFHS. Our next step is to create prototypes that allow us to test the major concepts we’ve identified. Over the next two weeks, we’ll be balancing the curation of our spring deliverables with continued effort to synthesize our research findings and get ready for an increased focus on design in the summer semester!