Adaptive, Resilient, and Open to Change: Designing For The Future of Portland Public Schools
Introduction
For our MPS/MDes Studio II course, we worked on a semester-long project guided by the design firm Prospect Studio. In 2019, Prospect Studios worked with Portland Public Schools (PPS) to create a future vision for their district. Our brief was to design an artifact situated between their vision of the future and the present, making the vision plan feel more real and tangible.
Through secondary research we learned that teachers in Oregon have expressed feeling “overwhelmed, burned out, and not supported,” (2019 Oregon Educator Equity Report, p.51) leading to low retention rates and impacting their ability to show up for students. Additionally, research on teacher resilience is relatively new (Beltman et al., p.185) and expanding, encouraging our decision to design for the “Adaptive, Resilient, and Open To Change” section of PPS’s Educator Essentials tier. The vision plan described “Adaptive, Resilient, and Open to Change” as shown:
We framed our design question as: How might we design an artifact that exemplifies a change and signifies a future where educators are empowered to be adaptive, resilient, and open to change?
Our approach to research followed three main phases. First, an exploratory phase to understand the current state and experience of educators. Our generative research built off of our exploratory findings to focus on educators’ relationships, priorities, and future visions, which we used to develop preliminary concepts. Lastly, evaluative research provided directed feedback that helped develop our final concepts.
Exploratory Research
Our exploratory research began with a review of secondary sources, followed by interviews with primary sources. As the start of our design process we set out to collect and analyze data and to eventually synthesize a greater understanding.
Initial Territory Map
Our goal for creating an initial territory map was to align our team’s preliminary understanding of our chosen area (educators being Adaptive, Resilient, and Open to Change), and communicate it to Prospect Studios for feedback. This method was assigned to us, but we were left to devise the layout and content on our own.
Our final map outlined who was included in “educators”, what PPS wanted educators to achieve, and how they might do it. Most importantly, this step helped us to align as a team about where “adaptiveness,” “resilience,” and “openness to change” overlapped and diverged, and to begin developing a definition for each.
Secondary Research
With this initial mapping, we set out to better understand the current state of public education at PPS through desk research. How closely did PPS’ future vision align with the present day?
Two of our group members had taken Transition Design, which led us to consider STEEP-V and MLP frameworks as ways to analyze systemic factors influencing PPS. The STEEP-V framework seemed like the best starting approach to build a multifaceted perspective. STEEP-V helped us organize and diversify our research, but may have encouraged us to take too broad a view: it was difficult to relate meaningful patterns or insights back to adaptiveness, resilience, and openness to change.
When we began conducting interviews with participants, however, it highlighted areas to explore further. We organized these threads into an MLP framework to better understand the “weight of history,” and the “push of the present” that influence the “pull of the future.”
The MLP revealed contextual and temporal themes, including the strength of Portland Association of Teachers (PAT) (the local teachers’ union), Portland’s history of racist policies, the rise of standardized testing, and the mounting concerns with teacher burn-out.
Primary Research
Our goal for primary research was to supplement our secondary research insights with qualitative information on PPS educators’ day-to-day lives and perspectives on being Adaptive, Resilient, and Open to Change.
We chose to conduct one-on-one ethnographic interviews, as they offer an in-depth, open-ended format for gathering information. As a result of limited access to PPS educators through Prospect Studios, we reached out to educators in our personal networks, yielding three participants from PPS and one from a small private school.
In developing our protocol, we relied on a storytelling question format to help educators place responses in context, asking participants to “tell us about a time when…” These questions provided insightful examples, but after our first interview, we also realized we’d need to ask directly what “adaptiveness,” “resilience,” and “openness to change” looked like in education in order to achieve a more generalized understanding. Iterating on our protocol after each interview helped our team hone questions, gather meaningful insights aligned with our goals, and put participants at ease.
To make sense of the robust information we had gathered from our interviews, we used Affinity Mapping to synthesize our insights. We clustered 10–12 key quotes from each interview around emerging themes, including organizational collaboration, teacher challenges, and workplace culture.
Our affinity mapping process revealed a number of overlaps between Adaptiveness, Resilience, and Openness to Change, conflicting with our previously differentiated understanding of this principle. We reframed “adaptive, resilient, and open to change” as one idea — “ARC” — grounded in actions and outcomes. This consolidated view became important in shaping our design decisions.
Our secondary and primary research offered us a strong glimpse into both the personal and system-level struggles PPS was facing. While both methods were helpful alone, it wasn’t until we considered them together that our most fruitful insights arose.
We learned several key insights from teachers, including:
- External constraints like resources and standardized testing limit perceived adaptability
- Administrators play a key role in defining school culture and determining what projects succeed
- Peer support, good communication, and trust are key to feeling “taken care of,” which educators saw as important to resilience.
We used these insights to establish a preliminary set of design principles that an artifact enabling ARC should achieve:
- Encourage effective communication
- Promote shared values
- Maintain durable networks
- Embrace changes
- Advance educational equity
These initial principles helped to direct our focus for our next round of research.
Generative Research
Building off of the insights gleaned from exploratory research, our goals for generative research were to understand how relationships between stakeholders foster or hinder ARC, to spot patterns in the daily challenges educators encounter, and to learn educators’ desires for the future in order to generate concepts for artifacts.
We gathered potential methods and discussed how they might align with our research goals as well as their feasibility (given the constraints of social distancing) for online activity.
We decided on a diary study to help identify patterns in educators’ daily lives that might not arise from an interview alone — when did they feel supported or unsupported? While virtual workshops would use generative activities to gain insight into educators’ relationships and priorities in the present and future.
Diary Study
We asked educators to fill in a Journey Map daily for one week, to understand their highs and lows. Follow-up prompts asked about the supports they have when challenges arise.
Virtual Workshops
Our workshops consisted of three exercises.
Exercise 1: Relationship Mapping
We adapted Dan Lockton’s New Metaphors Toolkit to have participants describe their relationships through metaphors. Our goal was to better understand teachers’ relationships as factors for being adaptive, resilient and open to change.
Exercise 2: Prioritization
Knowing that PPS’ resources are limited, we wanted to understand what resources educators currently have and value, and what they prioritize most in a desirable future. We developed two axes to express scarcity and priority.
Exercise 3: Stuart Candy’s “The Thing From The Future”
By running the prior exercises in a sequence from present to future, we primed our participants to think about desirable futures — a key focus for this exercise. We wanted to understand what ideas educators already had about the future, be it desirable, undesirable, or neutral. For this reason we gave them a broad choice of adjectives describing the future, and time to develop multiple ideas. While their concepts didn’t have the level of specificity we anticipated, their card selections were insightful.
Generative Research Summary
We felt constrained by our ability to find participants: even after posting to social media, emailing Prospect Studio, and contacting 12+ acquaintances, we had 5 total participants, limiting our understanding to a small sample size. Without overlaps in availability, we conducted each workshop individually; we had hoped to see what Things From The Future would result from collaboration between educators, however, individual workshops did provide more time to focus on each participants’ responses. Regardless, we knew we’d need better ways to reach beyond our personal networks for our evaluative research phase.
Otherwise, it worked well to begin with a warm-up exercise in Miro, breaking the ice and getting participants engaged with the experience. The exercises we selected prompted participants to reflect and encouraged them to share deeply emotional and personal insights. Meanwhile, participants were thorough in mapping their days for the diary study.
Insights from our generative research activities strengthened and expanded what we had heard in our exploratory research:
- Teachers felt most supported by others helping them proactively
- Student growth was a key motivator
- Lapses in communication, especially with administrators, were the biggest frustrations
- Mental health was a top concern, but rarely met
- Teachers felt valued by community, but hoped policy would follow suit
- Gaining the entire family’s trust and involvement was important
From these insights we shifted our design principles to focus more on desired outcomes, which would guide our concept development:
- Teachers have the space to experiment, fail, and try again
- Colleagues, schools, and districts collaborate openly
- Teachers thrive despite external pressures and circumstances, helping students do the same
Evaluative research
We approached the evaluative stage of our project intent on validating and refining possible future concepts, and evaluating which were more desirable for educators. Gathering feedback was also an opportunity to evaluate how our mental models mapped to our initial concepts. Could we ask better questions? Were we addressing the needs of our stakeholders, and understanding the problem from their perspective? These and many other questions helped push along this stage of our design process.
To begin this process we considered how we might address the multiple desired outcomes we identified for ARC educators. Because of the large number of proposed solutions, it made sense to address challenges through a system of related concepts, rather than a single intervention. After brainstorming more than a dozen concepts, we identified the most effective (Meadows, 1997) ones and sorted them into two unique concept systems for participants to compare:
Collaborative Future
Reflective Future
Our team required feedback on several aspects of these systems, making Speed Dating an ideal approach. While this exercise is typically synchronous and in-person, we had learned educators were extremely pressed for time and chose to conduct an online survey. We hoped this would allow us to reach more participants while recreating the key aspects of a speed dating experience. Additionally, the psychological safety of an anonymous, optional survey would ideally contribute to honest feedback, since courtesy biased responses are difficult to avoid when interacting face-to-face.
We had many goals for the structure and outcomes of the survey, which we accounted for as follows:
After 5 days of collecting results, we had 17 unique responses, more than any of our previous research, with outsized representation from English teachers in the public school system. We placed survey responses into a matrix to find common themes and consider ways of addressing common critiques.
Evaluative Research Summary
We were successful in finding participants online, especially through Reddit, and the branched logic of the Tripetto survey allowed them to navigate through one or both system concepts for time’s sake. However, this flexibility had the drawback of a long setup time — creating the interactive survey took a high level of team coordination and effort as we crafted images, storyboards, scripts, and process flow.
We took away several insights from our evaluative research:
- Educators reacted positively to the theoretical notion of additional collaboration and reflection. The majority of participants chose the reflective system over the collaborative one.
- There were concerns that a competitive aspect to ARC Summits would widen inequities, and that preparation would burden teachers’ already-stretched time.
- Participants reacted negatively to the idea that reflection should be required or prescriptive, and a year-round school model seemed logistically unlikely.
- Existing Professional Learning Communities seemed to overlap in purpose with our concept.
In order to avoid placing additional strain on teachers’ time, we needed to envision a realistic transition to a future where teachers have more flexibility and bandwidth to take advantage of new resources. Additionally, while it might include some new elements, this future would need to account for existing resources. To address these challenges, our final concept revisions and imagined transition would give space for existing solutions to grow alongside new ones.
Final Concept
Moving into our final concept development, our goals were to incorporate feedback from our evaluative research into a revised concept system and representative artifact. During this stage, feedback from Arnold Wasserman led us to the example created by Singapore’s teaching professionalization tracks and a district in Iowa that implemented leadership positions and classroom coaching. In both cases, teachers felt supported and valued in their roles, but were also provided multiple services and flexible time to use them. Knowing these examples exist made it believable to conceive that future teachers’ time might be structured differently so that they could take advantage of opportunities for reflection, collaboration, and innovation.
Context and Concept (2021–2029)
Positioning our concept, ARC Services, in 2029, we used a backcasting exercise to imagine changes that could bring about this future context. These events were based on future signals we had gathered through our research. Some of the key moments are:
- COVID pushes teacher burnout to new highs
- This burnout prompts a national teacher shortage in 2023
- The federal government passes legislation providing more funding to teachers in 2024
- PPS and its union use this funding to create a new teacher development model and establish ARC Services to support it in 2025
Inspired by modular customization projects like Half a House, teachers’ schedules would be modular, balancing reduced teaching time with designated time for professional development modules, innovation projects, mentorship opportunities and more. Most importantly, this flexibility would expand as teachers progress, giving both new and senior teachers opportunities to grow and meet the needs of their school or district.
ARC Services would support this new structure by coordinating resources to be used during teachers’ flexible time. ARC Services would be a central hub, linking existing resources and groups with new services including:
- Career coaching for new teachers
- Facilitation of informal listening sessions and working groups
- Pedagogy workshops
- Call for contributions to school- and district-level innovation projects
To ensure PPS’ future preparedness, ARC Services would also give teachers opportunities to experiment and explore solutions for anticipated developments in the district. The topics could be generated by ARC Services, but also proposed by teachers who have chosen to spend their flexible time innovating with ARC.
Final Concept Summary
This final concept was heavily influenced by our explorative, generative, and evaluative research. These steps established our understanding of the components and conditions a successful concept would need, and allowed us to test this understanding to refine our concepts. This process eventually led us to envision ARC Services and forecast the new model of teacher development needed for teachers (and ARC Services) to thrive. This highly iterative process allowed us to create concepts and address the conditions needed for teachers to be adaptive, resilient, and open to change.
Concluding Reflections
Team Alignment
At each stage of the process, we noticed that creating our research protocols also served as checkpoints to align our team internally. We needed to be on the same page about the challenge we were addressing in order to know what information we needed from research participants. It felt challenging to focus our research at times, as ARC seemed interconnected with many sections of the PPS vision. As a result of the breadth of ARC, we normally revised and refined our design principles after each round of research. Much like the research itself, these principles started broad, but were slowly honed to a fine edge. This continuous reflection and refocus helped articulate our understanding of the problem space as patterns emerged and drove our design direction.
Remote Research
This project has provided important takeaways on remote research, especially within the context of a pandemic. Our ability to source participants from PPS was affected by extenuating circumstances: the district initiated a time-consuming remote-to-hybrid reopening phase in March. We learned that it’s better to cast a wide net sooner rather than later, especially seeing the thorough responses we received from teachers in online communities. We also learned how to adjust established research methods for a remote context by focusing our efforts on reducing complexity for participants — for example, having one researcher from our team “driving” the mouse during Miro workshops to capture insights while another researcher kept notes.
Future Possibilities
The downside to our limited access power (Goodwill, p.21) was that we are left wondering whether the educators we spoke with are broadly representative of the educators in PPS. Many already seemed to embody “ARC’’ qualities, despite expressing that the system as a whole was unsustainable. We also have a lopsided view of teacher-administrator relations, having connected with many teachers but only one administrator from a small private school. Relationships with administrators, at least from teachers’ perspectives, seem to play a key role in adopting new initiatives, so speaking with additional administrators would be a focal point of further research in a longer project.
Citations
Educator Advancement Council and Chief Education Office. (2019). 2019 Oregon Educator Equity Report. State of Oregon. https://www.oregon.gov/eac/Documents/2019%20Educator%20Equity%20Report.pdf
Beltman, S., Mansfield, C., & Price, A. (2011). Thriving not just surviving: A review of research on teacher resilience. Educational Research Review, 6(3), 185–207. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2011.09.001
Kiryttopoulou, N. (2013, October 23). Overcoming the Courtesy Bias in Constituent Feedback. Feedback Labs. https://feedbacklabs.org/blog/overcoming-the-courtesy-bias-in-constituent-feedback/.
Nelson, L. (2016, January 15). What the US could learn from Singapore about making teachers better. Vox. https://www.vox.com/2016/1/15/10773592/teachers-singapore-shanghai-professional-development.
Greenspan, S. (2016, November 10). Half a House. 99% Invisible. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/half-a-house/.
Goodwill, M. (2020). A Social Designer’s Guide to Power Literacy. Kennisland. https://www.power-literacy.com/field-guide
Meadows, D. (1997). Leverage Points: Places to Inverven in a System.
http://donellameadows.org/wp-content/userfiles/Leverage_Points.pdf
