Week 13-Refining Concept

4/26 — 4/30

This week, we worked on refining our concept based on the feedback received from Peter and Arnold. Arnold said what we proposed did address the teachers’ need and encouraged us to push forward to think about:

1. What will happen between 2019 to 2035 for this preferred state to happen?

2. What global cases can we reference to back up our proposed concept?

These questions help to ground our concept and make it more practical for Portland Public Schools. We began to review the MLP and STEEP-V analysis and search for the trend and shift that shapes the education systems. We listed the force from the Union, policymakers, and potential environmental crisis. For global cases, we reference the Singapore model and the Iowa model of teacher career development. We read some case studies and listed the key aspects of the Singapore model and the Iowa model. We’d like to know about how the model work, what are the goals for the model, and most importantly, what makes it successful. We’re also informed that we shouldn’t just copy-paste the model without understanding the context. Therefore, we also talked about the difference between the PPS’s context and the model’s context. Our goal for this secondary research is to understand:

What aspects of the current model will fail in the PPS’s context? How can we adapt and integrate into our research?

After several rounds of iteration, we developed the basic ARC framework for the future of PPS. The framework allows novice teachers to pivot to different teacher paths based on their time participating in ARC services. At first, we thought about it as a career ladder, which looks more like the left diagram below. The teachers will proceed by their tenure and time spent in ARC services. We decided to provide a more flexible structure without the title. The teacher’s expertise and value will be counted by the type of ARC services they attend, but there is no hierarchy in our framework.

The current system framework is our final concept for the Prospect Studio. However, conveying a design concept without an actual artifact is difficult. And if we spend too much effort introducing the detailed design artifact, the audiences might misunderstand our idea to be a digital/physical product. How might we envision the future with our audience? We found one effective way is through the news venue. People perceive news to understand what happens to the world around them. To situate our audience in the future of PPS, we believe doing news from the future of 2035 is the most engaging and feasible way. Therefore, we decided to do a news venue to introduce our concept through the dialog and support the dialog with visual assets.

When developing our outline, we kept ourselves informed with the following question:

What events and touchpoints of the ARC Summit can imply or describe parts/aspects of the systems concepts?

We then outline the presentation and video outline as below:

With the outline, our goals for the next step are:

1. Work on the video script to explain the concept
2. Finalize the detail of ARC service frameworks which will be addressed in the final presentation
3. Develop the system diagram to convey the idea
4. Develop the artifacts in each touchpoint
5. Asking for feedback