Week 7: Preparing for Generative Research
March 15–21
This week, we began drafting our generative research protocol and trying to find participants. We reached back out to a PPS teacher we had interviewed, who said that she might know additional teachers and administrators who would be willing to share their insights. However, we were faced with the contextual realities of doing research during challenging and ever-changing pandemic times, because she responded that PPS was in the midst of transitioning from remote to hybrid learning and that it was an all-consuming feat. People simply did not have additional bandwidth to help us out — understandably! We heard the same from Prospect Studios. So we knew we would need to reach a little wider to find participants, but in the meantime, we worked hard to think through what exercises we would want them to do.
Generative Research Protocol
We started by compiling a list of possible/intriguing methods. Some of these were introduced in a lecture in Research Methods on generative research, others stood out to us from looking at last year’s groups’ processes.
However, as one teammate pointed out, any method can be used to find out anything, so we needed to specify what our goals were before we could determine the best methods for our generative research. Since we are still students as well, we also decided to give more weight to methods that any team member was especially eager to try out and learn from. At a high level, this included facilitating workshops and running a diary study.
We time-boxed generating research questions and then grouped our questions into categories with similarities, using emojis to mark the 2–3 that resonated with us most and narrowing down as a group. After examining the overlaps and speaking with Peter and Stefania, one thing that we felt adamant about from a protocol standpoint was the need to have participants move from considering the past and/or present states into considering the future state, rather than expecting them to consider the future without any kind of reflective warm-up.
Workshop on Generative Workshops
We then spent time preparing for an in-class workshop on Wednesday with Liz Sanders, Associate Design Professor at OSU and author of Convivial Toolbox, by creating draft personas and preliminary concept ideas, and preparing some possible present and future images.
While this was a helpful exercise for us, we slightly misinterpreted the need to create personas in advance. The workshop was about designing a workshop to have participants think about the future — in which they would be the ones to create personas. Some of the strategies Liz suggested included having participants create a persona for the present and future — especially an extreme one. We mentioned to her that collaboration between teachers and administrators was something we wanted to understand better, and she suggested we might have teachers create a persona for an ideal admin and a terrible admin, and vice versa for admins with teachers, to unearth some of their desires and challenges. (We wound up doing a different exercise to explore these relationships when we found out we’d have participants from a variety of districts, rather than just PPS). She also suggested we have participants react to our concepts rather than generate their own from scratch — this is something we plan to do in our next round of research, along the lines of concept “speed dating”.
Furthering our Protocols
We circled back to our in-progress protocol after the workshop feeling refreshed. We broke into teams of two to address two generative components: an asynchronous daily diary study, and a synchronous workshop. We felt these methods would be effective and wanted to gain experience with both forms of research, but also wanted to allow some flexibility knowing that potential participants were quite busy.
Diary Study
While interviews can highlight themes and examples within an educators’ work, the more in-the-moment, in-depth nature of a diary study would allow us to unearth the day-to-day moments that made educators feel resilient or challenged, supported or unsupported. Knowing that collaboration and communication had emerged as important themes in our preliminary research, we hoped to understand more about what this looked like on a daily basis by having participants respond to the following:
A daily drawing reflection to think through the day’s challenging and rewarding moments:
Questions on a Google Form:
- What was new or different about today? (This was intended to explore whether educators would mention new things they proactively tried, external factors they were reacting to)
- What made you feel most supported in your work? Please describe.
- At what moments did you feel like you would have benefit from additional support? Please describe.
- Would you make any changes? (To explore whether there were ideas readily in mind for making improvements)
- Please feel free to add any other thoughts or comments in the space below.
We had two participants for this exercise.
Generative Workshop
We selected exercises that would allow us to examine:
- The present and desired future state of collaborative relationships in the educator’s school district.
At first, we thought about having educators draw a map of the people with whom they collaborate most during the school week. But we realized that metaphors might be a deeper way to explore this, so we developed a revised version of Dan Lockton’s New Metaphors card game. Educators could select from a number of metaphor cards to fill in the following statements (which we also wordsmith’d before our workshops began):
“As an educator, my relationship with _____ is like _____ because…”
“_____ thinks their relationship with me is like _____ because…”
(We wanted to incorporate that element of putting yourself in someone else’s shoes from the workshop with Liz)
“In the future, I hope my relationship with ______ is/is not like _____ because…”
2. The needs of educators that were or were not being met, and which they perceived to be the highest priority to improve in the future.
We created post-its such as “Quality of life”, “Income”, “Professional development”, for educators to map out. We began with the priority (low to high) axis only, but with so much horizontal space to fill as well, we began thinking about how we could utilize it and added the availability axis. Some of these post-its were intentionally somewhat open to interpretation.
3. What futures they were considering and how.
We had played Stuart Candy’s The Thing From The Future game in class, and wanted to test it out with our participants to get some concepts flowing. For the theme cards, we balanced between positive, neutral, and negative futures.
For the object cards, we made them plausibly applicable to education and would tell participants they could add their own. For the “who” cards, we used the same school stakeholders we had included in the earlier exercise.
We began this exercise by using the framing of “In a ____ future, there is a _____ that helps ____”, but we were concerned participants a.) might just pick cards and leave it at that without providing additional detail, and b.) assume from “helps” that the outcome had to be positive. We changed the framing to “In a ____ future, there is a _____ designed for______,” and clarified how we would present an example to encourage them to go into detail about how that Future Thing works.
With our protocols ready, we scheduled times to meet with workshop participants the next week.
