Phase 3: Week 6 — Concept & Generative Research
3/7/21
🌹 Rose:
- Fri interview with students
- Hearing/facilitating the New Valley principal’s perspective
- Presentation on research synthesis tips during Research Methods
🌱 Bud:
- Synthesizing interviews and insights
- Collaborating with team Zoomers
- Working to be more comfortable with quiet scenarios (ex: student interviews)
- Interested to see where else we could go (reach out to the other principal )
🌵 Thorn:
- Now sure how to turn insights into a design
- Hectic last week
- When students were quiet/technical difficulties with interviews
During this group meeting, we worked on preparing slides for our exploratory research presentation. We organized the content to better tell a story of our research thus far and focused on making information simple and digestible (ex: to explain research insights we focused on including quotes from the interviews to help provide evidence). We also considered ways to bring in more visuals to our presentation, such as including demographic graphics to describe Santa Clara school district and generating word clouds to represent data from our student survey.
We brainstormed ways to visually represent our framework thus far. After spending some individual time to sketch on our own, we shared back to the group. We found similarities across our sketches and were able to develop an early iteration of a visual framework to help explain our problem space / line of thinking thus far.
Design Framework
We came up with the idea of a student exploring future-ready learning and global citizenship. The outward projection represents future-ready learning. As students develop their broad and practical knowledge, key life skills and self-directed learning skills, they are better prepared for their futures.
The internal angle represents the scope of experiencing cultures and embracing perspectives different from their own. As students are exposed to more cultures and develop a mindset of welcoming people from other countries, they would expand their perspectives.
Through learning about the future & exploring global citizenship, they can become more well-rounded individuals.
Additionally, Peter conducted an unstructured synthesis to sort through expert/stakeholder interviews and came up with the following affinity map (below). The inner core represents teacher values while the second ring is the manifestation of their intent. This could be how they want education to look as a result of their values or something that they are actively doing to support their students. The third ring is then the response to this such as the many systemic and social issues that confine/confound their efforts.
3/8/21
We presented our exploratory research to Prospect Studio staff (Fiona, Jenny Hoang, and Sonya Lopes). Our feedback was as follows:
- A nice balance of secondary and primary research
- Look into culturally-sustaining curriculum and pedagogy especially in places like SC where there might be a significantly large Hispanic population
- A little bit lost on how civic engagement relates to being future-ready. define civic engagement
- Visual framework intriguing
- Unclear about the teacher/expert stakeholder synthesis, we will need to generate insights across both primary and secondary research
- as we deepen our understanding of the endpoint of the graduate portrait, one of the challenges that schools will have, is now that they have their vision of the graduate, what does that look like if you start in PreK? Want to challenge our thinking about both ends of the spectrum.
- Are we going to be specific about tech adaptability? (re IFTP report) being specific could help us narrow our focus
- Emoji futuring graphs really interesting. intriguing how students feel hopeful but also a lack of agency in the future.
- We could consider the futures triangle and a futures wheel to help frame our work
3/10–3/11
We had a guest workshop run by Doris Wells-Papanek who is the director of the Design Learning Network. We did a role-playing activity to better understand the perspective of students, educators, district leaders, and community members.
During Research Methods, we also had a guest workshop run by Lauren and Kate who are researchers from Bessemer Alliance. They walked us through a Rose Bud Thorn research synthesis activity to help us codify our data. From there, we were able to cluster insights together and start to identify themes.
3/12
During our team meeting, we recognized the need to translate our insights into design principles in order to help us with concept ideation. We came up with a rough draft of design principles:
We want to design for an “X” system for future-ready, global citizens that:
- Promotes student self-knowledge and resiliency
- Encourages culturally-sustaining practices
- Offers opportunities for diverse experiences
- Facilitates learning experiences outside of the classroom
- Emphasizes X over test scores and standardized testing
With these principles in mind, we tasked ourselves with individually brainstorming concepts and presenting to each other 1–2 rough storyboards during our next team meeting on Sunday. From there, we hope to have early concepts generated to work with during a workshop in studio with Liz Sanders.
