TEACHERS Design For Education

Brown Master of Arts in Teaching and Urban Education Policy graduate students share their prototypes during a TD4ED design jam

Client: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

roleS: Project Lead; Experience Designer

Design Challenge

To take teacher-driven change in education to the next level in ways that sustain teachers’ interest in education transformation, and are useful to them as they tackle meaningful challenges in their classrooms, schools, districts, and communities

Overview

The Business Innovation Factory’s Student Experience Lab designed, tested, and launched a free, collaborative platform that teaches educators design thinking skills and empowers them to create, test, and implement solutions to challenges they face in their schools. Through a series of pilot programs in Rhode Island, Chicago, and Philadelphia, BIF worked with teachers to co-create the platform and curriculum, called Teachers Design for Education (TD4Ed). To take this work to the next level, my task was to strategize around how TD4Ed could reach even more teachers. I conducted user testing to inform changes to the platform, secured new strategic partnerships for the product, and experimented with, designed, and launched new delivery models that accounted for a wider range of users’ needs and constraints.

Process

At the start of this phase of work, my team had hypotheses about a variety of partnership types that could increase the impact of TD4Ed in different ways, including high-profile crowdfunding, blended professional development trainings, sponsored design challenges around specific problems, embedding TD4Ed into existing tech platforms that educators were already using, and offering microcredentials to teachers that complete the TD4Ed curriculum.

After developing an overview and deeper understanding of the potential strategic value of each partnership type, I conducted interviews and user testing with new and “alumni” TD4Ed users to better understand what compelled some educators to complete the 6-8 week curriculum, and why others dropped out along the way. Armed with insights from this research, my team began having conversations with representatives from the organizations that seemed most promising for delivering more value to our users. At the same time, I also prototyped and tested new ways in which BIF could deliver TD4Ed.

Insights

Through research, we learned something important: the TD4Ed offering and its potential excited new users, but self-facilitated teams often had a difficult time actually completing the 6-8 week online curriculum. Successful teams worked together both online and face-to-face, which emphasized how much teachers craved opportunities to connect in person, and how critical this offline component was to delivering a valuable experience. Guided by this insight, I prototyped and tested a range of blended professional development opportunities based in the TD4Ed curriculum – ranging from one-time workshops that gave participants a chance to experience the basic outline of the design thinking process, to a flexible “design jam” model that condenses the curriculum and provides in-person collaboration opportunities. As part of this, my team also tested expanding the offering beyond K-12 educators to afterschool and alternative programs, youth organizations, education graduate students, and parents.

Outcomes

Based on what we learned from testing our prototypes of the new models, we launched a comprehensive TD4Ed Blended Professional Development Program blueprint and toolkit for educators and others working with youth, with step-by-step instructions for the end-to-end experience, detailed facilitation guides, and all assets and materials. This led to an increase in engagement with the curriculum, and project completion increased by 42%. Several teams taught processes to others and incorporated design thinking into their own practices. In 2015, the TD4Ed team received a Core77 Professional Notable award in the Design Education Initiative category for the original platform and relaunch.

We also utilized strategic partnerships to better meet educators “where they are” by offering TD4Ed in online platforms for educators (e.g. BloomBoard’s personalized professional development platform), recognizing work with microcredentials, and spreading the word about the curriculum in blog posts and podcasts about design thinking for educators.