Craft Category: Artifacts

Cedar Rapids: Connecting Empathy Interviews and Standards-Based Learning

When designing change in a district, it is essential that leaders hear directly from students, families, teachers, and classified staff (i.e., those most impacted by teaching and learning); this is often done via empathy interviews. As they reviewed their notes from their empathy interviews, the Cedar Rapids Community School District design team surfaced themes about opportunities to build relationships, to create more personalized and authentic learning experiences, and to reconsider effective feedback for students. The team’s discussion connected the themes from interviews to broader efforts across the district to engage students authentically, enable more personalized education, hold high expectations for all students, and facilitate standards-based learning that could help meet students’ needs.

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February 4, 2021

Article: Design Thinking – How to Create Your POV

When designing change in a district, it is essential that leaders hear directly from students, families, teachers, and classified staff (i.e., those most impacted by teaching and learning); this is often done via empathy interviews. It can sometimes be challenging to make sense of the themes from empathy interviews, so this guide from Perficient introduces a framework for translating stories from empathy interviews into actionable insights.

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February 4, 2021

IDEO Design Kit: Share Inspiring Stories

When designing change in a district, it is essential that leaders hear directly from students, families, teachers, and classified staff (i.e., those most impacted by teaching and learning); this is often done via empathy interviews. This protocol from IDEO guides teams to review notes from empathy interviews and capture themes that should inform your design team’s work.

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February 4, 2021

IDEO Design Kit: Find Themes

When designing change in a district, leaders hear directly from students, families, teachers, and classified staff (i.e., those most impacted by teaching and learning) via empathy interviews. They then must make sense of those interviews to better understand the challenge they’re solving for, from the perspective of those most directly impacted. This protocol from IDEO guides teams to share learnings from interviews and look for patterns.

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February 4, 2021

Phoenix Charter Academy: Getting Inspired by Competency-Based Teacher Professional Development

In their redesign work, Phoenix Charter Academy began by exploring how to better equip their teachers to implement their unique model, which supports disconnected youth through competency-based learning and significant social-emotional supports. Phoenix knew that this would require attention to both staff skills and staff mindsets, and that different teachers came to the work with different strengths and needs.

As a result, Phoenix explored how districts have built teacher professional development models that are competency-based. This would enable Phoenix not only to flex and adapt its support to different teachers, but it would also involve teachers in a learning model akin to what their students experience in this competency-based school.

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February 4, 2021

Monterey Peninsula: Getting Inspired by Relationships Between Students and Adults

Through their redesign work, Monterey Peninsula Unified School District has explored deepening personal relationships and students’ feelings of connection within the school community. The design team knew that such personal relationships and feeling of connection are important foundations for student engagement and student learning – but that too often, there are inequities in terms of which groups of students feel most supported and connected to school.

The team conducted research to better understand the equity implications of personal relationships and students’ sense of belonging. They also explored options for adapting their district structures and processes to better prioritize the work of building these relationships and connections; for example, the team reviewed staffing and scheduling changes other districts had made so as to build intentional structures for relationship-building.

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February 4, 2021

Mastery Charter Schools: Getting Inspired by Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Pedagogy

Mastery Charter Schools has a clear commitment to equity – its vision is to be a model anti-racist school district. To live out this commitment, Mastery seeks to provide affirming, engaging, and culturally relevant learning experiences for all students. Mastery’s design team researched other districts that have implemented culturally relevant and sustaining practices. This research supplemented the work they were already doing internally to define those practices for their unique community context.

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February 4, 2021

Mastery Charter Schools: Getting Inspired by Blended Learning and Digital Literacy

Mastery Charter Schools envisions a future of confident, independent learners supported by personalized, blended, and culturally responsive teaching and authentic relationships with adults. To achieve this vision, Mastery knew it would have to design an approach to digital learning and use of technology that would advance the network’s equity goals.

The team researched approaches to embedding blended learning in every classroom as a way to personalize learning to student needs, close the digital divide, and prepare students for life after graduation. ISTE technology standards for students – which provide clarity about how to use technology in a way that empowers students – became an important resource for Mastery’s design work; the team even contacted other districts that had implemented ISTE technology standards so as to learn from their experiences.

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February 4, 2021
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