Let's REALLY get to know the HUMANS at the center of our design process

As we unpacked our first brainstorm using the Innovator's Compass, it became quite apparent that we were sharing the experiences of our users (students and parents) from the teacher perspective. We observe our students ALL DAY long and we hear from parents via email at least weekly so often we feel like experts on these humans at the center of our design process. But are we really?


"There is a lot of space to come at this from a lot of perspectives. Let's get to the why!" said Ela
"Let's put more in the hands of students!" said Ela
"Let's invite parents into the co-design process!" said Ela


"OK!" said US, reluctantly admitting that maybe we aren't the experts on our students' and parents' true feelings that we think we are...


And so we brainstormed questions to figure out what matters most to:

Students:
When do you feel most excited in school?
Draw a picture of your brain during math class
Tell a story of your favorite time in math class
Draw a picture of what math class feels like to you
Describe the personality and characteristics of a teacher that you felt was very effective.
What frustrates you the most about other people?
Describe 3 moments where you were happy in school (this classroom)
What is the most embarrassing moment you've ever had in school?
What's going well for you right now
What would you like to change, why?
When do you feel comfortable sharing ideas in math class?
What is math class like now and what was it like last year?
What are you interested in learning (in math)?

Parents:
When has your child been happy/enjoyed math class?
What should HTH teach? Why?
What is something that you've done in math class that you are proud of? Why?
What makes you feel most successful? Why?
What matters most to you? Why?
What do you want math class to be like? Why?
Draw a picture of an ideal math class



Moving forward we know that the more we engage the people, the better.  Today we will figure out the logistics on how we use these questions to get a more rounded understanding of the amazing, wonderful, creative, and thoughtful HUMANS at the center of our design process.

A first pass with the Innovator's Compass!

Thanks to the support of the fabulous Ela Ben-Ur, our math team has continued our forward lean into the Project-Based Math world and the tensions that we often feel in our environment!

We have been using Ela's innovators' compass to organize our thoughts. The first day we brainstormed as many possible sticky notes as we could about the sections of the Innovators' Compass.

Yesterday, we clustered our post-its and came up with the following thoughts on each of the sections of the compass:

Discover OBSERVATIONS:

Challenges of untracked classrooms

Parent mentality toward the math program

Challenging the math status quo

Making life-long learnings

Students being overly driven by grades

Students lack agency/perseverance

Bridging project and math learning

Expectations of what students know/should know/figure out

Define PRINCIPLES:

Emotional - how do the kids feel in our classes

Skills - what kills should the students have without a doubt

Mindset - how do the students approach learning

Teachers actions - what should the teacher be promoting

Dream IDEAS:

Better using time for improving math overall

Shift parent mindsets

Have more time for reflective processes

Classroom structures

School Structures

Design EXPERIMENTS:

Teacher grouping (tag team teaching/swatch subjects)

Things that build community among everyone

In class methodologies

Student Grouping

These represent our math team as a whole and we are looking forward to the continued quest to become a well functioning team AND to WIN or LEARN.