Using Design Thinking to empathize with the Assabet Collaborative.

Last month the Assabet Valley Collaborative hosted a two hour workshop on Design Thinking.  The director Cathy Cummings has been trained an an organization and hopes to pilot sessions at the AVC.

We brainstormed on a session around the Innovators Mindset theme and spent a large amount of the time framing the question, using the HMW, How might we model.  We started out focusing on How might we insprire/encourage teachers to try innovative practices in their classroom.  Initially, I thought the empathy model was the teacher, but turns out it's the student.

We were give the following homework to complete this month.

For those of you who missed it - we'd like to catch you up because we'd like to continue our Design Thinking work next month.  So please do read over the notes and then do your homework - see below.    (Those who were there - please feel free to add your insights in the notes or in response to this email.)

HOMEWORK for next month's meeting:

Homework - Empathic Interviews

Each group member will conduct at least 5 short in-person interviews - of students, teachers, and administrators using the following 2 questions:

1.  Describe the most positive, lasting learning experience you’ve had.

2.  Describe a negative learning experience you’ve had.

Probe for:  what was being taught, how, why it was positive or negative, what the teacher was doing in that experience; what the interviewee and other learners were doing during that experience, etc

Take notes during this interview and share/upload in our google folder in time for our next meeting!  

We will work with these qualitative data points at our next meeting to better frame our problem with the actual “users” in mind.  I'm thinking we can have one group try on using a “journey map” or “service blueprint” using these data and the other group try doing some root cause analysis using “5 whys” - but, like we did today, we will pivot based on where we are then....  

I conducted interviews with student in my school today.  Here is the link  http://bit.ly/DTempathyinterviews 

I am particularly excited to push myself in the area and hope to bring  more back to our school.

Our district will be exploring more design thinking in June and hopefully as part of the PLT for next year!