"Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future." – Peters.
Teachers can tell us quite a bit about the type of experiences they want in the profession. Many schools and districts use teacher working conditions surveys, exit interviews, and intent forms to ascertain the quality of a current teaching experience as well as prepare for future adjustments to top down planning models.
What if we offered an alternative path that unleashes teacher experience by design? At Matchbook Learning, we’re piloting a design thinking experience in the next few weeks as a means to creating an experience for teachers that makes Matchbook Learning a place where they want to continue to learn and grow for many years to come.
At our weekly professional learning sessions, we’re going to introduce our teachers to resources from the Stanford D School on how we think with our teachers in terms of creating a world-class work environment.
Our first session is a strategy board exercise off of a brainstorming exercise from the “D” school resources. At the session, our principal will frame the problem for our teachers and model the use of the design protocol. Teachers will have an opportunity to probe on the protocol and evaluate potential strategies on the strategy board that includes ideas around principal support methods, feedback loops, teacher recognition, differentiated pay schedules, incentives, child care supports, living expense supplements, professional growth stipends, and prize competitions for example.
Next, the team will be asked to generate their own solutions through a brainstorming session with only a few requirements:
- No idea is off the table or too wild; this is a generative exercise
- The list must be at least 25 total ideas, hopefully more
- Teachers should lead the discussion and process
After session one, our principal will thank them and validate them for the ideation. Then, he’ll lead a prioritization exercise through a great site called Mind tools to address ranking tiers of some of the ideas per the teacher’s inputs and votes.
The results of this exercise will continue into a design loop with our Matchbook team members. This process is not an approval process, but a feedback process for the second round of teacher design which will take place weekly until our teacher experience design is in prototype phase – where we’ll continue to shift, scale, or scrap based on what our teachers are sharing about their experience.
Stay tuned as we share more about our learning environment at Matchbook – a place where teachers want to learn and teach because they design the very experiences that bring them joy and balance in a very demanding profession.
By Bryan Setser & Ron Harvey
