#school shaped

[schoolshaped-blog]

Semester Reflection

This semester, we spent a lot of time thinking about building relationships with schools and educators. We started this class with some contacts through School Shaped, but actually getting time to observe and do co-designs in schools was very difficult. The barriers to entry seem to range across the spectrum from teachers not having extra time to simple communication differences. After this semester, we have developed an appreciation for how tricky it is to develop these relationships. At the same time, it is definitely important to have contact with the schools and engage in design exercises in that space, which makes the work that School Shaped is doing incredibly important.

One of our main interests when going into this class was getting in contact with schools that fell in every range of the resource spectrum, so that we could account for a range of needs in our design work. We learned quickly that this was a difficult proposition to execute. Getting into high resource school settings, like the public schools in Needham and Wellesley, proved to be fairly easy. On the other hand, accessing lower resource schools proved challenging. As we reflect on this semester, visiting a range of schools multiple times seems to be one of the primary challenges to overcome in the next iteration of this project.

Before we were able to observe classes in schools, out first build cycle was spent talking to teachers over Skype. Both teachers we spoke to were trying innovative things in the classroom, and they both spoke about the resistance of the school system to change. In contrast, on our local school visits to a high school and first grade classroom, the pedagogical model, looked pretty much the same as it had when we were in school. If a teacher wants to change from the traditional model, they have to go above and beyond what is expected of them. The school system is currently positioned to resist major changes, causing motivated teachers to have to work against a system instead of with it.

Another interesting thing we learned is the balance between rapid prototyping and taking time to design and codesign thoughtfully.  Olin classes like UOCD provide a lot of structure on how to approach the design process, scaffolding how much time to spend on different phases.  However, this was a lot more open-ended, and working within a much smaller time window than UOCD.  We found it could be difficult sometimes to do enough design exercises when we also needed to get a working prototype completed.

If we did this class again, we would have liked to be sure to spend more time on the specific design exercises.  As we’ve learned from classes like UOCD, they’re valuable for engineering for people and making sure our products are actually useful and important.  Our work this semester was grounded in observations, but we didn’t get to complete as much codesign and incorporate continuous feedback as we might have liked.  This ties into our point about school communication - part of the problem was the difficulty we found in communicating with schools and scheduling effectively with busy teachers.  Both our time constraints and theirs played a role in the difficulty in doing codesigns.

Anne and I are officially done with this semester of School Shaped, but over the next week we plan to develop our first app further. We are planning to add user accounts and make networking possible, creating a usable site for teachers.

[schoolshaped-blog]

Build Cycle 2: Reflection

This cycle was a little more difficult for us for several reasons.  It followed our visit to a local elementary school, in which we spent a morning observing four different first-grade classrooms.  When we met as a team to discuss and follow up on our observation, we all had the same impression: we had no idea where a technology prototype would fit in these chaotic classrooms.  In our previous cycle, we had focused on designing for teachers.  And as a team, we were most interested in coding a software product and building up our technical skills in that space.  But we could see from our observations if the teacher took even a few minutes of attention away from the class to use a software product, the room would probably descend into chaos.

For a time, we struggled with how to resolve these conflicts and figure out a product that would be useful to the classroom and to our learning.  For some time, we considered the idea of building a mobile app, and focusing it on use by the classroom aides rather than the teacher.  During our observation, we saw that the aides spent time on their phones anyway, so it would be a possibility to get them using an app.

But as we considered further what we could build, especially focusing on the classroom management area of opportunity, we weren’t convinced an app for the aides would be high-impact or help solve the classroom management problems we observed.

That was where we ended up realizing we didn’t have to design for the teachers or aides - what if we designed for the kids?  After all, they were the ones we wanted to impact the most with thinking about behavior management.

It’s getting more common in schools for there to be technology readily available for kids in the classroom.  We decided to design our app around the assumption that there would be a device in the classroom that kids could use - such as an iPad, which has a big touchscreen and is familiar to kids.  Opening our minds about who we could design for and what we could make really allowed us to find a prototype idea we were excited about building.

From there, we had some interesting challenges in making our app useable for kids, especially first graders who are still just learning how to read.  We made the font large, the front end design kid-friendly, and tried to address the reading problem by including audio button that would read options aloud to you if necessary.  We also planned to accompany each icon with a picture or icon, a feature that hasn’t yet been implemented.

Finally, another problem we ran into was getting feedback on our app.  We wanted to follow up with the teachers we observed to find out if they thought our ideas would be useful in the classroom or for their kids.  However, we found out that teachers are extremely busy people and we were unable to find a time for us to have that follow-up.  This was disappointing to us, because we were moving forward on intuition alone, without the opportunity for co-design with our target users.  Because of this, we don’t have any feedback to incorporate into the design of the app, and if we moved forward with this project, we would be sure to talk to first-grade teachers (and students, if possible) to figure out what changes might need to be made for it to be useable in the classroom.

[schoolshaped-blog]

Implementation Plan - Cycle 2

Idea:

We’ve decided to pursue the classroom management area of opportunity.  We found that in the classroom, students were consistently rewarded or punished, by having “King Sticks” given or taken away.  As we observed the classroom, we as onlookers were unsure what behavior had caused the reward or punishment, so it seems unlikely that 6-year-olds understood that intricacy.  We want to look into ways for managing classroom behaviors in a way that the teacher can keep track of student behavior progress and most importantly, in a way that the students themselves understand and can reflect on desirable or undesirable behavior.

Our idea for this is an interactive service where kids can reflect on the day and mark their self-assessed behavior progress.  This kind of self-assessment and self-regulation would empower the students about their own behavior, see their progress, and keep tabs on themselves.  This allows students to understand what words like “respect” really mean, because they apply it to their own life when self-reporting each day.  It also allows the teacher a way to see where each student is at, all collected together.  Teachers could also check in with students each week to talk about progress, and allow quiet kids who don’t act up to also get time with the teacher.

One important component of this would be that teachers use it without any kind of grade or assessment around the student’s responses.  If that were the case, then students would be incentivized to lie and defeat the purpose.  

Components:

Student sign in, possibly names on buttons (password? We could do really fun stuff here)

What was the hardest king value for you today? What was the easiest?  Which are you going to think about improving for tomorrow?

Each king value would be able to speak if you clicked an audio button.

Having trouble with X?  In what situation?

Trouble respecting fellow students? Teachers? Classroom assistant? Someone’s belongings? School property? Etc

As much as possible, use pictures over words (or pictures with words) - target audience is 1st graders

Stretch Goals:

Teacher dashboard that shows students and what they answered (first thing to mock up if we have time)

Teacher customization interface so that other schools could customize the app

[schoolshaped-blog]

Cycle 2: Areas of Opportunity

Elementary School Observation

Ways to gauge student reading level in English when they don’t speak English well

One teacher that we observed noted a special case for one of her students: that they were an excellent reader in their native language, and seemed to be able to read English, but were unable to verbally communicate with the teacher to demonstrate reading comprehension. “I know that they can read English,” she said, “but I don’t know how well. I’ve resorted to asking the native language teaching assistant to ask questions about the English-language book that the student is reading.” It seems an interesting problem to measure how well somebody is learning a language in one linguistic modality without speaking their native language. It seems that a piece of software could potentially measure the reading level of a student, but doing it in a way that doesn’t rely on reading or writing ability, and is language-independent, seems challenging.

Way to keep track of each student’s reading level and what words they’re struggling with

Each classroom had 20-25 kids, all at different reading levels and struggling with different things.  The classrooms had bins of books sorted by difficulty level (usually coded A-K or with colors to mark difficulty level).  When the teacher was doing one-on-one reading time with a student, she would mark down what level the student was at and what words they were struggling with, and when books got too easy for them, they got to move up a reading level.  All this was done on paper with a single chart, where a teacher erased a student name and rewrote it when they moved up a reading level.  A technology system that kept track of all the students and their levels would be easier for the teacher to see who is at what stage.  They would then also be able to be easily aware of statistics such as how long a student has been at a certain level.

Way for students to know if they’re reading words correct when they’re reading alone, without the teacher with them to correct them

When the teachers do one-on-one reading time with the students, they have the student try to read a challenging book aloud.  Often, the students will make mistakes when reading new, difficult words, and the teacher will correct them and help them learn the word.  However, during this time, the other 19 students in the class are all doing independent reading time.  Even though they are reading “just right” level books, there are almost definitely some words that they don’t know, and make mistakes on, with no one to correct them.  It would be cool if there was a way we could allow students reading independently to know if they read a word incorrectly, without a teacher or teaching assistant watching over them?  One possibility is a speech recognition system that listens to the student read aloud and compares each word to its database of what the book contains.  Limitations of this would be that it would have to already know the contents of all (several hundred) books in the classroom, and all classrooms have different sets of books.

Keeping track of quiet students who don’t act up

At the elementary and high school classrooms we visited this cycle, we noticed a pattern of quiet students getting less attention and communicating less with the teacher.  Quiet students at the elementary level were largely left without any attention from the teacher because the teacher was so busy disciplining students who were acting up. They used a positive reinforcement system to reward students for positive behavior and penalize them when they acted up, but more students seemed to be receiving penalties. Good behavior was not recognized and rewarded with anywhere near the same frequency.

At the high school level, this dynamic played out in a different way. Some of the high school students were very vocal in classroom discussion and would respond to the teacher and ask questions, but there was a whole other group of students who said nothing the entire class period. If the teacher asked the class if they understood a concept, only the vocal students would respond. In both of these situations, quiet students seem to be getting less engagement in their education environment, and we think it would be interesting to involve them in the discussion.

Classroom management

In the elementary school, we saw multiple methods of informal classroom management, like positive behavior support and informal from-the-hip punishments. In every class that we observed, we saw a blend of systems and teachers relying on their spur-of-the-moment judgement. We’re unsure how well this classroom management was working, as our observation was short. However, our personal experience and past readings informed a simple conjecture: that classroom management is difficult, and that many systems of classroom management are difficult to implement correctly or fully. Beyond this, many systems of classroom management make us uncomfortable from an educational philosophy standpoint, especially when used with young children (for example, punishments that . To this end, we could research new or alternative methods of classroom management and make them accessible to teachers, either through an application that assists that method, or an application designed to teach that method well.

High School Observation

Handout management

When we visited a high school history classroom, it was their first class back from February break. We noticed that some of the students were struggling to find the handouts that they needed in class. When we spoke to the teacher, she also talked about how many issues she had keeping track of the handouts she had on a subject, not to mention resources other teachers might have. It was also important for her to be efficient with printing out handouts for students, because the school limits the numbers of pages she can print. Together these problems create an area of opportunity around handout management. If we could remove some of the calculations that teachers have to do to manage these teaching tools, or help students keep track of their handouts, we could make a significant improvement in a large part of many high school teachers workflow.