Refuse to Go Backward: 3 Steps for Human-Centered Design (plus a few baby steps)

by Third Eye Education, consolidated by Nick Truxal

Third Eye Education’s Core Collaborator’s February discussions have been rotating around “Human-Centered Design.”  It’s been a blended conversation: covering the threads of voice, disparity, equity, practices of application, training, and onward. The following is our attempt at a concise representation of these discussions.

Overview

First, if you are new to the ideas of Human-Centered Design (HCD)…

3 Resources to Get You Started

• Stanford d.school Toolkit

• ​​The Interaction Design Foundation
• Examples from the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation

3 Key Elements to Keep in Mind

• Ideate ‒ create as many ideas as possible
• Iterate ‒ test them out, remove what doesn’t work, improve what does
• Implement ‒ put the strongest forward and make it happen

Application

To return to the dangling click bait of an introductory quote, we do have a chance to establish new normals as we emerge from the pandemic.  For example, Rochester Public Schools in Rochester, Minnesota is exploring establishing a Design Team: a group with diverse viewpoints and skill sets designated to solve problems from the large to the small in innovative ways.  In exploring this idea with the Third Eye Collaborative, John Alberts pointed out the obvious: “We were attempting to solve the problem of how this team might function with traditional tools, while the team itself would be functioning through the lens of HCD.”  This idea can apply to this article, and to Third Eye Education, as well.  Why discuss Human-Centered design when we can apply it?

The Rules of the Room

When approaching Human-Centered design, who gets invited to the room?  Who establishes the rules of the room?  Does everyone know the rules?  Do we need to even have this process of invitation, particularly in education?  More importantly, how do we disrupt power imbalances to not only ensure we are using HCD for good, but that we are using it for the audience we intend?

With Third Eye, we have never explicitly invited an open dialogue. Our hope has been that we could model one.  We have captured the ideas of educators we’ve never met from around the country and represented them in our Dessa series.  We’ve sought to boost the signal of educators, researchers, and those outside our field whose work has been undervalued.  However, we know there are byproducts of these choices.

For example, we exist in a digital world.  Boom! We’ve hit a barrier to what we hoped would be easily accessible and open conversations, removing folks that don’t have technology or are uncomfortable with it.  We frequently look for underrepresented voices that have been published‒another unnecessary barrier, as publication has many flaws in who it lets through as well.  Further, even though we intend to begin representing student thoughts and voices in our work, we have yet to do so.  Thus, the audience we are working for is left silent in the discussions that impact them the most.

The Third Eye

There are variations of the three terms used within the HCD world, but they tend to boil down to Ideate, Iterate, and Implement.  In the simplest terms:

Ideate
create as many ideas as possible

Iterate
test them out, remove what doesn’t work, improve what does
​
​Implement
​put the strongest forward and make it happen

The human in “Human-Centered Design” comes from a consistent focus on the audience‒giving the intended audience a voice, and approaching every voice with empathy.  Once again, John Alberts was en pointe.

“I have my audience agree that they will participate in whatever they, as a part of this design group, come out with in the end.  They have to be open minded.  They can’t come in with a specific idea already in place.  Most importantly, they as the key audience have got to be a key voice.”

Here at Third Eye Education, we have a team of fifteen educators who meet monthly.  We rotate who hosts each month, and the host shares a problem or innovation they’d like to explore.  We have fifteen brains throw out ideas, and fifteen people who follow those threads.  We break apart, iterate, test, and hone between meetings.  Finally, we implement the ideas in our own districts and on our own terms.  This is where at least one article a month comes from for this site, and certainly impacts how our articles and podcast function.  

In full transparency, however, we don’t want to be a team of fifteen educators, we want to be an open door for anyone who cares about the growth of oneself and the growth of others.  As such, please share your thoughts on changing these three I’s to three you’s.  Or better yet, to three us’s.

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ideation

Gina Meinertz, Assistant Superintendent of the Spring Grove Area School District, shares her process for ideation‒storylining:

My concept of storylining blends the phenomena-based storylining that science curriculums are moving towards (Illinois example), with the Montessori principles of a three-period lesson, the Visible Learning work of learning intentions and success criteria, and student inquiry-based, place-based, and experiential learning. I taught four sessions to interested teachers in our district this summer. Our teachers are using this as a tool for human-centered design in learning. All students have a voice in the storyline as they explore their interests and perspectives with success criteria. 
 
Storylining Folder with Professional Development Links and Step-by-Step Guidance
 
In our meeting, I recommended not thinking about just having one design team, but setting up a system where educational stakeholders rotate in and out of the design lab. Then, by using storylining as a tool the different stakeholders map the Ideate, Iterate, and Implement steps of Human-Centered Design in a way that tells a story of growth, voice and equity.  Here is an example of how we are starting to track our story and growth. This is the skeleton of what we are building:
 
Experience Mapping - Coaching and Transformational Documentation Tool

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iteration

For the Iteration portion, we’ll share a tool that has been used with great success for improving specific lessons, but can be used on a systematic basis as well.  Dover-Eyota Public Schools has been piloting it’s use for structured professional development communities for the last year.

Step 1:  
Identify a specific, actionable “teaching problem.”  Use the above Ideation process, or others, to choose the problem.

Step 2: 
Research why:

• Bring in research to read and discuss
  • Why does this problem exist?
  • What does research indicate as possible solutions?
• Discuss or communicate with an expert in the field
  • Experts are often excited to share their findings
  • In our experience, they’ve been lovely human beings, too

Step 3: 
Design a lesson around a hypothetical fix with your instructional coach or with your team.

Step 4: 
One teacher in your group teaches the hypothetical lesson; others come to observe... 

• The focus is on the students - is this hypothesis working?
• How are the students reacting to the lesson? 
• What are they understanding or misunderstanding?
• Focus is on improving the lesson, not on the teacher

Step 5: 
Come back together with the entire team to make tweaks and improvements.

Then, repeat steps 2-4 as needed.  This is the true definition of iteration.  

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implementation

In January, Third Eye’s Core Collaborators explored the challenges of implementation.  We’re still learning in this area, but consider checking out our initial thoughts in Five Steps for Successful Change: What We’re Trying to (Hopefully) Make Lasting Change.

The TLDR Takeaway

One of our Third Eye collaborators captured the crux of the issue this way: “Let’s not return to normal, because we all know it was terrible.” ​

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​Third Eye Education is a cohort of midwestern educational leaders seeking and sharing insight from educators, districts, & learner-focused communities. 

​Nick Truxal is the Teaching & Learning Director for Dover-Eyota Schools and the bass player for a number of Minnesota-based bands. 

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