Organizational Change
Design Research
Service Design
UI/UX Design
Coding
University of Pennsylvania
My master’s thesis focused on co-designing a collaborative digital application with an autism support research group servicing the Philadelphia Public School System. The process introduced human-centered principles into the service’s practice.
My Role
This was a partnership with the service’s coaches who consult autism support teachers. I conducted ethnographic methods including dozens of interviews, contextual inquiry, four workshops, a competitive analysis of current digital platforms, and weekly observations.
Through this process, I introduced design methods for coaches to use in their own work.
“We’ve been using your strategy with teachers!”—Philly AIMS Coaches
The work heavily drew on organizational change design literature.
Background
Philly AIMS has spearheaded notable efforts to improve autism support in Philadelphia’s public schools through teacher coaching services. As its efforts and influence scales, Philly AIMS must balance expectations from a resource-strained school district and a research-driven agenda with the needs of instructors they serve.
PhillyAIMs, housed under the University of Pennsylvania, partnered with Georgia Tech’s Design & Social Interaction Studio in hopes of developing a product concept to better impart research-proven practices. Our studio conducted bi-weekly interviews with the Philly AIMS staff, learning about the complex school district ecosystem and regulations.
After interviewing coaches and visualizing their responsibilities I realized:
Some service practices unintentionally
regarded teachers as means to an end.
While some practices looked out for teachers’ best interest—such as when coaches advocate to principals on teachers’ behalf—others seemed to regard teachers as another classroom tool to improve—like when data collection is prioritized over teachers’ immediate concerns.
Key Questions
In a final presentation to the Philly AIMS Director and staff, I made a case for inquiry:
Could the coaching service better view teachers’ personal and professional growth?
We scaffolded our inquiry with three Consultee-Centered principles:
A more holistic service balancing teachers’ needs could propel PhilliyAIMS’s mission of providing students with autism quality care. After all, fully investing in a teacher will not only touch the ten students in her current class but possibly the hundreds over her lifetime. The problem space captured my imagination. I asked to make it my master’s project, and the PhillyAIMS team agreed to a partnership.
Shadowing Coaches in Classes
May 2015, I went to Philadelphia to shadow the two coaches and discovered they deeply cared for teachers’ success, often going above and beyond their job descriptions. However, caught between conflicting expectations from The School District of Philadelphia, university research, and new educators. try as they might, coaches couldn’t always put their clients’ needs first. Rather than imposing my own values, I told the coaches I would reinforce theirs. They appreciated a co-creation approach.
A service blueprint of current processes:
Research Plan
Co-Design a Service Framework
Shadowing also revealed the importance of resources, such as worksheets and props, within coaches’ practice. Resources not only mediated interaction between coaches and teachers, but also between teachers and students, class staff, and principals. What’s more, resources enable coaches to influence classroom processes without being present. Rethinking interactions around resources would be a good starting point for re-designing the service.
Create a Teacher-Centered Digital Product
I didn’t want to come in with a tech-centric approach. Yet, I found a digital platform would support Philly AIMS’s goals. Digital media could offer asynchronous communication beyond one-hour windows and sustainability after consultation.
More importantly, digital media could be a medium for coaches and teachers’ to share creative solutions. Co-designing a resource sharing application could in turn reshape service practices.
Check Viability for Teacher-Centered Approach
The School District of Philadelphia rejected my co-design proposal informally stating my master’s project wasn’t of PhD research caliber. Without access to autism support educators, co-designing a teacher-balanced digital tool seemed contradictory. Yet, the rejection merely reflects the barriers towards human-centered initiatives I had intended to explore.
Co-Design with Coaches
Rather than ending the research, I treated the rejection as a part of the design challenge. I asked PhillyAIMS to co-design with coaches instead. Navigating forty classrooms per year, coaches have panoramic insight on teachers’ experiences as well as district and internal organizational processes.
Coaches referenced their lack of technological savvy. Many of the software applications that coaches and teachers interact with had been mandated top-down, and input has already been decided based on what the school district or research study deems valuable (e.g., student data spreadsheets). I needed to assure the team that they were not merely consumers of the collaborative media we were aiming for, but instead active co-creators whose insights were needed to shape the final product.
Building Common Ground
“What values drive your work?”
Rather than directly answering my first workshops’ theme, the team enumerated what made their work hard. They needed to trust an outsider like me understood the gravity of their situation before opening up. At the end of the workshop, they explained equality drives their mission: they hope a child with autism, no matter his/her socioeconomic background, might have access to quality care. Data-driven, evidence-based strategy is a means to reach equity.
Aligning Priorities
I had an at-home interview with the supervising coach. As someone who had been with the team the longest, she had recently entered a new leadership role and considered herself a “spokesperson” over a “lead.” The team had recently tripled in size, making collaboration more difficult especially as there was not as much feeling of project ownership among the new coaches. The supervising coach said she wanted to foster :
-
- Team Building
-
- Participation
-
- Idea sharing
She also suggested a prompt for the next co-design session: coaches make resources for teachers, but they rarely upload them to the shared drive or the Philly AIMS website and the spokesperson coach wanted to know why.
Brainstorming Together
The supervising coach and I brainstormed a workshop activity where coaches bring a resource that they recently made to help a classroom and freely shared the inspiration behind them. One coach exclaimed how much easier it was to verbally explain instructions with teachers during in-person meetings as opposed to typing them.
“Videos would be a great way to share the rationale behind resources.”— Coach During Brainstorming
Making Dialogue a Habit
“During meetings, rather than simply talking about problems coaches are facing, we now have a positive format for sharing coaching resources to address commonly faced problems with the opportunity to share feedback and generate further solutions.”—Spokesperson Coach
After the workshop, the spokesperson coach incorporated show-and-tells into weekly team meetings. The team also began recording the show-and-tells. Conversations that were exclusive to one teacher and coach prior to the workshop now function as a learning opportunity for the entire coaching team.
Building on the coaches’ idea, I facilitated a Round Robin for creation of tags. Coaches would later use this design method with teachers.
Value-Ladened Product
I designed and developed a working prototype for a digital resource-sharing platform. While shadowing them I realized the coaches’ greatest strength is cross-pollinating knowledge and across classrooms, Show-and-tell videos convey the rationales behind creating and using the resources. Teachers can glimpse the coaches’ problem-solving thought process and learn to creatively tackle challenges themselves.
This redesign invites teachers to search with keywords to access relevant Strategies, resources embedded with instructions and narratives. Each Strategy is tagged with phrases from the Round Robin activity.
Outcome
“Through the coaches’ participation in the development of the digital tool for teachers, we have gained a better understanding of…the difference between disseminating information and imparting knowledge.”—Spokesperson Coach
Strategies From Community Life
While Philly AIMS has been contracted to distribute an evidence-based curriculum, the coaches and directors were excited about the digital tool’s potential, not as a means for them to push out content, but a platform for teachers to share their own experiences and solutions with each other.
Organizational Impact
This research was heavily influenced by Sabine Junginger’s theory Human-Centered Product for Organizational Change. My engagement began with periphery touchpoints, such as the service and digital tool. Engaging with coaches allowed for a joint exploration deeper into PhillyAIM’s values.
Co-design’s core principles (prioritizing participants’ needs, mutual learning, and sustainability) parallel consultee-centered consultation. The participatory process embedded these principles into Philly AIMS’s culture through a lived experience.
Shifting Culture
Co-design respects that people know best how to get their work done. From the start, I told coaches I would support their needs. The initiative supported the Spokesperson coach’s collaborative team vision. Centering inquiry around coaches‘ priorities means adopting their measurement of success. This process modeled strategies to elicit educators’ needs and started dialogue on how to measure achievement outside evidence-based data point.
“[The design process] has provided valuable insights to…how we think about our consultation to teachers.”—Spokesperson Coach
“[Michelle] has guided us through various strategies during coaches’ meetings to encourage equal participation and idea sharing in a meaningful way and has helped us to become more focused with our problem-solving efforts.”—Spokesperson Coach
It would be nice for us as a center to be implementing more of these practices and I’d love to learn more about the kinds of activities that might be helpful for us.”—Spokesperson Coach
Finally, I had a met with the directors proposing making coaches’ practice more central to the service. The Philly AIMS director later had a meeting with coaches encouraging them to rely more on their “clinical intuition.”
Discussion
“It’s great seeing the similarities between our two disciplines. It affirms what we’re doing.”—Philly AIMS Coach
Regardless, if the teacher is properly executing evidence-based practices or staying the following year, she chooses to be in that class now, and her presence alone means the world to her students. The coaches help because teachers, as people, matter in and of themselves. Similarly, the project’s turning point came when I began to regard coaches, not as a lever for the Philadelphia autism support community, but as people mattering in their own right.
Acknowledgement
I owe immeasurable thanks to my advisor Nassim Parvin for sharing this journey together. Her feedback, patience, and support has made this possible, and her compassion, dedication, and understanding has redefined mentorship for me.
Many thanks to the Philly AIMS coaches Zinnia Pitrowski, Diana Cooney, Meghan Kane, Rudy Calderon Jr., Jacquie Russo, Julie Caramanico, and Mina Kim for joining on this experimental journey. Thanks also to the Philly AIMS director, Dr. David Mandell and Erica Blanch who supported our efforts to inquire into their unique organizational processes and practices through design.