To open schools, we need to design with students.

Let’s stop trying to solve a new problem with old methods. We need new ways and we need to include students as designers of the solutions.

My 8th grader’s school is planning to open soon and I couldn’t help to overhear the student orientation Zoom as administration explained the high-level plan and the new hybrid schedule. What caught my attention (as I brushed my teeth careful to not end up in the camera view and become one of ‘those’ embarrassing parents) was when a student asked how they would manage to bring all their books back and forth to school between days learning in class and from home. The answer given was unsatisfactory and missed the point. And it wasn’t the only interesting question and it reinforced something I have long believed — schools need to involve students in the redesign of education including how students go back to at-school learning. Especially now.

I’m a strategy and service design who regularly works to make sure an organization’s services, digital products, and customer experience work seamlessly, reduce friction, and are designed around the real needs and context of real humans and the way they use things. At the core of what I do is an approach called Human-Centric Design (also known as Design Thinking) that is used by modern companies and organizations to accelerate change and innovation.

Taken from how designers have always worked, Human Centric Design suggests a more agile, insightful and accelerated way to solve problems and is driven by a few core principles that challenge the way we have traditionally tried to plan our ways out of problems. They are the mindsets that traditional businesses struggle with but that applied to unleash creative potential and deliver results faster. These are three core mindsets.

Learn with Empathy — Usually, the people who plan are not the people who live with the solutions leading to a lot of bad meeting-room assumption making. Designers seek a better understanding of challenges by talking to and including the end ‘customer or user.’ This means deeply immersive and empathetic conversations with people about what they ‘do’, ‘think’ and how something makes them ‘feel’ — all things that traditional market research misses. The outcome is insights that help focus efforts on the real problem as opposed to symptoms and better ideas that come directly from the reality of people’s actions and behaviors.

Collaborate & Co-Create — Designers also look to develop solutions in collaboration with others rather than looking to presumed experts that traditional business would normally defer to in their comfortable silos disconnected with what happens at the front lines of anything. This means pulling together teams of ‘rival’ functions — in this case, administrators, teachers, parents, traditional designers, and of course students. It is in the diversity of perspective that designers find more holistic ideas as well as uncover idea pitfalls that, missed, sabotage success. Design also included their audience in the process of ideation seeing users/customers as ‘experts’ in their own experiences. Even if the ideas of the user are not fully developed they almost always serve as inspiration for designers to deliver the solutions that work.

Prototype to Learn. Test to Improve. — Business often create elaborate plans from the comfort of their meeting room and then are surprised when they fail. That’s because we have learned to calculate risk based on theory and by building on what has worked in the past. Today, what worked in the past doesn’t deliver a ton of value in a chaotic new world. To reduce the chance of failure, designers run quick prototypes of their ideas in order to get a feeling for how it might really work. This about learning with your hands and not just your head. It can mean things like improv of interactions, quick sketches of a new product that you pretend to use, a faked website that you try to navigate. This exposes weaknesses, barriers, bad assumptions as well as possible new ideas. And it does so quickly and cheaply before people become too invested in the idea to make needed changes. Testing is done as they take their prototypes to real users to learn in the wild’ and make immediate pivots until the solution is running smoothly.

It’s this kind of ‘design’ approach, rather than traditional ‘planning’ that school administrations could really benefit from now. But, much like big business and government, schools suffer from a legacy process to change that is inflexible, values ‘knowing’ over ‘learning’ (ironic, right?) and works towards a plan made by experts (in this case administrators and some teachers). Now I’m not saying that much of what they are proposing isn’t good or that they are not asking questions of students and others. But that’s not enough when problems are complex and very driven by human behavior.

Here what schools could do:

Start by Mapping the Experience
Start by mapping out the end-to-end experience of students, teachers, and others at school to identify where people might get ‘stuck’ or issues occur. This means imaging the day of a student ever before school starts as well as what are the things that will happen or be needed a week before starting. By looking at things from the experience of someone (an 8th grader) it becomes easier to identify moments that might need to be carefully orchestrated or ‘gaps’ where information will be needed. We call this Journey Mapping and it provides a more thorough and human behavior focus on a challenge. It is done with post-it notes that identify stages, moments and events, pain points, supporting processes amongst other things. (and now those post-it notes are digital in Mural)

Learn Rapidly from Students, Teachers, Cleaning Staff, etc
I am sure schools are asking people questions. But these questions must be better and lead to insights. Asking a student ‘what worries might you or others have about returning?” or “what could be hard to do when you get back?” along with follow-ups of “why is that”, “how does it make you feel?” delivers deeper insights into problems that might otherwise go unnoticed. It opens the conversation up for people to tell you things you didn’t know to ask or you thought were unimportant but — with some probing — turn out to be the invisible driver of success. This is all about finding the right problem to solve and the powerful levers to use. From a small number of interviews, you can quickly start to learn what is important, what might go off the rails, and how people feel about something (which tells you a lot about how they will respond.)

Co-Create the Solutions
Learning is often too one way, from teacher to student. We need to flip that. Schools can take challenges like ‘how will we manage a socially distanced lunch” and ask small groups of students to work on solutions. As the end audience, students might well have pragmatic ideas or address issues that the adults didn’t know to think about. The value of this might not be the ideas but the direction students take the thinking in that provokes new thinking in the adults and that leads to the better solution needed.

Have Teachers Prototype New Processes
It is amazing how quickly you discover that something that is so logical on paper falls apart in real interactions. Like good improv, teachers should try out new processes and policies in short walk-through skits where they take on the roles of students and others and see what happens when they pretend. Suddenly realizing that gathering at lockers will be problematic simply because you acted our the student morning routine exposes a weakness in a few minutes and before it actually happens. Schools can do a one-day run though of what returning to school is like to rapidly gather physical input.

Empower Teachers to Test and Pivot
On week one of school teachers and administrators should be hyper-observant of what happens, what is working, what is missing, and then quickly meet daily to discuss these things, come up with adaptations and quick fixes to be launched the next day. Like prototyping, this rapid cycle of doing something, learning from it, and adapting quickly will drive a more perfect process in weeks rather than waiting forever to address the problems that are undoubtedly going to arise.

All of this means more empowerment. Empowering teachers to work as in-field researchers and problem solvers. Students as problem owners and solvers. Parents as partners with the administration.

I know schools are aggressively working on plans right now and it may seem impossible to take a breath, take stock and try this approach. But this is what is needed if we want our schools to be safe, for everyone to have more faith in the rollout and for us to get back to something of normality. And it is the right approach in uncertain times with the value of this bettering, more secure return to school and maybe, as an added benefit, a new way of thinking about how education works overall.

Photo credit: Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash