KPMG Hui 1 MIT

On the 28th of March, we came together for our first hui at KPMG. As always, going to the city in itself was challenging for me. (I am not a city slicker). After getting lost and overcoming a few other hurdles, I managed to make it on time to catch the team at the end of breakfast. 

We first did a variation of WWW. 

What has emerged to add clarity and confirmation to my thinking?

I could "hear" how overwhelmed teachers were when starting at school. Some feel like solutions should be at uni or MOE, a common factor seems to be time vs volume of new learning. 

I shared with the team how successful my survey has been. I have had 58 responses from teachers across the country. 84% are NZ trained and 14% overseas trained. The areas that new teachers struggle with the most is as follow: 

Planning (70%), 

Assessment (57%), 

Finding resources(37.5%), 

Understanding curriculum (35%) and 

Grouping students (35%)

What I learned from our discussions were that I have no idea of where the teachers are from as I chose to do the survey anonymously. This presents a challenge as I can't measure whether it is happening in Manaikalaani schools or not. My next step is to narrow my data collection down by working with Matt and his facilitator's network. I am hoping to get a focus group organised to assist me with more data collection. It might be in the form of another survey, or rather an interview. I want to think of a creative way to do this, but also want to get it done as soon as possible so that it can inform my prototype design. 

What has challenged or confronted my thinking?

How can what I design not only be helpful in my own school, but across Manaiakalani Schools.

What HMW statement am I currently confirming?

How might I create a resource to support teachers starting out at a new school where they are presented with a complex array of new learning in order for them to be effective in the classroom.

We then had to create a storyboard using 3 of our Crazy 8 ideas. We could either decide to use just one of our best 3 or combine ideas 3 into 1. I chose the latter. I chose a site, spreadsheet with links and youtube videos. 

This is my current idea. A website that can serve as a dashboard for all new teachers in Manaiakalaani schools. I tackled the 3 highest concerns as collected from the survey. 

The blocks represent pages on a site. On the first page, I would summarise all the assessment expectations, have a video of how to administer the test, the templates, an example of a completed test, and links to where the data should be captured, or where the results could be found. 

The second page will have all the information needed to plan, examples of single-cell and collaborative space planning, and templates. Also on this page will be a Glossary of abbreviations used in schools. 

The third page will helpful links to resources starting wider with curriculum resources, then narrowing it down to resources that can support teachers in class, and finally resources that students can use digitally. 

The final idea is to have some kind of checklist for each unit that shows the teacher's progress through the induction phase. When they have completed the induction they earn a badge or certificate. (This part of my idea pose to be a bit of a challenge, although very helpful. However, it touches on creating logins etc which is a bit out of reach for me).

Feedback from my team: 

Everybody felt that this was something that they would use in their schools. The challenge was posed to some new teachers being able to work through something like this by themselves, and others would still need support. 

Through discussions, I realised that I would have to have separate sites for Primary and Secondary. We brainstormed what that could look like e.g. whether I should create 2 separate sites or just have a link to primary and secondary available. Also, I should create a template and a PES completed example. Schools can then make a copy of the template and adjust it to suit their own schools. The challenge on this one was that it is not as easy to create a template on sites so that it is available to all schools as the creator of the template will have to assign access to whoever wants to make a copy. But I am confident that we will work around this and come up with a solution. 

I could also add our Manaiakalaani Resource Experts as well as Toolkits recordings to my bank of resources. 

The team had to evaluate each person's idea as a Now, Wow or How. I managed to earn a WOW.

Now WOW HOW
Determine if projects are Now, Wow or How ideas.
Now ideas are ideas that are feasible and probably already exist.
Wow ideas are feasible, but also original
How ideas are not (yet) feasible, and also original.

It was really useful to meet as a team and discuss our progress and ideas. It keeps us accountable and inspired. I have lots to do and look forward to the following step in the design thinking process.