Using Design Thinking to Reimagine Back To School Night

I am very excited to share that I have started my new job as Director of Curriculum at Keys School in Palo Alto. Over the summer the faculty read the book Creative Confidence by Tom and David Kelly. As a way to integrate their Design Thinking model into our teacher work week, we are going to use the model to reimagine our Back to School Night. 

We will have 3 hours on the first day and 1 hour two days later to complete the process. Here is our plan. (I would welcome your suggestions or ideas for improving upon it!) It is based on the Stanford Design Thinking model which is outlined in the book and which I have blogged about previously.

Groups Part One: We will create groups with as much diversity across grade levels, experience levels, points of view etc.

Empathize - Experience what the “user” experiences

Interview:

Groups will break into pairs and interview each other about their BTSN experience as a teacher, as a parent, etc.

One pair will look at parent survey feedback.

Empathy Map:
After the interviews, participants will fill out an Empathy Map summarizing what they heard in the interview into four quadrants:

• Say - What are some quotes and defining words your interviewee said?
• Do - What actions and behaviors did you notice?
• Think - What might the interviewee be thinking (that s/he didn’t say)?
• Feel - What emotions might your interviewee be feeling?

We will post the Maps around the room - Everyone will do a gallery walk.

People will return to their groups and complete 1 Empathy map that summarizes everything you saw.

Groups Part 2:

We will reconfigure groups so that they are more homogeneous by school (The Lower School and Middle School are on separate campuses and have separate Back to School Nights).

Define - Come up with an ACTIONABLE problem statement

Give out a Point of View Statement Handout where faculty come up with adjectives to describe the user and verbs to describe what the user needs and insights into why based on this blog post.

Faculty write out a Problem Statement:  User + Need + Insight

Ideate - Focus on idea generation

Brainstorm

Groups will stand up and try to generate 100 ideas in 10 minutes and write them out on Chart Paper.

We will post the lists around the room.

Post-it Voting 
Give 5 dots to each person. Have people walk around the room and put dots on their favorite ideas.
Participants look around the room at the ideas that have the most votes.

Choose
Participants return to their groups and choose one idea to prototype (the ideas does not have to be from their original list and more than one group can choose the same idea)

Prototype - Getting ideas out of your head and into the physical world.

Groups create a prototype of their idea. Prototypes can be anything that takes a physical form:

a schedule

a handout

a role-playing activity

a space

an object

a video

Test - Refine the solution and make it better

Groups share their prototypes with everyone.

Participants fill out a feedback grid for each idea.

We look at the feedback and determine what we are actually going to try at BTSN.

(We follow up BTSN with a survey to further test prototype and iterate for next year.)

So that's the plan so far. I have about two weeks before I put it into action. Please let me know if you have any suggestions or resources that might help me improve upon it.

Thanks.