Educators from the Savannah Chatham County Public Schools System (SCCPSS), from 4th to 12th grades teachers of English Language, Arts, Science, and Social Studies disciplines.

The schools are facing several challenges including teacher burn-out and attrition rates, rigid standard-based instruction and evaluation, tight district budgets, little support for personalized learning and issues with student engagement. Our role was to facilitate an interactive experience to inspire teachers to find space to be creative within the constraints of standardized lessons, to consider the implementation of methods that better serve the need of 21st century learners, and to be open-minded about alternative pedagogy, in order to combat stagnancy within the Savannah Chatham County Public Schools System (SCCPSS).

We were a team of 8 multidisciplinary designers. I participated with the team in writing the creative brief, brainstorming ideas for the workshop and testing them. I was specifically responsible for planning a detailed journey map of the onstage and backstage activities happening during the workshop delivery.

The workshop preparations lasted 4 weeks during spring 2017, the workshop was delivered during 3 hours.

After meeting with our client and presenting her a creative brief, we started by learning more about teaching and learning through secondary research, then we moved to brainstorming and prototyping. Our team ideated more than 300 design concepts for the workshop’s flow and content. We used a clustering method to synthesize the ideas into groups; the process of organizing and eliminating these concepts provided our team with a sense of direction while creating this workshop. Through this process, we converged on our first complete workshop concept related to the GRASP model from Defined STEM (an acronym for determining Goals, Roles, Audiences, Situations, and Products as learning objectives in lesson plans). The GRASP model is designed to provide teachers with a structure plan rigorous scenario-based instruction for all students. Using this tool, our team created a wide range of activities that allowed users to interact collaboratively and creatively in our workshop. We developed a user journey map to understand each touch point of the whole process, which further enabled the team to design specific activities for each section of the GRASP model. However, during our first prototyping experience, we discovered that the model was hard to translate with a group as large as our intended audience and that the activities would require too much time to complete in full. That’s why we considered taking the essence of the model but go a different way. So, we started again, from scratch, and we came up with new activities that we prototyped and iterated.

The outcome was a 3-hour workshop that consisted of several activities. We started by providing the teachers with a safe place to express their feelings and concerns about the last school year, followed by a creative introduction of the facilitator with the purpose of creating a positive connection between them and the teachers. Then we started an activity that allowed teachers to identify their working style in a team based on personality profiles. Our next job was to form diverse teams and build a connection between teachers of different schools. Then, through several activities, we transformed a standard lesson plan into an interactive one with the goal of demonstrating that any standard lesson plan can be delivered in an interactive and engaging way, thus making the students more passionate about learning, and the teachers more passionate about teaching.  At the end of the workshop, teachers shared feedback and brainstormed about how to implement what they learned to create more engaging lesson plans. All participants were very excited and found our workshop very fruitful. After that, they wrote their thoughts down on the poster, and we documented the poster and sent it to the teachers in a follow-up e-mail.

The impact of the workshop was very positive, teachers shared how they could use the creative techniques they learned in their classrooms. Teachers received our message, they experienced an ‘AHA’ moment where they realized that any lesson, even the most boring could be delivered in an interactive and engaging way. In a week after the workshop, the client told us that the teachers are using the brochures that we distributed every day and that they would like to print them to every school in Chatham County. Also, they were inspired to create an inspiration board, like the one we created for them for teachers at each school.