On Deck: A resource for teachers under pressure
On Deck: A resource for teachers under pressure
The Challenge: Engage and empower K-12 teachers interested in fostering conversations about social justice in the classroom throughout the school year.
The Design Solution: Education Amplifier Activity Deck, a deck of cards designed to put power in the hands of the students and alleviate stress on teachers
The Impact: Amplifier’s team launched the Well + Being card deck, which is available for purchase on their website.
The Challenge:
Amplifier is a nonprofit design lab, one of whose key initiatives is Education Amplifier, which “aims to help K-12 teachers facilitate non-partisan conversations about social justice issues in the classroom.” Amplifier was looking to maximize the potential of Education Amplifier and better understand the needs of the teachers they served. They saw teachers in their network struggling with bandwidth and lack of resources, and the pandemic only amplified their challenges.
Amplifier partnered with our Advanced Human-Centered Design class and gave our student team a design challenge that they would tackle over the course of the semester: How might we engage K-12 teachers interested in fostering conversations about social justice in the classroom throughout the school year?
The Research:
Our students set out to gain a deeper understanding of the impact and limitations of Education Amplifier in classrooms. They began with in-depth conversations with teachers from within and outside of the Amplifier Network as well as high school students. The student design team sought stories, asked open-ended questions, and stayed in a place of inquiry and uncertainty to uncover insights below the surface.
They heard a lot of powerful stories. The story of a young, overachieving math teacher who needs to feel like she is not failing her students because she is burnt out and helpless in supporting students who have fallen behind academically due to COVID-19. The story of an art teacher in rural Wisconsin who is unable to effectively teach due to community members’ racist and politically extremist behavior. The story of a POC middle school math teacher teaching in an underprivileged, predominantly-POC community who needs to support his students in their social and emotional development.
The Key Insight:
The student team heard loud and clear from the teachers they spoke with that the combination of school district pressures and post-COVID pressures yielded two major things:
- A lot of kids really suffered from falling behind not just academically but also socially and emotionally because they weren’t with their peer groups for 1.5-2 years
- There is very little time in a school day for teachers to incorporate anything outside of the curriculum
- While many teachers valued Amplifier’s materials on social movements across the world, they shared that they had much more pressing needs for social-emotional learning in the classroom.
The Design Solution:
The combination of the two key needs the team heard – the need for flexibility, and the need for emotional and social connection, led them to design the Ed Amplifier Activity Deck, a card deck that facilitates social-emotional learning through bite-sized activities. As the team explains, “This creates the opportunity for student-led discussions and activities that might provide some respite for teachers. It also allows for choice: students can choose which deck cards they feel most comfortable with. It also facilitates connection, creativity and empathy.”
The team tested their ideas with five teachers, putting their designs back in the hands of their primary users. One teacher resonated with the card deck idea, but pointed out that questions urging students to share aspects of their personal lives might be overwhelming or upsetting to some students. As the student team shared, “Based on his feedback, we iterated the card deck to include less personal prompts and more parallel tasks, in addition to adding a tag that specified what age group that questions were designed towards.” Another teacher was excited about the card deck, seeing its potential to help students form new social connections in her class. The teacher’s feedback helped the team fine-tune their prototypes and hand off a toolbox of resources and initiatives to the Amplifier team.
The Impact:
The Amplifier team loved the card deck, and having seen the ways in which it met deeper needs for the teachers in their network, they took the student team’s prototype, refined it and built it out into a final product. The deck is now available for purchase on Amplifer’s site. Inspired by real teacher’s stories and designed to meet their unique needs, it’s been exciting to see the Ed Amplifier Activity Deck in action in classrooms.