Roxanne Pompilio
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EDL 655

Communication, Problem Solving and Decision Making PK12

"One thing is sure. We have to do something. We have to do the best we know how at the moment . . . ; If it doesn't turn out right, we can modify it as we go along."
— Franklin D.Roosevelt
counseling Frances Perkins

Problem Solving

Design thinking—Evolution phase

8/13/2015

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The evolution phase began with a discussion of what to look for to determine whether our parent website is a success? What are the indicators of a successful product? How do we know if we our meeting the needs of our end users (parents)? Our team’s discussion included, but was not limited to, parent ratings of the website, the use of follow-up surveys and interviews, the degree of parent activity on the website (particularly what links and sections were routinely visited), and an increase of visibility of underrepresented groups. Another indicator of success we discussed was the importance of evidence collected from ongoing evaluation/monitoring of the parent website and that design changes/modifications would need to be made as the website evolves over time. This will be important for measuring the website’s sustainability and its interoperability.

In moving forward to next steps, our team reached out to an outside audience for feedback and compared this with feedback received from our colleagues. Our outside audience included business professionals and school Principals.  Both groups held similar opinions about what they valued the most, particularly the need for such a site, the opportunities it afforded to increase parental communication, access to resources, and involvement at school and at home, and translation component of the site. Most changes suggested and concerns expressed included issues of time, getting “buy-in” from parents and teachers who will start-up and run the site, and technical aspects of how the translation function will unfold and how a mobile device program for parents will work. Based on the feedback we received, our team decided further investigation and additional steps were needed prior to rolling out the parent site. First, we will need to conduct additional surveys to both parents and students to see which parents (one or both are likely to participate) and whether both groups view the website as a way to increase parental participation. Second, we need to recruit an initial startup design team consisting of parents and teachers (and a few students) to develop and run a field test/pilot at each of our school sites. This will be done prior to and during back to school nights. Third, the start-up design team will need to develop a plan, including a timeline and calendar, for development and piloting the parent website at our school sites. Finally, we will need to work out the details for how frequently the website will need to be monitored and the use of Google "analytics" to assess the areas used most frequently.

Your individual contribution to this week's work

  • Set-up shared Google Document
  • Added guidelines, checklist, and rubric
  • Suggested using a chart to organize our feedback from outside audience participants.
  • Shared Blendspace link with videos to a former Vice Principal of mine who is now Principal at an elementary school. I selected her because she provides an administrator viewpoint and she has experience with elementary, middle school, and high school parent groups. I also shared the Blendspace link with videos to a retired business owner who has experience with developing and getting a patent on a product. I selected him because although retired, he had to go through a similar process in starting up his company, getting “buy-in” for the product he patented, and had to consider very similar steps to what my team did for our design process.
  • Read over additional articles/research suggested and selected elements for our team to consider when refining the parent website (Ulises and Angela reviewed this section and agreed I’d covered points from the articles that were relevant for our design project).
  • Collaborated with Ulises and Angela in both parts of the evolution phase in refining our website.

Challenges the group or I faced, and what I
would do differently to better the process?
  • By this phase in the process, we have improved our digital collaborative skills and found communication and collaboration less of an issue than the early phases in the design process.
  • Divergent thinking is also becoming easier.
  • We are using our collaboration time more efficiently.
  • Confidence in our design skills and in our own ideas has improved as well during this phase of the design process.
  • In terms of challenges, probably the biggest during this phase was getting outside audience members to view our design model and give us feedback within a short time frame (I called in a few favors, as my former administrator was starting at a new school during the time frame I needed the feedback and other administrators I’d considered were out of town).
How would you implement the reflection process with students or your staff?
I use a similar process as required in the evolution phase for students to evaluate and reflect on their work. However, I usually have them seek feedback from classmates or from students in other classes. I like the idea of having them seek perspectives from an outside audience. This also has the additional benefit of making my students more accountable. If they know that others in the community and well-respected professionals will be viewing their work, the effort they put into the work will most likely reflect this. (If I were to change anything in this process, I’d make sure students had a clearer idea of all of the phases and processes prior to starting).

How did effective communication play a role in your collaboration throughout the entire DT process? Strengths? Areas of growth?
As mentioned previously, our team’s confidence improved throughout the collaborative process, we became less dependent and reliant on the guidelines from our professors, engagement increased among group dynamics (we moved from frustration in the early phases of the process to increased investment and a clearer understanding of the entire process). This in turn, afforded better communication. Overall, I learned a lot about problem solving, the importance of communication in the collaborative process, and feel I will be successful in implemented similar processes with students and staff.
Evolution Phase I & II
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Design thinking—Experimentation phase

8/11/2015

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Our collaborative work for the Experimentation Phase of the Design Thinking (DT) process began with a review of our DT challenge, increasing involvement of underrepresented parent groups and revisiting and aligning our DT questions. Particularly, we are concerned with how we might better address issues of communication and access to increase parental involvement and support at school and at home. Following this, we reviewed the point of view and needs of our end user (our parents) with emphasis on underrepresented parent groups. These parents need better modes of communication, access to and entry points for support services and resources because of the language barriers and inequities that exist between parent groups. Our solution to this challenge involved developing a website capable of streamlining the modes of communication so that resources are consistently updated, can be accessed from several locations using any device, and are more accessible for all parent groups. At this point in the process, we were ready to develop prototypes of our parent website. Our first two Prototypes A and B had visual appeal and many of our parents’ needs. Prototype C was missing the layout, but was more comprehensive of requirements to meet parental needs. Our final product, Prototype D using the Weebly platform— was a synthesis of Prototypes A-C. For a more in depth view of this process, see our shared Google Slide Presentation below. This platform afforded ease of use for our users and connectivity to social media, as well as to already established school sites.
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Experimentation phase—increasing parental involvement and support

Google Slide Presentation
To test our prototype prior to full development, we crafted it to receive feedback from our end users and from our colleagues. We asked those viewing our design thinking process and final prototype the following questions:
  • Whether the Parent Connection site meets their needs?
  • Which parts of the site are the most useful?
  • Which aspects of the site were confusing?
  • What parts of the site need to be changed or modified?
  • What parts of the site do not work and need to go back to R & D?
The feedback we received (see below) was invaluable and fruitful.
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Our team discussed, categorized, and reevaluated our final prototype over Google Hangouts based on the feedback we received to better refine our end product. We also examined what did not work? And what needed to be further investigated?  Overall, we received more positive reviews of our product than we initially were expecting. Probably the main concerns of those reviewing our final product/version of the parent website was whether we’d be able to get the needed “buy-in” from key stakeholders (our parents and teachers)? And whether we’d be able to streamline the site to meet parent needs without sacrificing usability. Among items needing further investigation were the details of how a mobile device checkout program would work for parents, additional costs/budget concerns, sustainability and ongoing evaluation/monitoring, how our social media campaign would roll-out, and the selection of a startup team to further refine and develop our website.

Individual contribution to this week's work
  • Set-up shared Google Document with what was required, including a checklist and rubric
  • Organized team workflow and recommended process to follow
  • Developed Prototype A and Final Prototype D (our team voted for my Prototype A) so it made more sense for me to design the synthesis of Prototypes A-C after our team agreed on what elements should be included in the final prototype.
  • Agreed to take-on Part 4 of the presentation—The Solution to our DT challenge in terms of the presentation on our shared Google Slides.
  • Shared all of our work with our professors
Challenges the group or you as an individual faced
In terms of collaboration, this became much more streamlined than previously. It seems we have developed a system that works. Online collaboration is more efficient and expectations are clearer. Challenges included technical difficulties in getting our presentations uploaded to Youtube and/or Google Drive. Although I uploaded and checked my work earlier, I did not attempt to view it from multiple browsers (this was a great lesson as I know now what browsers it can be viewed in and have a plan if this occurs in the future).

Next time, would you do anything differently to better the process?
I used Google Draw for my Prototypes of the website. I thought this was an excellent idea, but with more time, I might have set-up a prototype on Weebly. Our team had discussed this as an option, but decided against it because the site would not several missing links and basically would be under construction, yet would require us to publish it in order to get feedback on it. We agreed hosting the parent website on Weebly when we are really to field test it, would be a better ideas and is in the works if we move forward in rolling out our design.

How would this process differ if implemented with actual end users? What would you need to take into consideration?
If implemented with actual end users, this idea would probably need to include a way for them to field test the website. This is an essential part in the process, as it would allow our team to trouble-shoot many of the issues we may run up against.

How can the revolutionized idea of collaboration in the 21st century add to the DT process? Elaborate on some possibilities.
Collaboration in the 21st century has changed from how it was used previously in that we have a greater opportunity to learn from and work collaboratively with individuals representing diverse cultures, religions and lifestyles, and have access to experts across the globe to collaborate with and further the design of our end product. Those with the ability to work fluidly around the globe and who are able to leverage technology will definitely have a comparative advantage over those who do not possess these skills.

Experimentation Phase I & II
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Design Thinking—ideation phase

8/3/2015

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Ideation Process Parts I-III—Shared Google Document
Mural.ly—Brainstorm 100 Challenge to Idea Formation

Reflecting on the IDEATion Process—Parts I-III

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Reflecting on the Ideation Process—Part I: Generating 100 Ideas
The first part of the ideation process was perhaps the most challenging for myself and my group. We established norms for brainstorming, created a Mural.ly document with three columns, but when we initially met, the ideas were not flowing. In terms of myself, much of it had to do with brain overload. For the first part of the activity, we created the columns so that we could post ideas without being influenced by the others in our group. However, later when we were trying to build on each other's ideas, it was difficult to see them and remember what others came up with, so we decided to collapse the columns but keep the color-coding. It helped to take a screenshot of the ideas, as it was easy to expand to view and these were easy to add to our Google Document. In terms of my own contribution for this section, I came up with the initial idea of creating three columns. A constrain during this process was that we had to wait for everyone to  finish generating ideas before we could discuss, categorize, and select the promising ones. Therefore, there was a bit of a gap between parts 1 and 2 of the process.
Ideation—Part II: Selecting Promising Ideas
For this part of the process, we had to develop a protocol for selecting ideas. We came up with placing similar ideas into categories. The categories we came up with include: Involvement, Use of Technology, and Communicate, which are at the heart of our end users' (our parents' ) needs. 
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Ideation—Part III: Reality Check and Refining our Ideas
This part of the process came together once all of us were able to eventually meet. Because there was much overlap with our ideas across all three categories and many of these could be put into action with the right design product, designing a parent website is a way we truly believed will improve parental involvement of targeted or underrepresented groups. The website will provide streamline communication, create access and new points of entry, and provide more consistent translation than some of the previous delivery systems. In terms of constraints, this end product had more than we initially realized, but there were a number of realistic solutions. There were also a few outrageous ones (See a few of our radical solutions we generated in our second Ideation round—>Mobile Techlabs for parents or free parent mobile hotspots)
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In terms of constraints, we were able to brainstorm solutions to these, some more radical than others (see above). Probably, the most difficult of the constraints was time. There never seems to be enough of time. Although not mentioned as part of the solution to this dilemma, many of the reasons against investing time in a parent website have to do with the school climate and culture, at least this is my own experience (resistance to change). Many are worried about taking risks and changing traditional practices such as use of email for all modes of communication (even though there may be more efficient methods). 
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Evaluating the Effectiveness of our Solution—Creating a Website for Parents: Although most school sites already have a school website with information parents can access and districts have websites as well, what my group and I noticed is that parents are lost trying to navigate the district site and therefore, do not access many of the resources available or do not even know they exist. As for school websites, most have a page with some information for parents (minimum at best) that do not meet the bulk of the needs we discovered with our parents, particularly the underrepresented groups. Our solution is inclusive of most of our parent needs, incorporates most of the ideas generated, and adds a more personal connection for parents that was lost. Furthermore, our solution is cost-effective, easy to maintain, and it meets many of the communication and access issues parents were having; particularly language support and having a central location to meet (in this case a virtual one).

Challenges and What to Change for Next Time

In terms of my own challenges, these were twofold. First, I'm still playing catch-up. I have several obligations I have put off in order to get caught up in all of my courses. What I discovered is despite working continuously since I returned from China, I am still behind scheduled. I finally wrapped up EDL795a and I am caught up in EDL652, so this week affords an opportunity to hopefully make more headway with EDL655. Unfortunately, getting caught up in EDL655 also depends on the amount of work and time others are willing to or can commit. This brings me to the second challenge, group schedules. I found when I set aside work time, no one else was available. When others were available, tasks we agreed to complete prior to meeting were not finished. This was frustrating for me as I do not like to waste time when I have a lot of work to do. This being said, our group collaboration time is improving. I find the clearer the task, the more efficient our use of online collaboration time is. For example, if all of us are not sure what we are doing, everything takes twice as long and we are frustrated. What I found to work, is if I review requirements and scaffold the steps so that everyone else understands what we are doing better, we get our collaborative work accomplished much faster and more efficiently. Also, use of the chat box in both Google Documents and Mural.ly definitely saved time. Not everyone had the best Internet connection so discussion over Google Hangouts while working in the documents created delays. We could still use this off and on but didn't need to be on for three hours. 


Using the Ideation Process with Colleagues or Students
As my comfort level gets better with online collaboration, I am definitely excited about using this process with students. I particularly think the brainstorming technique is useful and I like some of the ideas from IDEO to get the brain working. I think in terms of the time constraints required in the ideation process (although according to IDEO, these are by design and are intentional), this would need to be explained to students or many would find the experience stressful (I'm thinking about my AP folks). For colleagues, this process would be particularly good in some of our professional development trainings; except we would need better Internet in our library if online. 


Ideation and Creativity: There are many traditional characteristics of creativity in the ideation process in terms of brainstorming, generating ideas, refining ideas, developing these, problem-solving, and finding solutions; however, the process does include non-traditional characteristics such as the reduced amount of time to brainstorm ideas and the fact that there is much less time between ideas and solutions. The creative process also becomes a more collaborative activity than an isolated one and also adds additional problems to solve like how to collaborate with team members across distances. Although I like the idea expressed in the Britta Riley collaborative open-source "Garden in my Apartment" project. Rather than research and development, the process enabled others take take the guidelines developed by others to research and develop it themselves.
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Design Thinking—Interpretation Phase

7/26/2015

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Interpretation Phase—Parts I-III
Mural.ly—Capturing Meaning through Interpretation

Interpretation Phase—Parts  I-III Reflection

Interpretation Part I—Tell Your Story
For the first part of the interpretation phase, each of us shared a “story” of our findings from the expert interviews and surveys conducted. My portion of the story focused on what I learned about parental involvement and support from my interviews with experts and research on Diigo. As a group, we decided to use Mural.ly based on Sara Chai’s recommendation and reference to it in our Google Plus EDL655 community. This was our first experience using it, but it’s easy once you get the hang of it. I found a suitable template that could be modified for our purposes. To show the key facts, needs, and perspectives of our end users and experts, each of us used a different color post-it to represent the groups we interviewed or surveyed. This was completed in Q1 on Mural.ly. Mine post-its are in yellow. Our shared “stories” can be found on our Google Document.

Interpretation Part II-III—Find Meaning and Framing Opportunities
To make sense of our findings, we captured the learning from the stories and created categories for our findings. For example, what was the most memorable and surprising story? What did participants care about? What stood out? And what frustrated participants? From here, we looked for common themes and patterns and constructed new categories. We initially had six categories in the Q3 section but narrowed this to four and then to three. We found that many of the categories overlapped. Part of what made this possible was Sandra Leu’s suggestion to consolidate/summarize our post-it findings. This was particularly helpful, as I was able to clearly see where my findings best fit. I shared all of this with the rest of our group and they are in the process of consolidating their post-its as well, so that we can complete the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) process to frame opportunities and develop our plan.

Challenges
There were several challenges during this process. Again, time was an issue. Our group is behind and playing catch-up is never easy. We tried to do a better job during this phase by dividing up tasks. For example, we each documented our “stories” and then shared what we had with the rest of the group. For Part II, we collaborated to make sense of our findings through a Mural.ly shared document and were able to construct six categories. Another challenge was we were not clear on all parts of the process for Parts II and III, which created delays. At this point, our group needed clarification, so I contacted Sandra. We narrowed are categories down to three. I suggested that we individually consolidate our post-its, as not everyone was able to meet online for this. The group agreed this was the best way to proceed. For Part III, I made a few suggestions for the QFT process for Q4 to get us started and also added a suggested revision for our DT Question to our shared Google Document. Overall, Sandra’s feedback was extremely helpful for Parts II and III. She provided the needed support for our group to move forward.


Changes to Improve the Process for Next Time
Some of our challenges stem from being behind and having to revisit PPTs, audio sessions, virtual sessions, and get extra help to make sense of everything. In my own case, I am not used to being behind schedule and it is frustrating. I feel like we are going to be one week behind the rest of the class until the end of the course unless something changes or we catch a break. Not sure I have a solution.

Application for Students or Colleagues
The Interpretation Phase of the DT process is applicable for students and colleagues. For students, it taps into several critical thinking skills and also meets many of the common core requirements, particularly for understanding point of view and for higher order thinking. For colleagues, the interpretation phase might even be useful in our WASC process that we are undergoing.

All 8 tenets of critical thinking were evident to this process?
  • Discipline of Mind
  • Open Mindedness (Deferred Judgment)
  • Metacognitive Thinking
  • Empathy
  • Humility
  • Questioning
  • Reflection
  • Healthy Skepticism
The interpretation phase required “being in tune” with our own thinking and reflecting on each of the steps throughout the process. The interviews of experts forced me to look at the research without preconceived judgments and view the parental involvement issue from multiple perspectives. The results of our findings uncovered a few surprises, i.e., that many parents believe there are sufficient support services. This caused our group to re-examine what we perceived to be the problem and whether it was a problem for all parent groups. Finally, questioning was a constant throughout the process in terms of creating questions, revising questions, questioning our thought-process, and whether we were drawing sound conclusions from our research.
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Design Thinking—Group Capstone Project by Roxanne Pompilio, Ulisses cisneros, and angela acuna

7/18/2015

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Design thinking phase 1—discovery phase

Identifying the problem: 
Parent involvement and support at school and at home

challenge question: 
how might parents be involved and support their child at school and at home?

Design Thinking Visual
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Research on Parent involvement

Diigo Outliner—Parent Involvement

Discovery phase—Parts I-III

Discovery Phase I-III—Design Thinking
Reflecting on the Discovery Phase—Parts I-III

Summary, Contribution, and Challenges

The first phase of the Design Thinking Project creates the foundation for and sets the stage for the other phases of the project. The discovery phase of the design project presented a few challenges in terms of collaborative work. I was in China for the entire first week of the discovery phase of the project with limited Internet access and a 15-hour time change, which created delays in the collaborative process. We initially had four members in our group and lost one (why I’m not sure). Anyway, I was contacted by Angela Acuna and Ulises Cisneros and we conducted most of our initial collaboration via email and held one Google Hangout between the US and Taiwan, where we brainstormed possible Social Justice problems and a suitable challenge question. Ulises set-up our initial shared Google Document and I revised a lot of it prior to our final turn-in. Ulises and Angela narrowed down our challenged question while I was in China to--How might parents be involved and support their child at school and at home?

Once I returned from China and revisited all of the requirements for the Discovery phase, I revised the question to: How might parents be involved and support their child at school and at home?

This question resonated with all of us as we are at different schools. Initially, I had wanted to create a question that had more cross over with my work with schools in China, but realized it was better in terms of the time frame and potential communication delays with schools there to focus on the parent involvement issue here instead. We all wanted to work on a solution for a real problem that impacted all of our schools. We realize that we still need to narrow this question down more, and plan to do so after completing the Interpretation Phase of the project.

Perhaps the biggest challenge in the Discovery Phase was the time involved in online collaboration to develop the interview and survey questions. All three of us worked together over Google Hangouts for about six hours (2 separate sessions) to construct the questions for our end users and for the experts. I later revised a few of the questions and presented my revisions to the group. Since we were behind schedule, I suggested we divide up some of the tasks that didn’t require online collaboration. I also volunteered to complete the visual image for our DT question. I had a few ideas, constructed a draft of the visual and shared it with everyone for feedback. Everyone in the group liked it. However, I still felt it was missing something. I did some additional online research on Social Justice and looked at images on the Internet. This gave me a few additional ideas to better connect our problem in the visual to the social justice theme. Another challenge was that our group was not completely clear on what was required and we spent a lot of time working this out. This was frustrating for me, as I hate wasting time and I had a lot of work to get caught up on. I felt that much of our online collaboration was not as productive as it might have been. (I felt some responsibility for this because I was not here at the beginning of the project. Once it became clear we needed help and more direction, I reached out to our professors, took some time to revisit PPTs, videos, and guidelines for sections we were unsure about).

Overall, I felt that I did a bit more work in the Discovery Phase, but by choice. After looking over the exemplary Google Document another group had submitted, I felt our document was inferior and confusing, and did not cover all parts on the rubric, so I revised it. I also volunteered to do the visual. In terms of the interviews, these ended up being time consuming because they required transcribing recordings for some of them and time conducting the interviews (I’m not sure if the surveys were as involved).


What I would change or do differently next time:

  • Review the checklist with the group in advance. Make note of questions we have and make sure we are clear on the task before starting.
  • Divide up tasks that can be done individually. (Although it is important to collaborate, I personally felt it took too long to construct all of the questions together. We could have each worked on the questions for the group we were interviewing or surveying and then could have provided feedback and revisions for one another).
  • Agree on a calendar of who is responsible for what much earlier in the project. I added the calendar in my revised Google Document, partly out of frustration, as I felt we were not moving forward.
Probably the most helpful part of the discovery process was toward the end of the Discovery Phase, as our group had a clear direction by then and I felt we were making progress and I could visualize what are next steps were. Also invaluable to the process, was the timely feedback and clarification from Dr. Ward and Sandra Leu on our questions for end users and experts, clarification on the Google Document layout, and for the steps involved in the discovery process.

How would you apply this process with students or colleagues at your site?

The design thinking process is an excellent way to get both students and colleagues to think creatively and to “think out of the box” or more divergent. Although frustrating if you are a convergent thinker, more innovative solutions to problems are possible and solutions we might never have anticipated. It also affords more work in a collective environment and teaches many skills needed in today’s global environment. For students, the design thinking process fits well with problem-based learning and connects both globally and with real world problems and issues that need to be resolved. For colleagues, the design thinking process affords an opportunity to learn and work collaboratively with peers/cohorts and learn to use many of the Web 2.0 tools in the process. Having little experience with Google Hangouts, I now feel competent and even comfortable enough to use this tool with my AP students. This was something I wanted to do last year, but never really got it off the ground. I definitely plan to use it this year for some of our online sessions, as well as the design thinking process for an end of unit project.
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    Roxanne Pompilio

    "Frustration is greater when we have much to do and say, yet lack the time to express it."
                  By Roxanne Pompilio

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