Real-Time Redesign

1. Celebrate progress.

The work of transforming teaching and learning is difficult and long, so it’s important that you celebrate your wins along the way. Hopefully, your team has seen the powerful impact of your pilot. Consider ways that you can share those outcomes so that students, families, teachers, and classified staff feel heard, see the impact, and get excited to join in.

Just as important as celebrating the outcomes, however, is to celebrate the process. Hopefully, your team has gained new insights, tools, and resources related to running an inclusive design process. Take time to reflect on what you’ve learned and what aspects of the process you hope to use in the future. Consider sharing these lessons learned more broadly, too. See the “Showcase” step of IDEO’s Co-Designing Schools Toolkit for an example of how to celebrate your progress.

2. Commemorate the process.

The work you have just completed – a meaningful effort to promote equity and resiliency – is an important part of your school system’s history. Too often, these efforts can go unnoticed or be forgotten amid the challenging day-to-day work of running schools. It is important that community members can access this transparent work in the future to learn from and build upon it – including those who were and were not involved in this process.

Make sure your work is well codified, communicated out to people across your school system, and stored in an accessible place to prevent your community from starting from scratch with each attempt to increase equity and resiliency.

3. Plan for broader change.

Through the design process, your team gathered several ideas for improving teaching and learning in your schools. You’ve hopefully built new knowledge and skills about how to make those improvements. Consider as a team what your next steps might be to build upon existing momentum and address the next round of needs in your school(s), such as scheduling recurring meetings to continue the work.

You may choose to take on broader change through continued cycles of the Real-Time Redesign process focused on targeted improvements, or you may use this design process to inform a larger-scale, longer-term, end-to-end strategic planning process. Both approaches can lead to long-term change, and many effective school systems pursue both pathways for change. Regardless of the path you choose for your immediate next steps, get specific on what the timeline and major activities look like to keep your school system moving in the direction of your vision. Use the Path Forward Planner to plot out your school system’s next steps toward more equitable, resilient teaching and learning.

4. Share with others.

The Real-Time Redesign toolkit’s inclusive, targeted design process can be used to move towards more equitable and resilient teaching and learning. However, the fundamentals of the toolkit are applicable beyond this particular context. Share this toolkit so that others in your school system and community can make meaningful progress in solving gnarly problems. Invite others to use this toolkit in their work with specific stakeholder groups (e.g., students, families, teachers, classified staff) or in specific areas of the school system (e.g., an individual school, grade level, department, or classroom).

Additionally, part of the power of this toolkit comes from the embedded examples of real school systems that have implemented the design process to advance equity and resiliency. Consider how you can “pay it forward” by sharing your own examples and experiences.

If you would like to share your school or school system’s work with this toolkit, contact [email protected].