Martha Chomyn

Project Context

Context: This project was completed between September 2020 –November 2020, with independent and group components executed by a team of 4 gradstudents.

Key Activities: Stakeholder analysis, persona development, experience mapping, ideation, business modelling, prototyping, implementation planning

My Primary Roles: Research, persona development and experience mapping, solution prototyping

Vulnerable Populations and COVID-19

This project was my major focus during my first semester of my Masters program. In the spirit of a very unusual school term, my team and I had all independently chosen to focus on educators in some capacity during our first, individual project. We were grouped together based on our similar interest in the topic. 

Initial Response

The Ontario government's released their back-to-school plan in late July, but there were 3 areas of top concern for parents and teachers alike.

1. Environment - Families were given the choice between sending their kids to school in-person, or stay at home to attend a "virtual classroom", but the inequities of this solution were starkly evident. 

2. Class Sizes - Teachers and parents alike were unclear how expectations to physically distance in the classroom were to be followed if no caps were put on class sizes. 

3. Mask Regulation - Students in Kindergarten to grade 3 were not required to wear masks, causing concerns for families and teachers about the greater risk of virus transmission. 

The Importance of Keeping Classrooms Open

In addition to educating students, schools perform a secondary function of childcare, allowing parents and guardians to attend work full time. Beyond this though, schools also provide support for low-income and at risk youth, whether through nutrition programs, counselling, or a safe space. 

This part of the project took up most of my focus. As a natural storyteller and the daughter of a teacher, building out personas and envisioning the events and emotions of the day came naturally to me. I was fortunate to have teammates who could expand on my ideas and visualize them beautifully! I spent more of my time focused on Carolina (persona 1), so I'll give her more attention in the content below. 

Empathy Map

Once we had created profiles of our personas, we were able to move on to the creation of Empathy Maps to help identify the difficulties teachers were facing both online and in the classroom. 

I found this exercise so valuable for our team to move forward with a fuller understanding of what Carolina and Marilyn were dealing with, and how we might be able to help them both. 

Experience Mapping

Going into details about Carolina's work day helped us get super specific about what her pain points were. It's worth noting that none of us are teachers, and we weren't allowed to reach out to primary sources for information, so we had to make some general assumptions and cast our minds back to our own kindergarten experiences to build out this day-in-the-life. 

Opportunities for Intervention

Once we'd completed the exercises to understand Carolina and Marilyn's struggles, we were able to identify 4 potential areas where we might be able to offer some relief.

• Technical Troubleshooting - Just because they're online doesn't mean teachers are IT experts.  Yet theyare constantly having to help students and their parentsresolve connectivity issues -- and deal with their own!
• Student Engagement - The limitation or total absence of close, face-to-facecontact with students makes it difficult for teachers tomonitor individual engagement. 
• Mental Health Support - Working in a pandemic is incredibly stressful and has significantly affected teachers mental health. They need help to better cope with work-related stressors
• Lesson Planning - Whether distancing in-person or connecting online, teachers are need to adapt their lesson plans to be effective in physically-distanced and/or virtual environments, and they don't have enough time to do so. 

While it was a big area to wade into, ultimately we decided to turn our focus to Mental Health Support and reframed our design challenge to respond to the following question:

As we turned to the design ideation phase of this project, we set some clear boundaries about what we would consider a successful intervention. We agreed that the solution needed to preserve certain aspects of the education system and teacher roles, while also not adding additional burdens or making the situation less safe for students and teachers alike. To that end we developed a set of criteria that indicated what the solution must and must not do. 

Once we knew what direction we wanted to focus our intervention, it was time to get creative. To get into the mood, my teammate led us in a brainstorming session to generate stress-busting ideas for kindergarten teachers. We clustered our ideas and then voted on those we liked best. 

After we had narrowed down our options to a top two (investing in modular classrooms, and providing more in-class support for teachers), we split into two groups and did some top-level research to assess the viability of those ideas. 

Student Teachers and Virtual Assistants

We determined that what teachers were lacking the most was support. By utilizing tools like Strategyzer's Value Proposition Canvas and Business Model Canvas, we were able to ensure that our proposed solutions would satisfy our solution criteria, meet the needs of the teachers, and create value. To that end, we came up with two complementary programs.

1. Student Teacher Placements

In Ontario, Student Teachers are required to complete teaching placements in the classroom in order to fulfill their program criteria; candidates must finish four 20-day placements, adding up to 80 days total. My teammates dug into the status of what effect COVID had had on these placements and found that a staggering 40% of student-teacher placements had been cancelled. This kind of delay would have an immediate impact on Student Teachers being unable to complete their programs, and could potentially create a bottleneck for future placements. 

Our proposal was to reconfigure the placement structure and have Student Teachers fulfill their entire 80-day placement in one classroom. This would limit their interactions and effectively integrate them into the classroom "bubble". We also reasoned that a longer placement would be more helpful for teachers as they wouldn't have to bid farewell to their Student Teacher just as they'd started getting to know the students and learning about the ins and outs of the classroom operations. 

2. Virtual Assistant Interns

Inspired by the difficulties plaguing Marilyn, our more experienced but less tech-savvy remote teacher, my teammate had the idea to create a virtual intern program for undergraduate students. Similarly to the difficulties faced by Student Teachers, we found data that 35% of Canadian post-secondary students had lost an internship opportunity as a result of COVID. This meant that there was a pool of students who would be eager to gain work experience -- especially those hoping to go on to teachers college themselves, as schools often look highly on applicants showing experience working with children or in school-settings. 

The proposed solution would see undergraduate students taking on the role of a Virtual Assistant to remote teachers. This could entail formatting presentations, finding appropriate online resources for classroom teachers, writing up updates for parents, and even simply monitoring the virtual classroom to help mute or unmute people as needed. We decided that this solution would be best fulfilled through universities that already have an affiliated teachers' college as they would already have the connections in place to coordinate the placements. 

Prototyping

We thought the most effective way to prototype our solution would be to tell a story of a day-in-the-life of both Carolina and Marilyn, before and after our solution was implemented. For each persona, we hand wrote a diary-style entry (and yes, that's my penmanship below), while our wonderful teammate drew the visuals you see below as a storyboard to complement the written entry. 

Once we had flushed out what our solution was and how it would look, we had to get into the nitty gritty about how we were going to implement this plan. We knew that in order to maximize effectiveness, we would need to act quickly to get these changes rolled out and taken advantage of in the classroom. Using a timeline to clearly outline what should be happening when, as well as a RACI chart to outline the necessary steps and who would be responsible for fulfilling them all, we were able to present a thought-out and detailed plan of action. 

It bears calling out: While I was involved in team discussions for this portion of the project, I definitely did not lead the charge on this section!