Promising Practice: CityBridge’s New Pilot Planning Tool

The CityBridge Education Program team has a new Pilot Plan and Learning Tool that we’re offering to the community. To introduce it, I’ve prepared this set of Frequently Asked Questions to help orient folks to this latest addition to our toolkit.

Wait, why did you create yet another pilot planning tool? Don’t you already have one?
It’s true! We have iterated on our pilot planning tools consistently in our Fellowship programming: here’s what we built in 2018, 2020 , 2021, and 2021 (again). Our tools are in “perpetual beta.” Based on feedback from teams in Design Studio and Design Fellowship, as well as results from their pilots and input from expert coaches, we’re constantly working to improve materials.

What’s new about this one?
In previous versions, we created detailed documents that relied on complex navigation schemes to help folks move back and forth between different parts of the planning process. Each section was full of boxes; the boxes were individually numbered. It was precise and exacting… It was also confusing!

In the new version, we’ve simplified things into six (and a half) sections. Each section includes a self-contained explanation of its purpose and the most important information necessary to plan a pilot. The intention here is to make the tool more self-contained, so that educators and social entrepreneurs can use it independently, without a CityBridge coach. We hope that it’s useful for alumni seeking micro grants!

What’s the most important part of the tool?
In the 2021-2022 school year, we tried to clarify what a strong pilot looks like by writing a rubric that set expectations for each part of the plan. Applying scores to each element of the pilot emphasized that each component—from empathy data to problem statements to learning questions—is important. But each important step in the process has to contribute to learning and reflection at the end of the pilot.

So while every step in the process is crucial, the keystone to a successful pilot, based on our work with dozens of teams over the past few years, is the reflection process, now part six in the revised tool. This is where teams push themselves to honestly consider the learning questions and hypotheses they proposed before running the pilot. How did colleagues feel about the new program? Did families attend the pop-up learning experience? Did students hit the intended learning goals in a new lesson? Was it feasible to get your idea up and running?

Each of the first five parts of the tool is a stepping stone to that reflective moment, but as we say to Fellowship teams: “a pilot only fails if you don’t learn anything.” It’s hard to know what you’ve learned if you don’t pause to reflect.

Who is this for?
Anyone who wants to start with the needs of students and stakeholders, then test a new approach. The pilot plan could help you design any number of tests, large or small. Not sure where to start? Get inspired with these templates based on pilots from teams in Design Fellowship.

What else do I need to know?
If you need help planning empathy interviews to kick off your piloting process, check out the “Building Empathy” section of our Incubator Toolkit.

Coaching Roundtable

At CityBridge Education, we believe that coaching is a foundational part of the Incubator experience. As coaches, we take an identity-affirming and strengths-based approach to support entrepreneurs in designing, solving, and launching equitable and excellent educational solutions to discrete educational problems.

We believe that coaching should be individually tailored to each entrepreneur or team, so that they are able to maximize their experience and design impactful solutions for their school communities.

Earlier this month, I sat down with three of our past Design Fellows—Rohini Ramnath from DC Bilingual; Andre Zarate from Sojourner Truth Montessori; and Michele Gray from The Social Justice School—to learn about the role coaching played in their CityBridge experience and in their entrepreneurial journey. We laughed, and while we didn’t cry, we did get deep. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did.

Watch the full conversation

This post is a part of The Rewind, our month-long highlight reel sharing what we’ve learned and spotlighting the leaders and ideas we’ve supported from 2020-2022.

The Power of Reflective Moments

When I started working with Felicia Owo-Grant and Ayinde Spradley in fall 2021, they wanted to go big. From our first coaching conversations as part of CityBridge’s Design Fellowship program, they made clear that their ultimate aim was to build an in-house professional learning institute to support educators across the entire 16-school network of Friendship Public Charter Schools. 

The challenge they framed early on was that—for all the strengths of the professional development offered to leaders of Friendship schools—principals and academy directors (the Friendship term for assistant principals) did not have a way to get continuous leadership development and professional learning. 

My desire in coaching teams is to help them make big, transformational changes, so it feels counterintuitive, maybe even wrong, for me to look at seasoned leaders like Owo-Grant and Spradley and say, “I want you to start small.” But in Design Fellowship, starting small is one of many strategies to help teams learn about and reshape complex challenges in public education. 

By pausing to reflect on what they knew about how to meet the needs of leaders at their schools, a pathway came into focus for Owo-Grant and Spradley. This pathway still leads to the institute they imagine—the “Friendship Learning Lab” for leadership and professional development. But the forks, curves, and crossroads along that winding track are reflective moments that generated significant learning for this team. “I used to think that we would not be able to identify an area small enough to pilot,” Owo-Grant wrote at the end of the second Design Fellowship workshop in October. “Now I see the benefit in narrowing the focus and how it can yield better understanding for even initiatives with large, lofty goals.”

My learning, as a designer of the Fellowship program itself, is that reflective moments generate the insights designers need to better understand the challenge, the experience of stakeholders in their community, and the next best step on their pathway to a potential solution.

CALL OUT: Our team at CityBridge has refined a set of tools, workshop sessions, and coaching strategies over the course of multiple years to support educators and teams in redesigning public education. As part of our commitment to sharing that work more widely, we are presenting a first version of our “Incubator Toolkit,” which is designed to help teams go from a first hunch about an education challenge to those critical reflective moments that come after implementation of a pilot test.

H4: REFLECTIVE MOMENT #1: WHAT DO OUR COLLEAGUES REALLY WANT?

With their long-term vision for a Friendship Learning Lab in mind, Owo-Grant and Spradley started where we encourage all Design Fellowship teams to begin: by talking with those closest to the problem. While they had hunches and anecdotal data about the gaps in professional learning for Friendship leaders, particularly academy directors, their empathy interviews and survey research crystalized how those leaders experienced the challenge.

As they sifted through their interview and survey data, Owo-Grant and Spradley had an important reflective moment. For all the technical and adaptive skills these leaders wanted to learn, they also wanted to be able to show up as their full, authentic, and vulnerable selves in leadership development environments. For a group of rising and established school leaders, nearly all of whom are Black, it was the need for a safe space to feel like they could take risks and talk about their own biases—where it was okay to not be an expert and to admit to missteps—that was important. By using empathy research tools and pausing to reflect, Owo-Grant and Spradley crystalized an important insight that shaped the piloting work that followed.

CALL OUT: The empathy interview tools included in our Toolkit foreground two equityXdesign principles: designing at the margins, by connecting with those who have been excluded from a community; and starting with yourself to unpack the biases, power, and perspectives you bring to any interview.

H4: REFLECTIVE MOMENT #2: WHAT DO WE NEED TO TEST?

In their theory of change, Owo-Grant and Spradley identified a “home-grown learning institute” as their long-term goal. The theory of change also included a list of preconditions that would need to be true in order to enable the success of what would eventually become the “Friendship Learning Lab” and another layer of “inputs” necessary to realize those conditions.

I got to engage in several heady and jargon-filled conversations with Owo-Grant and Spradley as they drafted their theory of change. But for all the theoretical and technical detail we nerded out on, the crucial reflective moment was when they realized their key question: did the training they offer create brave spaces for leaders of color? They needed to pilot a professional learning environment “where leaders can bring their authentic selves and feel vulnerable to not be the expert.”

CALL OUT: A theory of change, or TOC for short, is a process and a product for strategic planning and thinking. The version of TOCs that we offer in the Toolkit is a simple graphic organizer for teams to write down the causal links between the actions they take and the outcomes they’re aiming for.

H4: REFLECTIVE MOMENT #3: WHAT DID WE LEARN?

It was time to build and run a first pilot. Starting small meant planning a single morning of professional learning for a group of academy directors. This right-sized pilot would test several important questions, including: Was it feasible for Owo-Grant and Spradley to collaborate with their colleague, the deputy chief academic officer in the Friendship central office, on the design of the session? And to what extent were the participants able to focus on self-reflection and to interrogate personal biases in a brave space?

These types of questions can seem pint-sized next to the goal of developing an institute aimed at supporting hundreds of educators. But small learning questions embedded in a pilot like this are connected to the larger challenge. Spaces of psychological safety and belonging for Black and Brown educators to get personal as they grow as leaders are not just nice to have—they are necessary. Further, they hypothesized that de-siloing leadership development work required that they develop these learning opportunities in tight collaboration with Friendship colleagues.

The results of the pilot affirmed their hypotheses. During the session, academy directors readily leaned into the novel opportunity to talk about personal bias and how those intersected with real challenges facing them at their schools.

When Owo-Grant and Spradley reflected on the results of this first test afterward, they developed another insight: not only was the content of professional learning sessions like this important, but so was the collaborative process of creating the workshop itself.

CALL OUT: Pilots are experiments, big and small, that are systematically designed to answer a set of questions. Through pilots, which we see as low-risk opportunities to learn, innovators are able to “try-on” a solution aimed at addressing inequities within our education system. Our Pilot Plan template provides a highly specific framework for guiding designers through a pilot.

H4: REFLECTIVE MOMENT #4: WHERE DO WE GO NEXT?

The conclusion of that first pilot was another key moment for reflection. The final section of the pilot plan document asks designers: What did you want to learn? What is your emerging answer? And what are the implications and next steps? At this point, those simple questions appeared before Owo-Grant and Spradley after the bend in a lengthy path. 

One of their learning questions for the pilot was this: To what extent was it feasible for them to collaborate effectively with their colleague, the deputy chief academic officer? The answer that emerged was that it was more than just feasible; it was hugely beneficial to the creation of a powerful professional learning session.

That insight around the need for new ways of de-siloing work across the Friendship organization guided them through the crossroads. They had affirmed the importance of creating spaces for self-reflection on biases in leadership. Now they saw the opportunity to develop ways of collaborating with colleagues to meet the various other learning needs school leaders said they had, like budgeting, instructional planning, and management.

The next pilot Owo-Grant and Spradley are working on involves the creation of a scope and sequence for professional learning for any leader at Friendship Public Charter Schools. But what they are testing next is the collaborative process of creating that document and the related PD opportunities that will form the foundation of the Friendship Learning Lab. 

At this point, I don’t have a conclusion to Owo-Grant and Spradley’s story, since they are still on the journey. But getting to the end doesn’t feel like the point. Rather, it’s about getting to moments of reflection. We challenge teams in our Incubator programs, and in Design Fellowship in particular, to do a lot: empathy research, theories of change, multiple pilots. There is great value in the process of learning and leveraging each of those tools. But the most crystalized insights from the process come at the pause points at the end of each cycle work with these tools. The insights that emerge swing their compass arrow in the direction of a new path. And off they go in pursuit of new questions, new solutions, new learning.

This post is a part of The Rewind, our month-long highlight reel sharing what we’ve learned and spotlighting the leaders and ideas we’ve supported from 2020-2022.

Promising practice: Expansive Measures of Success

The Need for Expansive Measures

Accurately measuring student progress is a process fraught with difficulties: interim exam scores are too infrequent to give us up to date information, and daily exit ticket scores give us a one-dimensional point-in-time snapshot of student performance. Further, achievement data only gives us one piece of the puzzle, leaving us in the dark about students’ social-emotional wellbeing, confidence in class, and trust in their teachers. The effects the pandemic has had on student achievement and wellbeing make these issues all the more urgent—we cannot afford to only look at incomplete pictures as we support our students through and beyond recovery.

What, then, should a curious educator do? How can we supplement our existing sources of achievement data with more nimble, holistic data sources to form a full picture of student progress?

The answer can be found in expansive measures: non-traditional measures that can indicate to us whether we are on track to both our achievement and non-achievement goals.

What Are Expansive Measures?

Expansive measures likely exist within every classroom, but they are not visible to everyone. Classroom teachers are the richest and most up to date sources of data and knowledge about students: on a given day, a teacher collects, stores, and interprets innumerable non-assessment-based data points within their own heads about the progress of each of their students. For example, teachers can have a sense as to whether a student will be successful on an exit ticket based on classroom actions and behaviors. With the support of school leaders and administrators, we can unlock the intuition and expertise of classroom teachers to more nimbly gauge our progress and impact. Specifically, expansive measures should:

• Be separate from assessments: they are not grades, scores, or anything traditionally considered “student achievement data.”
• Be easy to implement: they can be embedded in existing practices within the classroom or school.
• Make sense: the connection between the measure and student achievement should be clear and as unambiguous as possible.

Example Expansive Measures 

The following example expansive measures aim to use student confidence as a proxy for student achievement. Research shows—and teachers intuitively know—that students who see themselves as capable learners who can surmount challenges are likely to be more engaged in class and subsequently see academic gains. Student confidence, then, can be a particularly useful measure, as it gives insight into both academic achievement and a student’s social-emotional growth.

Homework completion rates

Why: homework completion can suggest a variety of student attitudes and beliefs, such as student confidence in their understanding of content, willingness (or ability) to engage in academic work outside of school, and sense of connection to the teacher.

Indicators of success: an increase in the overall completion rate of homework within a classroom could suggest an increase in student confidence. Increases in homework quality (as defined by the teacher) could provide further evidence of student learning.

How to collect the data: classroom teachers can report out weekly homework completion rates to their school leaders.

Student questions during independent practice

Why: the types of questions students ask during independent practice can suggest their level of confidence with the work, as well as their level of engagement.

Indicators of success: we would expect students to move towards more complex questions as they gain confidence. A spectrum of questioning, from ‘disengaged and low confidence’ to ‘engaged and high confidence’ might look like students asking about:

• Topics unrelated to IP (“can I go to the bathroom?”)
• Instructions (“what are we supposed to be doing?”)
• Help with content (“how do I do this?”)
• Asking for work to be checked (“is this right?”)
• Internalizing learning (“would it also work if I did it like this instead?”)

How to collect the data: observational data can be collected during regular classroom observation rounds; additionally, teachers can fill out a short survey each week (“During IP this week, [target group of students] mostly raised their hands to ask about _______”).

Additional examples of expansive measures can be found in this video from School Retool, which refers to expansive measures as “uncommon measures.” Note that each measure focuses on student behaviors, rather than traditional data sources, to signal progress towards goals.

Developing Your Own Expansive Measures

While the above measures may help give insights into student progress, they are not exhaustive. It is likely that teachers have their own expansive measures that they rely on each day. Conducting empathy interviews and focus groups with teachers can help you surface those measures. Ask teachers: “What student behaviors let you know that your lesson was successful?” It is likely that their answers are a type of expansive measure.

In order for teachers to feel comfortable sharing their insights, however, it is the role of leaders to create a culture of safety around expansive measures as reliable indicators of student achievement and success. For leaders thinking about co-developing expansive measures with their faculty, make sure to also develop a plan to both champion and support teachers throughout the process. Ask yourself: “what are the leadership moves I need to make in order to make this possible?”

Making the Connection Between Expansive Measures and Student Achievement

When using expansive measures as a way to gauge progress towards an academic goal, it is important to validate them with student achievement data whenever possible. As you collect more data from both expanded measures and traditional sources, ask yourself: “was this measure really an indicator of success?” If so, you may keep using your measures. If not, it is important that you update your expanded measures, and find student behaviors that better align to student success.

A useful way to engage in this validation process is to “pilot” your measures: design a small-scale experiment that aims at understanding whether a particular expansive measure was aligned with student achievement. You may, for example, spend a week recording student questions during independent practice in one or two classrooms, and compare that data to exit ticket scores. Review the data at the end of the week with your teachers and decide whether the measure is aligned to student achievement. Use your reflections to either develop a larger pilot including more classrooms, or to pivot to a different measure and a different pilot.

Expansive Measures Advance the Work of Equity

While the pandemic has highlighted the current and urgent need to adopt expansive measures, the longer-term vision of an excellent, equitable education system also necessitates their use. Traditional data sources, while important and necessary, often provide a one-dimensional point-in-time snapshot of a student’s progress. Expansive measures allow schools to understand and track the progress of the whole child, widening the aperture to add context to existing traditional student achievement data.

Rather than replacing traditional data sources, expansive measures enrich them, and in doing so allow schools to better identify marginalized students and provide them with the support they need. As you begin to think about how you might incorporate expansive measures into your school or classroom, think also about how they might live on in your school post-pandemic and help you move towards a more equitable education for all students.

Brainstorm Blues? Use a Pilot Template

What do these songs have in common: “What’d I Say?” by Ray Charles, “Delirious” by Prince, and “Give Me One Reason” by Tracy Chapman? These songs have different artists, different moods, and different instruments—but all have a shared underlying template. What they all have in common is a simple song structure called 12-bar blues. Rather than create a new structure for each of these songs, the artists used a tried-and-true template with a simple pattern of chords that repeats throughout the whole song. They didn’t have to create something from scratch to create something great. Similarly, educators running pilots to try new ideas in their schools and ventures can use existing patterns for their tests. 

Sometimes, it makes sense to brainstorm a radically new way of testing an idea. But over the past two years in Design Fellowship, we saw that brainstorming pilot ideas from scratch was not always the best use of precious design time. Instead, teams were inspired and could jump-start their work just by learning about the basic pilot ideas used by previous teams. So with dozens of pilots to draw from, we built a new tool used in our Design Fellowship, a set of “pilot templates.”

A pilot template, like the 12-bar blues, is a simple pattern that multiple teams have used before. For instance, over the past two years, multiple teams have identified the need to build new social-emotional learning (SEL) programming into the school day, and they have run pilots to understand the impact of their new approach. When a team in the current cohort identifies a similar need, CityBridge coaches suggest they consider this basic structure:

• Pilot type:
  • Example: “Incorporate SEL structures into the schedule (change the use of time, cede power to students)”
• What it looks like:
  • Example: Designate time in the schedule for SEL, wellbeing, or relationship-building. Could include SEL “moment” during class time, advisory sessions with small groups, or large-group community meetings, among other structures.
• Evidence and measures (these are the learning questions that a pilot should help to answer):
  • Feasibility: Are staff and students able to participate? Do they use the time as intended? 
  • Attitudes: How do adults feel about the time? How do students feel about it? Do students feel seen? Is there joy? Healing? 
  • Outcomes: Are students able to feel more whole and connected? Do they develop attachments with adults? Do they develop specific skills or mindsets?
• Examples from past teams:
  • Hendley Elementary School trained 4th- and 5th-grade students to lead community circles and gradually released more control of the meetings to student leaders.
  • Bard Early College High School piloted classroom routines (SEL check-ins) to deepen relationships between faculty and students and forge a strong sense of belonging for everyone.
  • Truesdell Education Campus implemented a bilingual community circle in order to create a more inclusive space for English Language Learners and bilingual students and faculty.

The template assumes that a team has already done the empathy research and problem definition work to accurately and equitably describe the challenge. The template also leaves out all of the details and specifics of how to run the pilot. But a template is versatile, just as the 12-bar blues can be the foundation of a danceable Prince tune or a slow Tracy Chapman groove. We currently have about eight types of pilot templates covering SEL, professional development for teachers, and student leadership development. We will add more as we learn alongside Fellowship teams each semester.

The learning questions offered in the template, while generic, can help generate useful insights across many situations. Each of the examples from past schools describes a substantially different approach to incorporating a new SEL structure with its own unique group of students and families. Templates have several advantages over brainstorming pilot ideas in a vacuum:

• Inspiration: Teams can simply take ideas from the template without following exactly what it suggests.
• Bias to action: Teams can move quickly to try something, reflect, learn, and improve.
• Rigor: Teams can use the learning questions as a guide for the different levels of evidence to gather.
• Cumulative transformation: Teams can build on the work and learning of others.

Brainstorming new ideas from scratch can be fun and exciting—and sometimes it’s the right approach. But when teams are building their equity design muscles, pilot templates are a promising tool. As promising as the 12-bar blues? We’re not sure yet, but we’re still piloting.Pilot templates are one of many tools available in the beta version of our Incubation Toolkit. Learn more about tools and methods for building equity-centered pilots, and share your feedback, with this early version of the Incubation Toolkit. Check out the tools and email Andrew Pratt, apratt@citybridge.org, with your ideas and input.

PROMISING PRACTICE: SEEKING FUNDING AS A SOCIAL ENTREPRENEUR

One of the more critical activities in starting a new venture is rather obvious: raising money to sustain operations. What is less obvious starting out is where to go to find capital. While there are many different types of capital you can take advantage of—loans, venture investment, grants, the list goes on—this particular Promising Practice will focus mostly on what’s known as non-dilutive funding.

Non-dilutive funding is any type of funding that does not require you to give up equity or ownership in your business. This is only applicable to for-profit ventures. For non-profit ventures, all funding is non-dilutive. Below, you’ll find my internal process for finding funding opportunities that help you get creative and practical about how to apply it to your venture.

Step 1- Introspection

Sit and think deeply about the various types of communities and organizations that your venture has the potential to interact with. Also, consider the various aspects of your identity as a founder that might align with funding opportunities. Write these down. If you have to stretch to make something fit into a particular category, then it might not be the best fit. Alternatively, this may help open up new ways of thinking about the streams of non-dilutive funding that might apply for you.

Your Venture

• What are some commonalities among the people your venture aims to serve? Do they all live in a particular area?
• Do your customers all share common interests? Are they a part of similar groups? Do they experience similar issues in any way?

Yourself

• Does the school you attended have venture funding resources?
• Are there funders looking to invest in people with your particular racial, gender, or socioeconomic identity? Think about this broadly. Funders are all about creating a community of entrepreneurs; this means that there is something out there for everyone.

Other potential areas to consider:

• Geographic Region
• Academic/Professional Specialty

Step 2- Find Resource Depositories

Once you’ve identified the various buckets that you and/or your venture fall into, then you should find resource depositories (think newsletters, websites, and listservs) that fit within those various categories. There are going to be a lot of them!

Here are some of my favorites:

Civic Tech- CivicMakers

EdSurge

ProFellow

HelloAlice

Word of mouth

LinkedIn!

Step 3- Securing the opportunity

• Always make sure the story you tell is aligned with the mission and vision of the opportunity, even if you may fit other criteria.
• Build relationships before and leading up to the date of the award to get connected to the people offering the non-dilutive funding.
• Make sure your public-facing materials and your private materials (deck, videos, one-pagers) don’t contradict the narrative you’re pitching for the grant. It can confuse funders!

If you have specific questions and want to follow up, you can always reach me at rjones@citybridge.org. I’m happy to help support you on your entrepreneurial journey.

PROMISING PRACTICE: TAKING AN EQUITY PAUSE

The pandemic has challenged us in many ways. When the experience of school, work, and home changed forever on March 18, 2020, we were called to act quickly in pursuit of finding normalcy amidst chaos. I found myself, like most of my colleagues in the education space, scrambling to make sense of it all and to find workable solutions to a problem we had literally never seen. To add insult to injury, the terror and trauma imposed by the divisiveness of anti-black racism only deepened the wounds three months later with the public lynching of George Floyd. Despite the internal turmoil and external pressures, we had to keep building solutions to address the compounding problems before us.

In the CityBridge Incubator, we work with solution-designers, individuals, and teams who have a shared focus on designing a more equitable future for DC’s young people. These are leaders who see obstacles and believe that they can be removed or transformed. In our practice, deeply informed by the equityXdesign framework, we teach our designers to slow the pace of solution-building to become more aware of how their identities, experiences, and perspectives shape their interaction with the problem. This deliberate moment is called an equity pause.

An equity pause is an intentional moment to “stop the clock to reflect on our language, ideas, and hunches in the context of a discourse or transformation.” Take, for example, most people’s response in the early days of the pandemic—many of us went into our toolbox and pulled out the solution that was familiar, and we began to execute. Few of us took the necessary moments to reflect on how our bias or experience created blindspots as we created new interventions. What if we stopped the clock, in the midst of transitioning to fully online instruction and asked ourselves questions like: What value can being home with family offer in the instructional environment? (Instead we opted to find ways for home to mirror school.) Or: Is fluency with technology widely held? (Instead we required our youngest students to negotiate multiple online platforms.) How different would our experiences of instruction during the pandemic have been if we had paused?

These moments are brief, yet consistently applied across the solution-building journey. They are intended to elevate the designer to a level of consciousness that spurs more equitable practice in pursuit of transformation. These moments are not intended to promote gradualism. To be clear, there are problems that need immediate solutions, but change that transforms the way we engage in the work of educating young people requires a level of intentionality that our industry rarely provides.

In this reality, it is incumbent upon us to slow the pace and create space to engage our identities. Allow me to inspire your next equity pause by offering a few questions that you can ask yourself in the midst of building:

• How does my identity impact the way I am interacting with this problem?
• How does my experience impact the way I am thinking about the solution?
• Why does this problem exist?
• Am I blaming our most marginalized students or families for this problem?
• Do I only have traditional forms of data at my disposal?
• Who have I engaged to help me solve this? Who have I excluded?

Whether the impact of your problem solving will be felt among a few or many, designers of a more equitable future pause in the midst of solution-building to assess the impact of their lens on what they are building. You can begin this promising practice today.

PROMISING PRACTICE: DESIGNING FOR EQUITY – THREE STEPS TO CONDUCTING EMPATHY INTERVIEWS

We know that it is easy for equity to go out the window when designers are busy and feel the urgency of deadlines. In our incubator, we intentionally coach our participants to slow down and listen. The radical act of practicing empathy and seeking to understand the true problem at hand makes us all better and helps push us closer to co-designing with, not just for, our most marginalized.

To help our program participants achieve this, our participants engage in conversations called empathy interviews. An empathy interview is a short, structured interview between a designer and those who are directly affected by the problem being addressed. The goal of the interview is to be constantly listening and creating space for empathy and transformation. We know from experience that you can never conduct too many empathy interviews. After all, in order to truly understand a complex problem and design the right solution, you must go deep.

Let’s dig into the three steps to conduct an empathy interview.

1. First, you have to decide who you are going to interview. Remember, you want to conduct a few interviews. As you are figuring out who to interview, think about who is most impacted by the problem, who will provide you with a different perspective based on their unique experience, and who you can learn from. Be sure to reflect on whether this person is the most marginalized by the problem. If not, try again and seek out to learn from people who likely experience the problem from a different perspective.
2. Next, you will need to create the interview questions. We recommend keeping these short—not asking too much—but allowing for open space and stories. Click here for examples of interview questions.
3. Last, but not least, when you are conducting these interviews, always keep in mind who you are as the designer and the power and privilege you hold. Be thoughtful about where you are conducting these interviews and what your body language and demeanor say to the person being interviewed. Will a 5th-grade student be as open and honest in an interview in the hallway between classes while they are rushing out of class? Likely not. Before, during, and after the interviews, think about flattening hierarchy as much as possible. Before the interview, take some time to reflect on your identity. Ask yourself:
   – What power and privilege will I bring to this conversation?
   – What biases do I know that I have? How will I mitigate those?
   – What about my own situation might create distance or closeness to the person I’ll be talking to?

Now that you conducted your interview, you should generate some insights. What did you hear? What are some key themes that you heard? Put them into a few simple sentences that distill the insights you garnered from this interview. We don’t want you to stop there. Our ultimate goal is to co-design with the community affected by the problem; therefore, we urge you as the designer to go back to the person you interviewed and show them the insights you developed from the interview. Ask for their feedback. Did it resonate with them? Did they think you were off track or miss anything? Always be sure to ask if they want to be a partner with you for the rest of your journey. 

Remember, as designers, we should be conducting empathy interviews consistently, with each time bringing in more and more people into the design process. Empathy interviews are just one of the many tools you should use to equitably design with others. I look forward to sharing more of those tools with you. Check out our Empathy Interview Guide with more tips and example questions!

PROMISING PRACTICE: MAKE THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE WITH A THEORY OF CHANGE

Whether you are creating a new program, launching a new school, or transforming an existing school, the CityBridge Incubator helps teams design and scale innovative and equity-centered education solutions. But to solve a problem, it is important to know what you are currently doing, and most importantly why. One powerful tool we use in Design Fellowship to help educators and entrepreneurs achieve this is a theory of change. For today’s promising practice, I’ll be illustrating the process of developing a theory of change through the experience of Washington Yu Ying, a Chinese-immersion elementary school in Washington, DC’s Ward 5.

So what is a theory of change and why is it important when designing solutions? A theory of change is an explanation of how the activities of a team or an organization fit together to create the intended outcomes. A theory of change connects inputs (e.g., curriculum) to outcomes (e.g., rigorous instruction).

During our Design Fellowship, CityBridge coaches help teams build their theory of change with simple tools such as sticky notes and Sharpies. When working virtually, we use a digital tool such as Google Slides or Mural. The process starts off feeling like a brainstorm around the question, “What are all the activities we do now to advance this goal?” From there, it feels more like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, trying to match inputs and outputs in the right sequence but with no image on the front of the box. While a theory of change is a product that teams create, it is also a process in which team members talk, debate, and wrestle with not just what they do but why.

The challenge Yu Ying wanted to address in Design Fellowship was how to equip their faculty to create a sense of belonging for all students. This was their long-term outcome.

Yu Ying set to work on their theory of change. They established that the race equity trainings they previously invested in were a key input. But in conversation about how this input fit together to create a sense of belonging within the school, they realized that a puzzle piece was missing. The question Yu Ying had to grapple with was, “How do we translate those trainings into classroom practice?” Their new hypothesis was that if teachers shared their personal experience with race and received professional development to connect staff learning and student experiences, they would be equipped to create culturally-responsive lessons and deepen relationships with marginalized students.

With support from the CityBridge coaches, Yu Ying went back to the drawing board to connect the pieces and answer that question. They added a new set of components, including a toolkit for designing and auditing lessons for cultural responsiveness. From there, they built a pilot to test out these new tools and ensure that they supported their goal of creating a sense of belonging.

“We do a lot of isolated things,” said Yu Ying Executive Director Maquita Alexander as she reflected on the process of building the theory of change, “but this helped us see how it all connected or how it didn’t connect.”

On its own, their theory of change did not tell them what to do, nor did it even define the problem for them. It helped Yu Ying understand the “what” and “why” of their solution and provided clarity on how to move forward on their goal. By having the conversation as a team and developing a theory of change, they were able to activate the equityXdesign principle of “make the invisible visible” by shining a light on the existing dynamics within the school that obscured what they needed to see. Stay tuned for more on equityXdesign in our future newsletters.