Policy implementation is perhaps the most difficult element of education reform. But what if policy development and implementation were flipped? What if policy design began with an implementation perspective? In a blog post in Education Week, explores this concept:
The idea of Human-Centered Systems Design is that if we want to design policies and systems that work, we need to flip the top-down assumptions and begin with the needs of teachers and students and design accordingly. For example, a typical policy question might be: “How do we close achievement gaps in our district?” In contrast, a human-centered design question might be: “I’m Mrs. Johnson, a 9th grade history teacher. I teach 120 students a day, half of them are reading at a 6th grade level or below, all of them need to pass Regents in a few years, the district and principal have expectations about coverage, students are struggling with Common Core assessments, I have two young kids of my own that need considerable attention, and my husband travels two days a week. How can I meet the many expectations that are being placed on me within the time I have?”
This approach brings into view things that are largely invisible from the 10,000-foot level, in particular the range of competing demands facing real teachers, and the absence of any sort of systematic plan to help them meet those expectations. Those of you familiar with design thinking will see the influence of that approach here; design thinking begins with empathy with a real “user” and then moves through a series of stages–defining the problem, brainstorming, prototyping, and finally testing back with that user–to try to develop something that would actually work from the perspective of the ground.
Part of what is appealing about the design perspective is its emphasis on simplicity and alignment–as Apple’s popularity indicates, the best designs are simple; rather than overloading with stuff you might need, they focus on the few things you actually do need. Since a big part of the problem, from the perspective of the teacher, is that they are being asked to integrate a blizzard of conflicting imperatives (each of which may have made sense at the time it was issued, but cumulatively are a nightmare), design promises to work from the other end of the telescope and create a coherent approach that is asking the teacher to meet a limited number of objectives and providing the support to enable them to do so.
The key difference is that design thinking comes out of a tradition of industrial design; what is being made here is often a physical (or virtual) product that will solve the problem of the “user.” Transposing this approach to public education has some limits:
1) teachers and students generally do not think of themselves as “users”
2) these are not problems that likely can be resolved with either a physical object or an app;
3) as public institutions, who decides what happens to them are political questions, something which design thinking is silent about
4) because schools are complex interacting social institutions, piece-meal solutions to individual problems won’t work unless they are integrated into the overall fabric of those schools.
“Human-centered systems design” is then defined as marrying the ideas of bottom-up design from design thinking with the idea that improvement at scale requires the development of good systems. Presumably key to this process would be co-design, involving the various stakeholders who would be affected by a given policy, with really careful attention paid to the voices of those who would be most affected by it.
For more information about this perspective on policy development, see http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning_deeply/2016/01/the_case_for_human-centered_systems_design.html
