Reflection Exercise – Visualization

Challenge

I am a new teacher on a public high-school and my/our challenge is do students to go to

their class every day and make commitment to study more. The project includes all teachers and

administration members and must be implemented in 30 days or as soon as possible. There is

no budget to spend until started and no exclusive time will be offered. To do this project teachers

and administration members must use your own know-how and experience and free time

between classes. We will focus on trying to uncover what they do not want to come to classes,

classify in contexts, discuss to learn from each other in the process of defining the scope,

boundaries, key elements, and relationships between elements to consider when identifying

pain points and opportunities for improvements or solutions.

Selection

Our team has analyzed design thinking approach and we will try the visualization tool.

The visualization tool is indicated to create a picture and make it tangible and concrete. This tool

can be important to overcome edge, open-up the student’s mind and understand student’s

reality before identifying and define solutions to the problem.

Application

For the first visualization, we focused on know the student’s realities and understand

their environment. This will show to us what kind people (culture, financial available and family

structure) there are involved on challenge and help to create a picture of these background.

Each student present yourself and explain a little bit of themselves, such as names, the

relationship with them parents and family, their hobbies and what kind of help or where they

like to receive a hand. All session was recorded and send to teacher and administration members

for email to the team started to realize what can be useful and make difference.

For our second visualization, we focused on gaining student’s empathy. This started with

presentation of life experiences of the team members that have environment near to the

students. To do that, our team has been separate in three groups to they can work it in a subset

challenge. The first group was responsible to speak with students and are composed for those

that has lifestyles near to the students, because them can create empathy easily. The second

group was responsible to create a picture (slides presentation) and are composed for those that

has drawing ability. And the third group was responsible to observe and analyze the student’s

behavior and are compose for those has observational and/or psychology skills. After the

session, the recorded was send to the members team with appended observational group

annotations.

Insight

By applying the visualization tool, our team identified our assumptions and designed

launches to test these assumptions. These are created from combines shared and new insights

and the incorporations of student’s feedback, an important resource to understand the subset

problems. The students can easily identify themselves on teacher’s presentation and gain

confidence about what teachers saying. These actions close by their relationship and help

students to understand how important hard study is as well as create a picture about their future

jobs, houses, cars, families and perhaps dreaming about it more strongly.

The team can also identify variables in the problem space – that is, it helps them to

identify what they don’t know, in what areas they need to obtain information or data to provide

the values for the variables. Some of the extra data there are identify and need to be study are

if they have food at home, what kind of food is available, if they can pay to go to school or not,

if their parents are in jail, if they environment are corrupt by drug dealers and if they suffer

prejudice.

Approach

Given that our team did not know the design thinking method, the visualization is the

appropriated tool. This tool can provide most valuable aspect, such as shared insights and

learning with feedbacks, that is useful as start point of design thinking method. Future launch

designs should be used a storytelling tool. This new approach may transform even more the

student’s realities for put their experience front and center.

