As part of my usual Sunday routine, I write about and reflect on my process. I prefer to do this on Sunday for a few reasons:
Sunday evenings tend to be a more restful time than the rest of my (sometimes hectic) week.
For practical purposes, the weekly assignment is due on Sundays at midnight.
It’s much more difficult to reflect on the week until I have at least some distance between myself and it.
This Sunday, however, I am finding myself much more distracted than usual. This morning I received a phone call about a death in the family. Grief cannot easily be described as what it is, but is generally understood as what it does. I am grieving, and I am experiencing grief, and grief is doing its thing—like the way cabin pressure changes on an airplane, I feel it and know what I need to do and how to cope with it, but I cannot truly escape the discomfort.
Earlier today I could have written with confidence about the state of our research or on the topic of Portland Public Schools. In fact, our interviews went very well and we found ourselves very excited at the end of each one. We were practically (((VIBRATING))) with enthusiastic observations about what we were hearing and how it related to our secondary research or insights from prior conversations, but now a sort of numbness has muted all of that. I feel like a stranger to my own words. Instead of dwelling on my own thoughts and experiences, I’m going to instead take some time to talk about the work of my peers. Of course I’d prefer to instead write about my own experiences, as I usually do, but today is different. I’m a million miles away, and cannot be reached.
In preparing for our presentation on Monday, our team met over zoom for two separate work sessions this weekend. It was necessary for us to reexamine our interview notes, insights from secondary research, and to identify relevant patterns for PPS and the subject of educator essentials.
Up until this weekend, we’ve thought about the Prospect Studio vision in quite literal terms, and have regarded their goal of teachers that are “adaptive, resilient, and open to change) as three distinct attributes. What we have found through our interviews, however, is that these attributes do not exist in isolation, but are more like dimensions to a general shape of things to come. We further realized that the “it” of these attributes is less important than the “how.” These goals are not about “states of” or in ways of being, but rather through actions, choices, and decision making—both individually and collectively. This is a problem that is just as much a matter of policy as it is a matter of social science. The question then is not how an educator might be these things, but instead a question of what conditions will encourage or discourage the act itself.
We shifted our focus to treat these attributes as a single verb: “ARC” (Adaptive Resilient, and Open to Change). By thinking about “arcing” as an action, we can think about and frame these attributes in more practical terms: how ARC is being put into action will help us to consider what relevant artifact we might ultimately create.
I usually begrudge the process of reporting on work in progress—it feels like reporting on a cake before putting it in the oven—but this time I feel very differently about the matter. I think that in this particular case, I am able to see the value to our process and how this periodic break to present work at different milestones just makes sense. We are not presenting on arbitrary dates, but during key moments in process.
In addressing what we need to outline in our presentation, we are also being invited to reflect on our work so far, and to see what has and has not changed for us as a team. We have had very active discussions as a group, about what new discoveries have reshaped our understanding or challenged our assumptions. We reviewed our interview recordings and began picking apart common threads.
In past experiences at CMU, our group work usually did not last more than maybe seven or eight weeks at most. Working at this depth, over an entire semester, has given us the time necessary to work through a more recursive and generative process. This level of analysis, meta-analysis, and reflection, have helped put some distance between our individual perceptions and the information that is available to us.
Working in this way has revealed the importance of process and some of the exercises completed in previous coursework. Affinity mapping continues to be one of the more valuable approaches to sorting uncategorized insights and to promoting pattern recognition. We have used affinity mapping as an iterative tool, especially for refining our interview questions.