ARC services' mission is to be the central hub for the many stakeholders contributing to Portland's teachers. This includes providing structure and support for existing resources within the community, addressing the current needs of teachers, and developing solutions for the future.

ARC services is divided into three focus areas: Mentorship, Research and Futures. Mentorship serves as the primary center for meeting the day-to-day needs that already have answers and methods, Research experiments with new methods, and Futures explores the farther futures of teacher's needs in PPS.

ARC Mentorship

Coordinates and expands the district’s existing resources for multi-tiered support, professional development, and classroom mentorship.

ARC Research

Works directly with teachers and conducts research to help the district identify and adapt to current challenges.

ARC Futures

Brings together teachers, admins, students, and others to test new approaches, anticipating problems before they happen.

By connecting the many resources already in existence and previously disconnected stakeholders, ARC is the central hub for teacher's current and expanding resources.

ARC Services is enabled by the ARC Services Platform, which provides the following key functions:

ARC Homepage

The ARC Homepage serves as a central hub for educator resources, workshops, summits and individual ARC profiles.

ARC Development

Teachers can schedule co-teaching workshops, mentorship, and more via the portal.

ARC Summit

The summit page provides registration, and also serves as a directory for teachers to access to previous events.

ARC Profile

Hours logged with ARC Services are recorded in educator's ARC profile page. This helps them to plan their weekly schedule balancing time for teaching with career development.

2023

National Teacher Shortage

Exacerbated by COVID-19 burnout and online/remote teaching conditions, current trends in teacher shortages continue, yielding low retention rates across the country.

2025

Congressional Response

The 119th Congress passes the Schooling Innovation Act: introduced by Majority Leader Stacey Abrams, the act provides substantial funding for improving teacher retention.

State and City Response

PPS and the Portland Association of Teachers renegotiate teachers’ contracts, creating a modular teacher scheduling system, modeled after teacher tracks in Singapore and Iowa.

2026

PPS Launches ARC Services

PPS introduces ARC Services as a significant component of teachers’ new contracts, to help structure the flexibility created by the modular schedules.

ARC Services offers teachers coaching, mentorship, and new opportunities to innovate in their professional careers.

2029

Portland’s First Annual ARC Summit

With three years of ARC Services momentum, the ARC Summit is an inaugural celebration and exposé of PPS teachers' hard work and innovation, showcasing the result of ARC Services' expanding offerings.*

2035

Adaptiveness, Resilience, and Openness to Change are embedded values in the Portland Public School district

ARC Services promotes a self-sustaining culture of continuous learning and support,  connecting teachers' experience in the classroom to district-level opportunities for equitable improvement.

PPS remains a highly desirable place for teachers to work, even when disaster strikes.

What does the future of education look like? What do educators hope for in the year 2030 and beyond? What do current trends tell us about what might come next for public school students, educators, and the surrounding communities? Working with Prospect Studio, a strategic planning consultancy firm based in San Francisco, we spent 15 weeks exploring these and many other questions as part of our Graduate Design Studio course at Carnegie Mellon University School of Design.

Fiona Hovenden, Ph.D.

Founder, Strategic Foresight

Starting in Fall of  2018, Prospect Studio began a future visioning process for Portland Public Schools. 

"A Vision is a bold leap into the future that paints a vivid picture of the world we want to create. It identifies a destination—a “north star”—that inspires collective action, guides strategies, and drives growth. A Vision helps us step outside the present and imagine what is possible. It liberates our imaginations to think differently about our path forward."

— Portland Public Schools reImagined: Preparing Our Students to Lead Change and Improve the World

The future vision for Portland Public Schools includes three areas:

• Graduate Portrait

• Educator Essentials

• Educational System Shifts

Within each ring of this future vision, there are multiple criteria and characteristics. Our team focused on the area of “Educator Essentials.”

Through secondary research we learned that teachers in Oregon have expressed feeling “overwhelmed, burned out, and not supported,” (2019 Oregon Educator Equity Report, p.51) leading to low retention rates and impacting their ability to show up for students. Additionally, research on teacher resilience is relatively new and expanding, encouraging our decision to design for the “Adaptive, Resilient, and Open To Change” section of PPS’s Educator Essentials tier. The vision plan described “Adaptive, Resilient, and Open to Change” as:

"PPS adults honor culture and traditions while being open to change. Each person supports this openness by understanding that failure, multiple attempts, and iteration are necessary, if not critical, parts of continuous learning. They demonstrate a commitment to continuous improvement by developing the skills and persistence to shift the system and structures around them when necessary and build their own resilience through self-care, and collaboration with students, educators, and others."

We combine these three attributes to a single term we call ARC (Adaptive, Resilient, and Open to Change).

Working directly with specialists, K-12 teachers, and both public and private school administrators, our team investigated the current state of public education. Our research process included three phases (each linked to a more in-depth presentation of research methods and findings):

Exploratory Research: Gathering insights through interviews and secondary sources (published studies, articles, news stories, etc.).

Generative Research: Conducting a series of workshops with K-12 educators to produce early prototypes and conceptual artifacts.

Evaluative Research: Receiving feedback from K-12 educators, helping us to refine our concepts for improved desirability.

Through these rounds of research, it became clear that designing for teachers to be ARC would require creating a culture of support, reflection, and collaboration, encouraging iterative growth, and structuring time for individual needs.

The ARC Services concept addresses these needs through creating structure for mentorship and coaching, facilitation of research-based problem solving, future-oriented simulations, and a shift to flexible, modular schedules for teachers.

We are Team Deep Thought

A small group of graduate students in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. Hello!

Individual Contributions

• Video editing

• Motion Graphics

• Stock footage integration

• Sound Design

• Interviews

• Workshop facilitator

• Evaluative research

• Project Documentation

Tools

• Adobe After Effects

• Adobe Illustrator

• Adobe Photoshop

• Miro

• Figma

• Google Workspace

• Trello

• Tripetto.app

Carol (Ting-Yun) Ho

Is an interaction designer with over four years of experience designing enterprise products for IBM. She recently earned her second Master's Degree in Design For Interactions.

Catherine Yochum

Is an interaction designer with a background in psychology and B2B SaaS client success. She is currently pursuing her second Master's Degree in Design.

Matt Geiger

Is a interaction designer with an interest in object-oriented design and UX research. Combining a background in electronics and engineering with an education rooted in fine arts and design, he recently earned his second Master's Degree in Design For Interactions.

Chris Costes

Has been a designer for six years, and has over a decade of professional experience. After working in digital products and services, he returned to school in 2019 and is currently pursuing his second Master's Degree in Design.

Advisors

Arnold Wasserman | Design Leader

Fiona Hovenden | Founder, Prospect Studio

Sonya Lopes | Researcher, Prospect Studio

Jenny Hoang | Researcher, Prospect Studio

Peter Scupelli | CMU Design Professor

Sofía Bosch Gómez | CMU PhD Researcher

Hajira Qazi | CMU PhD Researcher

Stefania La Vattiata | CMU MDes Student

Research Participants

Director of Engagement at PPS

K-8 Art & Innovation teacher at PPS

Reading Specialist partnering with PPS

Middle school music & drama teacher

Private school administrator

8th grade SPED English teacher

8th grade English teacher

2nd & 4th grade teacher

19 teachers who evaluated our design concepts ❤️