Fresh from the Spring session of our Act 45 course, administrators have hit the ground running with techniques learned in Human-Centered Design to Support Student Growth & Achievement.
The HCD strategies already have helped Ridgeway Area School District Superintendent Heather McMahon-Vargas make headway in discussions to condense Ridgeway’s school week to four days for students, while using the fifth for staff development.
HCD tools also have helped Midland Borough School District Superintendent Sean Tanner pinpoint issues that seemed to be adversely affecting Midland’s 8th grade class.
Launched in February, the Act 45 course is designed to help administrators and other educators draw relevant stakeholders into problem solving and decision making. HCD provides a toolkit of methods for gathering and sorting information, prioritizing findings, and using those findings to identify solutions and build consensus. (The Summer session for our Act 45 course begins June 18. Register at Eventbrite while seats are still available.)
Although efforts to involve various constituents in decision making had often run aground before McMahon-Vargas began using HCD, the techniques recently helped her conduct “one of the most valuable conversations that I’ve had with my stakeholders in a very, very long time.”
“These strategies are real-time ways for operationalizing a process to get people on board,” she said. “We’re going to transform the way we educate kids because of stakeholder involvement.”
Similarly, Tanner said using HCD has led to “some eye-opening stuff for us already.” For example, the strategies helped discover that block scheduling, while providing flexibility, was also making some 8th grade classes “a little too long” for students.
“I really liked the course,” he said, adding, “the instructors were excellent—you can tell that they really believe in HCD themselves and use it regularly.”
