The Consortium’s Human-Centered Design (HCD) team is heading into 2022-2023 with educators scheduling customized trainings in record numbers. More than 200 are already slated for sessions beginning in October.
The record enrollment comes following summer trainings when our team worked primarily with administrators focused on finding new strategies for engaging their district’s families, communities, and staff.
As a result of the sessions, 45 administrators are launching their school year with “new ways to gather feedback without doing surveys,” said one participant. Another said the sessions provided “different methods and ways of taking large numbers of ideas and filtering them into usable action steps.”
While administrators are enrolled in some of our upcoming sessions, the balance looking forward in 2022-2023 is shifting toward classroom teachers.
“We have seen the power of Human-Centered Design transform classroom practice as well as school culture and staff morale,” said Consortium Program Director Sarah Brooks, who serves as one of our HCD trainers. “It’s truly about changing mindsets – an approach to putting people at the center of decision-making – in addition to providing educators with a set of tools to change their practice.”
One classroom teacher who recently took our HCD training said it provided “strategies that can easily and immediately be incorporated into the classroom to increase student engagement.”
Educators participating so far this year represented Westmoreland Intermediate Unit as well as Riverview, Burrell, Franklin Regional, Kiski Area, and New Kensington-Arnold school districts. Additional cohorts, beginning with New Castle Area School District and IU7’s Educational Leadership Academy are slated to get underway in the fall.
Educators can learn more about our approach to HCD on our website or get a sense of what our training covers by checking out our Design Thinking playlist on YouTube. Custom workshops can be arranged by emailing one of our Professional Development team leaders, Aaron Altemus or Sarah Brooks.
