Reflecting Back on our First Cycle

Looking Back

It’s not a secret that our team loves reflection; there’s a reason we focused on student reflection in our first cycle. And given our first prototype, it’s only fitting that we reflect on our own experience as we move into cycle 2.

Although we love our app idea, we feel that we should have better iterated on and developed our idea throughout the cycle. It would have been great to take the idea back to teachers to ask for feedback, or even done an evaluation for ourselves in the middle of the cycle. Instead, we waited until we had some technical results to demonstrate, at which point there was too little time left in the cycle to do more design work.

On the more technical side of our prototype this past cycle, we worked well on bits and pieces of our node app, but never accomplished total integration. We ran into many problems with developing in node because we lacked experience with the tools we were trying to use. Rather than working towards our strengths or genuinely understanding what we needed to do before we approached implementation, we got stuck in the process of using brute force to implement aspects of our prototype.

Moving Ahead

Going forward, the principle goal of our team is to create impact. We would like to use tools that we are more comfortable with as learning a whole new skill in less than three weeks seems unlikely to pan out. Our team is more software centric, so it is likely that whatever route we take will be in the software realm. All of us have taken a software design course in the past, and so have a plethora of experience with python.

One side of this experience we have not yet explored involves designing for people other than teachers. Teachers are perhaps the easiest to design for as they are reasonably easy to access and have a direct interest in student development. However, there are also students, parents, administrators not to mention the rest of society that have some stake in our current education system. Students are difficult to design for as codesign is nearly impossible given a lack of access. Administrators are usually very busy and are hesitant to endorse anything which might not show a direct impact. Parents too, are very difficult to access and are usually very busy. However, it would be great to incorporate the ideas of at least some other stakeholders into our next cycle.

We’re excited for this next cycle and hope all our loyal fans are too!

Our First Prototype

For our first prototype, we wanted to expand on the area of opportunity around student accountability. Based on our own experiences and an interview with Becca, we thought that self reflection would be a powerful tool to promote student accountability. Becca had discussed a time when she asked students to reflect on their first project and then use those reflections to set personal goals for a second project. She saw measurable improvement both in students reaching their personal goals as well as in the quality of their projects. Based on this idea, Becca had proposed a tool that would promote for student reflection, and then return these reflections automatically before the next milestone (for example, at the start of a new project). We chose to expand on this idea for our first design cycle.

Process

The goal for our team’s first prototype took the form of an app that allowed students to submit a reflection and then receive their reflection back via email at a time designated by the teacher; we envisioned that this would be before a major project, test, or evaluation. Both the teacher and the student could read the reflections at any point.

At first, we decided to make a minimum viable product of a submission page for students, backend storage, and teacher’s page to view students’ submissions. The minimum version of the student’s page had a submission window and name area. We decided that this met our minimum deliverable of just making sure that the teacher could get the reflections without having to give out an email address. The backend simply had to store these reflections for the teacher’s evaluation. The minimum version of the teacher’s page displayed the students reflection and near the bottom only displayed reflections which contained certain words as a primary implementation of possible teacher analytics tools. A future iteration would most likely include automation to send the reflections back to students before a major project or at a prompt from the teacher.

At this point in time, the minimum student page and minimum teacher page are complete, however, the implementation of the backend is still unfinished. As the backend is more complicated to set up and our team does not have prior experience in working with backends, this is not unexpected. Once this is complete, the minimum version of our app should be more or less finished.

The work we have completed so far is located at https://github.com/rifkinni/SchoolShaped

Room for improvement

We also have discussed ideas for how we could improve upon this app in a future iteration. One idea that we would like to incorporate is a method for teachers to respond to and/or give feedback on student reflections that are sent to the students along with their initial reflections. If a teacher decides to respond to reflections in this way, they can emphasize a particular aspect of the reflection that they find important for the student moving ahead. Moreover, it can show the students that the teacher finds the reflections and the student’s growth significant. We believe this would push students to take the reflections more seriously, and therefore make our app and these student reflections more impactful.

We have also discussed implementing tools that allow for deeper analysis of the students reflection on the teacher’s side of this app. Possibilities for these tools include a built-in sentiment analysis tool that allows a teacher to see if a student’s reflection is primarily negative or positive.  This could be used to track overall trends in the entire class’s reflections over time.