My role as a UX designer involved structuring an Understand workshop and synthesising its outputs and conversations; to craft app concepts that would help teachers continuously improve their art of teaching.
In order to gain a shared understanding of what goes on in a teacher’s life around professional development, we collaboratively sketched out the current journeys for teachers and leaders alike.
This enabled us to see the bigger picture, as well as the components that make up typical teacher development process and how they integrate with school leaders.
By understanding the drivers, motives, and industrial requirements that govern the process, were were able to empathise with teachers and to prioritise the focus of the solution.
On the current user journey maps that was collaboratively sketched out, we highlighted points where teachers were facing challenges.
As the institute stands to empower teachers to create better education outcomes, we also identified gaps between reality and what the they beleive to be ideal.
With the current journeys and pain points laid out visually in front of us, stakeholders were excited to sketch out the ideal journeys of improving teacher expertise.
From the ideal journey map - and by tuning in on conversations at the workshop - the future direction of teachers' professional learning became clear: Make seeking and learning so easy that it becomes a part of a teacher’s daily life.
The core functionalities required were identified to be: Finding professional learning, recording the learnings, evaluating their impact when applied in the classroom, and sharing their experience with other teachers.
Based on the future statement and core functionalities that were defined, two overarching concepts were explored in order to help prioritise the goals of the app - and to ultimately shape its true value.
The first concept defined the app as a tool to help teachers easily search for, record and keep track of their professional learning.
The second concept defined the app as a social platform where teachers can inspire each other to grow by sharing their professional learning, feedback and impact.
Feeding the concepts back into the ideal principal defined earlier, the social platform concept was selected as the base for prototyping. This concept added ‘fun’, ‘active’, and ‘connectivity’ aspects to professional learning, with the potential of becoming an app that teachers interact with often as part of their daily lives.
