Tell us the story of your school and what makes it unique. If you were to describe it in a few sentences, what would you say?
Atlanta International School is an international school for 3 year olds through 12th grade. We are one of only a few schools in the US that offers the full International Baccalaureate program (Primary Years Programme, Middle Years Programme, Diploma Programme), and our school provides students with a strong foundation in language and global perspective that is needed to succeed in a globally-connected world.

What was your original HMW (How Might We) question coming out of the January 14th Design Workshop?
How might we enhance collaboration between teachers and library/technology specialists to enhance student learning throughout our school?

Tell us about your team's experience with the Empathy phase and the biggest surprises and unexpected insights you found.

We interviewed a number of students, teachers, and parents, and were surprised to find many common themes, even between those with very different backgrounds. We were amazed at how passionate people were about learning. What surprised us the most was that the most memorable learning experiences people shared were really personal and took place outside of school.

Tell us about your team's experience with the Design Summit. What stands out most? What will you take with you?

We interviewed a number of students, teachers, and parents, and were surprised to find many common themes, even between those with very different backgrounds. We were amazed at how passionate people were about learning. What surprised us the most was that the most memorable learning experiences people shared were really personal and took place outside of school.

What POV (Point of View) statement did you settle on at the Design Summit (at least for now)?
We have gone through many iterations of our POV, so we're including our most recent POV here:

We met: enthusiastic, inquisitive, passionate learners who shared that some of the most powerful learning is student-led and student-centered, engages multiple disciplines and intelligences, builds empathy and shifts students’ perspectives, transcends the classroom space, fosters a sense of ownership and connection, and is authentic, creative and hands-on.

We were amazed to realize that the most powerful learning experiences transcend structured time, space and curriculum.

It would be game changing if we could transform our use of time, space, and curriculum to create a consistent learning environment of applied, trans-disciplinary, project-based learning that nurtures collaboration, creativity, and a shift in perspective leading to meaningful action.

Tell us about the prototype you built at the Design Summit. What was it? How did it address your POV? In the testing you did with users, what did you learn?

We put together a prototype that allowed participants to think of school spaces that fit interdisciplinary projects. While this was insightful, we felt that it was perhaps a bit too restrictive. Further discussion following the Summit revealed the links between time, space, and collaboration, and we felt that we couldn't focus on one at the expense of the other two. We have since reframed several times before arriving at the revised POV in the prior question.

Tell us about what you're going to do next to continue iterating. What's your action plan? What are you doing on Empathy? What are you doing on Define/POV? What are you planning to do on your prototype?

We have gone through a series of reframes. We returned to our empathy interviews and did a more in-depth analysis of the data that we have gathered. We also did the empathy interview work as one large group, rather than analyzing it in pairs or smaller groups as we had before. This has proven to help us establish a stronger consensus among the group.


What other reflections on the process to date and the collaboration with other schools would you like to share?


One of our biggest challenges has been to establish wider buy-in from stakeholders across our school community. We have participated in a number of meetings and have also had a number of shared conversations, and this has steadily yielded positive benefits. We have seen some game-changing conversation over the past few weeks, and we are looking to carry that energy into our work next year.

Tell us the story of your school and what makes it unique. If you were to describe it in a few sentences, what would you say?


Our school believes in "Excellence without Excuses". We adopted this motto because we are faced with many challenges due to the population we serve, yet, we understand that we cannot focus on the challenges if we want to succeed. It is extremely important that our focus remains on solutions for excellence. Our vision is to be valued as a premier learning environment by placing students first through quality and excellence. We strive to help our students learn to their full potential by ensuring our ideal are aligned with our action to ensure our students are life, career, and college ready.

What was your original HMW (How Might We) question coming out of the January 14th Design Workshop?

Our original HMW was "HMW increase parental involvement of low achieving students not meeting standards"?

Tell us about your team's experience with the Empathy phase and the biggest surprises and unexpected insights you found.
The Empathy phase revealed several ideals about our school that were shocking and reaffirming of what knew yet did not have the data to support. The initial process began with interviews of high achievers, low-achievers and average achievers. We were shocked to see how open parents were to discuss their experiences. We also had students interview their parents, which revealed greater revelations. It was interesting to realize that all of the parents supported their children as best they could. However, our biggest surprise was that parents felt teachers did not support students which led us into wanting to empathize with teachers to understand why they were not supportive.

Tell us about your team's experience with the Design Summit. What stands out most? What will you take with you?
The Design Summit was an opportunity to have more meaningful discussion about the understanding gained about our new user-teachers. Moreover, the summit allowed us really think about how we may develop a prototype to address the challenge or at least bring some form of resolution. The opportunity to build, test, rebuild and test our prototype was extremely helpful. Additionally, the feedback offered from other schools really was powerful in helping to truly empathize with out user. All in all, the Design Summit was surely time well spent.

What POV (Point of View) statement did you settle on at the Design Summit (at least for now)?
We met Ms. T, a caring, knowledgeable, reflective loyal teacher. We were amazed to learn that she felt a lack of support and acknowledgement of her concerns. It will be game changing for her to be heard and to become a contributing member of the school community.

Tell us about the prototype you built at the Design Summit. What was it? How did it address your POV? In the testing you did with users, what did you learn?
Our prototype is a teacher-led forum which allows representing teachers to have an open and safe discussion with administrators regarding teacher concerns. The purpose of the forum is to develop a shared understanding. A design team member will facilitate the discussion. Prior to the forum, all teachers will submit their concerns anonymously; these concerns will be entered and analyzed using Survey Monkey. Survey Monkey will identify the top three concerns; a representing teacher from each grade-level will be selected to speak on teachers' behalf at the forum. Administrators will be allowed to address concerns.

Tell us about what you're going to do next to continue iterating. What's your action plan? What are you doing on Empathy? What are you doing on Define/POV? What are you planning to do on your prototype?
Our plan is to share the challenge with our administration and test the prototype at least once before the end of the school year. We received valuable feedback from other groups, which has allowed us to restructure the forum a little differently than initially presented.

What other reflections on the process to date and the collaboration with other schools would you like to share?
Being a part of this initiative has been amazing opportunity to share ideas with other schools. It also also been a tremendous learning opportunity as it relates to taking the time to truly understand people better before making judgements or trying to solve for their benefit. 

Tell us the story of your school and what makes it unique. If you were to describe it in a few sentences, what would you say?

Mount Vernon Presbyterian School’s mission…
We are a school of inquiry, innovation, and impact. Grounded in Christian values, we prepare all students to be college ready, globally competitive, and engaged citizen leaders.

Mount Vernon has become a destination for families seeking a school preparing and positioning this generation of students to be college ready, globally competitive, and engaged citizen leaders. As a school of inquiry, innovation, and impact, we are designing innovative programs of study that allow students to explore their questions, passions, and interests in a hands-on, experiential learning environment.
A 21st century framework for designing student success and demonstrating student mastery requires Mount Vernon to develop a rigorous, relevant, and innovative learning and assessment map for each student; recognizes the critical process of employing a variety of approaches and methodologies in order to engage and motivate students of this generation; and prioritizes the training and development of the faculty and staff in a fast paced digitally-based global marketplace. The most important relationship for programmatic excellence–academics, athletics, arts, and Christian studies–is the relationship between a teacher and a student, both actively involved in a state of continuous learning. Therefore, the School seeks to design engaging, challenging, and applicable learning opportunities for all students and to assess the quality of student work demonstrated through a variety of quantitative and qualitative experiences including the evaluation from external experts.

What was your original HMW (How Might We) question coming out of the January 14th Design Workshop?

How Might We… enhance our school environment to nurture innovators because the needs of the future demand it (and the next generation deserves it)?

Tell us about your team's experience with the Empathy phase and the biggest surprises and unexpected insights you found.

Emily: I think we are uncovering and discovering the complexity of designing in a school environment in which stakeholders--students, faculty, administrators, and parents--all have different but overlapping and often intertwining needs, perspectives, and desires. It has been a challenge to zero in on a specific user because we are so keenly aware of the systemic impact of any prototype we work through.

Alex: We interviewed a wide range of people from faculty to students of many different age levels. It was surprising for me to realize when unpacking our interviews that although each different user had specific and unique needs, there were connected underlying tones with each user that related back to a need for time and space. They were different users with different needs, but my mind was forming connections, and this made it sometimes difficult for me to focus on each unique user during our narrowing users process.

Kristyn: The Empathy mode reinforced for me how critical empathy is for the Design Thinking process. So often we jump to assumptions about what someone needs and wants, and the deeper we dug into our users the harder it was to isolate just one need. I echo the challenge of the inter-connectivity of our users’ needs, and it is also hard for us as designers to put our own needs aside because we are all so passionate about this work! I think it will be extremely important for us moving forward to continue to empathize with our users as we iterate and get feedback to ensure that we are moving forward in a meaningful way.

Mary: The unpacking of our interviews proved invaluable and a positive experience. Creating our POVs in a collective and highly focused manner provided a richer and more connected outcome in understanding our users.
The biggest surprise for me was the range of needs we discovered. And when we zeroed in on two users to design for, one user was in need of time and space to feel innovative while the other user was in need of time and authentic moments for learning outside the bubble of school for herself and her students.

Tell us about your team's experience with the Design Summit. What stands out most? What will you take with you?


Emily: It was incredibly refreshing to carve out time and space to focus and to have the freedom to shift between the maintenance and task work of team-based design.

Mary: We had a wonderful experience at the Design Summit. Two days of immersive design thinking and active learning and collaboration. Any chance to be part of a DT experience is an opportunity for growth and connection. What stood out most for me was my teams resilience and thoughtful nature. It was a real bonding experience. I will take with me the fact that we as a team were able to pause, reset, regroup, and go forward without falling apart. #FailUp

Alex: I loved every aspect of the Design Summit. It’s always nice to have a change of scenery, and being in a room with so many passionate people who truly want to make an impact was refreshing and inspiring. What stood out most for me was the diversity of the needs and users each team is designing for. It was a great reminder that we are all coming from unique backgrounds with diverse users who have real needs-and our users should stay at the focus of our design. I most enjoyed the sharing of the prototypes and feedback sessions that we did for each team at the end of the Summit on Saturday. In giving others feedback, and hearing their stories, I gained new insights for our prototype and the directions we could move as well.

Kristyn: I loved the Design Summit because it brought such a unique group of people together that wouldn’t normally be sitting around the same table - both within our own school communities and beyond our own school communities. It was energizing for me to feel that we were collectively doing work that matters, and getting outside of the sometimes restrictive time and space of school allowed that to happen. I think it’s really important to see the work that other schools are doing because that is at once affirming and constructive. We know we are doing meaningful work, and the feedback we received from other groups was invaluable. I wonder how we can set the same norms within our schools that we operated by at Dobbs.

What POV (Point of View) statement did you settle on at the Design Summit (at least for now)?

We met Holly, an energetic, caring teacher in an innovative environment.

We were amazed to learn that Holly is frustrated because her students don't seem to care- they can't see connections to the real world.

It would be game-changing if Holly's and her students' experience of school more closely resemblled the "real world". 

Tell us about the prototype you built at the Design Summit. What was it? How did it address your POV? In the testing you did with users, what did you learn?

Emily: We tend to vacillate back and forth between concern over whether we have bitten off too much with our prototype and feeling like no one piece of our prototype would or could function without the other components.

Meg: Our prototype was bold! I loved the ideas we built into the prototype and our desire to match the needs of our user. We learned that our vision still needs to become a shared vision and something that our entire school stands behind. There are still people, and the summit highlighted this for us, that may not see the relevance or the need for our solution.

Kristyn: Our prototype was bold and complex. We are a team of passionate ideators, and as a result it is hard for us to focus on one small piece of the puzzle because our heads immediately go to the puzzle as a whole. It’s clear to me how important the WHY is in our narrative so that all stakeholders can see the value of our proposed solution. I also think based on our experience with various users that whatever solution we end up with needs to be so simple that the form and function of it is obvious.

Tell us about what you're going to do next to continue iterating. What's your action plan? What are you doing on Empathy? What are you doing on Define/POV? What are you planning to do on your prototype?

Our current action plan is to test out our solution with MV users. We are also narrowing down on our pilot group that we will go full throttle with in August. Over the summer, we are going to continue advancing the work through a series of faculty summer grants. The grants will focus on different aspects related to nurturing innovators and advancing our School's mission. In DEEPdt, designers are in constant back and forth between the modes, Discover, Empathize, Experiment, Produce. Currently, we are in Produce mode as we are testing and collecting feedback on our prototypes, yet we will be moving back into Experiment mode to iterate and refine our prototypes. Here is a link to our Action Plan http://bit.ly/1fxukxg

What other reflections on the process to date and the collaboration with other schools would you like to share?


Meg: I love going through the DT process...each time I go through that process I learn something new.

Mary: In reflection, I cannot underestimate the power of the HMW…? (Not the HMW… statement). We utilize the HMW… Question and/or What if? as our bridge between the Empathize and Experiment mode of #DEEPdt. On Friday, our team jumped from the carefully crafted & meaty POV statement right into brainstorming. It was not until the drive home that evening did it dawn on me why something felt off with our transition, process, volume & quality of ideas… On Saturday morning, the MV d.Team made a calculated and collaborative decision to pause, regroup, and go back into Empathize mode (even when we were instructed to continue iterating on our prototypes, test, and create action plans) In DEEPdt, the process is nonlinear and our decision to jump back and forth between modes puts us on a better course to connect with our user as well as spark our brainstorming abilities and building on the ideas of each other. We took our “meaty” POV and riffed HMWs…? with ease, dare, and a what if? attitude…. And we created a curation of some powerful questions in need of solving for the future.

The decided upon HMW…? was
How might we… restructure the school day to feel more like a real world day and then monitor and visualize student progress?

Tell us the story of your school and what makes it unique. If you were to describe it in a few sentences, what would you say?


Our mission is to promote student achievement through academic and individual goals in a safe learning environment. Abbotts Hill, in collaboration with the community, is a place that celebrates and fosters the development of responsible, self-confident and self-reliant students.

Abbotts Hill strives to make sure students are achieving at their highest level, and we have a staff dedicated to giving students their best in a nurturing, learning environment.

What was your original HMW (How Might We) question coming out of the January 14th Design Workshop?

How might we design a way to maximize meaningful use of instruction and collaboration?

Tell us about your team's experience with the Empathy phase and the biggest surprises and unexpected insights you found.

For our empathy interviews we focused on the areas of collaboration and instruction. We set out to interview as many staff members as possible including teachers across grade levels, departments, and support staff.

Once we had an opportunity to interview our own staff, we decided there was much to learn from the personnel of surrounding schools and counties. We listened to their experiences with collaboration and instruction in hopes of finding insight on what is working and what is not, within their own schools.

We, as a team, enjoyed the empathy interview process. We were surprised to find just how much empathy can be gained from brief interviews. People were so willing to talk to us--they want be heard and hope change will occur. Through empathy, we also saw how much we related to those that were talking to us. The insight we gained was the number of people who felt the same way about the time committed to our job, and also, how differently collaboration can look throughout our own school building. 

Tell us about your team's experience with the Design Summit. What stands out most? What will you take with you?

First of all, we were excited and impressed with the strength of our own team. We found we work well together and we are free to express our ideas openly. Throughout the two day process, we interchanged roles with each of us stepping forward to be a leader when needed. Using collaborative ideas built so many better ideas than individual times would produes.

For all of us we loved the concept of both thinking and acting fast so as not to get hung up or attached to one idea (especially if it was the wrong idea). A quote from our training that our team came back to often throughout the Summit was, “When in doubt, give yourself less time.” We appreciated that we had the power to constantly edit and recreate so that we didn’t have to worry about being “right or wrong”.

Each of us enjoyed creating the prototypes. During the test phase of our prototypes, we appreciated the feedback and input we obtained from other professionals.

What POV (Point of View) statement did you settle on at the Design Summit (at least for now)?

We met a teacher pulled between work and family.

We were amazed to realize there are other methods available to provide teachers the feeling they can get their job done during the school day.

It would be game changing if we could provide the teacher with methods of collaboration to be efficient.

Tell us about the prototype you built at the Design Summit. What was it? How did it address your POV? In the testing you did with users, what did you learn?

We left the Summit with two different prototypes (one from Friday and one from Saturday). Our first prototype focused on a schedule that provided more time for teachers to accomplish the many tasks that occur throughout the day. We simulated a day in the life of our user currently as well as in the future with more time built into the schedule. Feedback was helpful in that it showed us that just adding time may not solve the problem, but maybe the focus should be on what is going on during that time.

So on Saturday we reiterated and began a new prototype focusing on collaboration. We decided maybe our user needs to employ a “team approach” to getting everything done during the day. As we proceeded, we learned maybe both our prototypes need to be combined so that time is provided for collaboration and efficiency to occur.

Tell us about what you're going to do next to continue iterating. What's your action plan? What are you doing on Empathy? What are you doing on Define/POV? What are you planning to do on your prototype?

Immediately after the Summit, we went right to a user in our school and presented both prototypes separately. We obtained feedback on both models. Again, the answer was not clear on one prototype over the other, but maybe a combination of time and collaboration together. We then used the opportunity to have a second empathy interview with our main user. We, as a team, spent time understanding a “day in the life” of our user.

Since then, we have revisited composite POV statements from all of our empathy interviews. We wanted to make sure that we are focusing on a prototype that will work for more than just one person. Going forward, we would like to present both of our prototypes to more users within our building for more feedback and maybe more direction on which concern is greater: time/schedule or models of collaboration. 

What other reflections on the process to date and the collaboration with other schools would you like to share?The entire Design Team process has provided us with a great network of people and resources. We are excited to learn the Design Thinking process and have already discussed ways design thinking can be used for different experiences with students in our school and in our own personal lives.