Design Sprints for Optimizing Administration and Curricular Initiatives
This is a Certificate Program – 18 Hours of Professional Development will be Awarded.
Schools that had leaders recently complete this course:
Governors, School Administrators and Academic Heads ask us to facilitate Design Thinking workshops when:
Strategic Planning has devolved into an exercise of creating shopping lists and not addressing real problems or pursuing new opportunities to improve the school.
A problem within the community is causing conflict but no one has the will or capacity to address it.
Everything seems like a priority but you only have the time and resources to identify the one thing that will have the greatest impact on teaching and learning.
Solutions seem so obvious, but the path to realizing them is fraught with uncertainties, stakeholder anxiety and structural hurdles.
Stakeholder buy-in is crucial to implementation but has been very difficult to attain with so many other competing priorities preventing key stakeholders from being able to meet to build consensus.
Teams are stuck and there doesn’t seem to be any way of moving forward.
Schedule a Free 1-Hour Design Sprint Scope Meeting
Less talk, more workshop! In 1-hour we will define the scope of the challenge that your school can address in a multi-stakeholder Design Thinking process. Even if you don’t decide to work with us, you will have drafted a project scope to share with other stakeholders…and we will have saved a lot of time in drafting a proposal with you.
Create new opportunities by challenging old assumptions
Design Thinking is a process organizations are employing across the globe to overcome their biggest challenges. This process, though, isn’t just about solving problems, it’s roots are grounded in identifying innovative ways to differentiate how organizations work, with the purpose of creating new opportunities by challenging old assumptions.
An example of how we use Design Sprints with Search Associate member schools:
Now is the time for private schools to begin challenging all of their old assumptions about recruitment, induction, and retention of foreign staff. There are solutions to recruiting and retaining quality foreign faculty that are much more effective than rethinking the benefits package. But, to identify and realize these solutions you need to truly understand the experience of all stakeholders involved, especially the capacity and capabilities of the staff with the responsibility for supervising and executing these activities.
Devising new ways of recruiting, inducting or engaging staff is only a small part of actually realizing the impact of the solutions we implement. Implementing new ways of working, regardless if it is outsourcing to a 3rd party or creating a new process for staff to follow, will never realize their full impact unless these processes are DESIGNED with all the stakeholders in mind that these policies affect.
We are not solving the whole problem. We are taking measurable steps to incrementally learn and solve, to control for all the different variables, of which the 'stakeholders' will be the greatest challenge to address.
What participants are saying…
Our workshops are innovative and inspiring, but don't just take our word for it. See what our participants from our previous Design Sprints workshop learnt from the training.
Design Sprint Benefits to Improve Recruitment, Induction, and Retention
The insights and experience we expose schools to are:
Give them an opportunity to reflect on their school’s recruitment, induction, and retention practices.
Provide them an opportunity to hone their school’s policies and processes to give it a competitive advantage.
Improve their understanding and use of Design Thinking tools so that they can apply this practice to other school improvement initiatives.
Connect them with peers at other schools so they can benchmark their school’s practices.
We confidently expect that a focus on this work will have the following positive consequences:
Higher levels of teacher satisfaction;
Higher levels of teacher performance;
Higher levels of teacher retention; and
lmprove the quality, stability, effectiveness, and reputation of schools.
What Questions Have We
Recently Answered?
How can we better prepare teachers to be successful in our school’s context?
How can we incentivize teachers to renew contracts?
What are our teachers’ most critical unmet needs?
How might we improve recruitment branding?
How can we identify candidates better FIT for our school culture?
How do we build better leaders?
Design Sprints will enable decision-makers and staff to review, understand and identify best practices to improve a school’s recruitment, induction and retention practices. This process will be facilitated by Michael Iannini, a Council of International Schools Affiliated Consultant that has been accredited in the following areas of expertise:
Appraisal and professional development
Leadership training
School governance
Strategic planning
Design Sprint Process
Schools participating in this process should nominate 4-7 senior members of their staff that have extensive knowledge of their school’s recruitment, induction, and retention practices. The course will be facilitated over a 4-8 week period, consisting of five 3-hour workshops. The program schedule and number of workshops will be decided after further consultation with executive stakeholders.
A sample course outline and objectives are as follows:
Workshop 1
Understand
Objective: Understanding is crucial to a human-centered design process such as Design Thinking, and allows design thinkers to set aside their own assumptions about recruitment, induction, and retention practices in order to gain insight into users and their needs. At this stage, we are capturing data and “converging” what we learned into a few key insights.
Workshop 2
Define
Objective: Reflect on the insights since the previous workshop and synthesize them in order to define the core problems that the school has identified, and identify one problem we think is at the core to overcome existing challenges and/or taking advantage of newly identified opportunities.
Workshop 3
Ideate
Objective: Identify new solutions to the defined problems, and start to look for alternative ways of viewing the problem. Numerous ideas, or problem solutions, will be presented and the top 3 will be delegated to each school to Prototype and Test guiding policies.
Workshop 4
Prototyping and Testing Guiding Policies
(Potentially 2 Separate Workshops)
Objective: This is an experimental phase, and the aim is to identify the best possible solution for the problem identified and validate it with real stakeholder feedback. The solutions are implemented within the prototypes, and, one by one, they are investigated and either accepted, improved (or iterated on) and re-examined, or rejected.
Let’s talk more!
Schedule a meeting with Michael to start mapping your school’s plan on improving recruitment, induction, and retention.