2023 - 2024

︎Baltimore, Maryland

Role:
Lead Social Design Researcher and Faciltiator

Skills:
Liberatory Design
Learning Experience Design
Human-Centered Design

Outcome:
Phase I: Curriculum Redesign
Phase 2: Community Asset Mapping Strategy

Tools and Methods Used:
Phase I:
Ethnographic research
Persona Building
Group Interviews
Journey Mapping

Equity-Centered Principal Pipeline Initiative

MICA’s Practice-Based Studios in Partnership with Morgan State University

The Equity-Centered Principal Pipeline initiative is a partnership between Baltimore City Schools(the District), Morgan State University’s School of Education and Urban Studies (S.U.E.S.), and the Maryland State Department of Education, funded by the Wallace Foundation. One of 8 districts across the country granted an 8.3 million dollar grant from the Wallace Foundation, this 5-year initiative focuses on understanding leadership in Baltimore Public Schools and its relationship to the equity-centered principal pipeline. The Wallace Foundation defines a principal pipeline as a districtwide strategy to develop a large, ongoing supply of effective school leaders.

Findings from the Social Design course will inform the larger Wallace work for the District. The work in this course will help shape the district’s definition of an equity-centered leader. This definition will be informed by the needs and wants of the broader community around Baltimore Public Schools, influencing the creation of a pipeline that can produce school leaders capable of addressing the intimate needs of Baltimore City students, teachers, parents, faculty, and community members.

Users: Morgan State University S.U.E.S graduates, faculty and administration, and current Baltimore City Public School leaders and their school’s community

Phase I: Spring/Summer of 2023 Objectives

The Social Design team is working collaboratively with our community partners to discover what Baltimore City’s vision of equitable leadership might be through a community-centered design process.

Identify economic, social, political, and personal factors that impact equity in schools
Understand the perspective of family members’ expectations of an equity-centered leader
Describe the dispositions, characteristics, and mindsets of an equity-centered leader

Design Challenge: How might we define Equity-Centered Leadership within the Principal Pipeline?

Frame & Plan ︎︎︎ Research ︎︎︎ Sythesis ︎︎︎ Ideate ︎︎︎Prototype ︎︎︎ Implement and iterate

Phase I : Frame and Plan & Secondary Research Findings

Student Achievement & Student Wellbeing

One ultimate goal of the District and a strengthened principal pipeline is student achievement. However, this outcome may hinder the pursuit of overall student care and well-being.

Leadership and Context

Exemplary school leadership is defined as effective vision-setting, culture-building, instruction, and management of people, systems, and resources. However, we want the definition of school leadership to include the ability to understand, navigate, and manage the context, environment, and community in which schools exist.

Design Principles

Before my team and I began to investigate what is currently happening within Baltimore City Public Schools beyond theory, but in practice throughout BCPS, the team understood they needed to undergo a mindset reset. Recognizing implicit biases, they hold and work to address them before interacting with our key community partners.

To address the team’s individual and group biases, we partnered with David Clifford, a co-creator of Liberatory Design. A vital goal of this practice is to generate self-awareness and liberate designers from habits that perpetuate inequity within their design process. Throughout the semester, we participated in a series of self-awareness exercises using the Liberatory Design workbook. During their time with David, my team identified key design mindsets that were guidelines for holding ourselves in the field. The Liberatory mindsets discussed later defined our design principles for engaging our stakeholders.

6 School and Community Visits

24 conversations

Reviewed 30 reports & articles

900 data points collected

Research

Methods

Guided Activity

Journey Mapping:

Conducted Journey Mapping activity with Principals, Assistant Principals and candidates on the pipeline to help facilitate a converstion around their academic experience and leadership journey.

This activity engaged Baltimore City Public School leaders as professionals who have gone through a system that has equipped them with the tools nessasary to lead their schools, but also engaged them as people, wanting to understand how their personhood affects their leadership skills and how their personal lives existed concurrently while on the pipeline to leadership.

︎

Interviews

Engaged in one-on-one discussions and group interviews with teachers, staff, community organizations and parents. During these interviews we unearthed the following tension:

Student and teacher wellbeing

Family/neighborhood outreach programs to help connect the schools families with nessasary resources

Climate managment when addressing student’s lived expierence outside of the school effecting their learning enviourment within the school.

Journey Map Synthesis

Post Interview Discussion

Observational Visits

︎

Liberatory Design Workshops

We utilze Liberatory mindsets and modes to refelct on the Social Design teams identities in effort to build trust with our community partners to create a design process that is transformational and not transactional.

I co-facilitaed Liberatory Design workshops with Morgan State’s School of Education and Urban Studies, engaging faculty, adminstration and students. By understanding we are working in a liberating space, dealing with education and equity, we shared our expertise in teaching the S.E.U.S. program new ways to practice self awareness and empathy building through how they lead.

As a Design Researcher and Liberatory Design practioner, I know I do not solely hold the power to faciltiate change, but I do have the ability to share my knowledge and tools I use with my community partners to faciltiate change together.

What did we learn?

Where can opportunity exist?

Tools and Methods Used:

Phase II:
Guided Activities:
Community Asset Mapping Tool and Community Dream Box

Equity-Centered Principal Pipeline Initiative

MICA’s Practice-Based Studios in Partnership with Morgan State University

Phase II Area of Focus:

Focusing on the findings from Phase I, this new cohort of students making up the Social Design team in Phase II understood that equitable leadership did not solely depend on the characteristics of BCPS’s leaders but is significantly informed by the specific needs of their school’s neighborhood and the families who attended their school.

The phase primarily focused on the intersection of these three components: leadership, neighborhood, and family needs. The Social Design team partnered with Montebello Elementary and Middle School to learn from the school’s families and the broader Coldstream Homestead Montebello community to get a clear picture of how leadership is molded to support the entire ecosystem and community.

Reseach Objectives

What are the community assets of each school's ecosystem?
Why are those assets of value to Glenmont and Montebello families and their surrounding community?
How do these families and community members seek out these resources?

Design Challenge: How might we develop and support leaders to leverage community assets to help better children, schools, staff, community needs, and school wellness?

Human-Centered Design Process:

Frame & Plan ︎︎︎ Research ︎︎︎ Sythesis ︎︎︎ Ideate ︎︎︎Prototype ︎︎︎ Implement and iterate

Frame and Plan: Shifting the focus from leadership to families

To understand the work that must be done to practice equitable leadership the Social Design Team understood Equity as a working model influenced by certain governing forces present, the lived experience of the people, and the context of the place.

This cohort was focused on how the local neighborhood and the school’s families demonstrate equity in and around their neighborhoods.

Presence of Liberatory Design in Phase II:

Before primary research for Phase II could begin, this new team needed to undergo the same self-awareness series as the previous cohort. With a new team came a different set of biases, and with a new set of objectives came a new set of Liberatory Mindsets that needed to be upheld throughout the Human-Centered Design process.

With our key stakeholders shifting from principals to families and broader community members, we needed to shift our design principles and place our focus on this particular Liberatory Design Mindset, Build Realtional Trust.

How we engaged Montebello families:

Montebello’s Community Coordinator allowed us to conduct a community engagement session at Montebello Elementary and Middle School on the same day as BGE's Day of Giving. During the event, families had the opportunity to connect with housing programs and receive assistance with energy bills through the support of BGE and local housing organizations. Here, we could engage with parents and hear their perspectives on the location of community assets inside and outside Montebello while they actively accessed the assistance they needed.

Research Method: Guided Activity

Community Dream Box:

Purpose: The Community Dream boxes prompted parents/caregivers to activate their imagination. Allowing them to express their needs from an imaginative state without putting limits on what they have access to currently

We asked:

What Resources or support do you wish the school had to support parents and caregivers?

︎

Map My Community:

Purpose: The mapping activity allowed parents/caregivers to see their neighborhood on a larger scale and mark their responses on the map with a green, blue, or yellow sticker corresponding to the question.

This activity encouraged parents/caregivers to interact with their community tactilely.

We asked 3 questions:

What do you like about the neighborhoods surrounding Montebello?
Where do you get supplies and support for your child/family? (food, clothing, cleaning supplies)
Where do you go to receive resources outside of the school that support your child's success?

Next Steps:

The MICA Social Design team successfully fulfilled the community engagement objectives of the Equity-Centered Principal Pipeline Initiative in the Spring of 2024. The team's findings from phases I and II will inform the curriculum redesign at Morgan State University’s School of Education and Urban Studies (S.E.U.S.) to help rebuild and reshape the leadership of Baltimore City Public Schools, particularly for principals and leaders who graduated from Morgan State's S.E.U.S. program.