CLEO

Design Research and Service Design

Timeline: August 2021 - December 2021

Team: Andy Wood, Brenna Chen, Aashish Suresh, Kayla Bucci, and Josh Jacobs

Role: Design Researcher and Strategist

A special thanks to: The entire CLEO team for teaching me patience and empathy throughout my senior year.

Alaska currently ranks #49 in the United States for K-12 education. Current research on education points toward high teacher turnover—in the 5 school districts with the highest teacher turnover, only 46.9% of students have achieved up-to-date reading proficiency. This is especially detrimental for rural school districts like Hoonah City Schools District, where only 33% of teachers have stayed after 5 years in the region.

As a part of USC’s Innovation in Engineering and Design program, my team and I set off to investigate this issue at hand, talking with educators, superintendents, and government officials across the greater Alaskan region. Diagnosing the systems in place, we designed a platform to help teachers integrate into their assigned community, allowing them to feel at home and give them the incentive to stay with their students.

The Education Ecosystem

To better understand the overarching education system in Alaska, we conducted secondary research on its teacher hiring practices and the teacher shortages within rural regions. Utilizing Miro and sticky notes, we collected and connected information on how teaching certification is conducted, in addition to the economic forces driving retention.

Our research also pointed us to several key statistics about teacher shortages in rural school districts:

• Rural teachers make a starting salary of $33,200 compared to suburban counterparts who make an average of $40,500

• By the end of the third year, 50% of school principals leave the field

• 39% of remote/rural schools struggle to fill positions in every subject

• In the 2012-2013 school year, the turnover rate was 8.4% in rural schools compared to 7.3% for urban teachers

• In Hoonah specifically, the turnover rate fluctuates between 50-60%

Furthermore, the environment and community simply aren’t made for any ordinary teacher. Winters are long, freezing, snowy, and windy, with temperatures varying from 24°F to 65°F. Rural towns tend to have only one grocery store, post office, and restaurant, and everybody knows each other.

What Teachers in Rural Alaska Face

Systems research was only a piece of the picture. I designed a user research strategy and reached out to 20 teachers across the Alaskan region to talk about their experiences as educators. The interviews focused primarily on recruitment tactics, employment compensation, teaching incentives, and community experience.

Some of the participants were superintendents, some were principals, and some were K-12 teachers, but there was one recurring trend that showed up in my user interviews.

Teachers did not feel connected to the community they were living in. In fact, some were shunned from the community after teaching.

One story that resonated with this trend was from Mark, a former secondary teacher at Mountain Village in the lower Yukon. After spending a year teaching there, he was let go despite the teacher shortage there, and he attributes it to several mistakes.

Essentially, it’s not that Mark didn’t make an effort. He simply didn’t meet the social expectations of the community he was living in.

Back in California, Mark was considered a good teacher. But to be a good teacher in Mountain Village, Mark needed to understand the local culture. These three events clearly demonstrated to the community that Mark did not.

From a school administrator's perspective, they now have to begin the grueling task of courting a limited number of quality teachers, onboarding them, and hoping that they are one of the rare ones with a personality that immediately makes them click with the community.

The Design Challenge

Looking at Mark’s experience as a teacher in rural Alaska, we saw that his primary negative moments occurred during the school year when Mark had to integrate into the community while teaching.

Essentially, the absence of any formal cultural integration support left Mark vulnerable to community conditions, and eventually, his isolation from the community itself. And this disconnect in cultural expectations and teacher onboarding leads to a vicious cycle.

My team and I decided to focus our efforts on designing support for teachers who struggle to integrate into new communities, leading to our problem statement:

How might we allow teachers to find both cultural and community support in new rural Alaskan communities?

A Platform for Cultural Learning

Rural Alaskan teachers need ongoing and localized cultural onboarding to guide their integration into a new community, but current cultural onboarding resources among school districts are ineffective; currently, there’s only a 2-day cultural camp that’s supposed to prepare teachers for teaching in native communities.

After sketching and wireframing, I prototyped CLEO, a web app that gives school administrators a better chance at integrating their teachers by using community mentors to leverage local knowledge, build cultural experiences, and foster authentic relationships.

For administrators, CLEO delivers a low barrier to entry and approach to cultural integration that reduces the time and resources spent searching for teacher replacements. It creates more teachers that want to stay in the community and that the community wants to stay.

For the community, CLEO makes teachers better community members from day one. It fosters relationships with the teacher, giving more confidence to the community that this teacher is someone they want to support their kids.

The Product Functionalities

Here is a rundown of how the product would work for people like Mark.

To start the onboarding process, Mark’s administrator would point him to the Mountain Village community page on the web app. The curated content on this page will give Mark a brief introduction to the history of the community and will help familiarize him with basic cultural norms.

The platform then guides the chosen mentor and the administrator through co-creating a tailored checklist of what they would like to see from Mark in his first month.

For example, this could include stocking a smokehouse with a local fisherman, meeting with a specific town elder, or going berry picking with some of his future students. Through these guided experiences, Mark would meet new people and see the importance of participating actively in the community.

When Mark arrives in Mountain Village, he would log into his account and see the checklist of things to do and immediately have a sense of what the community values as well as what they expect from him. This is the baseline onboarding journey that Mark and every new teacher in Alaska deserve.

With CLEO, Mark’s teaching journey in a new community is easier with assisted cultural learning programs and social integration.

Rural Alaskan communities are built around human connections. But incoming teachers struggle to make these connections because they don’t understand that being a good teacher means being a good community member. With CLEO, the platform gives teachers a better chance to authentically connect and make their new community their new home.

Lessons from Systems Thinking

Designing for learning and culture has been one of the greatest challenges I’ve faced during my time as a student. It’s not only made me think about users of products, but also how they fit into society as a whole, touching the lives of those who use them. I have a lot of gratitude for the educators who helped to support this project—they’re the ones we co-designed this product with, and they’re the ones I hope to continue to design for far into my social entrepreneurship journey.