How Might We

Not too long ago, the most popular soap in America was Colgate’s Irish Spring with its deodorizing green stripes. Some of  you might remember this commercial. Proctor and Gamble, the competitors, found themselves spending month after month trying to develop a green striped soap to compete with Irish Spring. Each attempt met with failure when market tested.

Enter a young designer, Min Basadur, who with a simple question changed the focus. Instead of asking, how to make a green striped bar that people would prefer over Irish Spring, he shifted their thinking by asking a question that they had  ignored: “How might we make a more refreshing soap?” Asking this question opened the designers’ minds and eventually led to the creation of the soap Coast, still a top selling brand.

Lovely story, but what does this have to do with Gross Schechter Day School. Earlier this week, we posted a series of  pictures on Facebook of the staff during our opening faculty meeting. If you looked closely, you saw groups of Schechter employees diligently trying to build towers out of paper bags, spaghetti, string, and masking tape that would hold a marshmallow up in the air. This design challenge encouraged our staff to take risks, rethink their assumptions, and then assess the steps needed for project design.

As we talked about our experience with this activity, we explored the values that are important in continually improving  Gross Schechter Day School, such as enthusiasm, innovation, collaboration, transparency, and respect. We then began asking our own ‘how might we’ questions. For example, how might we be more reflective, how might we be more adaptable, and how might we encourage creativity. To help answer the last question, staff offered answers like creating  more open ended assignments for students where there may be no “correct” answer and incorporating more inquiry-based  education across the curriculum. Others suggested finding ways to let kids determine how something will be done.

The essential question of ‘how might we’ will inform our work as a staff throughout this year. Stemming from the larger question of how might we enhance and grow Schechter, the staff will be working in smaller groups to innovate and improve our school, grow a school that our parents our proud of, that our community kvells about, and that achieves our  goals of educating students who can meet the challenges of the 21st century as mensches for life.  I will keep you informed throughout the year as we ask these ‘how might we’ questions and come up with some next steps.  And I will look forward to having some similar conversations with you at my regular Bo N’Daber (Come Talk) sessions.

Where's the Brake?

When I get into a car, I have a few basic expectations of how the car will work. There will be a steering wheel, gas pedal, brake pedal, etc. Some things, like the radio and air conditioner, I know will be different and take a few moments to get oriented to, but it's not going to be rocket science.

Late Monday night, I had flashbacks to my first days as a driver when I didn't feel one hundred percent comfortable in the car. It started with sitting in the parking lot of the car rental agency in the Chevy Captiva that they had given me looking for the power outlet to plug my cell phone's car charger in to which was nowhere to be found. Feeling a little foolish for not being able to identify a basic car feature, I flagged down the attendant and he pointed out where it was, underneath a set of sliding cup holders in the center console.

"Ok," I said to myself, "Odd placement, but somewhat understandable from a design perspective. It's out of the way and won't interfere with operating the car's other features."

So, with this important task out of the way, I pulled out of the rental agency and drove to my hotel. Upon parking, I found myself again scratching my head and growing increasingly frustrated with my car. I was on a slight incline and wanted to engage the parking brake, something my father had taught me to do whenever parking the car. First, I tried engaging it with my left foot which is where the parking brake is located in both of our cars. My foot hit nothing but air and the floor. Then, I looked to my right to see if it was a hand brake, but there was nothing there (yes, I did look to see if it was below the cup holder with the outlet). I kept looking all over the dashboard and floor of the driver's seat, but I couldn't identify it. The car had to be designed with an emergency brake, right?

Would you know where the parking brake is?

Finally, after a short struggle to locate the car's interior lights, I opened the glove compartment, pulled out the manual, and identified a small button, pictured here, below the gear shift that engaged the parking brake.

Needless to say this whole process was completely counter intuitive. The car's designers had not taken into account what we were used to in designing this feature and instead, for whatever reason, had created a brake that was completely different from most other cars. Their lack of thinking about the user's experience lead to a high level of frustration for what should have been a very simple task.

In designing experiences for our faculty, students, or parents, we need to think about how they are going to interact with it. When they approach a learning experience or a faculty procedure will they know what to read, where to click, or what to do? Or will it run counter to what they are expecting and then potentially run into frustration.

This does not mean that learning experiences can't be challenging or that a process can't be complicated. It just means that the user's experience needs to include instructions, reference material, or guidance. My driving experience lacked any of this until I took out the car's manual which is not something that most of do on a regular basis.

I'm sure that the car's drivers have gotten use to this strange arrangement. I know that several years later, I'm used to the push button ignition button in my Prius and the funky joystick that serves as a gear shift. When I bought the car, the salesman pointed out these changes from the norm and made sure that I understood how they worked. If the rental agency attendant had just pointed out this unusual arrangement, I might have avoided the whole ordeal.

Simply put, design matters. Put yourself in the shoes of your users and try to walk a mile in them. If you trip, get blisters, or can't even get started, redesign the experience.

(Re)Designing Tefillah

A colleague of mine once referred to tefillah as the third rail of Jewish education. As irreverent as this may sound, it stemmed from a deep-seated concern that as Jewish educators we struggle with this area of the day school experience, not because it is not important, but because of its complexity and how hard it is to get it right.

Tefillah is hard. Even as adults we struggle with connecting with God during davening on a Shabbat morning. We try to find the right kavana (intent) to go with our keva (the fixed process of tefillah) and often miss the mark. I can only imagine what our synagogue rabbis are thinking as they stare at us from the bima while we are either grappling with this dilemma or are completely off task. Given how difficult meaningful, engaging tefillah is for adults, it is no wonder that adolescents also struggle with blending kavana and keva together in our daily minyanim.

With this problem in mind, we have begun a series of conversations at school to grapple with this challenge. Our Va’ad Tefillah (prayer committee) is a combined group of students and staff who are actively engaged in seeking solutions to this. The Va’ad Tefillah, with the support of The Jewish Education Project’s Day School Collaboration Network, has been using design thinking to address the often intractable problem of creating meaningful, relevant, and engaging tefillah experiences for our high school students. Through this design thinking process, we immersed ourselves in the situation by looking at it from our students’ points of view. We also sought inspiration from a variety of sources. With this in hand, we began to understand what tefillah experiences meant for them.

We then worked to frame our problem to create “how might we” statements that helped us better define the problems facing us in high school tefillah. We then imagined what could possibly be and collaborated to develop a series of prototypes to help us test our understanding, gain more information, and learn as we continued to work in the cycle of immerse, frame, imagine, and prototype.

Our initial prototypes were a series of alternative minyanim that allowed students to engage with tefillah in a different way. Here are the choices and descriptions that were available to students:

Regular Minyan: Similar to our daily minyanim, this larger group minyan will join together for a spirited davening.

Meditation Shacharit: How do I improve my focus, and organize my thoughts in tefillah?  Come to this Shacharit, where you will learn exciting ways to use meditation a mode of thinking to help you focus and direct your tefillot in new and exciting ways.

Words of Prayer: The siddur is an ancient combination of words from the Tanakh, with additions, adjustments and an overall organization made by our Rabbis through the generations. This minyan will take a close look at different prayers and we'll discuss how each prayer fits into the Rabbis' overall plan for the siddur, and how we can make sense of the siddur – personally -  as 21st century Jews.

Are You There God?: How can we discuss God? Why should we discuss God? What is God? How do we believe in God? (and what does that mean anyway!) This minyan will think about these questions and many other theological issues. Our goal is not to generate answers about God, but rather to startthe conversation about God.

Tech and Tefillah: Can the texts of the tefillot be communicated through modern means? How much of a tefillah would you tweet? We will explore using technology tools, like Twitter, PowerPoint, and Facebook, to help us gain greater understanding of the tefillot in the siddur.

Are these alternative minyanim the solution? Probably not alone, but they are a starting point. These experiences were followed up by a survey as we seek to design a better tefillah experience. Through this process, we hope to shift away from thinking about tefillah as an insurmountable challenge for the Jewish day school experience into one that adds meaning and relevance to all of those who participate.

I Am Not Planning a Polar Expedition

I just watched a Ted Talk by Ben Saunders which concluded with his plans for an upcoming Antarctic expedition on foot. He detailed his experiences doing things that most of us probably wouldn't even dream about.

Watching this talk was inspiring. Now let's be clear about one thing. I am not planning a polar expedition. While I do prefer cold weather to warm weather, my idea of a challenge does not include dragging a sledge filled with supplies across Antarctica for four months. I can think of a large number of things that I would rather do with my spare time.

But, Saunders is not encouraging everyone to run out and join a polar expedition. What he is encouraging is for us to get out and experience life. Getting out of the house, to borrow Saunder's phrase, means stepping outside of your comfort zone.

I wrote about this in an earlier post when I was challenging myself to stretch my linguistics skills. Taking risks needs to be a part of education and equally applies to students and faculty. As an administrator, I've challenged myself to learn about design thinking and will be taking part in the Day School Collaboration Network that the Jewish Education Project is supporting along with UpStart Bay Area.

Normally, schools make changes gradually. We run a program, evaluate, and make the changes for the following year. Design thinking, however, challenges us to consider rapid prototyping - making quick sample products that you test out and then go back to the drawing board as you test out the ideas.

This approach runs contrary to what I'm used to doing and moves me out of my comfort zone. I'm looking forward to seeing how design thinking gets me out of the house in the upcoming months. I'll be sharing my experiences through this blog.