Build team capacity for co-design by exploring participatory research methods.

Identify 1-2 product feature areas that are ripe for improvement. These can be used as the basis of the co-design workshop.

Continue to develop team co-design capacity through workshops or technical assistance. Develop a best practices guide for team members to leverage.

Develop a bank of workshop activities, processes for recruiting and supporting priority students or teachers for co-design.

Work across the different teams to identify opportunities for co-design with priority students and teachers across your product development process. This can include co-defining the problem, generating ideas to co-evaluating the product.

Before the co-design session, identify how and where participant ideas will be leveraged within your process. Be transparent with participants about what they can impact within the product. Consider weighing co-design participant features higher during feature prioritization.

Create a co-design session output tracker with access to co-designers.

Update the tracker on how their ideas were incorporated into the product.

Formalize the process of prioritizing co-design insights within the product feature decision making. This includes a process for prioritizing co-designed ideas, with a backlog for future inclusions and a process to continually engage co-designers while keeping them up to date on product changes.

Continue to consistently incorporate co-designers' ideas into the product and set up touchpoints with those co-designers as the ideas are incorporated into the product.

Identify a point person on the team to loop back to participants with the synthesis of the research and the next steps.

Develop reusable email and presentation templates for assigned team members to populate and share research insights back with participants on a regular basis.

Continue to actively communicate with participants about the impact of their participation in the research and insights from research.

Gather feedback from participants to understand the impact of sharing insights and next steps with them.

Modify the process based on feedback.

Do an internal accessibility review of your product. Ensure that the product meets WCAG guidelines.

• WCAG 2.0 guidelines.

Get an external accessibility audit of your product by organizations that are run by disabled testers like weco. Utilize the audit for product improvement and ongoing research with disabled students and teachers.

Establish a process for recruiting and engaging with disabled students and teachers to co-design features and provide product feedback.

Review the NDS design principles to identify opportunities to engage in research, design, and development of the product to better meet the needs of neurodiverse users and improve the overall user experience of the product.

User experience designers, in collaboration with UX researchers, can help design features and functionality to set your product apart. Consider hiring a qualified designer.

Set up your internal process to ensure that the designer has equal power to engineering and other functions so that they can be a voice for the user.

Ensure internal processes enable designers to actively participate in an iterative development approach so that user insights are captured, reflected in updates to designs, and validated again with users.

Develop a user centered mindset within the team so that all team members are centering the needs of every student or teacher, and championing their asks.

As a team, schedule team training on adverse childhood experiences, trauma, and the impact of trauma on learning and healing-centered engagement.

Reflect with your team on your research questions and practices. Identify practices or questions that might trigger a trauma response. Identify pathways to modify the features and research.

Develop a co-design prep that includes exercises to de-escalate participants if they experience a trauma response during the session. Include resources such as social workers that participants can reach out to.

Outline and implement what a healing-centered engagement approach looks like for your team.

Continue to reflect with your team and co-designers, after each session, to revise your trauma-informed and healing centered practices.

Review the existing product design and development timeline with your team. Identify opportunities for consistent product feedback sessions with students and teachers. Work with your team to implement the product feedback sprints.

Identify process or timeline blockers that prevent your team from getting consistent product feedback from priority populations. Work with your team to implement feedback sprints in line with the design and development cycle.

In addition to gathering user testing feedback on a consistent schedule, consider how your team can engage priority populations in co-evaluation of the product. What changes need to be made within your team to do this?

Consider changes to team processes and mindset to evolve your team's current product UX testing cycles to a more co-creative process. When would students and teachers need to be brought in? What do they need to know? How might they impact the product through co-evaluation? What infrastructure do you need on the team to enable this evolution

Identify opportunities to gather feedback from co-design participants during or after their engagements with your team.

Schedule an internal session to review and reflect on feedback.

Develop standardized processes for gathering feedback from participants about their experience, such as through anonymous surveys.

Utilize results to improve your engagement practices.

Establish mechanisms to routinely analyze and synthesize feedback received from co-design participants about their experience engaging with your team and work on addressing any concerns.

Foster continuous engagement by maintaining ongoing dialogues with co-designers to share how their feedback has shaped your team's processes or product development.

Identify the demographic mix of priority students in schools and districts that your team is currently looking at launching the product in. Identify gaps in student feedback on your product.

Identify schools and districts that have a higher population of students that you want to prioritize for feedback. Build a plan to launch these school districts.

Ensure you can disaggregate usage data by race, gender, age, disability, socio-economic status, location within your product, or through partnership with schools to identify gaps. Continually consider new school partnerships to ensure that your product serves all students.

Build relationships with school districts that serve priority students. Work to identify mutually beneficial opportunities for product access, compensation, feedback gathering, and product support with districts.

Establish privacy protocol to ensure that data collected is secure. Develop analysis protocols to ensure that student data is not used to paint a deficit picture of student skills. If applicable, within the product work to disaggregate data collected by race, gender, disability, socioeconomic status. If not possible within the product, work with the school district partner to gather this data.

Review privacy protocol to ensure that data collected is secure. Review and refine analysis protocols to ensure that student data does not paint a deficit picture of student skills. Identify other relevant and useful ways to disaggregate the data.

Identify other relevant and useful ways to disaggregate the data to support different analysis including measurement for motivation, engagement and persistence.

Analyze data to identify student subgroups that the product is currently not serving and identify opportunities for co-identifying the "why" with these students.

Review the motivation, engagement and persistence (MEP) framework to understand how you can measure your product's impact on student MEP.

Conduct a motivation, engagement and persistence (MEP) evaluation of your product to identify areas of opportunity and gain a better understanding of where your product sits in relation to MEP.

Use the C*MEP framework to identify all opportunities to support student motivation, engagement and persistence within the product.

Continue to iterate on your product feature with a lens on product impact on student motivation, engagement and persistence.

Identify unintended consequences from product use or data breaches. Identify potential algorithmic bias and other ethical concerns within your product and from internal use of data generated.

Develop an internal process for identifying unintended consequences during feature ideation and development. Leverage available data and feedback channels.

Develop a preliminary framework for categorizing and documenting ethical concerns, including data privacy, security, and algorithmic biases.

Establish a consistent process for proactively monitoring for unintended consequences of product use, data breaches and algorithmic bias through data analysis, and regular user feedback collection.

Continue to refine and enhance the proactive monitoring of unintended consequences of product use, data breaches and algorithmic bias, adapting methods as required. Demonstrate a commitment to early detection and understanding of these issues.

Capture questions your team has about disparities in learning. Work as a team to answer the questions, and understand  the variety of needs across focus populations.

Schedule time with your team to evaluate the product based on the equity principles your team developed in order to identify opportunity areas.

Establish cross-team functional meetings to reflect on what worked and what didn't at the end of each feature being developed with an explicit focus on your principles and defining what equitable implementation looks like.

Identify existing meetings where team members can discuss biases and positionality, and how that might impact product decisions with a trained facilitator.

Create ongoing opportunities when ideating on new features or research for team members to reflect on how their positionality impacts synthesis and analysis.

Create opportunities for ongoing self reflection within the team on positionality, bias and how this might impact their work and the product.

Identify data collected about students, districts and teachers. Include demographics, product use etc. Identify ways in which the data might be misused. Create internal use guidelines.

Develop and implement cross team guidelines for ethical data collection within your product and during research.

Establish data review meetings to review product and research data. Identify opportunities to improve data collection, storage and iterate on the kinds of data collected.

Leverage a professional research recruitment company to recruit students currently not prioritized in your research and co-design processes.

Consider a variety of options for recruitment of priority students including research recruiting firms, after school programs, PTA meetings, community based organizations and direct partnerships with school districts.

Develop long term relationships with school districts, community based organizations and communities of priority students to ensure that recruitment and research practices are not extractive and mutually beneficial.

Identify pathways to gather student, caregiver and teacher input in the context of use to help prioritize product improvement opportunities.

Develop co-design workshops with students and/or teachers by leveraging participatory methods to understand nuances and the context of use. Ensure participants and the research teams are immersed in the context of use to ensure ideas generated consider the environment reflective of authentic product use.

Identify opportunities within the product that can help your design and research teams understand student needs to help prioritize which problems to solve within the product. Consider ways you can have feedback features within the product for student input problem prioritization.

Develop problem prioritization, workshop with students by leveraging participatory methods to deepen engagement.

With your team, identify the budget available to compensate students, teachers and caregivers for their time and expertise.

Establish an internal payment policy.

Review your existing payment policy for lived experts and identify how it compares with SME compensation. Work to ensure that the compensation is comparable and fair.

Gather feedback from priority students, teachers, and caregivers on in-kind support, in addition to monetary compensation, that will be helpful for them.

Dedicate time within existing team meetings for members to share new learnings around priority student context and teachers that impact their learning experience. Incentivise continuous learning within the team.

Identify ways in which team members can learn more about priority student and teacher context. This could include listening to podcasts, watching relevant movies, building partnerships with community based organizations and Title 1 school districts for team members to immerse themselves in student context.

Consider building partnerships with community based organizations and Title 1 school districts for team members to immerse themselves in student context. Ensure that your learnings are incorporated in the feature ideation and product development process.

Dedicate time within existing team meetings for members to share new learnings around policies and systems that have impacted the educational system in the US. Incentivise continuous learning within the team.

Incentivise team members to review existing literature, podcasts, movies that highlight the current and historic impacts of the US educational policies. Create opportunities for share outs.

Create a learning arc for team members where they listen, read and engage with the same content with a focus on education policies and practices. Debrief as a team and map out how that impacts your work.

Ensure your team has qualified research staff to conduct primary research with priority students, educators and caregivers.

Identify information gaps that you have on student, teacher and caregiver experiences. Develop discussion guides with a focus on student strengths and assets. Conduct virtual or in person research.

Review your primary research interview guides with a priority student strengths and assets lens.

Consider developing internal capacity to recruit and manage priority student and teacher product advisory boards for ongoing feedback.

Review existing high leverage teaching practices with your team and identify the pathway to incorporate it within your product.

With cross team members, prioritize up to 3 high leverage teaching practices and learning science practices to implement within your product.

Develop an iterative and reflective process for the team to continuously review and revise how well the product supports educators on high leverage teaching practices practices and learning science practices.

During the synthesis process identify if your analysis can be harmful to the student or the community. Focus on strengths and assets that the insights highlight. When you see a deficit, consider how that might be impacted by systemic issues such as poverty, hunger etc.

Create opportunities within your synthesis process to review the take away to ensure that they focus and build on strengths and assets of the students and their communities.

Apply an asset based perspective to existing research and content shared on priority student experiences. Ensure that language used in your research is not culturally destructive or leads to stereotyping of students.

Review MEP frameworks in the provided library to gain a better understanding of motivation, engagement and persistence, as it pertains to priority students.

Conduct an evaluation of MEP for your product to identify areas of opportunity and gain a better understanding of where your product sits in relation to MEP.

Establish internal team processes for identifying, tracking, and measuring how product features impact MEP.

Create an opportunity for team members to learn about the impact of adverse childhood experiences, racial trauma, and poverty on learning.

Review your research materials on an ongoing basis to ensure that questions do not force participants to relive their traumas.

Contract with a trauma informed social worker for participant support discussing sensitive or triggering topics.

Build internal capacity within your team so that multiple team members can engage priority students and caregivers in a trauma informed way.

Review research materials on an ongoing basis to ensure that questions do not force participants to relive their traumas.

Build internal capacity within your team so that multiple team members can engage priority students and caregivers in a trauma informed way.

Train team members in deescalating participants who might have trauma stress responses during individual or group sessions.