Wilma Lam,

Host:

Hi. Welcome to Optimistic Design, a podcast where we take a practical, positive look at the future of design, ethical innovation, and technology. I'm your host Wilma Lam, Strategy Director here at Substantial.

For today's episode, I am pleased to welcome Adha Mengis, Project Director of Community Collaboration and Design at Digital Promise, where he designs learning experiences for educators rooted in equity and metacognition. Adha is passionate about excellent pedagogy and supporting people to actualize their innate potential, has worked with people in classrooms and schools from age 13 to 65+.

Adha, welcome to Optimistic Design.

Adha Mengis:

Thank you for having me, Wilma.

Wilma Lam,

Host:

Oh, we're so excited to be able to talk about this topic. I think education has been talked about a lot in the last few years, with the pandemic and the need to kind of innovate and redesign in this space. So really excited just to get to talk to you and dig into your background.

Maybe just to get things going. I know that you started your career as a teacher, so you've been in the field in Oakland, California. Can you share a little bit about how you got interested in human-centered design and educational design?

Adha Mengis:

Yeah. So I started my career in classrooms, as you mentioned, here in Oakland, California. Oakland is one of the most diverse cities in America, and a place that has a lot of needs all across the board. I was starting in the classroom just as a place of like, where can I have the most impact as direct service, that I can grow my skills and develop a lens towards seeing what equity looks like in the world, and what an inequitable society is? I did that as a classroom teacher.

“When you talk about human-centered design, there's no more human-centered profession than teaching, obviously.”

I came to realize that everything I loved and felt about the classroom and connecting with young folks, is just the language and mindsets of human-centered design in a different package. I felt like the mindset of empathy and creativity and experimentation was something that was afforded to me through a classroom, and 30 young people, and a content domain like Algebra 1 that I was expected to deliver in a compelling way.

So the bridge between education and design was already there when I thought about it and acquired the language over time to think about: what are my tools, what do I have available to me to make a compelling lesson plan or a compelling unit of a scope and sequence for young people to buy into this thing? Design offers very similar mindsets of trying something out, seeing if it works, innovating in terms of meeting people's needs wherever they are. So meeting folks along the way who shared those mindsets, I kept hearing about human-centered design, and I was like, I need to get into this, who are the people and the places practicing this thing? I was able to go from there and start to further myself in service of being an expert in this field.

Wilma Lam,

Host:

Your point about being a teacher and being in the classroom very much actually following the human-centered design process definitely rings true. I imagine it's kind of like you're prototyping live and there's a lot of students to give you that feedback in-person. Yeah, like, is this working, is this not working? It's probably actually so much faster than what we typically get on the product and service design side of things. So it feels super accurate.

You mentioned being really interested in learning more about human-centered design and what it meant. So as you went on that journey, into where you are in your career now, who or what influenced and inspired your approach to design today?

Adha Mengis:

Yeah. So I had the pleasure of working at IDEO for two and a half years, which is like the company design studio that is where thinking and acting like a designer for educators was really established. Some of the folks who wrote that original playbook, back in 2011 or 2012, were some of my mentors at IDEO; [03:58 indistinct] is one person I can think of explicitly, who comes to mind. Through my experiences in working at IDEO, and managing programmes that coached educators as designers, I was able to interact with some of the leading minds in this work. Folks who have created Liberatory Design cards out of the Stanford d.school, folks at the National Equity project in Oakland, California, and just thinkers and leaders all over the place who have influenced me.

I just wanted to shout out and highlight a few of those organizations, because they're still doing webinars and institutes and convenings all the time. So the folks who are listening to this and thinking about where they could learn more, those are places I would definitely start with, because they influenced a lot of my work.

Then in design, we often say the best way to learn is by doing. I was able to take a designer mindset into some school districts and with teachers, and think about what they're prototyping in live time, and practice a design thinking mindset with them. So inspired all along the way and influenced by folks who have written and led in this work, but also by my own actions and experiences out in the field.

Wilma Lam,

Host:

That sounds like a very transformative experience. In the work that we've done at Substantial in the education space, we've also referenced a lot of the amazing work from Stanford d.school and National Equity Project, especially Liberatory Design as a methodology. So definitely rings true on the projects I've worked on as well.

So now you've transitioned and you're working with Digital Promise. Could you talk more about the creation of Digital Promise as an organization?

Adha Mengis:

Yeah, for sure. So Digital Promise was a little department in the Department of Education actually, and I think at one point it was called the Office of Technology and Innovation or something like that, around the time of the Bush/Obama years. This small little department was finding some traction and some interest in what it means to work at this intersection of education, innovation, and technology, and kind of branched off and became its own nonprofit. That was about 10 or 15 years ago now.

From there, the organization – it says in the name "promise to address the digital learning gap" – has continued to blossom and grow. It's a place that offers so many products and services now: from the Verizon Innovative Learning Schools, to the League of Innovative Schools, to the different pathways and credentials that recognize and honor lifelong learners, because there has been continuous intersection of education and innovation. It's a cool place to work, because there's always something interesting happening.

Wilma Lam,

Host:

Could you share a little bit about your role, in particular, as Project Director of Community Collaboration and Design?

Adha Mengis:

Yeah. So I work on a team called the Centre for Inclusive Innovation, and we're kind of piloting a model of an alternative way to think about design or equity-centered research and development. My goal and my role is to make sure that we're bringing in a community voice, authentic community voice that is, and kind of live prototyping type mindset into all our projects. There are a couple of projects that are really my domain. But it's thinking and considering, like, how are we centering student voice, user voice, at the center of everything that we do, and creating the workshops and protocols and the programmes that goes along with centering those folks. Making sure that anything that we do and create is addressing the real need, but also that they're co-creating alongside us.

Wilma Lam,

Host:

It makes so much sense to be going back and really thinking about how you can center student experience as part of this work. Because ultimately, it's really about the impact that it has on those students. I know one thing that Digital Promise has worked on is addressing the digital learning gap. Could you talk a little bit about what that digital learning gap is, and how that's been addressed?

Adha Mengis:

Yeah, sure. So I'd be happy to talk and feel happy to do a little bit of a history lesson about the equity and technology intersection. I feel like 10 years ago, when I was in the classroom, considering the digital learning gap, a lot of the considerations were around devices. It was a device problem, a hardware problem. How do we get devices in the hands of young people because we know devices, and form pedagogy? They make feedback cycles quicker for educators, they can make assessments more dynamic and easier, and those many things.

About the middle of the last decade, 2015 to 2016, I think it changed from a hardware issue to a pedagogy issue. It's like, okay, we kind of have a feeling of the devices we need or what that looks like. Then it was a matter of how to coach educators in blended learning, and coach them in iterating one lesson a week or maybe one lesson per unit. Then over time, in our more recent history, it went from a little bit of iteration in the digital learning gap and addressing how classrooms are using hardware and software, to everybody has it in the last two years because we are at home and doing learning through Zoom and Flipgrid and Google Classroom because of the pandemic.

“When you take the digital learning gap and tell a history of the intersection of education and technology over the last 10 or so years, it's evolved over time. As we consider where does it go next, it's less of an issue of getting devices in hands or making sure that everybody knows about the most new and innovative software, to simple ease-of-use.”

Taking students from being just consumers of technology and users, to producers of videos and content in new ways and innovative ways that we have never done before.

So when I think about co-creation, that's the next aspect of the digital learning gap to be addressed. I'm excited to see what teachers, who have been scrappy in the last couple of years through the pandemic, have created on the other side that has stuck with. Because the 2022-2023 school year we're going into now is our first, I would say, unbothered academic year that teachers across the country are planning for, which is a huge mindset shift. So this will be a really interesting year.

Wilma Lam,

Host:

Yeah. So you've talked a little bit about what comes next in thinking about equity-centered design for education? I'm also curious, as you think about the broader design field, in what ways do you think the broader field could maybe better address designing for equity as well?

Adha Mengis:

Well, I think for practitioners of research and product designers, and those folks who are a little bit further away from the direct service, I think there is a desire and a need that they should feel called to, to be as close to the end users as possible, and in a way that's never actually been that's more democratized than ever.

I've been on more focus group calls with students in the past six months to a year than I ever was before. I have students that I work with and pick their brain about a certain tech tool or whatever, and they can submit their feedback using a platform like Flipgrid; they don't even have to type in their feedback in a survey. So when you consider the way that we've been flattened and give access to the voices of young people – and also ways that they can share their thoughts so it's not just write in a paragraph how you feel about this thing – I think about the design field in general, there's almost no excuses anymore of how to integrate the voices of young people and educators into their work at all times. Every nonprofit, product, every foundation, doing this work from afar, that wants to take an innovative mindset, should have some version of an advisory board or student council that they're co-creating with alongside, and engaging in a programmatic way so it's not haphazard.

If you're not compelled to that, then I would consider the design field to maybe not be the spot for you if you want to sit behind and stay at a remove.

“The design field is certainly about what's new and what's exciting, and trying new things and finding out if they work or not. But it's also at the end about people, and being able to connect with people over everything.”

Because everything that we're doing at the end of the day is a way to make ourselves and our systems more human, not less human.

Wilma Lam,

Host:

That makes so much sense, that at the end of the day, you design something that's done for other people that are going to have to experience the work that we create. You mentioned a little bit earlier, having done more focus groups recently than you've done previously in your career. This is something we've heard echoed with other designers and researchers in the field, and some of them have talked about how much of the pandemic has really changed the approach to their work. Can you talk about how you're thinking about partnership with students, educators, and their communities today, and the impact that maybe research during the pandemic has had?

Adha Mengis:

I don't want to diminish or forget about the power of in-person connection, because I think the foundations of trust are built through psychological safety and communication and relationships and the sort of belonging that is built best in-person, no doubt. I think building from within anchor experiences that are in-person and then having a long tail of virtual experiences is probably the best way to go, to engage any type of research or community-centered research process. But I don't think in the field that it's a lack of will. To me these days, it feels like, if anything, a skill thing or a practice, or having as many at best as possible.

So the protocols and the focus groups you might do in-person might look different from a virtual setting; the ways you're getting folks to create and rapidly prototype is naturally going to be less dynamic in those contexts. This step goes from like we've done it to now we're doing it intelligently; we're scaffolding the process for our end users. So that when we're asking them to prototype, we're in-person, and if we're asking them to give feedback on a thing, maybe we're doing it in a virtual setting.

So I think there's a kind of need in the field of a little bit of “co-design with students or co-design with educators” playbook, and certainly there are versions of these that exist, but with a little bit more nuance and subtlety to how we're scaffolding a process. So it's not just a six-phase design process – you empathize, and you ideate and you prototype and you iterate – but a little bit more nuanced, and how we do it across different mediums. Because these mediums are a natural state of how we're going to move, inevitably forever now; everything is hybrid. Classrooms don't have snow days anymore; they have digital Google Classroom days. We work from home as much as we do in-person work. So just speaking to that subtlety of how we move through things with a little bit more skill.

Wilma Lam,

Host:

Yeah. Building on this idea of skill – I think you mentioned building space to develop psychological safety and establishing trust – one of the things I'm really curious about is, do you have any specific guidelines or advice you'd give on how to establish that psychological safety and build that trust when you are engaging with student communities or other kinds of communities?

Adha Mengis:

Yeah. So activities and experiences where you're leveling the playing field and you can flatten the power dynamic in a very natural way. So that the adults in the room or the folks who are service providers or product providers are not the ones receiving accessing knowledge from folks who are further away, but yet co-creation activities that naturally level the playing field.

I can give you an example. One that I like to do when I'm with folks in-person is this activity where you just pair people off – this is in a mixed room with educators and providers, and we're kind of convening – to set a tone of connection before anything else, before we get into feedback or focus groups or anything like that. So when we pair off into groups, I like to ask one person to be the drawer and one person to be the talker. They pair up, and they're a team. Then the one person who's the talker gets an image, everybody gets the same image, and the drawer has to draw according to what their teammate is telling him to draw. The goal is to draw the most accurate picture possible.

So I like that activity, and I like to bring it up here because of the subtlety in it; everybody has a role, we need to work together and communicate clearly, you have to trust that the person is describing the thing accurately and the other person has to trust that the drawer is drawing exactly what they say. In the end, we get to show our images and have a good laugh about who's a good drawer and who's not a good drawer, and where do we fall onto this even if we're all over the age spectrum.

So that's a great example, I think, of a way to level the playing field in a natural, authentic way. I think this happens with a little bit of a messiness and less subtlety in opportunities. This happens sometimes with less intentionality in some settings, and I would love to just talk more about always bringing that intentionality into how we're leveling the playing field for everybody.

Wilma Lam,

Host:

Yeah, that makes so much sense. It strikes me that also, referencing back to the Liberatory Design methodology, also in the work that I've done, we think a lot about how you can flip the power dynamic that traditionally has existed between our researchers and people that they're doing research with. I think the activity you shared is such a good way for everybody to be doing the same exercise together. It sort of unifies that experience as a way to build trust. So I think it's an amazing activity to try.

You've also shared a little bit about the importance of recognizing the expertise of students and having them involved in building opportunities and taking ownership of building solutions. How do you think about student co-leadership in your work?

Adha Mengis:

If you'd indulge me for a second, I have this metaphor that I think of myself, as folks who lead this work and are convening young people to be co-leaders or march alongside with us. So when we march into this work, I think of an analogy of a kitchen and cooking a lot actually. Like, I as a convener am bringing folks along to provide their input and give us their context expertise. I want them to be an ace in their role, a master at being them, and nothing else; you don't have to worry about everything else.

A good example is, we like to start off conversations asking students how they might redesign the cafeteria or the lunch room? Because they are an expert in that thing; they've spent every day there, they're the ones who know how long the lines are, what parts get crowded, what the smell is from the trash cans. All those things that an adult in the building, or a district administrator, or a system leader might not have a lens on. So if you take the lens of how they're experts in the cafeteria, and you bring that same lens to whether it's classroom tools or systems that we're building at the district level, and you ask that they have to bring that same level of their own perspective to this next thing, that's how they co-lead.

We don't ask them to create the thing from scratch, so we're not giving them raw ingredients.

“As folks who've made programmes and products that we want young people to provide their input on, we want to set the table for them with a little bit of balanced diet, if you will, or a balanced plate; a little bit of this, a little bit of that.”

You can co-lead by just being who you are, and picking up and dropping and putting down what you need to pick up and put down. We can't give them raw ingredients and ask them to give their perspective, that's not really fair to them, especially as young people are still gaining fluency in their understanding of the world. We want them to just be them, and just be them. So that example of designing the cafeteria, or that lunch space, is a good example. Then that sort of convoluted metaphor I referenced of setting the table is our responsibility as folks who live at the intersection of education and design.

Wilma Lam,

Host:

That's a great example. So in addition to working with students – I mean we're talking about educational space here, so it's a complex, multifaceted system – I'm interested also in understanding how do you approach navigating the need to also work within what is a large existing system, and how do you partner with system leaders within education?

Adha Mengis:

That's a really good question. We often talk a lot in the field about readiness to do more community-centered work or equity-centered work. I mentioned earlier that I don't think it's a will issue, most times it's a skill issue. Then at the end of the day, I think when I'm working with systems leaders closely, there is something that's compelling about the distributed leadership kind of aspect that goes into any community-centered programme or initiative or model. So systems leaders often feel like everything might filter through them, or they're responsible for the success or lack thereof of a certain implementation of a thing, and whatnot.

“Core to design and a designer mindset is a little bit of coaching. It's a little bit of trusting people to be individuals and be multifaceted, and fully formed in a way that the way one person might implement something as different from another.”

Systems leaders are nervous, I think, sometimes, but definitely aligned mindset-wise, more often than not, about what it takes to implement and have some version of distributed leadership in this way. Because any community-centered initiative is going to have distributed leadership at the core of it. When I'm considering systems leaders, it's just as hard as any other position in the education world. It's mass turnover at the principal and superintendent level right now, just as there is a teacher shortage.

So when I'm considering what it looks like for them to have conversations about innovating, I often frame and find interest in framing innovation as iteration and not wholescale change. How are we growing incrementally and experimenting in a way that we're not cutting out everything from underneath us, we're not changing everything and throwing out what we did last year, but we're changing this one piece that we're doing once every now and then. I think that resonates, and that's a mindset of innovation as iteration that I try to message not just to systems leaders, but anybody across the education field that I'm talking to.

Wilma Lam,

Host:

Yeah, really thinking about the need for mindset change and working with distributed leadership. I think it really speaks to this idea that designing for education is not only about developing content or products or services, but specifically now thinking about social movements and behavior change and what it takes to build communities that are working towards the same vision and goals. So I'm wondering, what do you think about the role of design as a change agent for culture, and its ability to impact communities or organizations?

Adha Mengis:

Yeah, I am really compelled by movements in general, social movements. My partner has been in organizing advocacy for a long time. I think when I think about social movements and how that intersects with design, I think a lot about the Amazon union story from a couple of months ago with the warehouse of Staten Island and Christian Smalls, the young black man at the center of the unionization efforts there. There's something I found so inspiring in that, not just from a lens of growth, but also a lens of what needs they were meeting. If you look up the feature length article The New York Times did on Christian Smalls and Amazon unionization efforts, they were doing things like meeting people at their house, bringing food; they were on TikTok and all these social media accounts to inform and deliver information that folks weren't getting otherwise. But they were also meeting people's needs that Amazon was not meeting.

I just found it extremely compelling that they knew at the core of growth and meeting people where they are, they had to be in their homes, they had to be providing food, they had to be building these fundamental pillars of trust that Amazon was not doing. I thought wow, what a scrappy way to bring about change in your community. In fact, it has been a lot of inspiration. I've talked about that with several school districts and companies that are stuck right now, or maybe are just looking for a little bit of juice.

Wilma Lam,

Host:

I feel like that's core to what you're talking about. The power of that kind of connection with people, whether it's one-on-one or in small group-like community settings, can be really powerful. So I'm curious, when you think about how this translates to education or design – and specifically, you talked a few times about the fact that you're working at this intersection of education, design, innovation and technology – what do you think is most important to consider as you're designing in this space that's a hybrid of all of these things?

Adha Mengis:

You listed off: education, design, innovation and technology, and then there's like a fifth one of equity that I feel like is somewhere in there. That was actually going to be some of the advice that I was going to give. But yeah, really interrogate and question what you mean in terms of innovation or equity. I feel like most organizations and companies and districts and institutions that I work with have some version of an equity plan or a strategic plan in the next five years, which is tremendous. It's great growth that we've come to a place where that's explicitly written.

“The advice I would give to folks in the field that need researchers and designers is to really interrogate what it means to be doing this type of work with an equity lens, or to be really interrogating what does actual progress look like? Is it a change in representation, or is it one level deeper than that?”

It's co-creation, it's not just like having a certain amount of voices that check a box. So that's some advice I would give to people.

Then the other one that I kind of mentioned earlier, that I would more explicitly say is, to new researchers and designers, please, please, please, get as close to direct service as you possibly can, as early as you can, and make it integral to who you are in what you do in this work. I mentioned a lot of times that there is a bit of skill and subtlety that goes into some of this co-creation and equity-centered way of doing design, and no better teacher at that than experience. So when I'm offering a piece of advice, there's obviously volunteer opportunities, there's tutoring opportunities, there are ways to just pop into Zoom, whether it's an employee resource group, or I don't know what it is. But there are ways to make it happen and show what you value with your time and how you show up. I think there's no substitute better than that experience.

Wilma Lam,

Host:

That is some great advice for anyone that's interested in getting into this space and understanding it better. Maybe building on that, the great advice you gave, I'm also curious, what is the best advice that anyone's given you as you've worked in this space?

Adha Mengis:

Okay, it's not explicitly design advice. But I find a lot of parallels between design and coaching in general, whether it's leadership coaching, or sports coaching, or even instructional coaching for educators. I once went to a training with this coach who did a little bit of both actually, athletic coaching and instructional coaching. He said something that I found really compelling, along the lines of this.

“It's unprofessional to expect people or organizations to change more than 10% from year to year. However, it is also unprofessional as a person or an organization to not change by 10% year to year.”

That is speaking to that piece of innovation is iteration that I was talking about, about increments of growth.

So what does that 10% look like for you, as a person, as an organization, as a product, as a programme? Because we're not going to make radical changes overnight for the outcomes that we want, for young people, for our institutions; those don't happen overnight. I can talk a lot about what incremental growth looks like from place to place, but it's ultimately up for us to take that mindset in and say, I am responsible for 10%. I think that's an important design mindset to build in.

Wilma Lam,

Host:

Yeah. Well, speaking of this idea of ongoing incremental growth, and bringing it back to Digital Promise and the work that you do day to day, I know that Digital Promise also aims to support learning not only across the country, but also to learners at every stage of their lives, in order for people to continue to acquire knowledge and skills that they need to thrive. So I'm wondering, how do you think about designing for education technology, not only at this national scale, but also for lifelong learning?

Adha Mengis:

Yeah, this is a great question. Digital Promise offers a series of products and services that doubles down on this mindset of lifelong learning. Micro-credentials are a big part of the work of Digital Promise. We have a team that partners with higher education institutions to provide micro-credentials, which are a way of acknowledging people's skill in something. It could be anything from something in the arts, all the way to a really thin slice of one piece of teaching, like blended learning or something like that. It's not that you have to complete a course or anything like that, a micro-credential is almost analogous to a badge. So we found a tremendous amount of interest and intrigue in that.

We also have a lot of really cool projects from anywhere on the pre-K–16. We partner with districts at an initiative called the League of Innovative Schools, where superintendents are leading innovative work. The superintendents are among like-minded individuals that are also leading innovative work in their state country, and we bring them together once a year for a convening. The Verizon Innovative Learning Schools project is something that I think is really interesting in terms of building teachers' capacity for integrating technology into the classroom.

I mean, we're continuing to develop our portfolio and really consider what it means to have adult learners that are outside of institutions as lifelong learners. One of the most interesting projects I was a part of recently at Digital Promise was about developing learning and employment records, which are these alternatives to LinkedIn for folks who are not in white collar jobs to demonstrate their fluency and skills. There are alternatives to resumes as well.

I was able to be in focus groups with folks who were frontline workers during the early months of the pandemic, to talk about what technology platforms do they use when looking for a job, or in what 10 ways do they acknowledge and recognize their own skills? Because they are learning, whether it's a new skill on the job or off the job, and they don't know how to represent it, because maybe they went partially to college, or they're doing some on the job training that isn't captured through a diploma or certificate.

I thought that project was really compelling. One, because I got to interact and work with frontline workers during a time of tremendous need, and bridge a gap between a technology provider and frontline workers. But also, because I hadn't considered the role adult learning plays, especially during this time where we know that most people who have some college experience and don't finish it don't really know how to demonstrate that they have some college experience and don't know how to finish it. So it just challenged the way I was thinking about lifelong learning and what it means to do that through specific institutions and outside of them. So it was exciting. It's interesting work and relevant to all of us who are in this, like I said, intersection of education and design.

Wilma Lam,

Host:

Thank you so much for sharing that. We've covered a lot of topics today; we've talked about social movements, we've talked about collaborating with communities, and we've talked about lifelong learning. So I'm wondering, what is top of mind now, as you think about the future of education, design, and technology? What are you optimistic about?

Adha Mengis:

I am most optimistic, a little bit, about agency. So the agency that folks within the system, the students and educators that I've referred to so often, have been able to build over time, over the last two years explicitly, whether it's taking learning into their own hands or innovate on their own pedagogy through a time where there were no rules essentially. That's something I'm most optimistic about. My closest friends and even family members that I care about are still classroom educators to this day, and I just can't help but center their perseverance in what makes me optimistic about right now. I know that they know and we know that there is no silver bullet to this thing.

“In education, there is no panacea. We emerged from whatever you want to call it, learning loss, or the lack of connectivity we felt over the last two years, and there's no way through it besides with each other.”

So there's some piece of togetherness and perseverance that I think I've received and heard across the field for the folks who are still in it, that I just am optimistic about. It feels a bit corny to say, I know. But I think at the end of the day, that level of perseverance just is astonishing to see. That's the last thing I'm optimistic about.

Wilma Lam,

Host:

It's always wonderful just to hear what people are optimistic about and what they're moving forward with. Adha, thank you so much for joining me today.

Adha Mengis:

Thank you for having me, Wilma. It was a pleasure to be here.

Wilma Lam,

Host: