Background:
I serve as the Dean of Students in the West Shore ESD’s Career Tech Education center (CTE). Behavior is rarely an issue outside of the occasional vape pen or technology misuse. When polled early this year, our teachers identified attendance as a primary concern for student success. I dug into the data and confirmed that attendance is a problem for many students and the trend of missing school is increasing. Why are they having so many absences?
Problem:
My problem is that due to the complex logistics of a regional CTE center, students sometimes miss school and parents and home districts are unaware until it becomes a pattern or habit. I’d like to design a process to flag absences and processes of communication that better support students, families, local districts, and classroom teachers, boosting student attendance and increasing communication between all stakeholders.
Step 1 Empathize:
The first step of Stanford University’s design thinking process is to empathize with stakeholders in the problem. To empathize, the designer should observe, engage, and immerse into the problem. I looked to immerse myself in the data. Early on in the year we did a perception survey on students and one of the questions found that 87% of students look forward to coming to classes at CTE on most days. I also observed that we rarely have discipline issues that would be considered defiant or disrespectful behavior. During interactions with students throughout the week, 37 of 39 students asked indicated that they enjoy being at CTE most days. This all points to students wanting to be at CTE. Maybe I need to interview a different stakeholder in the problem.
I decided to interview a parent of a student at CTE who has missed what I would consider a significant amount of school. I took away three new understandings from my notes of that interview. The first is that the family is not informed when he misses school and would like to be. The second is that the family is only concerned with absences if they are affecting his grades. Finally, missing CTE for home school events is something that parents support and those absences do not matter to them even when they negatively impact grades.
After that interview I reached out to teachers to clarify why they feel absences are an issue. Most teachers cited many reasons for this being a concern, but the number 1 reason mentioned by all teachers was that absences are so common that they disrupt Tier 1 learning. Our programs pride themselves on providing students with valuable experiences that are difficult to differentiate for when students miss class. They spend a large portion of their learning time looking for ways to supplement student learning when absences occur.
I have a new view of the absence problem after empathizing with students, families, and teachers. With students and parents I am seeing that increased communication may be a part of the solution and that in our current system the absences are not impacting individual student achievement the way that I initially thought that it would. I would like to interview more parents, but my initial understanding is that students and parents are not currently considered with the number of absences occurring. The teacher perspective brought the understanding that the reason why teachers are concerned with absences is that teachers are adjusting their teaching based on student need and flexing for absences. This flexing is impacting both tier 1 instruction and teacher morale. For teachers it may be that I need to design a solution addressing the issue of what to do when large portions of students are absent. This problem looks very different depending on the stakeholder’s perspective and may require a multifaceted solution.
References:
Stanford University d.school (n.d.) Stanford design thinking model. https://dschool.stanford.edu/about.
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