Reinventing Middle School Using Design Thinking: Managing Reform at an Independent School

Introduction

Several years ago, the vision-setting board of North Country Day (NCD) identified an existential problem—how to ensure the long-term viability of the school. Several issues were at the nexus of the problem. For many years, families had to weigh their options of either waiting to apply their child to an independent high school for their ninth-grade year or take their chances at having their child admitted to a 7 to 12 school, leaving NCD at the end of sixth grade. Many families chose the latter, hoping to increase the overall likelihood of their child’s acceptance at the school of their choice. What lay on the other side of that choice was a 5 to 8 middle school, whose fifth and sixth grades followed a homeroom model, much like the lower school, and grades 7 and 8 followed a departmental model, more akin to high school.

For families calculating their options, it frequently felt like an even toss-up, where they would not sacrifice much in the way of program or experiential continuity if they chose to leave NCD after sixth grade and move on. In addition, the school is located in a region of the country that is flooded with ample and competitive independent school choices. Also, families were repeatedly giving the school feedback that what felt like a cozy and intimate lower school environment felt stifling at the seventh- and eighth-grade levels, where students (albeit, right on target developmentally) were looking to expand their peer groups. All this, combined with the fact that, like independent schools across the nation, NCD was facing a more competitive market as independent school consumer bases diminished due to rising tuition costs among other factors, led the school to re-evaluate its next steps for viability strategically.

At around this time Karen Hogan was hired as the middle school head, excited about the opportunity to get started on a career in school leadership and to bring her expertise and dedicated experience with young adolescents to NCD. Karen came in with a mandate for change. Cognizant that a dramatic change to a well-established middle school, led by teachers who had poured their expertise and passion into developing their own programs, would never take off without the cohesive rallying of its faculty, Karen was eager to pursue a way to engage all stakeholders in a process of redesign and program renewal. For this reason, Karen and her team looked to Design Thinking as the model protocol for the change. Beginning the winter prior to the change, she and other lead administrators, along with faculty, families, and students, embarked on a redesign of the middle school to become a grade 6 to 8, rather than a grade 5 to 8, middle school.

Context

Founded over a hundred years ago, NCD has remained a school true to its mission, with daily life imbued with the school’s core values of excellence, integrity, responsibility, and caring. A common refrain from visitors and families new to NCD is how well the school’s community lives the values, not just touts them. Often regarded as a “best kept secret,” the small school of approximately 300 students used to pride itself on its high value and yet humble presence, inadvertently underselling itself in a market with a surfeit of other local independent schools and excellent public schools.

NCD ran as a PK-6 school until the early 2000s, when grades 7 and 8 were added to form the middle school. From that year until her arrival about 15 years later, the middle school operated as a grade 5 to 8 middle school, serving roughly 120 students. As the new middle school head, Karen Hogan came in at a time of reform and with a mandate to restructure the middle school. In her first year, a new Head of School was hired and the new leadership team embarked on a capital campaign to raise money for an additional facility on campus while also planning for this restructuring process. With recent training in design thinking from the Nueva School Design Thinking Institute, ¹ she was eager to apply these ideas to this complex problem.

Design Challenge and Main Stakeholders

The design challenge facing Karen and the school was the restructuring of the middle school program nested within the PreK-8 school. Although historically, the school had conceptualized the middle school program as a 5 to 8 grade program, meeting the shifting demands of the market required the school to rethink the program. The reform was driven by the need to distinguish at the middle school with an entry point of grade 6, when most local public school students shift to middle school, and ensure they stay all the way to grade 8. Citing enrollment concerns, the board asked the incoming middle school head to initiate reforms to create a more marketable, robust 6 to 8 grade program instead. In addition to financial considerations, the small school was eager to provide a larger peer group for students at the crucial developmental stage of early adolescence when they needed to be nurtured toward more independence and maturity.

Viewing this as an opportunity, Karen recognized the need to address both structural and curricular issues through the redesign of the program. She understood that the shift would require an array of structural reforms impacting staffing, physical learning space and scheduling, particularly if they succeeded in growing the program. She also saw the opportunity to engage in crucial updates to the curricula and make reforms to academic offerings, advisory, arts and language electives, and the athletics program.

At the same time, she knew the change would present some leadership challenges for her as a new leader working with various stakeholders. One key stakeholder to consider was a group of veteran teachers who had been involved in developing the current middle school program. In particular, the sixth-grade teachers were accomplished and adored members of the school community who were known for the strength of their program. Implementing change was not a priority for them, especially in response to a top-down mandate. Helping teachers see the need for reform entailed addressing their concerns about growing enrollment, bringing in additional faculty, and shifting some aspects of the program they felt personally responsible for creating. Karen knew she would need to rely on design thinking protocols that would provide opportunities to recognize and build on existing strengths of the program, depersonalize problem-solving, and engage these teachers in the process of reform.

Another key stakeholder, the group of current families including students, needed to be involved in the change process. In the private school context, school leaders manage the complexity of client relationships, as families often identify as critical consumers of the educational program. In the case of redesign, long-term families and students had anticipated the middle school experience for many years and felt unmoored by what lay ahead. Karen aimed to address these families’ uncertainties and make the process as transparent as possible, while also reassuring families with the promise of a strong program.

As she set out to engage these and other stakeholders in the process of design thinking, Karen, working closely with the Head of School and leadership team, hoped also to bring other key stakeholders along through a collaborative process. Recognizing the emotional stakes of the work, both for those requesting the change and those resisting it, she hoped to leverage existing protocols and processes to solve the design challenge facing the school.

Design Intervention and Process

The team relied on the Design Thinking problem-solving method, as modeled by the Nueva School, ² to solve these problems. In multiple stages described below, the team went through a series of steps to plan for restructuring.

Leadership Challenges Arising From the Design Process

As Karen engaged in design thinking, she faced a series of leadership challenges that she continued to grapple with throughout the process. These challenges related to long-standing organizational norms, school culture, and practical realities facing her and the middle school faculty. Confronting these issues, she recognized that there were no easy solutions. As has been discussed in prior work, school leaders often navigate embedded dilemmas as they implement change (Spillane & Lowenhaupt, 2019). Karen’s experience in the context of reform was no different. As she learned to manage these challenges, she also came to accept that some of these dilemmas would persist even as they used design thinking to solve many of the problems that arose.

First, she needed to identify a mechanism for decision-making that was aligned to existing norms within the organization. She aimed to support change in an organization that elevated faculty engagement at the same time that it lacked processes for facilitating this engagement. The school had always prided itself for a commitment to faculty involvement, even as this engagement often led to paralysis. For example, prior decisions about scheduling changes often led to disagreement and no action because everyone could not agree on the best changes to make. To resolve this challenge, she knew she would need to integrate a process for engagement that would facilitate decision-making. She knew that in other schools, there might be a protocol at faculty meetings for how a group can reach consensus, such as having everyone agree to disagree, but continue moving the process forward. Such a protocol had not been used at the school before, and many faculty felt a strong commitment to achieving consensus.

Karen negotiated this challenge by allowing multiple opportunities for faculty to give feedback and engage in the process through various task forces, as well as implementing a new decision-making protocol that introduced a third option. Rather than the binary “agree” or “disagree,” she introduced the option to “disagree with consent to proceed.” This prioritized momentum through the process, as the faculty moved through the design thinking process. At the same time, however, it meant that some faculty might have felt left out or unrecognized in the process depending on where they fell on any particular decision. They may have felt that priority was given to momentum, rather than honoring their hesitation. Karen felt it was worth the risk given her mandate for change.

As she integrated this aspect of decision-making, she appealed to the iterative process of design thinking, reminding faculty that no decision was set in stone, but part of an ongoing process of trying things out, observing how they went, and continuing to make change. She hoped this would emphasize to teachers that going along with a decision that wasn’t their favorite might give them a chance to try something new that wouldn’t necessarily become set in stone.

A second leadership challenge related to the timeline. The schedule for the redesign required Karen to balance the design thinking process with the need to continue meeting the demands of the job, the challenge of “building the plane while flying it” that many school leaders face as they navigate reforms. Although Karen had trained in design thinking and practiced the protocols before in the context of workshops, figuring out how to implement it in the real world of schools, where the demands of the daily work requires most available time, was not easy.

Ultimately, to navigate this challenge, Karen relied on staff volunteering. This contributed to additional frustrations as some were eager to be involved but unwilling to commit their free time to the process. Empathetic to this tension, Karen sought to identify time during the school day when possible, but often fell back on opportunities to meet after the school day. This second challenge related to the first challenge and the cultural tension in the school of everyone wanting to be involved but not willing to commit the time. By relying on volunteerism, Karen knew she was setting up a structure that would allow some more access to the process than others. Teachers with small children at home or those with other obligations outside of school were less likely to take an active role in the process. At the same time, Karen knew that without some volunteerism, the school would not be able to have the momentum necessary to move forward with change. Recognizing the complexity, Karen aimed to strike a balance as best she could.

Third, Karen struggled to balance her commitment to the process and her own imperative to weigh in as a leader at certain points along the way. Others have noted this as a central challenge in distributing leadership (Spillane & Lowenhaupt, 2019). By creating a depersonalized process, she engaged others in problem-solving and decision-making. However, as the leader of that process, she needed to ensure that the results of the process yielded reforms that she could support and feel confident would work. She recognized the tension between trusting the process (and stakeholders involved) and shaping the outcome she wanted. For example, the sixth-grade team’s long-held homeroom model, to which they remained loyal, presented a problem for creating a unified 6 to 8 advisory model that would allow for a meaningful continuum of social-emotional learning curriculum and faculty support for students.

Addressing this challenge required Karen to step in at certain points along the way. Rather than strictly following the design thinking process, she inserted her insights and vision at key moments during the process. Relying on the process to illuminate possible solutions to design problems, she helped to identify and communicate key constraints that, in turn, shaped and narrowed the selection of these solutions.

As she worked through the design thinking process, these issues arose which presented Karen with leadership challenges—how to engage others in decision-making, keep the school running and students and families trusting while envisioning substantial reforms, and balance the collective process with the need to influence the outcome. Addressing these challenges, Karen crafted a design thinking process embedded in the practical realities and constraints of her context.

Reflection

As illustrated in the case above, the protocols and routines associated with Design Thinking hold great promise as leadership tools for tackling the structural and cultural issues that arise during organizational reform. Although there is little research documenting the use of design thinking specifically, the educational leadership field has increasingly emphasized the importance of organizational routines and processes that support collective, inquiry-oriented problem-solving (Bryk et al., 2015; Spillane et al., 2011).

As the field has adopted more distributed forms of leadership (Harris, 2008; Spillane, 2012), there has been a turn toward process-oriented leadership practice that incorporates multiple stakeholders in decision-making (Lowenhaupt, 2014; Spillane, 2012). For example, Spillane et al. (2011) showed how organizational routines have been used to structure professional interactions and support collective decision-making about structural reforms such as implementing accountability metrics in schools. Similarly, the implementation of processes associated with Improvement Science provides similar structures to support problem-solving at the organizational level (Bryk et al., 2015).

As well as incorporating stakeholders, these processes also leverage evidence and data in new ways, bringing aspects of research into practice by engaging stakeholders in gathering and interpreting information (Bryk et al., 2015; Coburn & Stein, 2010). By providing clear steps that help practitioners through what might be characterized as a research process, these approaches can serve to narrow the gap between research and practice and provide evidence for decision-making (LeMahieu et al., 2017). These steps are not unique to Improvement Science, which builds on a long-standing and evolving focus in the field that encourages ongoing, iterative processes that support learning organizations, as Senge (1995) and others have referred to the steps of growth. By applying design thinking, school leaders provide a delineated, predetermined set of steps that are flexible to a range of situations and allow both leaders and teachers to approach problems through a defined process. Although there is no magic to the exact steps, the general process and agreed-upon steps can foster growth, learning, and change. The case of NDC demonstrates how steps of the process can be useful for tackling issues with technical solutions. Applying protocols to problem-identification and solving can illuminate rationalized and depersonalized solutions to leadership issues.

Importantly, the case also reminds us that some problems are not so easily solved. Indeed, leadership practice can be characterized as a set of interwoven dilemmas (Spillane & Lowenhaupt, 2019; Cuban, 2001). Although some solutions are identifiable, change always brings to the fore the underlying “wicked problems” leaders must seek ways to balance.

Learning and Teaching Activities