January 1, 2016

The Case for Human-Centered Systems Design

By Transcend

“I have been doing some research with doctoral colleague Renee Rinehart on how people at different levels of the education system understand the same policies. We have been interviewing teachers, principals, districts, and state officials about two policies–teacher evaluation and Response to Intervention–to see how they make sense of the policy, as well as how they understand the roles that each other play in the system.

Not surprisingly, from the teachers in particular, we have found absolute puzzlement and/or outright hostility about the ideas and even motives of those further up the chain. I will save the quotes for the article we are writing on the subject, but state officials were compared to “the IRS” and there was significant sentiment that district and state officials should spend some time in their shoes if they wanted to develop policies that would work on the ground. Few of the teachers we have interviewed thus far were ever actually consulted by anyone higher up about a policy.”


By Jal Mehta

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