Equity Design Tools

These tools were primarily developed for the CityBridge Design Fellowship. The program is for teams of educators, social entrepreneurs, and school designers to build community and skills as they create, implement, and evaluate pilots of equity-centered solutions. There have been five Fellowship cohorts of ~150 participants total since fall 2020, representing ~50 organizations and schools. Fellows consistently rate the program at a 75+ Net Promoter Score, and 98% of recent participants report experiencing a strong sense of inclusion and belonging.

• CityBridge Entrepreneur toolkit. I conceived and wrote this package of tools and examples framing key tools and protocols that anchor CityBridge programs. This toolkit offers some of the most-used tools from across our programs. While not exhaustive, it is intended to provide a window into the specific work of the programs, allowing teams to try the tools on their own.
• Equity Design Tools, Spring 2023 Editions. Updated versions of some of the most-used pieces of the CityBridge toolkit.
• Pilot plan and learning tool. This is the anchor tool for the Design Fellowship program. All the key steps for equity-centered pilots: evidence-gathering, problem definition, hypothesis generation, articulating an implementation plan, developing learning questions, and reflection and iteration. Organized as a set of editable slides to make sharing and presentation easy. Also: a blog post explaining the evolution of the tool; a blog post about the importance of reflection in the piloting process; and another post on “pilot template” patterns teams can use to rapidly plan their own pilots.
• Design Fellowship Curriculum Overview. I conceived, design, led, and facilitated the Design Fellowship program, which provided customized tools, coaching, and financial support to design, test, adapt, and scale right-sized pilot solutions for excellent and equitable learning environments in DC public schools. This document gathers all of the key tools, readings, and workshop materials designed over the course of five cohorts, from fall 2020 to fall 2022.
• Value Proposition module for social entrepreneurs. Here I adapt tools from the Strategyzer organization to explain the utility of value propositions for early-stage social ventures.
• Analyze and Engage a Supportive Coalition. Tool I built to merge Transcend Education’s “Conditions for Innovation” with the Tamarack Institute community engagement techniques. Used by Design Fellowship teams to plan who to engage in their piloting work.
• Theory of Change Overview. For multiple cohorts of the CityBridge Design Fellowship, I tinkered with various ways to teach the core concepts for developing theories of change. Essentially, a theory of change helps designers, leaders, and educators explain the causal links between the actions they take and the outcomes they’re aiming for. This explainer document synthesizes multiple approaches to building TOCs and streamlines the process and examples for educators. TOC template.
• Empathy Interviews: A complete primer in just two pages on how to plan, conduct, and reflect upon equitable empathy interviews, a foundational step in human-centered design. Edited example of how one educator utilized the underlying tools to analyze interviews.
• Equity Design Learning Standards, v1.0. This is a set of learning standards I wrote and refined to articulate exactly what skills participants in CityBridge programming should learn as a result of participating in different programs. The primary focus is on learning in our Design Fellowship, and also includes social entrepreneurship or “Ventures” standards for our Design Residency program.
• Problem statement “mad libs.” This tool illustrates two approaches to crafting and revising equitable problem statements.
• Pithy Pitfalls. Slides I developed for Design Fellowship explaining some common problems with pilot design and how to address them.
• OurSchoolDC. OurSchoolDC was a paper-and-spreadsheet simulation I designed in 2017 to explain some of the complexities of the citywide lottery enrollment process for public schools.
• Designing for Race Equity: Now Is the Time (May 2020). Article I wrote for NGLC explaining how we used various equity design methods in our programs, up until spring 2020.

Transforming Teaching

I designed and led a 3-part series of workshops in fall 2022 as part of the CityBridge Transforming Teaching project, a city-wide initiative to co-design, coordinate, and fund 50 school-level design projects to transform teaching over the next five years. Participants were school and systems-level leaders from DC Public Schools and some of the largest charter operators in the city.

• Transforming Teaching Playlist. This set of tools collects of the key tools and methods from the fall 2022 Transforming Teaching workshops.
• TTP - Design Principles intro and cards: A short pdf doc I designed explaining the design principles that ground the CityBridge Transforming Teaching project. The cards are designed to help introduce the principles to educators and let them tangibly interact with the concepts.
• 🎴TTP - Design Principles cards: A single page you can print and cut out into cards.