This tool is designed to help design teams review prototypes to ensure that they are culturally relevant and advance racial and other forms of equity (e.g., gender, LGBTQ, English language learners and people with disabilities).

Creating healthy learning experiences means continuously examining where our own unconscious and conscious biases are showing up in our work. We do this by strengthening our individual and collective abilities to hold brave spaces to interrogate our own work. This protocol is designed to help build those muscles amongst a team.

We created this protocol based on several existing protocols that we have used over the years from the School Reform Initiative. It was originally designed for internal use on our team as we advance design work for the K-12 field, so it is oriented around students, but feel free to adapt it for your own contexts. While we identified five specific student identity groups, you may also want to add others based on your context.

How to use

This resource is designed to enable collective reflection. Therefore, it is best used: 

• Within a team that has already engaged in some training and courageous conversations about equity, identity, and privilege. 

• In a regular practice (for instance, scheduling a recurring monthly meeting for this purpose and having team members sign up in advance for slots). 

• In accompaniment with other individual and team activities for continuous learning aimed at elucidating unconscious and conscious biases, and with consistent reflective practice, such as journaling.

This protocol requires a presenter (one member or a small subset of your team) who comes prepared to succinctly share a prototype. It also requires a separate facilitator who helps hold the group norms and keeps time. 

Tips for facilitation:

• Work with the presenter beforehand to frame a good question – meet before the session to make sure the presenter is prepared to succinctly share their prototype.

• Stick to the time for each section – if you need help with keeping time, ask another team member (not the presenter) to volunteer to help you and/or use a timer. 

• Don’t be afraid to keep the group focused on the protocol – if someone raises a great question that is not relevant to the particular stage of the conversation, gently ask the participant to write it down and wait until you have moved on to the ‘final thoughts’ stage. 

• Resist the urge to skip the debrief – the debrief is a crucial way to deconstruct the conversation and improve the quality of our dialogue w/colleagues over time. 

• Be courageous and confident – strong facilitation is the key to having successful dialogue about our work and is appreciated by everyone in the group. If it helps to literally read each step to the group, by all means do so.

Update

To combat screen fatigue, we created an audio version of this tool. To visit that resource, click here.