The Designing for Social Systems program at the d.school, aimed to develop and teach design practices that integrate methods from human centered design, systems thinking, and strategic planning, all grounded in a commitment to equity and anti-racism.
Our mission is to support leaders and their organizations to bring about positive change in the world. We have seen how adopting design practices can help create that change.
With limited resources, social impact organizations must understand complex challenges and innovate on their approaches and interventions, all while running their existing day-to-day programs. This is where the d.school can help.
Designing a sex ed program for students with developmental disabilities: How Denver Public Schools used human centered design to reinvent sex ed.
When sex education specialist Rose Barcklow joined Denver Public Schools (DPS) in 2017, she knew she was taking on a big job. DPS is the largest school district in Colorado with over 200 schools, 90,000 students, and 4,700 classroom teachers. In Colorado, there is no statewide mandate or unified curriculum for sex education. However, there is a policy which states that if students do receive sex education, it’s required to be age– appropriate, medically accurate, and comprehensive in nature.
Studies around sex education are clear: Students who receive comprehensive sex education are less likely to experience unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections, and students who receive education on healthy relationships and consent experience less sexual violence and teen dating violence. Studies also show that students with disabilities benefit from sex ed just as much as their peers. These are students who are growing up, going through puberty, and experiencing sexual feelings like all young adults. Yet they are often told that they are not sexual beings or that if they act on these feelings something bad will happen. Often they are disregarded completely around sexuality. So why is sex education not more of a priority for this group of students?
Applying a human centered design approach.
Rose recognized that a Human Centered Design (HCD) approach was an ideal methodology to create a sustainable, comprehensive system for sex education in DPS. Sex education is a sensitive topic: She needed to approach the design by centering students and teachers rather than basing the program on external curriculum mandates. Early on in her tenure, Rose completed a round of ethnographic research by interviewing teachers, students, and parents. Rose learned that teachers’ comfort with teaching the subject is often the barrier to providing comprehensive sex education to students. This provided her with a launching point to begin to redesign a comprehensive sex education program for DPS.
Her research, however, also revealed a surprising insight related to sex education for students with disabilities. While most teachers showed some interest in finding ways to fit sex education into their full schedules, teachers of students with disabilities were extremely interested. They shared that sex education was one of the biggest pain points and needs in their special education classrooms.
Rose also heard from students with disabilities that they were interested in learning about adolescence and puberty. They want to understand the changes occurring within their bodies, how to develop romantic relationships and friendships, and understand how
to say no to unwanted advances. She discovered that students wanted to learn about where they could go for sexual health services like birth control, condoms, and menstruation management. It was clear there was a need for more inclusive sex education.
Building Rose's and her team’s HCD capacity.
In December 2019, Rose attended the Stanford d.school’s Designing for Social Systems workshop. The workshop provided frameworks and methods for how to integrate Human Centered Design, Systems Thinking, and Strategic Planning approaches with her unique work. It also brought clarity to the benefits of completing full cycles of design where research leads to insights, idea generation, experimentation, and implementation—a path to create a sustainable program.
Following the workshop, Rose prioritized using the HCD process for comprehensive sex education for students with disabilities because of the high need, high interest, and unique opportunity to work alongside students with disabilities to create a program for and with them.
The d.school program helped Rose figure out how to move past some of the barriers she was facing in applying an HCD approach within a large organization. She realized a number of organizational factors were preventing successful design work, such as making decisions without substantial input from teachers and students, a lengthy approval process to move forward with prototyping, and competing priorities that often demanded immediate attention and took time away from the HCD process.
Rose wrote several grants to expand the team to three individuals so that they could engage deeply in a design process and provide adequate staffing for comprehensive sex education for students with disabilities. Rose hired Rebekkah Abeyta who would specifically focus on creating Adapted Sex Education for students with disabilities. Also recognizing the difficulties to complete robust design work in a large system, Rose included a consultancy budget in the grant to bring someone on to prioritize completing the process. With her team in place, Rose was able to move forward with the capacity to take on the challenge.
A design process: Designing for students with disabilities.
Starting with an Ethnography Phase,the team interviewed a total of thirty-one individuals: nine students with disabilities and twenty-two adults with roles such as paraprofessionals, teachers, social workers, health educators, parents, and a speech and language pathologist. As interviews were completed, Rose and Rebekkah did deep synthesis work to make sense of all the information.
Through this process, one fundamental insight became clear: Students with disabilities are often left behind or left out of sex education because it is assumed that students with disabilities won’t have opportunities to form healthy, romantic relationships.
To kick off an Ideation Phase, the team invited key adults to participate in two, two–hour working sessions via Zoom. In these sessions, the group brainstormed possible solutions, mapped ideas according to their feasibility, and ranked and prioritized the ideas they collectively decided would be easy to implement and have the most impact on student learning. The team concluded with several key ideas to prototype.
In Fall 2020, seven months after starting the design research, Rose and her team prototyped and tested an Adapted Sex Ed Program. The program was piloted in five middle and high school classrooms serving fifty-one students. Over the course of the next year, Rose and her team continued to iterate and improve the programming.
Conclusion
The demand for the Adapted Sex Ed Program is at an all–time high, and DPS continues to have a waitlist for schools to receive programming. As of Spring 2022, programming is taking place in twenty classrooms, and there’s a waitlist of nine classrooms wanting programming to start as soon as possible. As the program continues to evolve, Rose and her team continue to improve their offerings. The success of the program can be traced back to Rose’s belief that a design approach was beneficial and worth investing in to do the work. The challenge demanded that Rose and her team understand the experience and needs of different people, imagine new possibilities, and take a very iterative approach to shaping the program—and it paid off.
Read more about this case study here.
Credits
Thomas Both and Nadia Roumani