The d.school’s K12 Lab created the Positive Deviance Toolkit for Educators to help educators tackle intractable problems in schools.
Rather than seeking external solutions, this approach helps school teams identify existing "bright spots"—successful practices already working within their communities. Over two years, they worked with 15 schools across 11 countries to test and refine the toolkit, focusing on challenges like student belonging and assessment.
Using the Brilliance of our Communities to Find Existing Solutions to Persistent Problems
We’ve used the method of Positive Deviance, infused with the lens of human-centered design, to help educators find bright spots in their community. In doing so, we’ve also seen a shift in how folks approach problems. The problems that we use positive deviance to address are intractable. They are ones that are felt throughout the community. Ones that educators have tried to solve previously, but they continue to reemerge. These problems may have known practices that address them, but these practices have not been effective or have not taken hold. Positive deviance offers a path to explore why.
Bright spots are evidence of success without extra resources or outside expertise. They are areas impact where all other solutions have failed. Seeing this success and having confidence that it could be replicated has created a natural curiosity and excitement to explore what other problems can be explored and potentially ameliorated with a positive deviance process. Here’s an overview of positive deviance and how we’re using this practice with educators.
What happens when you move from “how might we?” to “how are we?”
From “what’s wrong here?” to “what’s right here, already?”
Positive deviance is a practice based on the belief that there is a bright spot within your community that has already found a solution for a sticky, intractable problem you are facing. Over the past two years, we have been exploring the potential for positive deviance in K-12 education. We have engaged over 100 educators from around the globe, working with schools that each represent the complexity, diversity, and opportunity we see across the education sector.
We are grateful for the work of Marian Zeitlin and her colleagues at Tufts University Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy for their foundational work, and for Richard Pascale, Monique Sternin, and Jerry Sternin for their 2010 book The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World’s Toughest Problems, which inspired our team in this project.
This is the positive deviance process.
This is positive deviance by design.
We created multiple resources for educators.
The Positive Deviance Toolkit
The K12 Lab’s Positive Deviance Toolkit for Educators brings together a suite of tools designed to help school teams identify and solve intractable problems by discovering and scaling their own existing local solutions.
This work is informed by what we learned through working with educators in applying positive deviance tools in their classes. These educators provided insight and feedback on the tools, process, and relevance in their community. We are so grateful for the support they provided, and are excited to share this toolkit as a reflection of their thoughtful work integrating positive deviance in their communities.
We hope that with the Positive Deviance Toolkit, communities will be able to embark on the process of observation, data collection, conversation, and finding solutions to share. We hope
that educators will be able to use it to dismantle inequity and barriers to students’ success, inclusion, growth, and joy. We hope that educators will be able to use it to further appreciate the brilliance that surrounds them — to recognize both what we need to end and what we need to amplify. The toolkit is not perfect (in fact, we’d still say it’s a prototype). However it has been a labor filled with intention, grace, and learning. We sincerely hope it offers
the same (and more) to educators and their students.
Here's how the toolkit was created.
After teaching a d.school class for university students and short-cycle testing some of the positive deviance tools in isolation, the K12 Lab brought the tools together to test them in sequence, as part of a complete toolkit. We put out a call to the community of educators who have engaged with the Lab. Educators came together in school teams to test a new set of prototypes in the service of trying to solve an intractable problem in the area of;
- Belonging: Our school needs to develop ways to ensure our students are safe and feel a sense of belonging; or
- Assessment: Our school needs a way to enable our educators in using new and existing assessment methods to improve students’ learning and personal growth.
Schools applied to address their own problems within one of these areas, and adapted the problem statement to better fit the contexts and needs within their schools. We were not looking for problems with technical solutions (like something a school could purchase or implement), but rather adaptive solutions, which would require most or all of the staff in the school to change their behavior. Also, in some cases, the general solution may already be known (e.g., students are more engaged with opportunities for authentic learning), in which case authentic learning might not be the solution, but rather the outlier teacher who figured out how to do this in a school where no one else does is where we hope the school community turns its attention.
Here's what teams did.
Fifteen schools from eleven countries were selected to participate in the prototype testing. This included trying the prototypes in their schools and engaging in weekly group sessions and team check-in calls. Schools included elementary, middle, and high schools, as well as public/district, charter schools and independent schools. School teams included individuals in a variety of roles and responsibilities across the school.
Together, they engaged in a process that took them from identifying a problem to finding local examples of people solving that problem to exploring how they might spread and scale those solutions internally.
Bright Spots
Using the positive deviance process, teams were able to identify a problem, uncover bright spots, and then make a plan to scale their bright spots.
To better understand the nature of the bright spots, we worked with a team of advisors to apply three types of filters: researcher, practitioner, and sorting.
Experts in each content strand reviewed the practices to determine at minimum that there was no significant evidence to suggest the practice described in the bright spot is dangerous or might cause harm.
Practitioners then reviewed the bright spots to determine if it would be possible for other practitioners to effectively use and adapt these practices. That is, we hoped that the expert practitioners would flag any practices that would be overly challenging to apply in a range of school settings.
To provide additional information and better understand the nature of the practices, we then coded the bright spots with eight sorting filters: who each was designed for (targeted universalism); who identified it (student or practitioner); whether the practice made purposeful use of digital technology; ability to be adapted for differentiated instruction; whether an equity lens was apparent to the team; and whether the bright spot was a practice (as opposed to a person or idea).
Scaling Impact Tool
We developed this tool for students during our d.school class Designing for More: Scaling Impact Within Education to uncover bright spots developed by successful high schools to improve their college admissions process.
How to use this tool.
Use this worksheet to organize your thinking, empathy work, and analysis as you define the problem, determine the positive deviants in your midst, seek what explains the positive deviants’ success, and quickly brainstorm ways to spread what they are doing.
Keep in mind that there’s no one right way to go through this process, but there is a logic behind figuring out who is succeeding against the odds, and seeing what they’re doing. Also, unlike the traditional approach to human centered design, you’re not doing empathy work to understand needs, but rather to find existing solutions. Your design work is not to create the solutions, but to work with the communities to uncover their bright spots and encourage more folks to do what you have discovered is already working in the field.
How to get started with positive deviance.
In this public goods project, as part of the Community Powered Assessment community of practice, we sought to create a more accessible set of activities and low barrier-to-entry tools that educators can use to try the process and mindsets in a “lighter touch” way, before engaging in a longer term project. We created the website, seekingbrightspots.com to offer a range of entry points and pathways to asset-based approach to problem solving.
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The issues that continue to emerge in education call for urgent, intentional action.
As the ones closest to the problem, we may have relevant solutions that we haven’t taken the time to examine. Educators are humble, and oftentimes don’t always want a spotlight on the incredible work currently being done to impact students.
Positive deviance helps us uncover how significant these practices, behaviors, and mindsets can be. It creates a pathway to share, learn, and create fuller educational and social spaces for students (and the rest of us too). We hope these resources will provide your school community with a new way of seeing the bright spots that already exist around you.
Credit
Devon Young, Peter Worth Jess Brown, Marc Chun
This work was primarily funded through grants from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation