I began this project in the Fall of 2019 as part of a Harvard Graduate School of Education consultancy team. Our team collaborated with CATES Tutoring and Educational Services to build a comprehensive education solution to implement in Maine.
We designed the project to secure a developmental collaboration between CATES and the Maine Department of Education (DoE). To do so, we tailored our solution to the key obstacles that the recently-appointed Maine Commissioner of Education was presently facing.
Research revealed the Maine DoE's two primary obstacles were:
1) Tackling apparent distrust in its system. Our initiative had to foster and perpetuate a new age of involvement in Maine education, thereby raising the expectations and confidence of teachers, students, and parents alike.
2) Growing educational capacity for new initiatives out of existing ones, thereby ensuring that the changes to come ‘stick’ while also respecting the expertise of teachers in the field.
Design process followed to uncover the Education challenges in Maine
To fill a statewide solution gap, our team used human-centered design strategies to formulate a multi-faceted, holistic strategy: the Dirigo Initiative. The Dirigo Initiative (Dirigo) was designed to assist the DoE with the key obstacles above, with the potential to scale statewide in under five years. Dirigo aims to do so through three components:
Media: a flagship television show (and accompanying digital content) that spotlights and humanizes real stories, innovations, challenges, and successes related to education in Maine.
Online: a website--built through grassroots collaboration--that jumpstarts education-focused discourse among stakeholders, and that provides a common collaboration space for teachers, ensuring that their professional development remains Dirigo’s primary focus
In-person: a series of community and county-scale events throughout Maine that serves to foster a culture of innovation in education and support the progress of every learner: teacher, parent, student, administrator.
These components seamlessly integrate and grow through user involvement, as Dirigo is designed to be crowdsourced and directed by Mainers in classrooms, at home, and in between.