Building a human-centered foundation for teacher empowerment in Ghana

User Research, User Experience, Design Research, Education, STEM

Introduction

The Practical Education Network (PEN) is a non-governmental organization with a mission to invigorate West African STEM education and enable an interactive, experiential learning environment. It achieves this through its range of products: training workshops, lesson guidebooks, networking services, and science toolkits that empower teachers to explore hands-on activities with low-cost and locally available materials. The organization was founded in 2015 by MIT alumna Dr. Heather Beem and is headquartered in Accra, Ghana.

I had the privilege of working with PEN as a Fellow with the D-Lab at MIT. The team at the time consisted of Dr. Beem, Samuel Adafia, and about three part-time workers and interns. I was the sole and Lead Researcher spearheading this project, though the small-team nature meant that we collaborated intensely across all functions.

The Challenge

PEN had been in operation for about two years by the time I arrived, providing workshops and materials to teachers throughout the Greater Accra region. Even though teachers were reporting high satisfaction with the PEN training workshops and materials, there was concern that teachers were not actually implementing those activities in their own classrooms. PEN wanted to discover the challenges and pain points teachers were facing in employing PEN activities and learning methods in their own classrooms, as well as their goals and motivations in teaching. This would allow PEN to better align their products with their users and inform the design of future services. PEN also needed to establish a cost-effective means of systematically gathering information from their users.

Approach & Process

Desk Review + Journey Mapping + Theory of Change

The first step was to understand the problem, determining key stakeholders, building context, and operationalizing our research questions into variables and dimensions of interest. I invested much time reviewing the organization, going through documents on their programs and other administrative data, and familiarizing myself with the context in which PEN operated - Ghanaian culture and history, education system, teacher-training system, policies impacting schools and students, economic landscape with particular focus to opportunities for youth, etc.

I then worked with the organization staff to map the user journey with PEN’s products, roughly fleshing out the teacher’s experience before, during and after interacting with PEN. This helped us hypothesize their sentiments and potential pain points in the broader context of their goals, as well as articulate assumptions upfront before validating in-field. We also worked to plot PEN’s social impact goals using a theory of change. Theories of change are a common tool in the social impact / non-profit space, helpful for mission-oriented organizations that intentionally seek to bring about sustainable social outcomes. Articulating the process by which PEN hoped to induce positive change ensured that activities and outputs were aligned with long-term impact goals. It would also later serve us in establishing more rigorous metrics for performance measurement (another key deliverable in this project, but not discussed here). Together, we mapped key stakeholders along axes of power and interest with regards to PEN programming - a helpful starting point to identify potential informants.

These tools juxtaposed provided a holistic overview of how and where PEN’s goals and products fit into the user journey.

(Note that my inclusion of the theory of change here does not necessarily mean that I endorse it as a standard part of the UX or product design process, however its usage for this project was relevant and fruitful.)

Contextual Inquiry + Interview

After identifying relevant groups of stakeholders, I prepared various interview guides and selected a sample of schools throughout Greater Accra to visit and speak with science teachers trained by PEN. After review and pilot phases, we commenced research: myself and at least one other PEN representative traveled to selected schools and interviewed teachers and stakeholders regarding their goals, values and motivations as a teacher, as well as the challenges and obstacles they faced implementing PEN products and learning methods in the classroom. This method also allowed us to dive deeply into teachers’ processes and behaviors in determining and preparing their classroom activities, uncovering shared (yet nuanced) foundational values that guided their daily practice, as well as wider systemic context that affected all aspects of the classroom. We also spoke with other stakeholders such as school headmasters, education influencers, other non-profit leaders, students, and ministry representatives - these interviews gave us a much more comprehensive perspective on the topic and built upon what teachers self-reported, allowing for much more holistic service and product design later on.

In addition to learning more about how science teachers prepare their lessons, I wanted to observe how they delivered their lessons during the class session and how a typical school-day proceeded. I observed a small handful of classrooms but in the end decided to not use the data. I saw that my presence caused people often to modify their behavior and, most likely, act in ways unrepresentative of their normal behavior. In hindsight, an observation study may have been more successful if I had a longer timeframe to become a fly-on-the-wall, or perhaps through remote observation of some sort.

Each interview was transcribed by hand and analyzed, coding by predetermined variables of interest as well as new and emerging themes.

Survey Design + Guerilla Testing + A/B Testing

A secondary goal of PEN’s was to determine the most cost-effective means of reaching users and eliciting responses. To this end, I tested four different survey models: SMS surveys, SMS surveys with an incentive, WhatsApp surveys, and WhatsApp surveys with an incentive. I selected SMS and WhatsApp as these were stated by PEN staff and Ghanaian friends to be the most responsive and accessible communication platforms in Accra (as opposed to email). We also wanted to see if adding a small incentive—being entered into a raffle to receive phone credit—might increase response rates.

Though the main variable of interest was response rate, I still wanted to make sure that the survey itself was relevant and well-designed. I consulted the literature around survey design and referenced publicly available surveys in education and teacher training to inform our own survey. I then pre-tested the survey at a large PEN training conference a number of times with teachers in passing. This guerilla testing method allowed me to do a quick-and-dirty screening for language, understanding, flow, and get fresh perspective and feedback on overall design of the survey.

Once we finalized the survey, I ran an A/B test by randomly selecting and assigning 5% of PEN’s total user base to each survey method. The participants in each group received a message with a link to the survey and instructions, and were then given a week to respond. After a week, I compared response rates while noting any technical issues we encountered through the process.

Synthesis & Impact

The insights we gathered allowed us to deeply understand teachers’ experiences with PEN, in their classrooms, and how PEN’s products fit into their own journey. We went on to ideate new product and service prototypes that would address users’ concerns and enable them to experience further success with PEN. We also developed key organizational metrics and performance indicators, and established more systematic user research processes. Contact me to learn more about the key insights we uncovered, the actionable recommendations and strategy for moving forward, and my personal takeaways (as well as tips for navigating Greater Accra’s tro-tro system - there’s method to the madness).

Deepest gratitude to Dr. Heather Beem, Samuel Adafia, and Evans Sackitey for trusting me with their dreams and passions for the youth of Ghana, as well as to all the people who shared their precious experiences with me.

“Timothy was an extremely valuable asset to PEN. He displayed a high level of organization and initiative. He came out with a thorough structure for his project, which was easy and flexible for me to plug into. In order to meet the project’s needs, he displayed resourcefulness in filling in the gaps in both his and my own experience. Given that the scoping of the work was bigger than realistic for this timeframe, I was impressed by his constant commitment to make progress, even going above and beyond. He displayed key qualities for research – good listener, empathetic, perceptive, able to quickly adapt to life in Ghana, joyfully threw himself into the work and integrated with the community, and flexibly adapted to changes. In terms of the output, he has left us with a solid foundation and we are confident that we can now put the gears into motion.”

- Dr. Heather Beem, Founder & CEO

See more photos from my time in Ghana here.