d.Tech High School

d.Tech High School is located in Millbrae, California. d.Tech is a brand new school that launched in August of 2014. Our design challenge with d.Tech focused on helping the school develop a common language of learning in an emergent school culture. This was a particular challenge for the new school, as most students had entered in the fall, having come from a traditional educational setting. d.Tech utilizes technology to facilitate individualized learning. Students were struggling in this radically different

The K12 Lab Network observed at d.Tech and helped to design a process for the school team to gain empathy, ideate and design prototypes to learn about how to create a common language to describe learning.

Through our empathy work, we gained the following insights:

• Parents and students are programmed to view grades as the measure of learning
• Parents and students are programmed to view grades as the measure of learning
• There is an obvious tension between learning "process" and learning "content" and students were focused learning content as the only form of "real learning"

After gaining insights into how the students, parents and faculty were thinking and feeling about learning at the school, the d.Tech design team and the K12 Lab Network worked together to ideate and design a prototype around a physical display of student learning.

Our last day with d.Tech, we spent time debriefing the design team's learning from the display prototype. We also discussed the overall design process and worked with them to think about how they might continue to use this process to solve new challenges they face at a school.