Section 2 – STAGE 5
STAGE 5: SPOT THE OPPORTUNITIES
This is the final stage of your participatory workshop with the students. At this stage you have really gathered a lot of insights. No time to rest though! Keep going. Students will enjoy this final bit of the workshop as they will see a real purpose of their input. Spotting opportunities for improvement will be enabled by the visual journey maps that have uncovered multiple pain points as well as areas of real joy and enjoyment. These emotional points your students have recorded – both good and bad – present many opportunities for improvements, new initiatives or perhaps letting go off something that isn’t working. You could actually complete your programme review process here if you feel you may need more time to digest all those findings from your own research and from the participatory session with the students.
We suggest to keep the momentum and get the student groups identify 3 priorities that would make the programme event better and 3 things that have to remain as they are because they make the programme so good. This is done well when you provide them with a red and green sticky dots or red and green pens that they can use to highlight these 3 opportunities and 3 must remain things on their personas’ journey maps. Give them 15-20 minutes to do that and ask each group to debrief their points onto separate blank posters you have pre-prepared (2 flipchart sheets).
Each group presents their 3 opportunities first and your role is to get into a coaching mode and try to tease out what is it that is frustrating about these points and how they may be turned into better experience. Let me give you a few examples that will demonstrate the importance of refraining from jumping into solutions or disregarding some of the points the students make. Your role at this stage is to identify the roots of these problems or the attributes of the positives, not just symptoms that students identify.
Here are a few diverse examples so that you can see how valuable seemingly study unrelated points could be:
Students point out that career support is not accessible and that is why they do not engage with it. It is very tempting to start being defensive but try to explore it further by asking more questions:
– What do mean by not being accessible – is it the time of the sessions or the staff availability?
– What would work better for you?
– What would an accessible support look like?
– How would we ensure that you can attend it when you need?
– What would help you engage with the support?
– And so on …
Through non-judgmental questioning you will be able to determine the root of the problem, which in this example was timing of the careers support and confusion caused by the information overload related to career provision.
Students record a real low point at the time of their first exam. Again, you may be tempted to say: “well, I cannot do anything about this, it is an exam and you need to get on with it”… I know you would never say anything like that! By exploring what is it about the exam, you may find out that this is the first time students take an exam in a new education system and they had no idea what to expect, or the room where they took an exam was very cold, or they were confused about using calculators …or something else that can be probably fixed really easily. Nobody is asking you to replace the exam, perhaps just prepare students better, give clearer instructions, run a few mocks.
Students record a very positive high emotions associated with coach trip to a nearby city’s careers fair. The trip has always been paid from the departmental budget. This trip occurs in the first week of their degree programme and the impact on their actual employability is low. However, the impact on being together as a cohort, having to dress up professionally, prepare their CVs and talk to potential employers together with their friends has a significant impact on their confidence and sense of programme support.
One year the department decides to cut their budget and the careers fair is proposed as an unnecessary luxury. This assumption was verified through the intelligence collected in the emotional journey mapping, which contributed to a case made to continue this activity. This example shows how decisions made based on pure statistical measure could damage the overall programme experience.
Students report a very low emotion in week 1 associated with the lecture theatre designated for that particular cohort. The programme director wanted to impress students on arrival and arranged for the best equipped lecture theatre just for that one welcome week. In week 1 when students are transferred to their home lecture theatre that is significantly older with hard seat chairs and low lighting, the cohort’s mood is negatively impacted and the programme team starts experiencing many complaints.
This example demonstrates how events are interconnected and how one event can affect another. Perhaps if the students were in the less comfortable lecture theatre from the start and could influence some quick improvements to be implemented such a change of chair padding, more access to electric plugs and better lighting, the overall experience would have been much more positive.
Little test of your designer ability - are you up for it?
At the end of your lecture, you put a slide up with the assessment deadline. You ask if there are any questions. Nobody puts their hand up so you finish the class and start packing to leave. A group of students approach you as you are leaving and ask:” When is the assessment deadline, please?” You will:
A
Get really frustrated and say that it was on the slide.
B
Repeat the deadline and ask them to pay more attention next time and march off.
C
Repeat the deadline and ask if there is anything else they need to clarify about the assessment.
I can only hope you have selected the correct answer and I know that this was not an easy one! We often ask obvious questions when we are confused, unsure and ashamed to ask for help.
Tips: Stay with these important topics to properly explore what is behind the low points identified in the journey maps and note down the students’ proposals. It is good to record these so that you can later share with the wider programme team or with other colleagues when you are trying to find the right solutions. Do the same for the good points to learn what it is students really appreciate about the positives and think about how you may implement the same process to turn the negatives into positives.
Give this final section of the workshop enough time and space. You do not need to have answers for everything there and then. Go around all groups, note down and record the main points and thank everybody for their energy and involvement. Outline the next steps and explain what you are going to do with the information gathered.
It is useful to have a bit of a celebration at the end of the session, little cake and a few photos with students. It is also useful to ask them for some feedback about the session – they can write a short note, a postit or tell you. It will be very rewarding, I can guarantee that!
Students usually report a great sense of pride, feeling of being valued, being heard and being able to share their journey and actually realise they all shared very similar frustrations, fears and also enjoyments.
Expected outputs
Student groups will come up with their main points and you will start seeing some repetitions or patterns arising from the discussions. Each group will circle the good points in green and the challenges in red on their journey maps. It is useful to keep the journey maps and record the context of these highlighted areas. There may be events before and after that have been also affected. From these discussions you can create a list of priorities to address and separate to short and long term.
Your inclusive programme review has been completed! Congratulations!
Now the hard work starts and equipped with these new insights, you will embark on a journey towards making your programme even better than it already is. The final task is to pull it all together and go back right to stage 1 to see how you can now connect all the evidence and insights to support your plan for implementing the improvements.
Reflection
Before we award you your most important badge, reflect on what you have learnt and note down your own journey through this process. Why not creating your emotional journey map?
YOUR PROGRESS
Your badge is here!
