 Colleen Clark from Arlington, Virginia is pursuing a PhD in integrative design at the Stamps School of Art and Design. Her speech title is No Time Like The Present, Designing Real-Time Support for Novice Teachers. Please welcome Colleen. Imagine, this is your classroom at an elementary school, and it is your first week of teaching. You feel prepared, you know your lesson backwards and forwards, and you're excited to engage with the 25 students in front of you. You start your lesson, and everything's going great. Students are listening intently, and they're asking thoughtful questions. But suddenly, in the back of the room, you hear some noises, and a group of students are starting to laugh and giggle. And another student looks really upset with tears brimming in his eyes. Chaos erupts. You try to mediate the situation, but things are headed south fast, and this isn't what it was like when you practiced. You look around the room, and you realize you are the teacher, and you are alone. Considering this story, it might not surprise you that education has a little bit of a teacher attrition problem. Fifty percent of novice teachers leave the profession within the first five years of their teaching. That would be as if, in this whole room today, we were all new teachers together, and within five years, from you to you, half just left. Not just left your job, but left the profession entirely. And we know from literature and anecdotally, that novice teachers report experiencing isolation and lack of support, or some of the main drivers, or why they're leaving the profession. This is a really complicated, nuanced, challenging, wicked problem, and you know what profession loves wicked problems? Design. And I'm a design graduate student. Now, some of you may think of design as the process that leads to an iPhone or a cool-looking poster. But designers, we also create services, experiences, and systems. Maybe you took the bus to get here today. The bus route? Designed. Have you ever ordered anything on Amazon? The process from ordering to receiving that item at your doorstep? Designed. And that line for TSA screening Designed. Badly. Oh, so badly, but still designed. Design thrives in ambiguity, in exploring messy spaces, and finding a different kind of approach to a given problem. More and more companies, governments, and institutions are looking to designers and their skillsets to help address the challenges of the 21st century. Designers can be navigators and guides towards previously unseen connections leading to more sustainable solutions. And this frequently happens in the context of collaborations where designers bring together a bunch of different disciplines. So, how can design help with this issue of teacher attrition and teacher training? Before I answer that question, I want to tell you another story. This story won't take place in a classroom, it's in a hospital. And if you listen closely, I think you'll notice some interesting similarities and differences between the classroom and the operating room. Imagine you are a surgeon. You're about to remove the appendix from a healthy patient. A procedure that takes about 30 minutes, you've done it a ton of times before. You start the procedure, things are going smoothly. You're confidently making your first few moves. You go to make an incision and the patient's blood pressure just plummets. Their heart rate slows. Alarms start going off all around the room. Your stomach drops. Your heart begins to race. You panic. You are losing them. Your mentor, the supervising attending physician, is in the room with you. And she has decades of experience. She has seen this happen before. She calmly guides you. You follow her instructions. The patient lives. You learn. And now you know a different approach for the next time this kind of thing happens. You heard the difference, right? Physician had that mentor in the room. The physician was able to avert disaster while still learning. Can we apply this type of model to how we train our teachers? If teachers got this type of real-time support, would it make them even better? Make them maybe just maybe less likely to leave? Now, given what I've told you about designers, I'd love to say that a designer alone came up with this idea. But it actually came from Demoji here at the School of Ed at the University of Michigan. Demoji is leading a partnership with Detroit Public Schools to create a teaching school based and inspired by the model of a teaching hospital. And this teaching hospital will be at Mary Grove, the school at Mary Grove, which is a brand-new school that just opened this past fall. I've been collaborating with Demoji and her team to try to figure out which elements and components of the medical model could transfer to teacher training. But the medical model cannot and should not transfer in its entirety to training teachers. However, there are certain elements that could be a really interesting source of inspiration for offering a different kind of support for novice teachers. Physicians get so much hands-on experience during their training. And in those experiences, they get frequent and timely feedback in the moment and support. And trainees report that this type of experience, this type of support, is absolutely critical in their development as physicians. Teachers don't have that, and they deserve it. So do their students, our children. So let's go back to when your lesson was going off the rails. What would this look like, this real-time support in the classroom? Maybe you had a mentor teacher in the room with you, and she could model effective teaching strategies for you, or maybe expertly intervene on your practice when you needed that additional support. Some designer-lead type of approaches to this couldn't be from visual cues to sophisticated technology or somewhere in between. This here is a controversial example, and it's a strategy used recently by some schools. It's called a bug in the ear, and it's a process where as the teacher you would wear a Bluetooth earpiece, and then the mentor teacher would be in the back of the room with a walkie-talkie type of device and speak directly into it, guiding you in the moment without interrupting your lesson and be able to do that discreetly. Another possibility, maybe the mentor teacher has an app on her phone, and she records observations of your teaching in the moment, and then you have access to that same app, and you check it in between classes, and you can adjust your teaching strategy throughout the day. Or maybe this mentor teacher is like a catcher and baseball, and can communicate to you non-verbally your next move. Now, if you experience some of these as a novice teacher, hopefully you feel empowered and supported by this mentor teacher, and you stay, you excel, and you mentor others. What would society look like if we could reduce this attrition rate? This is what designers do. We move society towards preferred futures. Now, let's be honest. Would you want to be the patient in an operating room with a rookie surgeon alone? No, I don't think so, and the rookie surgeon doesn't want that either. So, why do we accept this lack of real-time support for our teachers and their students? This is the type of question design asks and strives to help answer. Thank you.