LAUNCH Innovation Cohort: Transforming Education to Workforce Pathways through Design Thinking

Launch: Equitable Pathways for All is a national initiative that works to ensure that every learner has access to and the opportunity to succeed in high-quality, equitable pathways. Through Launch, two distinct cohorts, made up of 12 teams from 11 states, receive individualized coaching and support from a coalition of national partners:  Advance CTE, Education Strategy Group (ESG), ExcelinEd, Jobs for the Future (JFF), and New America. In June, we highlighted the self-assessment process the seven states teams in the Impact Cohort’s have completed to date. In this post, we are highlighting the Innovation Cohort, which includes five state teams employing a Design Thinking process to provide leaders with the time, space, and tools to re-imagine solutions for their state’s most intractable challenges. Over the course of two years, the Innovation Cohort will cross-convene and support teams in re-imagining and scaling new education to workforce systems that push the boundaries in the field.

Teams of state, regional, and local leaders from Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Ohio, and Texas make up the Innovation Cohort. During the first year of Launch, Innovation teams participated in four design sessions to ideate, iterate, and begin testing pilot concepts that would close equity gaps in college and career outcomes. The Design Thinking process foregrounds empathy research—surveying and listening to the needs of those impacted by the system—to catalyze more innovative solutions through a richer understanding of the system’s current inadequacies and challenges. As the teams develop and refine their pilot concepts, they are guided by the following Innovation criteria: focus on the user, blur the boundaries of our current systems, generate new types of collaboration, and provide opportunities for scale. By leveraging this criteria in their designs, teams and coaches hold themselves accountable to the spirit of the process.

Innovation Cohort lead Jerre Maynor, Senior Director at JFF, explained why the Design Thinking approach was appropriate for the Innovation Cohort, noting that “We wanted to create an environment to try new things, often nullified by either thinking too pragmatically or narrowing to what is tolerable in the current environment in their state or among state leaders. So, this was a way to create an insulated space to think outside of known practices and give teams a new process to move from idea to action and to be inspired and stretched by others doing similar work.”

The illustration below highlights how the Innovation cohort is re-imagining standard policy-making by prioritizing curiosity, ideation, and collaboration before taking action. Through the empathy research phase, Maynor observed that it “led to some of the stickiest reminders of why this collaboration is necessary and why these folks are coming to the table to create stronger collaborations… Ensuring people are reminded of who they are trying to serve, centering a specific [system] user.” 

Empowered with their reflections from empathy research, ideation and prototyping, state teams identified different challenges to address across the spectrum of college and career pathways. One team identified a need for a broader range of credentials of value to meet employer needs. Another determined that the state needed more transparent pathways options in high schools. And still another focused on a shortage of high quality career exploration options. Despite these differences, states found some common themes, too, including a need for better communication and support from school counselors and advisors, the continued impact of COVID-19 on students, and a desire for financial assistance and incentives to encourage uptake in apprenticeships and postsecondary opportunities. 

The team identified that there have been many comprehensive career pathways efforts built in Colorado, but unfortunately, most have not engaged postsecondary institutions from the start, and many have inequitable access and outcomes. Summit School District is looking to build its own pathways initiative and wants to ensure the district’s commitment to serving all students at the center. The team is working to support Summit School district at its closest postsecondary partner Colorado Mountain College (CMC) to identify new approaches to their work that center populations least likely to benefit from existing opportunities and to ensure strong postsecondary collaboration from the beginning. The goal is to embed and strive for equity with Summit’s strategy and execution and to create a model that CMC can retrofit at all 13 of its campuses.

In Illinois, the team is looking to use the FAFSA filing process to simplify the steps required to enroll in the state’s higher education system. Informed by data that FAFSA completion rates are highest for students from the state’s highest and lowest income brackets, the Illinois team’s intervention will target low and middle income students who generally do not complete the FAFSA or request a waiver. Instead of adding steps to the process of enrolling in postsecondary education, the team is focused on better utilizing their existing systems to simplify the transition from high school graduation to postsecondary education.  

The Innovation cohort is a solutions-oriented group. As such, teams have been eager to identify and implement solutions. Innovation coaches have worked closely with teams to highlight the need for patience and remind teams that challenges are a part of the design strategy. Maynor noted that one of the critical aspects of the process is “to add friction and drag so that [the teams] are not immediately going to the solution…so that they can think more fully about why they would go in a certain direction, how and why that would be different than what has already been tried. Purposeful collaboration is at the center of the process.” 

Looking forward, the teams will finalize their pilot concepts through the prototyping and testing stages of the Design Thinking process. Teams will engage in a cyclical process of testing their ideas with different audiences, anticipating intended and unintended consequences, and continuing to refine the concept to ensure the needs of the user are met. Once they are ready for implementation, the teams will set targets and identify metrics of success to analyze the extent to which their solution mitigates the challenges facing their target audiences and catalyze improvements in their education and labor pathways ecosystem. Based on each team’s goals, the outcomes will look different – some will attempt to make small shifts at a grand scale while others might focus on deeper, more complex interventions with a narrower scope. Each team will develop an implementation strategy for at least one pilot concept with the potential for scale fall of 2024.