Discovery
Recruitment
Session Planning
Building Relationships
Implementation
EvaluationEvaluation
Phase 6
Reflections and Impact
Exploring lessons learned and assessing Impact
During this phase, teams engage in a purposeful assessment, aiming to understand the impact of the fellowship or youth advisory group on participants and the broader community. Through careful evaluation, the goal is to extract meaningful insights that not only measure success but also inform future iterations, ensuring ongoing improvement and sustained positive outcomes. Jump in to this reflective journey as we navigate the evaluation process and celebrate the collective achievements of our Youth Fellowship!
Objectives
- Choose tools and processes that help you measure impact with youth, partners and for your own team
- Hold yourself accountable to making change for the youth, partners and for the field of education
Revisit Evaluation Objectives
It’s time to check in as a team, look back at your outcomes and start to pull your insights together.
Conduct Your Analysis
Watch recordings, do some qualitative coding, read back your chats, review youth reflection. Conducting the evaluation is all about scouring the narratives, trying to find themes.
Present Findings
Whether it’s your team or you are evaluating for a partner organization, find ways to share learnings and insights with the broader education field.
Design Sprint Detailed Notes and Design Sprint – Insights Report
Inform Future Iterations and Foster Accountability
Once you gather insights and decide what to share, it’s time to analyze what went will in your sprint. How did youth learn and grow? How did they connect? Ensure you and the team are self-reflective about your own process.
- Evaluate
Step 1/ Revisit Evaluation Objectives
You did it! Your sprint or focus groups are complete, and now it’s time to reflect. Go back to your session planning documents and look at your objectives. What questions did you ask, and what insights did you hope to gather?
- Checklist
Participant Interests and Skills
Take into account the preferences, interests, and skills of the potential youth participants. Consider conducting surveys or interviews to understand their areas of expertise and interest, helping you tailor the group structure to maximize participant engagement. This approach ensures that the selected format resonates with the youth audience, fostering enthusiasm and commitment to the co-design process.
Reflect on Session Objectives
Revisit your session planning documents and carefully examine the initial objectives set for the design sprint or focus groups. Identify the questions posed and the insights you aimed to gather during these sessions. This reflection serves as a foundational step to align the evaluation process with the intended outcomes of the fellowship. Ask yourself these questions:
- Have we met our objectives? What insights should be shared with our team or the broader ecosystem?
- Have we supported the youth well? Did they feel valued? What skills did they learn?
- In what ways will we hold ourselves accountable to the insights generated and lessons learned? How will we take action?
- Evaluate
Step 2/ Conduct Your Analysis
Engage in a careful and thoughtful evaluation process, analyzing the gathered data in relation to the defined objectives. Consider how you will use and share both quantitative and qualitative data. We advise that you do some basic qualitative coding to better understand the themes that arose.
One of the fun parts of leading design sprints is that some of the information, narratives, or experiences shared will unlock new ideas, pose new questions, or provide solutions to other topics. Utilize the assessment tools created by the BUILD team in the resource section.
- Checklist
Participant Interests and Skills
Take into account the preferences, interests, and skills of the potential youth participants. Consider conducting surveys or interviews to understand their areas of expertise and interest, helping you tailor the group structure to maximize participant engagement. This approach ensures that the selected format resonates with the youth audience, fostering enthusiasm and commitment to the co-design process.
Align with Partner on Insights
If you were supporting a partner to generate insights (and they aren’t directly for your organization), check in with your partner to see if you met the objectives set out. Ensure that the evaluation process aligns with the defined objectives. This alignment ensures that the evaluation provides meaningful insights into the success and impact of the Youth Fellowship.
Incorporate Qualitative Coding
Engage in basic qualitative coding to categorize and analyze the information, narratives, and experiences shared during the design sprint or focus groups. This coding process helps identify recurring themes, patterns, and noteworthy insights that emerged throughout the fellowship. It provides a structured way to extract valuable information and uncover unexpected ideas. You can explore how BUILD has done this in the Insights Report examples found in the resource section.
Utilize Assessment Tools
Check out the assessment tools provided in the resource section! These tools are designed to streamline the evaluation process and capture relevant data points. Ensure that the chosen tools align with the objectives and facilitate a comprehensive assessment of participant experiences, community impact, and overall success of the fellowship.
- Evaluate
STEP 3/ Present Findings
Compile the findings into a comprehensive report or presentation. Clearly articulate key insights, successes, and areas for improvement. We encourage team and organizations to host a session or meeting to present these findings to stakeholders (and if possible – include youth as co-presenters and leaders of this!)
For design sprints focused on improving something in education, we believe that there is a way to approach sharing your findings collaboratively so that more organizations can benefit from your learnings. This helps ensure transparency but also supports understanding of the fellowship’s impact, fostering collective ownership of the evaluation outcomes. Collective ownership and acknowledgement of insights means greater accountability to creating equitable systems and experiences for learners.
Below, you’ll find ideas for how to present findings more broadly.
- Checklist
Participant Interests and Skills
Take into account the preferences, interests, and skills of the potential youth participants. Consider conducting surveys or interviews to understand their areas of expertise and interest, helping you tailor the group structure to maximize participant engagement. This approach ensures that the selected format resonates with the youth audience, fostering enthusiasm and commitment to the co-design process.
Produce a Case Study
Develop a comprehensive case study showcasing the Youth Fellowship, highlighting key achievements, participant experiences, and the impact on the broader community. This end product serves as a detailed narrative, providing insights into the fellowship’s journey, outcomes, and the lessons learned.
Create Detailed Notes of the Design Sprint
Create detailed notes capturing the intricacies of the design sprint process. These notes should document the various stages of the sprint, including ideation, prototyping, testing, and participant interactions. Detailed notes serve as a valuable resource for understanding the fellowship and contributing to the Insights Report. Samples can be found below!
Create an Insights Report
Compile an Insights Report that synthesizes the evaluation findings, key insights, successes, and areas for improvement. This report should offer a comprehensive overview of the fellowship’s impact, drawing from the detailed notes of the design sprint. The Insights Report serves as a tangible document for stakeholders, facilitating a shared understanding and collective ownership of the fellowship outcomes. The BUILD team produces memos, decks, reports and webinars to showcase insights based on the partner’s needs.
- Evaluate
STEP 4/Inform Future Iterations and Foster Accountability
One of the aims of co-designing with the stakeholders closest to the issue at hand is that their voice influences, supports, and validates OR ADJUSTS your strategy. If and when we listen to youth but don’t make adjustments to our plan or can’t point to where their perspective was included in our product, plan, or vision, we are tokenizing them. Establish a system of accountability by committing to specific next steps. This not only ensures transparency but also cultivates a collective responsibility for the continuous improvement and sustained positive outcomes for youth participation.
- Checklist
Participant Interests and Skills
Take into account the preferences, interests, and skills of the potential youth participants. Consider conducting surveys or interviews to understand their areas of expertise and interest, helping you tailor the group structure to maximize participant engagement. This approach ensures that the selected format resonates with the youth audience, fostering enthusiasm and commitment to the co-design process.
Clearly Define Action Items
- Outline specific and actionable next steps based on the evaluation findings.
- Clearly define what actions need to be taken to address identified areas for improvement or capitalize on successes.
- Ensure that each action item is tangible, measurable, and has a designated responsible party.
Assign Responsibilities
- When working with external teams or partners, encourage them to assign responsibilities for each action item to individuals or teams who can make the change.
- Clearly specify who is accountable for the implementation of each next step. This ensures that there is a clear understanding of roles and responsibilities, fostering accountability among stakeholders.
Set a Timeline
- Establish a realistic timeline for the implementation of each next step.
- Define deadlines and milestones to track progress.
- As you grow your youth advisory group or as it becomes a Youth Fellowship, you’ll be able to communicate with youth throughout this process, providing an update, involving them in decision-making, and fostering an environment of open dialogue. This ensures that youth participants are informed, engaged, and actively contributing to the successful implementation of the identified next steps.
- Evaluate
Support Documents
Playbook Phases
Building Relationships
Best practices to ensure you are starting from a foundation of relationship-building
Implementation
Running your weekly (or daily or monthly) groups to capture insights, experiences and stories
Discovery
Building Relationships
Implementation
Recruitment
Session Planning
Implementation
Evaluation