Instituto Ayrton Senna's socio-emotional development platform for teachers
This project was developed during my time as UX Designer at Stefanini Brasil.
The main concept of this platform was to help teachers from public and private schools in Brazil to self develop their emotional abilities.
Teaching in Brazil is not easy. Our schools - in particular public schools -, have many structural gaps. Either by lacks in terms of physical space, suitable furniture, fair payment, or simply because some students are unable to dedicate themselves only to studying (and often have to work, even though they are minors, to guarantee the support of their families), our teachers have to deal with loads of emotional pressure summed up with the usual pressure of their profession. It's not uncommon to hear about burnout cases in the educational field, and these professionals are not usually supported in terms of mental health and development, or at least not in a proper way.
Working in partnership with Brazilian educators over the last few decades, Instituto Ayrton Senna has mapped out the need to develop fundamental socio-emotional skills for teaching practice. To materialize these requirements into a practical approach, IAS guided a series of lines of research, including literature review, review of competency models to describe the profession in occupation classification systems, and online empirical research with Brazilian educators.
In order for them to reflect on teaching practices that promote socio-emotional development, and know how to recognize, value and improve these same skills in themselves, IAS developed this program.
The components were made to be responsive, and the interface was thought based on a mobile-first approach. That way, we could explore our user's main access device (cellphone screens), use the smaller space wisely, and ease the coding for our devs.
Examples of some screens developed for the platform
One thing that was important for me to understand while I was developing this platform was that there would be no mandatory or unique route. Socio-emotional development needs to be a process that each person will follow – at a given moment, at an individual moment.
Thus, our team reflected on the challenge and came up with a suggestion of a step-by-step approach, but each educator could choose whether to follow it or not. Our 4-step approach started with filling a form based on self reflection of their main strengths and weaknesses, went on by developing a self development plan, continued by registering their progress and thoughts into a logbook and finally enrolling in one of the development programs of Instituto Ayrton Senna.
Inside the platform, the user could see the step-by-step approach and follow the path to self development by filling the quizzes about their emotional state, weaknesses, strengths and goals. These tools were developed by Instituto's pedagogues and was based off several psychological studies and tests made in partnership with their target audience
In the PDP section (acronym for Self Development Plan, in portuguese), the user was able to fill in the goals, plans, motivations and actions they would take in order to achieve what they wanted to develop in themselves. As the system kept everything registered and accessible at all times, the user could use this section as a guide to keep on track and avoid losing focus during their studies
The last step of the program was a logbook, where the teachers could keep a diary of sorts during their journey of self discovery and development. These registers were meant to serve as proof of how much they'd grown as they would go back and read it after completing one or more of their milestones, or they could also share their thoughts with their colleagues
By doing these steps (in any preferred order), the educators could grasp a big view of their points of improvement, their main difficulties and act on it, supported by the expertise of IAS's professionals.
