Leap - Building your Life project
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The document describes a mentoring program called Leap that aims to help high school students stay engaged in school by connecting their current education to their future goals. The program uses a mobile app and curriculum to guide students through self-reflection activities about their purpose and vision for the future. Students are matched with mentors to discuss these reflections and build relationships. The goal is for students to feel education is relevant to their lives and remain engaged in school and other activities through finding purpose. Initial learner studies suggest students found the reflective questions and mentor relationships impactful on how they think about their future.
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Leap - Building your Life project
- 2. Leap • Renata Citron MARIANA WANTS TO DROP OUT OF SCHOOL "I don't see any connection between what I learn in school and what I want in life" "My parents never finished school. They want me to go, but they don't know what's going on there."
- 3. Leap • Renata Citron WORLDWIDE DROPOUTS ARE A CONTINUING PR
- 4. Leap • Renata Citron A BIG PROBLEM FOR SOCIETY 2.7 4.4 5.2 7.4 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Bachelor's degree Some college, no degree High school diploma Less than a high school diploma Unemployment rate (%)* * Source: Current Population Survey, U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
- 5. Leap • Renata Citron ZOOMING INTO BRAZIL Only 56% of high schoolers in Brazil graduate by the age of 19. Todos pela Educação, 2015 16% of students aged 15-17 are not in school. Unicef, 2015 40% of dropouts are due to 'lack of interest'. Neri, 2009
- 6. Leap • Renata Citron How might we support high schoolers to make stronger connections between their school experiences and their future aspirations?
- 7. Leap • Renata Citron MENTORING HELPS STUDENTS STAY IN MENTORIN G RELATIONS HIPS Chronically absent high school students with Success Mentors were 52% more likely to remain in school the following year than equivalent comparison students who did not receive
- 8. Leap • Renata Citron GETTING STUDENTS TO ENGAGE IN SCH Students reflect on their sense of purpose Students establish trust relationship with their mentors Students learn about the connections between their future and their present Students feel the relevance of education to their future Students engage deeper in activities in and outside school "Models for action" Halpern, Heckman, Larson Student's purpose contribute to engageme nt Dweck, Walton, Cohen
- 9. Leap • Renata Citron A mentoring curriculum that helps high schoolers find value in school by finding purpose in their lives
- 10. Leap • Renata Citron 3 KEY ELEMENTS IN LEAP MENTORIN G RELATIONS HIPS MOBILE APPLICATI ON CURRICU LUM
- 11. Leap • Renata Citron HOW DOES LEAP WORK: Classroom Exp Self-reflection through activities in the app Class activities facilitated by an instructor
- 12. Leap • Renata Citron MOBILE APPLICATION: Dynamic activitie
- 13. Leap • Renata Citron MOBILE APPLICATION: Mentor stories
- 14. Leap • Renata Citron HOW DOES LEAP WORK: Mentoring Expe Students send messages to their mentors about their reflections in class once a week. Students meet the mentors in person once a month.
- 15. Leap • Renata Citron WHO ARE THE MENTORS? Similar background to students: • Went to public schools • Come from lower-income background • Lack of role models in their network Breath of profiles: • Professions/ Majors • Ages • Interests • Personalities
- 16. Leap • Renata Citron GETTING TO THE FINISH LINE LONG TERM GOALS: Increase high school completion rates Increase in student achievement Better self-knowledge of interests, passions and life projects INTERMEDIARY LEARNING OUTCOMES: Improvement of attitude toward school Interest in pursuing higher education and working Engagement in and outside school activities
- 17. Leap • Renata Citron COMPETITION PURPOSE CURRICUL UM MENTORI NG PROGRA MS MENTORIN G + CURRICUL UM
- 18. Leap • Renata Citron LEARNER STUDIES: Impact of media on s "It helped me visualize the future and kind of put myself in the
- 19. Leap • Renata Citron LEARNER STUDIES: Impact of mentoring "I really liked the idea of having a mentor and having to think about how you could do
- 20. Leap • Renata Citron LEARNER STUDIES: Impact of Storytelling "The mentors' videos made me think about my future in ways that I haven't thought about before. They broadened
- 21. Leap • Renata Citron NEXT STEPS Pilot the curriculum in a school in Brazil Engage mentors Develop content on the mentors Revise the curriculum Train the instructors
- 22. Leap • Renata Citron THANK YOU Insightful advisors: Karin Forssell Paulo Blikstein Brigid Barron Denise Pope Keith Bowen Soren Rosier Generous donors: Reece Duca Friendly contributors: Aliza Hoffman Kimiya Hojjat, Paloma Martinez Zulfiya Hamzaki
- 23. Finding value in schoolby finding purpose in your life.
- 24. Thank you!
- 25. Leap • Renata Citron DESIGN PRINCIPLES Empower users Scaffold self-reflection in tangible and interactive ways Mobile-first light application
- 26. Leap • Renata Citron GETTING STUDENTS TO ENGAGE IN SCH Students reflect on their sense of purpose and believe it’s possible to succeed in their life plans Students establish trust relationship with their mentors Students learn about the connections between their future and their present Students feel the relevance of education to their future Students engage deeper in activities in and outside school
- 27. Leap • Renata Citron LEARNER STUDIES: Results "I liked how the questions required me to reflect a lot about issues I don't really think about often but are really important." 10th grader
- 28. Leap • Renata Citron THEORY OF CHANGE Students establish trust relationship with their mentors Students learn about the connections between their future and their present Students engage deeper in activities in and outside school Students reflect on their sense of purpose and believe it’s possible to succeed in their life plans Students feel the relevance of education to their future "Models for action" Halpern, Heckman, Larson Scaffoldin g Vygotski Student's purpose contribute to engageme nt Dweck, Walton, Cohen Self- efficacy Bandura Purpose Damon
Editor's Notes
- Hello, my name is Renata and I'm here to present you to LEAP. But let me start by asking you to think of yourself when you were 15. Did you know what you wanted to do? Did you think that school was going to get you there? You probably felt that it was going to get you to college at least, right? But what if you didn't think you could go to college, what was the point of finishing school? Well, that's a big reality for a lot of high schoolers. In my country alone, Brazil, only 56% of students finish high school and only 14% of goes to college. That's a big problem that gave me the motivation to design LEAP, a mentoring curriculum powered by technology to support high schoolers find value in school by finding purpose in their lives.
- So meet Mariana, a high schooler that inspired me to design LEAP. She is a high schooler from a low income area in Brazil that wants to drop out of school. There she is required to take various classes that seem very disconnected to real life. Her parents didn’t finish high school and don’t really understand what goes on in his school. She’s bored and doesn’t see the point of attending school.
- You might think that this is not a big challenge anymore as US has very low dropout rates now, but unfortunately this is not a reality in most places in the world, including in my country Brazil where a big % of students do not graduate from high school.
- But why should they graduate? Well, research shows that having a secondary degree impacts substantially on your employability, as you can see from this chart. But worse, research also shows that high school dropouts have a higher probability to feed the so-called school o prison pipeline, turning to illegal activity as a form of income.
- So zooming into Brazil, where I plan to bring LEAP to, we have a big challenge in dropouts. Only 56% of high schoolers graduate at the age of 19. That means that 16% students aged 15-17 are not in school. And the #1 reason on why they actually leave is lack of interest, Essentially they don’t the connection between what they learn learn and their future.
- HOW MIGHT WE HELP HIGH SCHOOLERS like Mariana to MAKE STRONGER CONNECTIONS BETWEEN THEIR SCHOOL EXPERIENCES AND THEIR FUTURE ASPIRATIONS? And here I'm specifically targeting students that are in high school in public schools where the students come from low-income communities and where they don'’ have role models.
- I emphasize mentoring because during my research about the challenge of dropouts, I found this program in NYC that served as a great inspiration for me. The NYC Success Mentor Corps was a public policy in which students in public schools were matched with mentors as part of were matched with mentors as part of a task force to reduce truancy and increase school engagement. And as a result, students who had a mentor were 52% more likely to stay in school in the following year. So this project was a great inspiration for me as it was implemented in large scale as a public policy, but it didn’t involve technology, so I was actually intrigued with how technology could contribute to this opportunity and went to investigate further.
- OK, so we want students to have mentors and we believe that this will lead them to engage more in school. So how do we get there? Well we will start by getting them in trust relationships with mentors, which relates to a research done by by Halpern, Heckman and Larson that states that adolescents learn most when they watch, listen to, and copy the experience of role models, what he calls "models for action". Then with the mentor's guidance and modeling, students will reflect about their sense of purpose and believe they can succeed in life Then students will be able to connect their future to their present and see the relevance of their education And as a result, students will engage deeper in activities inside and outside school
- The solution that I developed is LEAP, a mentoring curriculum that helps high schoolers find value in school by finding purpose in their lives.
- SO there’s 3 key elements in LEAP: 1) A mobile application with prompts and stories of mentors that serve as starting points for their own self-reflection process. 2) A curriculum in which facilitators would use the prompts in the app as discussion starters for in class activities in a school or after school program. And 3) Mentoring interactions in which a mentor will guide students in their self-reflection a relationship facilitated by the prompts in the platform. And this mentoring piece is something that I really want to focus on.
- So going through an actual case of how this would work in Mariana's case: Mariana will have in her public school a class called Life Project, which is actually something that will be required with the high school reform in Brazil. In that class, she will have access to the app, that will give her self-reflection prompts. Those prompts will also lead to discussions and in class activities that would be facilitated by an instructor. The instructor will be a teacher at the school who will follow a curriculum that comes along with the app.
- For convenience purposes, I The activities in the curriculum will be dynamic and interactive prompts to support Mariana to reflect about her life project. Activities like choosing a meme to describe her school experience or choosing pictures to explain how she would envision her future. The objective here is to turn self-reflection into a fun and less daunting activity by using media that they relate better with. They could also bring their own media
- Another key part of the experience will be the mentoring component, in which students will have access to mentors' stories through inspiring small videos in which mentors model responses to some self-reflection questions. The students are also prompted to ask questions to the mentors.
- These questions and weekly reflections will be sent to mentors through an online chat feature in the app so that students can communicate with their mentors once a week. Once a month the school hosts mentor-students get togethers. These mentors are members in the community that
- Students want to see mentors that are like that Mentors are people with a similar background to the students, people who also went to public schools as well, come from lower-income families and had lack of role models in their lives. There will be a breadth of mentors with different professions, personalities and interests to appeal to different students.
- From other research based on mentoring programs, I identified the main metrics related to interventions like this. The long term goals would be to increase completion rates at high schools and student achievement. But as intermediary goals, the program should help students in increasing their self-knowledge of interests, passions and life projects, Improvement of attitude toward school, interest in pursuing higher education and working, and engagement in and outside school activities
- In terms of the competition in the space, there's a segment of solutions that offer structured curricula to be implemented in schools or universities related to purpose finding, like Echoing Green, Project Wayfinder, Purpose Project or Future project but they don't address the lack of role models issues for students. Then, there is a segment of programs related to mentoring like Spark, which is focused on professional goals and Big Brothers Big Sisters, which is more focused on promoting relationships, but they're not as intentional on connecting the school experience with the student's purpose. Finally, there are a few programs that I drew a lot of inspiration from like Icouldbe and imentor that partner with schools to implement a structured curriculum and set up mentoring relationships. So I went beyond what they did and leveraged the power of technology to offer students mentor's stories to get inspired with and by creating interactive and dynamic activities, increasing the ability of students' to self-express.
- After studying research, the competition, talking to experts, I created a few interactions that I tested with students in Brazil and US. So in this first study, I created a set of activities for students to think about their present and their future, like this mind mapping for them to think of their present and the selection of pictures for them to envision their future. As you can see from the quote, in which the student says that the pictures helped him to put himself in the image, the hypothesis that media helped them to express themselves better really worked.
- Then I decided to set up a few mentoring relationships and create a few prompts to guide them so that I would study what worked in those interactions more in depth. What I learned from that was that building TRUST with mentors is key for learners, the activity prompts were important to drive conversation and that having similar background (same gender, similar interests) was also very relevant. Also, I realized that getting students to open up and finding mentors with similar background was very challenging.
- So I decided to leverage the affordances of technology to work on those two challenges. I created an interaction with technology in which students watched videos of their mentors introducing themselves and modeling responses to self-reflection questions. I realized that students felt more comfortable by learning about the mentors on video and got inspired with their answers when they were thinking about their own answers.
- So, as next steps, I have a school lined up in Brazil to pilot the program in the second semester. So I need to engage mentors, develop more content on that community, revise the curriculum and train the instructors in that school. So I'd really love your feedback also on any red flags that I should be aware related to any of those next steps, especially on how to partner with schools.
- And to finalize, I really appreciate the support of my insightful advisors, generous donors and friendly contributors who helped me make this project happen.
- And I hope with LEAP we can solve Mariana’s and many other student’s challenge in funding value in school, by finding purpose in their lives. Thank you very much. At the end of the school we hope that you want find value in school Pause By finding purpose in your life
- And I hope with LEAP we can solve Mariana’s and many other student’s challenge in funding value in school, by finding purpose in their lives. Thank you very much. At the end of the school we hope that you want find value in school Pause By finding purpose in your life
- So to tell you in short about the design process to create LEAP, I left off with a few design principles in mind which were to empower users to believe in themselves and inspire them to think of a future, to scaffold their self-reflection in tangible and interactive ways and to use a mobile-first light application as I know this is a challenge for implementation of technology in schools in Brazil and the mobile penetration is much bigger.
- OK, so we want students to have mentors and we believe that this will lead them to engage more in school. So how do we get there? Well we will start by getting them in trust relationships with mentors, which relates to a research that states that adolescents learn most So the theory of change that is behind LEAP is that: Students establish safe relationships with their mentors Then with the mentor's guidance and modeling, students will reflect about their sense of purpose and believe they can succeed in life Then students will be able to connect their future to their present and see the relevance of their education And as a result, students will engage deeper in activities inside and outside school
- In terms of actual results of the last user testing I did, I got very positive feedback that the activities helped them think about their present, their future and relate to their present. They especially emphasized the value of the interactive activities like memes since they were relatable and the value of the videos to help them think about they often don't reflect about. The final design is a result of 3 different iterations by 3 different learner studies. In the first, we discovered that students really saw themselves in the media and it helped they scaffold their self-reflection and interactive way. I the second, students were connected with real mentors and I learned that they really appreciate having mentors and the activities
- And the foundations for this model come from theory and research like the "models for action" described by Halpern, Heckman and Larson in which adolescents learn most when they watch, listen to, and emulate the experience of role models. Self-efficacy It also considers that these mentors will not only be able to model but also scaffold the learner's development, understanding the student and scaffolding their path toward an aimed goal. it also relies on research from Bill Damon related to purpose which is student's long term goals. And the research from Dweck, Walton and Cohen showing that students identification of their purpose contributes to their engagement and tenacity in learning goals.