From Pilot to Product: Gathering Insights

When field-testing novel approaches to teaching and learning, the Incubator emphasizes “failing early” and “adapting quickly.” The Incubator’s teaching and learning team collects insights from these small-scale, iterative pilots to strengthen and refine the approaches of its tools.

Intern Tyler Fox recently put this approach into practice, conducting a quick pilot of a lesson plan in progress with Smita Bhattacharya, Research Assistant at the Center for Health Decision Science (CHDS), and high school student, Kayla Ballas. 

Fox has been developing the lesson plan that explores the role of midwives and traditional birth attendants in maternal health care. In particular, the lesson examines how these health care workers can help combat the troubling racial disparities in health outcomes of mothers in the U.S.  The lesson requires students to take what they learn from a video on the subject and create a set of collages. 

Each collage—one focused on midwifery and one focused on physicians—are meant to represent and stimulate discussion about the stereotypes associated with each profession. The students then debrief through a facilitated discussion that connects how those professional stereotypes interact with the health determinants of pregnant people. 

“By creating the collages ourselves during the pilot,” says Bhattacharya, “we could help Tyler identify the instructions needing clarification or the questions that were more effective in reaching the lesson’s learning objectives.”

“It was helpful to see firsthand what stuck and what didn’t,” adds Fox. “The tangible feedback from this pilot will only improve the quality of the final product.”