By Design

Since joining the Ed School while working on his doctorate, Lecturer David Dockterman, Ed.D.’88, has straddled the worlds of production and research, bringing his more than four decades of experience designing educational technology into the classroom.

Dockterman’s long-time HGSE course, Innovation by Design, has inspired generations of students to bring evidence-driven approaches to designing educational materials. Now, students are getting the chance to put those skills to use for real clients while still in the classroom through his new education product practicum. 

“Since we redid the master’s programs, we have a much larger Learning Design, Innovation, and Technology (LDIT) cohort, and many of those students are moving into learning design,” Dockterman says. “This is an opportunity to give them a closer bridge to what that looks like, with organizations that are designing to make impact at scale. This gets them contributing to something that’s real, not just a theoretical or academic exercise.”

The practicum was offered as a six-week course this spring, with a dozen students serving as design consultants for a real-life client. For this first iteration, students worked with Slam Out Loud, a nonprofit in India founded by Jigyasa Labroo, Ed.M.’22, that uses poetry, storytelling, theatre, and visual arts to help children from under-resourced communities find their voice through creative expression. 

For students, not only did they have a chance to work with a real client, but at the end of the course they created something that can go into a portfolio and on their resume, helping in their search for an internship or job. For some students, the client they worked for in the classroom might even become their future employer. 

But in addition to gaining real-world experience, Dockterman also views the class as a way to bring better research and evidence into the design of educational products. 

“There are lots of products on the market,” he says, “and many of them are weakly steeped in evidence and research, so what does it mean to try and infuse more evidence into the ed tech space?” 

For the clients that partner with Dockterman and his students, this could be a huge boon.

“The clients get the benefit of a group of academics — students led by someone, in my case, with a lot of experience in the industry — focusing on something that will make their product more effective,” Dockterman says. “That’s awesome, because clients don’t have the bandwidth necessarily to do that.” 

Prior to the spring offering, Dockterman ran the class as a week-long intensive during J-Term. The first set of 12 students consulted for Curriculum Associates (CA), a Massachusetts provider of technology-enabled assessment and instructional programs for elementary and middle school students. 

The course mimicked a true workweek, with students in the classroom from 9-to-5 every day — and often more like 9-to-9, Dockterman says. Representatives from CA visited throughout the week, first to introduce the problem of how to better support English language learners in math. Students then broke into teams, focusing their research on students, teachers, and CA’s editorial team. CA returned in the middle of the week to hear what HGSE students had learned and for an intensive design and prototyping session. 

Students delivered their final presentations at the end of the week. Based on reviews, the J-Term week was a success. “Honestly, I loved it,” says Mackenna Tenpenny, Ed.M.’25. “It was really intensive, and definitely a time commitment, but I loved working with a real client with a real problem,” noting that the school should add even more classes like this one. “It was so incredibly valuable.”

Much of the enthusiasm for the course also came from the environment Dockterman himself created. 

“I saw Dock as a facilitator role-modeling what we were expected to do,” says Palak Chandak, Ed.M.’25. “He was there 9-to-5 with us. We’d see him looking at the product, being a user himself, showing how he would approach the class as a learner. Because he was role-modeling that for us, we, in some subconscious way, could do that, too.” 

Both Tenpenny and Chandak say the experience with the practicum impacted their future course plans, with both students taking more courses in product management. Their only regret was they weren’t able to take part in the spring version of the course, since Dockterman wanted to bring in new students for each new client. 

With 40 years of experience and no lack of industry connections, Dockterman hopes he’ll be able to offer the class with a new partner each year. 

“I love the idea that we as a school can participate in influencing practice pretty quickly and pretty widely,” Dockterman says. “If this works, I’d love to do a lot of these, and I’m hoping we can create demand from potential clients.”

Andrew Bauld, Ed.M.'16 is a writer based in New York.