So You’re an English as Second Language Teacher Considering Becoming a UX Designer — Great!
It All Starts With a Logical User-Centered Process
Design is all about thinking outside the box and creating solutions that others had not yet formulated. It’s also about public speaking and pitching your ideas well enough to be implemented — you have a big tick in that box as a teacher because you regularly convince a room full of people that what you have to say on the ever-dry topics like grammar is indeed valuable to them.
Teachers are generally seen as people who create boxes for others to think in, but the really great ones encourage us to get out the box, so they must possess a fair amount of lateral thinking. Anyone who can get a room full of adults to do the same activity at the same time on a shoe-string budget must be pretty creative, and more importantly resilient. Most importantly, it makes perfect sense for a teacher to be a (great) UX designer as they are definitely user (student) focused.
While learning the design ropes I’ve had quite a lot of gentle acknowledgment of the parallels in the two industries; contextual inquiry (observing students implementing your lesson), journey mapping (empathising with the journeys my different students would take), synthesis (bringing all my observations into an actionable point of view), and iteration (updating my methods and lesson plans according to feedback). The key point for me, and my favorite part of the double diamond design process, was the validation of my work in class, or user testing. I would see my students light up as they understood what I was guiding them through and I would take the user response to every one of my designs (lessons) and iterate them for the next round. Every class contained co-created themes and topics that were tailored to the needs and interests of my students, and they each taught me a little more about how to be a better teacher and, more interesting human; I’d call that constant iteration, even agile, as I would only have 4 weeks with a group.
Surrounded by my UX immersive course classmates at General Assembly who (almost) all had direct design industry experience, I was incredibly relieved when I realised the integral design process at the center of UX was not alien to me. I had literally been herding the metaphorical cats required, in a very similar direction.
Herding cats — a futile attempt to control or organize that which is inherently uncontrollable
That’s nice, but how do you get a design Job?
Well, I’m leaning into it — I’m going to highlight the skills I have developed through years of creative problem solving, critical thinking, analysis, and observation of various levels of technology used by people with different goals and origin stories.
I’m going to speak to the skills I developed not only as an academic ESL teacher, but as a lead teacher who supported other teachers, a headteacher who supported the management team, administrative staff, teachers, and students, and as an internship coordinator who built relationships with placement partners and managed various stakeholders. All of these skills are underpinned by a profound understanding of the needs for personalisation, engagement, as well as time and budget limits inherently related to education.
Teachers, we should grow into the field of design as it promises the ability to provide better experiences for teachers, students, and all users who all hope to be engaged in their interactions as lifelong learners in our modern, digital world. Join me on this journey.
“We would be doing ourselves a disservice by ignoring or diminishing the different experiences and circumstances that brought us to where we are today. The more we embrace our backgrounds, the better designers we can be, and the more inclusive we can make our industry.” — Terri Lee
