“Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it.” –Seth Godin

In the new documentary Meru, there’s a scene where Conrad Anker, world renowned leader of the Meru Mountain climbing expedition, opens up his sketchbook to show the rest of his team a meticulously hand drawn diagram of the optimal route up the Shark Fin, the most technically challenging and dangerous peak in the Himalayas. As the team scrutinizes the sketch, and the camera pans up to reveal the staggering enormity of the peak and the ever shifting wind and snow patterns along the route, you realize that no map can adequately prepare the team for the trip they’re about to embark on. A map implies that its subject will remain static, and a mountain can — and will — change its form and shape at any time without warning. To be successful on the journey, the team will have to learn to function, in the words of Brenè Brown, as both mapmakers and travelers, every step of the way.

And that’s the thing about complex systems. Whether it’s Meru, or an emergency room, or a public school classroom, as Amy Edmondson explains in Teaming: “No sequence of events will unfold precisely the same way twice when people must interact to coordinate ideas or actions, and so participants in such a process are always in a position to learn.” Though you can, of course, benefit and take direction from the work of experts and trusted peers, your peak is ultimately your peak, and your art, like Seth Godin states above, is determining how to scale that peak when no one can tell you exactly how to proceed.

Last November, I sat down with our superintendent to propose a new professional learning model called APS Impact, to bring together 1:1 instructional teams across the county to engage in collective inquiry, gather video evidence of practice, provide purposeful peer feedback, and share lessons learned with our community. (Check out our introduction here.)

This August, we held our kickoff meeting with Impact Group A, our pilot team for the project, comprised of the 4th grade instructional teams from Barrett Elementary School and Arlington Traditional School in Arlington, Virginia. During the kickoff, we set out to establish our shared inquiry focus for the 2015-2016 school year. Although there are no reliable maps to guide this type of work, there were some big concepts in our sketchbook that helped us find our way together.

Concept 1: Cast the Right People for the Pilot (i.e., Don’t Remake The Love Boat On a High Speed Train)

In education, as in network television, the results of a pilot can make or break your concept (I’m talking to you, Supertrain). To get Impact off the ground, I knew we needed to recruit teachers for the initial pilot group who would enthusiastically embrace the long term vision of the project. Though I knew it was important to get the project rolling in a timely manner, once we got the green light, I waited until we had the right people on the train to fire up the engine.

Concept 2: Ease In With a Moment of Whimsy

We scheduled our kickoff meeting for the first Friday of pre-service week, which is always a hectic and cognitively taxing time for educators. To ease the transition from pre-service work to our Impact agenda, we started with a brief moment of whimsy so we could share an inclusive experience (the good folks at Adaptive Schools call this a “we-ness” moment), and share a collective laugh before beginning our adventure together.

Concept 3: Make Sure the Frame Fits the Painting

As Amy Edmundson writes, “Effectively framing a task involves providing a compelling answer to the question of why a particular project exists.” At our kickoff meeting, we established an enrollment frame for our inquiry by telling the compelling origin story of APS Impact. We discussed at the outset how we had been granted an unprecedented opportunity to design, implement, and evaluate our own learning. It was also an opportunity to demonstrate that, when given the proper time and resources, teachers can provide tangible evidence of impact on teacher practice and student learning. We also rooted our inquiry process in John Hattie’s work onteaching strategy and emphasized the importance of selecting an inquiry focus that would allow us to gather data and monitor evidence of impact over time.

Concept 4: Use a Protocol to Focus Energy & Build Trust (i.e., Constraints Breed Creativity)

To meet our objective of selecting a shared inquiry focus for the year, we needed a focusing protocol that would allow all members to give their input on what our problem of practice should be — in an open and transparent way — while imposing constraints that would enable us to find group consensus within our allocated time. We selected The Focusing Four Protocol from Adaptive Schools which has four discrete rounds:

1. Brainstorming
2. Clarifying
3. Advocating
4. Canvassing

After introducing our guiding question stem (“How can we leverage 1:1 technology to more effectively ____________?”) and running through the protocol, we were able to identify two possible inquiry focus areas:

1. Providing Specific & Timely Feedback to Students
2. Providing Personalized Instruction

After a brief concluding conversation we were able to achieve group consensus on personalization.

Concept 5: Lighten the Load

As Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao explain in their book, Scaling Up Excellence, one way to ensure a change initiative will flounder is to overwhelm the working memory of the participants with routines, requirements, and responsibilities, leaving them without the cognitive resources to engage in the work the initiative requires. Because the reflective work our members are doing on Teams is complex and cognitively demanding, we see if there are ways to honor our team’s labor with tangible benefits (e.g., recertification points, payment for work outside of contract hours) while working with administration to cut the cognitive load by giving back time during the school day so members can do sophisticated reflective work within their work day.

At Barrett Elementary, we’ve worked to rebrand ten hours of what was formerly committee time as personalized learning time. Follow our journey on Teams through the Twitter feeds below as we work to implement our guiding concepts.

Josh McLaughlin is an Instructional Lead Teacher at Barrett Elementary School (#KWBPride), NBCT, Founder of APS Impact, Co-Initiator of #APSCHATS(apschats.com), #T2T Curator, #TeamsBigTent Blogger, and Porcelain Boot Miniature Enthusiast.