How We Are Showing Our Work at Wayfinding Academy

Inspired by Austin Kleon’s book Show Your Work and fueled by the desire to share more of the story behind what’s going on at Wayfinding Academy with supporters from around the globe, I chose “Show (y)our Work” as the chief initiative for our 2017/2018 school year.

You might be wondering…what is a Chief Initiative? It is the ONE overarching goal we’ll work toward during year. It will keep us focused and make us more effective in preparing for what comes next. We’ll build everything we do around this one goal and have regular conversations and a shared language and work habits around it.

In an effort to explore a bit more directly the idea of a Chief Initiative in general and the purpose behind the current Initiative of Show (y)Our Work specifically, I sat down with the Wayfinding documentarian, Doug Neill, for a short Q & A about what this all means and you can check out that video here.

We have four major ways our community is showing our work this year:

1) Each member of the Wayfinding team (we call ourselves crew members) has an external facing platform where they tell stories of what they are doing and why they are doing it that way. For example, our Director of Students Services and Campus Activities, Tina, has an Instagram account she is using to show her work. One of our Guides, faculty member, and Internship Program Coordinator, Tiffany, created a website where she is writing about her work in the context of our goal to revolutionize higher education.

2) I’ve designed a longitudinal study to track key outcomes and progress on the promise we make about the impact our 2-year program will have on students’ lives. We promise “to cultivate humans who are empowered to thrive throughout the rest of their lives. They embrace curiosity, are willing to stretch, understand the importance of conscientiousness, know how to create community, and live life on purpose.” We expanded on the key elements embedded within that promise (which were drawn from our Creed stating what we believe) and developed our longitudinal study through a series of inventories that measure each of them.

Our students complete the series of inventories at the time of enrollment (or right before), at the end of their first year of the program, and again at the end of the program, so we measure each element three times over the 2-year program and will continue measuring them beyond it. Students’ Guides also provide input on each student at the end of each term on the 6 promise elements.

{Are you a lover of tests and measurements? Check out the Grit Scale from Angela Duckworth, one of the inventories in our study. You, too, can find out how gritty you are and track your growth alongside our students!}

3) The Wayfinding Hub is our custom-built e-portfolio platform where students and crew are asked to put samples of their work in a way that helps them tell the story of their Wayfinding experience and show others their skills. You can view some student and crew Hub profiles here if you are curious to see more. This is still a work-in-progress and we are updating it regularly, so check back later for more.

4) We have a set of about a dozen statistics we collect weekly or monthly or termly and put into dashboards so we can look for trends in the data and zoom out to try to capture the bigger picture and longer term perspective on the work we are doing. More details coming soon on this — we just debuted these at our quarterly retreat last weekend, so stay tuned.

Showing our work feels stretchy. We do it because we want to help others understand what we are doing and why we are doing it and model what we are asking our students to do as part of their Wayfinding experience. We are new to this, so are still learning and would love feedback or questions that you have about this. Is there anything in particular you would like to see us show more of or things you are wondering, please send me a note through our Contact form and I can direct it to the crew member in the best position to respond.

P.S. Want to see what we did for our Chief Initiative the previous year focused on Essentialism? Here are our thoughts on that.

Originally published at https://www.michelledjones.org on January 22, 2018.