As a Transcend team member, your three biggest tools in your toolbelt for building the content knowledge you need to support a community’s innovation or other stakeholders you’re supporting are:

• Transcend resources, mostly curated by our fantastic Usable Knowledge team

• Network connections to experts and practitioners with experience in the innovation area

• Tacit knowledge that your portfolio has built around its specific topic area or geography

Over the course of your onboarding, you’ll get to tap into all three of these sources to build your knowledge around the content of innovation, especially for any projects you’ll be focused on initially. In this initial Impression task, you’ll specifically get an overview of some of Transcend’s resources.

Tasks: Choose one of the three options below as a scenario to work through, and peruse some of Transcend’s resources and models in the context of that scenario:

• Option 1: A cohort of schools is beginning its design journey. An early part of their process involves building clarity and conviction around the Leaps. 

  1. Read: Peruse the ‘Resources’ tab on the Internal Hub to find any resources you might use to learn more about the Leaps yourself and/or to share with the cohort. 

  2. Do: Also explore the Innovative Models Exchange and consider how you might use the Exchange to learn more about Leap-y models yourself and/or use various Leap-y models to help build clarity and conviction with the cohort. 

• Option 2: A school partner wants to better support agency development but isn’t sure where to start. They have strong conviction and coalition, but lack clarity. 

  1. Read: Peruse the ‘Resources’ tab on the Internal Hub to find any resources you might use to learn more about agency development yourself and/or to share with the cohort. 

  2. Do: Also explore the Innovative Models Exchange and consider how you might use the Exchange to learn more about agency-rich models yourself and/or use various agency-rich models to help build clarity and conviction with the cohort. 

• Option 3: A school partner wants to implement project based learning at their school. This idea was generated from the community and has a strong coalition. However, the school team lacks the capacity to design experiences and is looking to adopt an existing model that stitches nicely with their existing design. 

  1. Read: Peruse the ‘Resources’ tab on the Internal Hub to find any resources you might use to learn more about project-based learning yourself and/or to share with the cohort. 

  2. Do: Also explore the Innovative Models Exchange and consider how you might use the Exchange to surface potential PBL for the school partner to consider. 

The following optional resources might help you build context for this task as well

• Watch: part of this Usable Knowledge video from a Monday call in Feb 2023 (from 22:30 - 38:30)

• Watch: this video walkthrough of the Exchange (08:20)

Now that you’ve explored the overall set of resources and models, get to know one or two resources or models in particular.

Tasks:

Do: Choose 2-3 resources or models that you identified in your task above (related to the Leaps, agency, or project-based learning). Dig into them! What do you find? Consider especially:

• What am I learning - if anything - about research related to this innovation area?

• What am I learning - if anything - about practice related to this innovation area?

• (if relevant) How might this information help me better support a community in this innovation area?

As a part of your onboarding process, we want to ensure that the learning you receive feels relevant and impactful! After each phase you will be prompted to take a short feedback survey so that we can continue to assess and improve upon our onboarding process. 

DO: Take the Phase 1: Impression Feedback Survey