Small is Good, Small is All: Building a Community of Practice

[LaShawnSpringer]

Small is good, small is all. It is a short but powerful missive that first came to bear for me working in a residential high school for nine years and that I return to often in my work. 

While we are often fed the narrative to “go big or go home”, the greatest lessons I learned from my students were about how the smallest moments can sometimes have the greatest impact. Moments like gifting a student a copy of their favorite author’s book; moments like sending a student an email to let them know their presentation at our all-school meeting moved me to tears; moments like asking them if I can frame and put their artwork up in our center’s office. Small moments that in totality helped my students feel seen and valued as their whole selves. And, now that I have moved on to Macmillan Learning, small is good, small is all is shaping how I think about our newest Community of Practice. 

The saying is one of nine principles outlined in adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, in which she invites readers to reconsider how we can enact sustainable and scalable change. Drawing inspiration from biomimicry—the practice of using nature's systems to solve complex problems—brown demonstrates how the smallest, seemingly simple changes can drive meaningful innovation.

brown’s work borrows from the tradition of Octavia Butler, whose books remain important reads across hundreds of high schools, colleges, and universities. Butler’s writing explores themes like social change and resistance and deftly moves between the past, present and future to show how community members (locally, globally and across liminal space) being in dialogue with each other can transform small seeds of ideas (literally and figuratively)  into a forest of possibilities. 

At Macmillan Learning, this principle resonates deeply. Just as Butler imagines new possibilities for coexistence and social change, our mission—to inspire what’s possible for every learner—anchors us in the belief that education is a powerful force for progress.

Building a Community of Practice

Our new Community of Practice reflects this principle, centering on diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusive pedagogy. Educational Theorist Etienne Wenger, in partnership with Beverley Wenger in the ‘90s, identified three factors that distinguish Communities of Practice from other working groups: a clear articulation of the purpose, the right people and effective practice, all operating in service of cultivating a space where knowledge sharing and production are constantly in motion. 

For us at Macmillan Learning, that has meant building on the good work of our previously established Diversity and Inclusion working group. The Community of Practice brings together colleagues from a cross section of content areas, including the Learning Resource Group, our team that produces learner-centered content and the Pedagogical Design Group, our team that uses data to bridge inclusive pedagogy, accessibility, and the best practices of course design to improve our products and empower instructors and learners. 

Together, our Community of Practice represents colleagues whose focus is to stay informed about best practices in teaching and learning to make informed decisions about how and why we might incorporate them in new and innovative ways, identifying specific ways to move our work forward and hold ourselves accountable–all to drive better outcomes for students and instructors. 

We’ll be working together to lower barriers to educational excellence for students and instructors while empowering educators to create transformative classroom experiences. And do it well, through a rigorously studied and informed design of our content and products. By focusing on thoughtful, evidence-based design, we’re not just improving education; we’re equipping students to thoughtfully engage with and shape the world around them.

The Questions That Guide Us

Our goals are lofty, but attainable -- especially if we find the right framework, container, and community to support the work. brown and Butler outlined this approach in their work: we need a framework oriented towards problem solving, but that would also provide us with space, time, and an accountability structure to do deep and honest work. This involves asking and answering critical questions around our current DEIA practices, and subsequently establishing shared practices. 

While we are just getting underway, the questions we are asking give us an opportunity to get clarity about what types of problems we’re aiming to solve, what data will inform our approach, and how we can learn across discipline and content areas. These questions allow us to break down the enormity of the task before us, to understand how what we enact on a small scale will be representative of what we’re able to build on a larger scale. 

For example, in what ways does our content serve as a window for students to learn about other cultures and experiences outside their own and mirror to see themselves and their experiences reflected back? How does the structure and outline of our course materials support a learner's ability to access and retain information? How are we helping students make sense of the world around them and their place in it? How do we help cultivate joy and curiosity for learning?

There are so many more questions, but our community at Macmillan Learning is eager to learn from and alongside each other. We believe that by taking small but deliberate steps, we can make a profound impact—transforming education, one small action at a time. And while on our journey, we remember the words from adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy: small is good, small is all.