Why I Chose to Make The Educators Well Roadmap Public

When you are building something new, there can be a temptation to keep everything behind closed doors until it is finished. To wait until every detail is worked out, every idea has become a plan and every plan has become something polished enough to share.

I have decided to do something a little different with The Educators Well.

I have made our Roadmap public.

Not because I have everything figured out. Actually, quite the opposite.

The WELL Trail is a way of showing where The Educators Well is heading, what we are currently working on, what we have committed to exploring further and which ideas are still simply possibilities.

And I think there is value in letting people see all of those stages.

The Educators Well was never meant to be built in isolation

From the beginning, I have wanted The Educators Well to be something that grows with educators, rather than something that is simply created for them.

After almost 20 years working across early childhood education, Family Day Care, In-Home Care, training and mentoring, I know how often educators are presented with programs, initiatives and resources that someone else has decided they need.

I want to build differently.

Educator voice matters here.

That means listening to what educators are experiencing, noticing where gaps exist, learning from conversations, responding to feedback and sometimes changing direction when something isn’t working the way we thought it would.

A public Roadmap gives you the opportunity to see some of that happening.

Not every idea needs to become something

One of my favourite parts of The WELL Trail is something called The Possibility Cloud.

It is where ideas can exist before we decide whether they belong on the Trail.

Some of those ideas are mine. Some have come from conversations with educators. Others have emerged through partnerships, questions, needs I have noticed or those random thoughts that make me reach for my phone and write something down before I forget it.

But being in the Possibility Cloud is not a promise.

An idea might grow. It might combine with another idea. It might become completely different from what I first imagined. It might move onto The WELL Trail.

Or we might decide not to pursue it at all.