Action-packed adventures with our favorite superheroes teach us some of the best life lessons. Imagine you are a superhero, and your superpower is implementation. You have superhuman vision that activates your ability to co-learn. Armed with this powerful mindset, you are able to quickly absorb new information and activate the strengths and brilliance of others to co-create solutions to wicked problems. What if Nick Fury was an implementation expert supporting your team? What could he teach us about what it takes to facilitate a group and the necessity of co-learning? Armed with strength and intelligence, Fury’s true power lies not in flexing those abilities on his own but in leveraging unparalleled leadership and organizational skills. It is difficult enough to form, facilitate, and sustain a group of hardworking individuals with unique strengths and talents for us ‘normal’ implementation specialists.

Imagine if you were charged with bringing together a team of superheroes (as some of you are)! Just because we have a team of superheroes does not mean we have a super team when we bring these individual personalities together to solve problems and navigate change. Fury can bring together the likes of Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America, not by unleashing their individual powers unto the world, but by getting them to learn about and value each other’s strengths and learn together about the threats villains such as Loki and Thanos present to the multiverse. How does he get them to shed their hard-won sole hero mentality and work together? He establishes with the team a set of common competencies or skills, which he expects them all to master, one of which involves learning and working together, and engaging others as needed. If implementation science is our superpower, how do we leverage co-learning to best strengthen the use of implementation science?

What is co-learning? 

Co-learning is the ability to work collaboratively with our partners to understand how knowledge of implementation science can be leveraged in the local context. Co-learning strategies allow us to learn about the culture, history, and current priorities in order to assess the most feasible and relevant uses of implementation science. Learning with our partners at the implementing site allows us to make more strategic recommendations for specific implementation strategies based on context and conditions.

Co-learning gives us a mindset of working with our fellow superheroes to fully understand how all our superpowers can be used in tandem. Together, through our expertise, our strengths, and our gifts, we can learn about our history of fighting off the scariest villains and what our communities need most. We come to understand how our superpowers support and build the strength and capacity of others. 

What does co-learning look like?

The key to making co-learning a habit is to foster a growth oriented mindset¹. That is, we believe that our intelligence, our thinking, and our abilities can and do change over time. For this to happen, we commit to learning from and with perspectives and experiences that may be different from our own. To make co-learning part of the culture of how you work together, cultivate opportunities to:

• Develop deeper understanding of the system in which you work including, but not limited to, the historical, organizational, political, economic, social, and/or emotional context and culture
• Create time, space, and safety for new ideas to emerge and be valued
• Build trusting relationships founded on respect for all perspectives regardless of race, ethnicity, language, or status
• Prioritize ongoing dialog to foster mutual understanding and integrate diverse perspectives and types of knowledge

What are strategies for cultivating these opportunities? 

It seems like it should be easy – just take the time to learn. However, our “blind spots”³, exacerbated by the stressors in our current climate and culture, make this more difficult (but more important) than ever. Here are a few strategies learned from our collaborators and practiced in our work at SISEP.

• Cultivate a variety of listening strategies including constructivist listening.
• Engage a variety of perspectives.
• Seek to understand how your team members work best so that they might feel safe enough to engage. Try a SCARF assessment!
• Develop interview protocols that help solicit the lived experiences of your partners. Some examples might be Empathy Interviews⁴ or Appreciative Inquiry⁵. Interview community members with deep knowledge of history or those embedded in the socio-political nuances of the community or organization.
• Practice a variety of facilitation strategies that seek to bring clarity and generate common understanding. Some strategies might be allowing for multiple modes of participation (not just speaking out but written in a chat, etc.), making intentional space for those who are quieter to participate (but always allowing a ‘pass’), utilizing clarifying question stems (“By that do you mean…”, “What I am hearing you say is…”), or assigning roles in meetings such as ‘process observer’ to ensure equitable processes for contributions are honored.
• Co-create norms for engaging in crucial dialog. 

Practice Makes Permanent

While our ‘tools of the trade’ or strategies might not be as exciting as Iron Man’s suit, Thor’s hammer, or Captain America’s shield, it is just as important that we understand how to use them well. When we understand how to utilize our tools for facilitating opportunities for co-learning, we develop a deeper appreciation for the people we work with and the culture and context we are navigating. This appreciation supports our work as implementation specialists to make a better match to implementation activities that lead to desired outcomes. Most importantly, this process of co-learning, or learning about and with each other, builds a sense of collective efficacy. In other words, we have made the shift from superheroes to a super team that has the shared power to generate our own solutions and maximize our change efforts. 

Try out a few of the strategies above! The more we practice, the more these tools become a habit or just our way of work. Want to learn more and practice your ‘co-learning’ skills? Be on the lookout for the new Co-Learning Implementation Support Practitioner Module on the AI Hub in June. 

“Avengers, assemble!”

Related Resources: 

1. Dweck, C. S. (2007). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House.
2. Metz, A., Louison, L., Burke, K., Albers, B., & Ward, C. (2020). Implementation support practitioner profile: Guiding principles and core competencies for implementation practice. Chapel Hill, NC: National Implementation Research Network, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
3. Banaji, M. R., & Greenwald, A. G. (2016). Blindspot: Hidden biases of good people. Bantam Books. 
4. Empathy Interview Protocol from The CASEL Guide to Schoolwide Social and Emotional Learning
5. Watkins, J. M., Mohr, B. J., & Kelly, R. (2011). Appreciative inquiry: Change at the speed of imagination. Jossey-Bass.