Back to Prep GPS Self-Narrative — Retrospective Draft (R/R/R)

GPS Self-Narrative — Retrospective Draft (R/R/R)

Review cycle: Aug 2025 – Aug 2026 (9 months covered: Aug 2025 → May 2026) Submission deadline: June 30, 2026 (per Christina Fajardo’s Apr 9 workshop) GSE rating context: GSE is a No-Rating department this cycle. Status: Working scaffold — bullets and stems pre-seeded. Reuben writes first-person paragraphs into each section. Sources folded in:

  • prep/2026-04-23-gps-self-narrative.md (April first-pass; 8 accomplishments, quotes, competencies)
  • meetings/josh-1on1s.md May 14, 2026 (R/R/R framing pivot)
  • prep/2026-05-07-josh-1on1-reach-robust.md (Reach + Robustness definitions)
  • Christina Fajardo’s GPS Self-Narrative slides (Apr 9, 2026)
  • 24/25 Self-Narrative (~/Downloads/2025 Thiessen - GPS Self-narrative v2.pdf) — primary voice anchor (most recent submitted)
  • 23/24 Self-Narrative (~/Downloads/2024 Thiessen - GPS Self-narrative.md) — secondary voice anchor

Format note (from 24/25)

The submitted version is prose-only, no headings, ~700 words, 9-10 paragraphs. The R/R/R headings in this scaffold are drafting aids — strip them out for the final GPS submission, or keep as light dividers if Christina’s template allows. Confirm with Josh next 1:1.

Voice patterns from 24/25 to carry forward

  • Thesis sentence in para 1 names the year’s transformation explicitly: “My [Nth] year at the Accelerator for Learning has been defined by a shift in how I approach my role, moving from X to Y.” This year’s candidate thesis: “…moving from someone who builds capacity for others to lead, to someone designing the systems that let those capacities scale.” Refine.
  • Concrete proof points by name. Last year: San Diego Unified, Headstarter, Phillips Brooks, Board of Trustees, SCALE, WFF, SXSW, ASU+GSV, DeepLearning.AI. This year: Courtney Garza, Andy Hock, Gregory Wilson, Fatma Al-Dohani, Rachel Wolf, Cathy Chase, Marily Oppezzo, ISTE Live, Oman, Lake Forest.
  • Cadence: “strategic pivot: from X to Y” is a load-bearing rhetorical move. Use sparingly — once or twice per narrative.
  • Don’t dodge gaps. Last year named “IT guy perception” and “fell short on fitness plan” directly. Same posture this year — Airtable, physical routine, in-the-moment capacity triage.
  • Close with a forward-looking aspirational paragraph that names the direction, not the destination. Last year: “the path isn’t always clear, the direction is: toward greater strategic impact through empowering others, building sustainable systems.” This year’s direction: toward strategic-connector identity, durable systems that outlast my involvement, and a portfolio whose impact is measurable in the absence of my presence in the room.

The arc this narrative tells

  • 23/24: Executor of workshops. Building muscle.
  • 24/25: Capacity-builder. Build-a-Bot scaled from “workshop I run” to “program others run.” Train-the-trainer started.
  • 25/26 (this year): Strategic connector / systems designer. Toolkits ship. ISTE moves from booking to licensing. Multilingual Build-a-Bot. AI Comic Studio reactivated. Faculty buy-in becomes a pattern, not instances. The “IT guy” reframe Josh handed back Apr 23 is the public marker of this arc.

Josh’s directive (May 14):

First-person paragraphs, reflective journaling voice. Lots of “I.” Recount what was attempted, the thinking behind it, outcomes, what emerged. Tie examples explicitly to Reach / Robustness / Resonance. STAR-style prompts to scaffold.

Companion doc coming: Josh sends a sacrificial first draft of the R-framework narrative mid next week (~May 20-21). This draft + his draft converge through tight iteration.

Operating Definitions (Josh’s language, May 14)

  • Reach — audience size, distribution, who gets the work. “What does the output look like in a year? What has the project achieved?” The question is who shows up, in how many rooms, in what contexts I didn’t design for.
  • Robustness (Josh prefers full word, not “Robust”) — both technical AND conceptual resilience. Scoping, front-loading the boring things, ugly first versions, building in slack (not optimization), reversibility, decisions that survive pivots. Systems that work without me in the room.
  • Resonance — transformational impact on identity, agency, and persistent skill. “More agency than knowledge. Persisting.” Working language: shifting how people see themselves and what they can do — not just what they know.

Through-line carried from April: Capacity building for localized experimentation. Outputs (workshops, toolkits, facilitators, prototypes) lead to outcomes (formats travel without me, new rooms open, ideas get tested faster).

Opening Paragraph (write last)

Reflective, first-person. 4-6 sentences. Frames the year with R/R/R as the lens — but don’t over-explain the lens; the body does that. Echo the 2024 narrative voice: “My [Nth] year at the Accelerator for Learning has been…”

[ Reuben writes — last, after the body sections are in. ]

Reach

Robust solutions increase reach and support reuse across creators. — Josh, May 14

STAR scaffold prompts

  • Situation/Task: What audience were you trying to reach that you couldn’t before? What was the constraint (geography, format, gatekeeper)?
  • Action: What did you do, and why that approach instead of something else?
  • Result/Impact: Who showed up that wasn’t in the room before? How many? What rooms did the work travel into without you in them?

Candidate examples to weave (pick 3–4, drop the rest)

  1. Build-a-Bot scaled from “workshop I run” to “program others run.”
    • Courtney Garza (Feb 2026, TCEA) — trained facilitator, submitted + delivered her own session at a major Texas ed-tech conference. First time Build-a-Bot ran somewhere I’d never been, by someone I trained.
    • Andy Hock (Feb 2026, Eugene 4J) — adapted the deck for a CTE conference. His framing, his slides, successful run.
    • Gregory Wilson (Mar 3, 2026) — completed first formal facilitator training walkthrough; now Build-a-Bot has a Tinkery-owned variant.
    • Multilingual ship (Q1 2026): German, Spanish, French, English. Christian Haake confirmed German. Build-a-Bot now reachable in four languages without translation work on my side.
    • STAR anchor: Success = sessions happening in contexts I didn’t design for.
  2. Oman Hackathon (Feb 2-5, 2026) — international delivery + follow-on thread.
    • Delivered with Fatma Al-Dohani, Ministry of Education, Oman. ~[capacity #] participants.
    • Spawned the special-education whitepaper thread with Dr. Shariffa Al-Said.
    • “Effort is a tax on change” reframe is still getting reused in my consultations months later — a phrase that traveled.
  3. AI Flash Lab — format crossed domains and oceans.
    • designkit.stanford.edu went live and is in active use (copyright notice added post-OTL conversation, Mar 11).
    • Anna-Lena delivered internationally in Q4.
    • Rachel Wolf (Mar 16): “exactly the scaffolding that would work” — Flash Lab applied to her USDA aquaponics/AI K-12 grant. Agricultural science education, not tech training. The format ported.
    • Tinkery Toolkit (Mar) — Gregory and I co-developed a website-format Flash Lab variant for on-campus reuse.
  4. ISTE Live 2026 acceptance (May 4, decided May 14).
    • Wed July 1, 9–10:30 AM, AI Pavilion. Reuben + Josh presenting.
    • Reach moment, not just a workshop — the stage itself is the artifact. First time the Accelerator Studio brings its model to ISTE’s audience.
  5. Legal 101 (Feb 18) — first true cross-cohort workshop.
    • Pulled seed grantees, tEquity, and Create+AI together. First offering that crossed program lines.
    • Kristen Blair: “Ooh. This is great!” — Josh forwarded broadly.
    • Reach in a different register: not more people, but people from previously-siloed groups in the same room.

Reuben writes →

[Three to five paragraphs. First-person reflective. Pick the 3-4 strongest examples and tell the story — what was the room before, what’s the room now, what did I learn about how the format travels.]

[ … ]

Robustness

Both technical AND conceptual resilience. Hardening the product and solidifying the team’s understanding of itself. — Josh, Apr 30 / May 14

STAR scaffold prompts

  • Situation/Task: What was fragile or one-person-dependent that needed to become durable? What problem would have come back without a system?
  • Action: What did you build (process, doc, toolkit, framework)? Why front-load that work?
  • Result/Impact: What now works without you in the room? What survived a pivot?

Candidate examples to weave (pick 3–4)

  1. AACDS / AI-Accelerated Community Design Session toolkit shipped.
    • Pre-Event / During Event / Resources / Post-Event four-quadrant facilitator toolkit released as the Q3 2025 deliverable on Goal 3.
    • Open-sourced with Stanford + Alana credit, per OTL convention.
    • Karen Murcia followed up; alpha-test cohort gave feedback.
    • STAR anchor: I shipped the thing so that the next person running an AACDS doesn’t need me to walk them through it.
  2. ISTE Authorized-Provider licensing structure (Feb-Mar).
    • Pivot from “run one workshop for ISTE” → train-the-trainer + revenue-share model (Feb 25 conversation).
    • Isabelle engaged OTL (Mar 4). OTL meeting (Mar 9) confirmed two-tier IP model: open curriculum + proprietary TTT.
    • Structural decision: keep the open-source layer open, build the proprietary layer separately as licensable IP.
    • Robustness moment: the way the IP is structured determines whether this scales for 10 years or one season.
  3. Seed grant lifecycle framework (SPARK → BUILD → SHARPEN → SCALE) + Three C’s mapping.
    • Co-developed with Josh, now shared vocabulary across the team.
    • Tag analysis plan agreed Mar 12 (AI-assisted, 3-month rollout: April calibration → May-June retag → July confidence).
    • Retag of 140 historical interactions completed Apr 7-8 (Goal 1 deliverable).
  4. Strategic Huddle “Calibrate Capacity” framework (May 12).
    • Quarterly cadence locked in (was previously “as-needed” in handbook).
    • Three calibration questions added: has support per seed grant stayed consistent, are we drifting, what would we cut.
    • Robustness via reflection rhythm, not via new tooling.
  5. Personal infrastructure: Claude executive-assistant system + Logic Model.
    • Personal Logic Model — operating modes, defensibility roadmap, evidence chains. Living doc, shared with Josh Feb 13.
    • Claude assistant: daily prep, end-of-day, inbox processing, synthesis engine, web dashboard, SQLite ETL layer, qmd semantic search, Fizzy poll sync.
    • The work has its own systems now. Daily prep takes 10 min instead of 45. Synthesis surfaces patterns I’d otherwise miss.
    • Tension worth naming honestly: this infrastructure serves me, not the team yet — but the patterns I extract feed Strategic Huddle, end-of-month, and weekly reviews.
  6. Health Coach Bot moderation pipeline (Mar 3, Mar 24).
    • Reactivated stalled project with Marily Oppezzo (Prevention Research Center).
    • Built keyword → moderation API → custom prompt flow. Provenance links to peer-reviewed sources. Edit-tracking UI + bot-version logging.
    • IRB consent language drafted with Marily.
    • Robustness in the technical sense: the failure modes for an AI talking to teens about health are not optional to plan for.

Reuben writes →

[Three to five paragraphs. Two of these should be technical robustness, two should be conceptual/system robustness. Make the distinction explicit.]

[ … ]

Resonance

Transformational impact on identity, agency, persistent skill. “More agency than knowledge. Persisting.” — Josh, May 14

STAR scaffold prompts

  • Situation/Task: Who was stuck, hesitant, or seeing themselves a certain way? What was the constraint that wasn’t tooling — it was identity, confidence, or framing?
  • Action: What did you do, and what shifted that wasn’t “the answer to the technical problem”?
  • Result/Impact: What do they do now that they didn’t do before? How do they describe themselves or their work differently? What persists when you’re not in the conversation?

Candidate examples to weave (pick 3–4)

  1. Cathy Chase / AI Comic Studio reactivation.
    • Project had stalled. I built a prototype that turned Dan Schwartz’s hallway-comment idea into something Cathy could test with students.
    • Cathy: “You really re-invigorated the project. It had stalled.”
    • Resonance: not the tool — the shift in Cathy’s relationship to the work. The project had agency again.
  2. Marily Oppezzo / Health Coach Bot.
    • Long-dormant. Marily had stepped back from active development.
    • Reactivated with Michele Patel involvement. Built the Prompt Lab; built the moderation pipeline.
    • Marily: “Ahhhh Reuben You’re SO AWESOME for doing this!!”
    • Resonance: Marily moved from “I’d like to revisit this someday” to “let’s get IRB submitted.” The agency shifted; she’s running again.
  3. Rachel Wolf + Sarah Williams-Habibi — VFT moderation unblock.
    • AI-with-minors safety question had stalled the VFT moderation work.
    • I drafted the moderator-bot approach + OpenAI content-flagging policy research. Sent to Rachel and Sarah Mar 11.
    • Rachel: “I bet there are plenty of folks in the GSE who would find this very useful.”
    • Resonance: Rachel went from “we have a safety problem” to “we have a transferable safety pattern.”
  4. Cyan DeVeaux — strategic-connector posture.
    • April 23 meeting → I committed to multiple intros (Kathy Kerns, Tech Interactive, Brian Brown HCI, Cathy as sounding board, Tim/Tammin Joyful Learning).
    • The pattern itself — I’m not the doer here; I’m the connector — is the resonance moment. Cyan’s study now has a network around it instead of a single point of contact.
    • Honest note: the Cyan thread has been quieter than I wanted in May. Naming that is part of the narrative — resonance is uneven, and it’s worth saying which threads carried and which paused.
  5. My own identity arc — connector vs. doer.
    • Josh’s framing back to me, April 23: “When Reuben steps into the room, you get unsucked. You’re not just an IT guy — you’re a relationship writer.”
    • May 14 — the role-evolution conversation that became a GPS-narrative conversation. Josh adopted R/R/R as our shared grammar.
    • The resonance was bidirectional. Josh’s reframe (the vulnerability-met-with-scaffolding moment) shifted my own sense of where this year is heading. The framework is now a shared artifact, not a pitch from me to him.
  6. Faculty buy-in pattern (worth naming as a system, not just instances).
    • Marily, Michele Patel, Cyan DeVeaux, Kristen Blair, Karen Wang, Wen Ma — repeat pattern of faculty/researchers who shifted from “I’d like to try AI someday” to “I’m running an active project.”
    • The Studio is doing identity work, not just service work. That’s the resonance signal.

Reuben writes →

[Three to five paragraphs. Resonance is the hardest to write — resist the urge to overclaim. Lead with what *persisted, not what was kind. The quote from Cathy or Marily can do a lot of the work — surround it with what shifted, not just what was nice.]*

[ … ]

Wellness / Sustainable Leadership (Goal 4)

Christina’s template treats this as a separate section in some versions; Josh’s R/R/R doesn’t have a clean slot for it. Recommended placement: short closing paragraph, in the spirit of the 2024 narrative’s last paragraph on health/productivity.

Pre-seeded content

  • Weekly review held consistently since January 2026 (Friday 2pm Personal Review block).
  • Capacity analyses: Jan 18→14 threads, Mar 20 active. Acknowledged drift; named it.
  • Strategic Horizon (Mar 3 launch) — rolling 3-month-back / 6-month-forward narrative.
  • Reflection cadence held. Energy audits attempted; reflective ritual landed; physical anchor did not land — honest gap from the Apr 23 self-assessment.
  • Sustainable leadership in 25/26 means: I built the infrastructure to see my own capacity, even when I didn’t always honor what it told me. That’s a real step from 23/24, where I didn’t have the visibility at all.

Reuben writes →

[One paragraph. Honest. The 2024 narrative closed with “first thing to go when external stressors hit is healthy eating and exercise” — same admission this year, but now with the systems visibility. Echo that voice.]

[ … ]

Areas for Development

Carried mostly intact from Apr 23 draft — these were already on the table with Josh.

  • Airtable / CRM hygiene — still inconsistent despite being the measurement instrument for Goal 1. Joe is the model; I’m still the cautionary tale. The pattern repeats: I capture in markdown + Fizzy, then under-update the shared system. Need a habit that sticks, not willpower.
  • Physical routine — Goal 4’s one unambiguous gap. Reflective and mental routines are solid; physical hasn’t landed. Need to pick something small and actually start. (Snowboard-ready by Dec 10 was achieved; April-May lull.)
  • Capacity triage “in the moment” — better at retrospective capacity analysis than in-the-moment “let me check and get back to you.” Still default to yes too fast.
  • Case study / documentation writing — 10+ strategic consultations happened. Publishable artifacts haven’t. Goal 2 SMART target (2 case studies by end of Q2) is the forcing function — name the writing gap itself, not just the deliverable.
  • Saying “no” earlier in the funnel — some threads that later stalled (LAUSD Foundation rescheduled, Cyan DeVeaux quiet, King ambiguous) probably needed earlier discernment about fit.
  • Resonance is uneven (new for this draft, May 15) — naming honestly which faculty/seed-grant relationships carried this year vs. which paused. Not every “ahhh you’re so awesome” turns into persistent skill or agency. The honest read makes the resonance claims I do make more defensible.

Forward Plan — Next 12 Months (Aug 2026 → Aug 2027)

Becomes the companion forward-looking doc Josh referenced May 14. Listed here as starting material; gets expanded into its own deliverable.

Carry-forward through-line: Capacity building for localized experimentation — with documented proof and a clearer expertise claim.

Four-category structure (Josh’s May 14 framing):

  1. Technical — Documented strategic influence + publishable case studies. Specific candidates: ISTE TTT model, Build-a-Bot multilingual scaling, Health Coach Bot moderation pattern, Flash Lab cross-domain port (Rachel Wolf’s USDA grant).
  2. Communication — Continue R/R/R as quarterly cadence. Strategic Horizon monthly. Tag analysis continued through retag → confidence phase (July 2026). Case-study writing as the explicit writing-gap fix.
  3. Wellness — Pick one physical practice with a real anchor (gym day, walking schedule, sport). Sustain weekly review. Build in slack (not optimization), per Josh’s Apr 30 framing.
  4. Time/Project Management — Saying “no” earlier in the funnel. Capacity triage moves from retrospective to in-the-moment. TPM hire (when scope lands) reshapes my work toward strategic/design/external; I scaffold to them, not around them.

Quarterly theme rotation (proposed):

  • Q1 (Aug-Oct 2026): Reach — ISTE Live afterglow, authorized-provider launches.
  • Q2 (Nov-Jan 2027): Robustness — case-study publication, IP licensing operationalized.
  • Q3 (Feb-Apr 2027): Resonance — strategic-connector identity formalized, role evolution conversation revisited with data.
  • Q4 (May-Jul 2027): Integration — ice-cream-in-August moment, retrospective for the cycle.

Quote Library (for use in body paragraphs)

Pre-seeded so they don’t get lost in revision. Drop the ones that don’t make the final cut.

  • Cathy Chase (AI Comic Studio): “You really re-invigorated the project. It had stalled.”
  • Marily Oppezzo (Health Coach Bot): “Ahhhh Reuben You’re SO AWESOME for doing this!!”
  • Elizabeth Schumann (HarmonAI Cheddar adapter): “WOW!!!!! This looks amazing!!! I could not love it more!!!”
  • Wen Ma (MyBook): “went above and beyond for a sustainable app.”
  • Fatma Al-Dohani (Oman Ministry of Ed): “Your presence, professionalism, and thoughtful contributions added great value.”
  • Rachel Wolf (Flash Lab → USDA aquaponics): “exactly the scaffolding that would work.”
  • Rachel Wolf (VFT moderation): “I bet there are plenty of folks in the GSE who would find this very useful.”
  • Kristen Blair (Legal 101): “Ooh. This is great!”
  • Josh Weiss (Apr 23 1:1): “When Reuben steps into the room, you get unsucked. We make interesting and novel connections we didn’t know were there. We don’t feel quite so alone… You’re not just an IT guy — you’re a relationship writer.”

Notes to Reuben while writing

  • Voice: Match the 2024 narrative’s first paragraph rhythm. “My [Nth] year at the Accelerator for Learning has been…” — straightforward, reflective, specific.
  • Don’t write the opening first. Build the three Rs, then go back and write the framing paragraph last.
  • One quote per R is plenty. Multiple quotes per section starts to look like collected testimonials, not a narrative.
  • Honest about what didn’t land. The Cyan paragraph, the Airtable admission, the physical routine — those make the rest defensible.
  • Don’t relitigate R/R/R definitions in the body. Josh’s intro paragraph (or your opening) sets it once. After that, just live in the framework.
  • Length: 2024 narrative was ~700 words. This one will likely run 1,200-1,500 given the wider 9-month scope. Don’t pad. Cut examples until each section earns its space.

Open questions for Josh (carry into next 1:1, May 21)

  • Format: prose only, or prose + short bulleted accomplishment list? Christina’s template supports both.
  • Spotlight: still the “3 spotlights + capacity-building through-line” frame from last year? Candidates this year: ISTE, Build-a-Bot scaling, Flash Lab.
  • Core competencies to emphasize for the performance conversation upstream of Josh: Develops Self & Others, Vision & Strategy, Drives Results, Leading Change?
  • Areas for Development: does the honest read miss anything Josh would flag?
  • His sacrificial first draft (promised mid next week) — does it confirm or shift the R/R/R buckets I’ve put things in here?

Generated: 2026-05-15. Reuben’s first writing pass goes into the “Reuben writes →” blocks; everything above each block is scaffolding to delete or fold in.

Source: prep/2026-05-15-gps-retrospective-draft.md