“I designed a pathway for learning, but I had never questioned what makes someone willing to take the first step.” Patricia Silva, 2026, 2:01. Watch on YouTube

The question that reshaped this brief did not come only from my own reflection. The course resources from Modules 1 and 2 led me to it.

Module 2 opened with a question I had not asked of my own design: Before I design professional learning, how do I know what people actually need? The Regional Educational Laboratory Northeast & Islands (2024) recommends gathering evidence through surveys, focus groups, and individual interviews before deciding what support people need. That is the investigation I propose at the end of this brief. I had designed the support first. I had not asked first.

Learning Forward's (2022) Culture of Collaborative Inquiry standard distinguishes between assuming what educators need and learning with and from them. My plan assumed that participants would arrive willing to begin.

Holloway et al. (2026) describe professional learning as an ongoing process shaped by adult learner variability and professional agency. I now see that variability does not begin inside the course. It begins at the entrance, where each person may stop for a different reason.

When I began developing my innovation plan, I was concerned about something I had repeatedly observed: a project may be academically sound, professionally relevant, and personally meaningful and still remain inside a classroom, portfolio, computer folder, or workplace. The problem is not always the quality of the work. Sometimes the bottleneck appears between having an idea and knowing how to communicate, represent, position, and present that idea to another human being.

I called this the Leadership Identity-to-Impact Bottleneck. My original problem was therefore not a lack of knowledge. It was the passage between what a professional has already built and the intentional, audience-responsive presence that allows that work to travel. That problem remains important to me.

ClockSkill has accompanied my work since my first project. It is the foundation of every framework I develop, even when it appears under other names, such as the Human System Bottleneck. In this innovation, ClockSkill took the form of From Project to Presence.

From Project to Presence is an eight-day individualized professional learning intensive in which participants bring an authentic project and work on how that project enters the world. Each day combines approximately 30 minutes of instruction and modeling with 30 minutes of applied project activity, delivered through Leadership City.

Three Pedagnostic Consultations at T1 (Baseline/Explore), T2 (Development/Retune), and T3 (Transfer/Present) examine comparable evidence from the same project over time. At T2, the Dual Mirror places the participant's self-observation beside the instructor's interpretation. Pedagnosis supports the interpretation of that evidence without claiming to provide a clinical diagnosis. A three-space model separates the private Activity Process Folder, the Leadership City learning environment, and the public Online Vernissage. I aligned outcomes, experiences, and evidence following Fink's (2013) model of significant learning.

The most significant assumption across PL1, PL2, and PL3 was that people would possess enough volition to participate in the learning experience I was designing. I assumed, perhaps because of my own relationship with learning, that other people would approach professional development with a similar willingness to invest effort and pursue improvement.

This was not a reasonable assumption to apply universally. Some may be interested but afraid of beginning. A professional may value an idea but lack the time, financial stability, or social support necessary to pursue it. Someone may have developed a dream years ago but no longer recognize themselves in that dream. And some individuals may simply decide that the proposed opportunity is not appropriate for them.

I imagine a person approaching a bridge. On the other side is something meaningful: an unfinished project, a professional qualification, a small business, or a new possibility. The person wants to cross. But the bridge is broken. They stop.

An observer might conclude that they lack determination. Someone else might offer a motivational speech. But none of these responses necessarily addresses the broken bridge. What if the first question were different? Why did you stop? And after listening: What would make crossing possible?

In educational psychology, motivation helps explain the formation and direction of goals, while volitional processes concern the protection and implementation of intentions when competing demands or obstacles arise (Heckhausen & Gollwitzer, 1987; Kuhl, 1985). Zimmerman (2002) further describes self-regulated learning as involving processes through which learners plan, monitor, and reflect on their learning. My earlier plan already drew on Panadero (2017) to involve learners in monitoring their own learning. Even so, I had not asked what happens before that monitoring can begin: whether the learner has decided to start at all. Haggard's (2016) lecture on human volition, which I introduced as a new source for this reconsideration, frames the same gap between intention and action (see Appendix).

My professional context has expanded. Leadership City could involve educators, adult learners, professionals, and individuals attempting to revive unfinished projects. A professional may possess considerable expertise but hesitate to promote a service publicly; the obstacle may involve fear of exposure rather than insufficient professional knowledge. Another person may enroll because the subject is appealing but later discover that the course demands more time or emotional energy than anticipated. Even the barrier matrix in PL3 began after enrollment: it planned responses for participants who were already inside the intensive.

My original plan gave considerable attention to instructional processes and evidence. It gave less attention to how different stakeholders might interpret the invitation to participate.

My next step would be to develop a voluntary, nonclinical exploratory questionnaire, potentially followed by semi-structured interviews. The purpose would not be to diagnose personality, classify individuals according to their level of willpower, or determine who deserves an opportunity. Instead, I would seek to understand how adults describe the relationship between their intentions, perceived obstacles, available support, and decisions to begin or resume meaningful projects.

I began with a question about how a project becomes visible. Reconsidering my own innovation has revealed a question that precedes the route itself: What makes a person decide to begin? And when that person stops, how do we distinguish a loss of purpose from an obstacle, a changed priority, or a need for different support?

Each of these questions points to the same place: the space between wanting something and acting on it. That space is volition. I now ask myself whether volition can be supported pedagogically and didactically: whether a learning design can help a person recover it, develop their will, and take the first step on the route.

Fink, L. D. (2013). Creating significant learning experiences: An integrated approach to designing college courses (Rev. and updated ed.). Jossey-Bass.

Haggard, P. (2016, May 17). Human volition [Conference presentation]. Jean Nicod Lectures 2016, École normale supérieure, Paris, France. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXgInKiZ8jY

Harapnuik, D., Thibodeaux, T., & Cummings, C. (2018). COVA: Choice, ownership, and voice through authentic learning (Version 0.9).

Heckhausen, H., & Gollwitzer, P. M. (1987). Thought contents and cognitive functioning in motivational versus volitional states of mind. Motivation and Emotion, 11(2), 101–120. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00992338

Holloway, J., Church, N., McKee, K., & Musiowsky-Borneman, T. (2026, May 1). From professional development to professional learning. Educational Leadership, 83(8). https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/from-professional-development-to-professional-learning

Kuhl, J. (1985). Volitional mediators of cognition-behavior consistency: Self-regulatory processes and action versus state orientation. In J. Kuhl & J. Beckmann (Eds.), Action control: From cognition to behavior (pp. 101–128). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-69746-3_6

Learning Forward. (2022). Standards for professional learning. https://standards.learningforward.org/

Panadero, E. (2017). A review of self-regulated learning: Six models and four directions for research. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, Article 422. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00422

Regional Educational Laboratory Northeast & Islands. (2024). Supporting educator well-being using evidence-based supports. U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences. https://ies.ed.gov/rel-northeast-islands/2025/01/supporting-educator-well-being-using-evidence-based-supports

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68

U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Technology. (2024). A call to action for closing the digital access, design, and use divides: 2024 National Educational Technology Plan. https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/GOVPUB-ED-PURL-gpo229250

Dr. Patrick Haggard — Human Volition (2016), YouTube, 1:08:57. Lecture series “Volition, Agency, Responsibility: Cognitive Mechanisms of Human Action,” École normale supérieure, May 17, 2016.