The Open Practice Academy

08/22/2026

Good intentions are not a learning pathway.

A team can care deeply about an initiative and still struggle to begin. Time is limited. Confidence is uneven. Responsibilities compete. The person who knows how to move things forward may already be carrying too much.

Custom Learning Pathways begin there: not with an imaginary ideal learner, but with the conditions people are actually working within.

A sustainable pathway makes room for:

✦ Capacity-aware planning that respects time, labor, and energy
✦ Shared ownership so implementation does not depend on one champion
✦ Clear artifacts: examples, templates, guides, and decisions people can return to
✦ Accessible design that reduces unnecessary barriers to participation
✦ Iterative support that helps teams try, reflect, adapt, and continue

The goal is not to make meaningful work effortless. It is to create a clearer, more humane route from interest to practice.

That is how systems help good work continue: by making the next step visible, the expectations usable, and the learning possible within real constraints.

If your team is interested but unsure where to start, TOPA’s Custom Learning Pathways may offer a place to begin.

Explore the pathway:
www.theopenpracticeacademy.com/customlearning

Learn more about The Open Practice Academy:
www.theopenpracticeacademy.com

What would make a learning pathway more enterable for your team?

08/21/2026

Your business shouldn't depend on one person remembering everything. Practice Cartography helps small professional services businesses map the knowledge, workflows, and decisions that keep the practice moving : so the work can continue through growth, change, and handoffs. Start with a free Practice DNA Snapshot.

Understand how your business really works.

Get Your Free Snapshot → https://www.theopenpracticeacademy.com/practice-cartography

08/20/2026

Tomorrow I’m teaching a free Lightning Lesson called The Threshold Question: What to Ask Before You Announce Any Change.

The whole thing started because I couldn’t stop thinking about this:

We spend SO much time figuring out how to announce change.

The email.
The rollout.
The presentation.
The Very Important Strategic Initiative™.

But what if the announcement was never the problem?

What if the real question is whether we’ve actually designed the conditions for another human being to step into the change?

That question turned into four questions.

Those four questions turned into the Threshold Check.

And then, because my brain apparently does not believe in leaving a perfectly good rabbit hole unexplored, that turned into a few different ways to work with the idea. 😅

Tomorrow: The free Lightning Lesson. Come meet the framework, think about a real change you’re carrying, and see what it helps you notice.

September 16: The Threshold Plan: A Working Session. Bring an actual change. We’re not just talking about the framework. You’ll work through it and start building your own Threshold Plan.

November: Beyond the Threshold: A Practicum in Human-Scale Change. This is the deeper dive. Three weeks of working with a real change, getting coaching and feedback, and thinking critically about what it means to lead change at human scale.

And then there’s Relational Practice Coaching, which is one-on-one work for the messier things that don’t fit neatly into a workshop or course. The “I know something is happening here, but I need somebody to help me think with it” kind of things. Which, frankly, are some of my favorite things.

I’m really excited about all of this because it feels like the pieces of my work are starting to talk to each other.

Leadership. Change. Care. Participation. Openness. Human behavior. The structures we build around people. The things that look like resistance but might actually be information.

All starting with a deceptively simple question:

Before you ask someone to walk through the door, have you actually looked at the threshold?

Come hang out with me tomorrow. I promise not to make you join a breakout room. 😂

Links in the comments. 👇

08/20/2026

I wrote something that I wish I'd had five years ago.

It starts from a place I know many of you have been: you want to adopt OER. Lower costs. Give students better access. Then reality shows up in the form of PDFs that don't quite fit, licenses you're not sure about, ancillaries that don't exist, and faculty who are already at their limit.

The messy middle is where OER implementation actually happens.

I walk through each mistake: from the "one-and-done" mentality to forgetting the humans doing the work: with practical fixes, checklists, and tools you can use right now.

If you're in the middle of an OER project (or thinking about starting one), this one's for you.

Read the full post → www.theopenpracticeacademy.com/post/7-mistakes-you-re-making-with-oer-implementation

08/20/2026

Attendance tells you who showed up.

It does not tell you what changed.

In a learning pathway, attendance is an output: not the whole story. The more useful question is: what can people now do, explain, adapt, or carry forward?

Look for evidence of practice shift:

A documented decision.
A revised workflow.
An adapted resource.
A new shared artifact.
A completed implementation step.
A participant who can explain what comes next.

These signals help us see learning move beyond the session and into the work itself.

Measuring practice shift does not mean demanding a perfect transformation immediately. It means paying attention to the small, observable changes that show a pathway is becoming usable, shared, and sustainable.

What changed because people participated: and how will you know?

Explore Custom Learning Pathways: www.theopenpracticeacademy.com/customlearning

08/20/2026

The problem isn’t always a lack of documentation.

Sometimes you need a way to make sense of what you already have.

Policies that don’t quite match the procedures. Project notes buried in shared folders. Multiple versions of the same document. Decisions hidden in meeting minutes. Processes that technically exist on paper but still require someone to explain how they actually work.

That’s what Practice Cartography is designed to help untangle.

🧭 Practice Cartography is a collaborative service from The Open Practice Academy that helps teams map the knowledge, workflows, decisions, documents, and people their work depends on.

Together, we look at questions like:

🔹 What knowledge does your work depend on?
🔹 Where does that knowledge live?
🔹 Which policies, procedures, and resources are actually current?
🔹 Where do documents or processes contradict one another?
🔹 What lives primarily in one person’s memory?
🔹 What would be difficult to understand if someone changed roles or left?
🔹 How can all of this be organized so people can actually find, understand, and use it?

The goal isn’t to create more documentation for the sake of documentation.

It’s to understand how your work actually works and identify what would make that knowledge clearer, more usable, and more sustainable.

And you don’t have to know what kind of help you need before you reach out.
Start with a free 🧬 Practice DNA Snapshot.

We’ll take an initial look at your practice and provide a proposal outlining what we see, where the opportunities lie, and our recommendations for next steps.

That proposal is yours to keep. It’s designed to give you something useful even if you decide not to work with me 💜

Sometimes you don’t need more documentation.

You need a map 🗺️

→ Get your free Practice DNA Snapshot: https://www.theopenpracticeacademy.com/practice-cartography

08/20/2026

Accessibility is not a final materials check.

It belongs in the learning pathway itself.

A professional learning experience becomes more accessible when people can understand how to enter, participate, and keep going. That means designing for the real conditions of people’s lives: not an imaginary learner with unlimited time, energy, confidence, and focus.

Build accessibility into the pathway through:

Multiple ways to participate, including conversation, reflection, collaboration, and asynchronous options.

Clear expectations about time, preparation, technology, and what “done” looks like.

Readable resources with logical structure, plain language, meaningful headings, and accessible file formats.

Flexible pacing that gives people room to engage without treating a different pace as a lack of commitment.

Captions, transcripts, alt text, and other supports provided as part of the experience: not after someone has to request them.

Reduced unnecessary cognitive load, so learners can focus on the important work instead of decoding the pathway.

Accessibility by design is care as infrastructure. It reduces barriers, makes participation more possible, and supports more sustainable implementation.

What would change if you designed the way in from the beginning?

Learn more about Custom Learning Pathways: www.theopenpracticeacademy.com/customlearning

08/19/2026

A fifth-grade fidget rule sent me back through my own childhood, teaching, and learning. Somewhere along the way, the question changed from “What’s wrong with me?” to “Why is it built this way?”

Huh. That’s a System.
Tiny comics about ordinary things that aren’t actually ordinary.

This first comic series accompanies my essay, There Had to Be More Gentleness in the World: On fidget toys, Paulo Freire, and learning to question what school asks us to become.

Read the full essay here → https://www.meganzara.com/themessymiddle/odgpn1my4zqhvlbiekvmypmqc869af

05/06/2026

I wrote something I needed to get out of my body.

It’s called For Whom, and it’s a spoken word poem for Su***de Prevention Month.

It’s about the cost of seeming fine.
The ache of being misunderstood after trying to tell the truth.
The grief of realizing some people only knew how to love the performance.

I don’t think I’m done with this poem yet.

But for now, I’m sharing the words.

For Whom is a haunting spoken word poem and visual meditation for Su***de Prevention Month, exploring mental health, quiet suffering, hidden strength, and the cost of seeming okay.

04/18/2026

Some leaders leave behind compliance. Others leave behind courage, trust, and growth.

This essay reflects on a kind of leadership I believe we do not name nearly enough, the kind that does not rely on title, fear, or performance, but earns trust through care, steadiness, and the quiet work of truly seeing people.

At the center of this piece is Ssiah Ross, or, as I call him, Coach Ross, whose leadership this season gave me a living example of what I have been thinking about, researching, and trying to name for a long time.

The trophy is real. So is what came before it. I watched Coach Ross build a team where every child knew he mattered. This piece is about leadership that leaves something behind: trust, capacity, and courage. The kind that does not make itself permanently necessary.