№ 05  ·  Brief Template Peninsula School District

Adoption Brief

For a bet that worked — and is being adopted district-wide.

Template· One of three: Adoption · Decommission · Continuation· Drafted by The Logbook

An Adoption Brief is what a team publishes when a six-week bet worked and the district is adopting the result. It is one page, posted to psd401.ai, written for two audiences: the next Peninsula team that needs to build on it, and other districts who might fork it.

§ I  ·  The structureOne backbone, six fields

Every brief — Adoption, Decommission, Continuation — shares the same six-field backbone. Only the Decision field changes shape across the three patterns.

  1. Header strip — brief type, ID, cycle, team
  2. Hypothesis — what the team said they'd try, and what they expected
  3. What we did — the actual moves, with dates and surprises
  4. What we learned — bulleted findings, what confirmed, what didn't
  5. Decision — for Adoption Briefs, this is "Adopt district-wide" + rationale
  6. What others should know — the lift-and-shift instructions for the next team or district

§ II  ·  A worked exampleWhat a published Adoption Brief looks like

Adoption Brief Logbook 0007 · Cycle 01 · 14 Oct 2026

AI-drafted family communications for new-student onboarding

Team · Communications Department

Hypothesis

If we equip Communications staff with a Logbook-built drafting assistant for new-family welcome letters, we expect to reduce drafting time per letter by half while improving readability and translation quality. Success means at least a 40% time reduction in measured drafting time across ten welcome letters, with no decrease in family satisfaction scores.

What we did

In Week 01 we built a drafting assistant on psd401.ai/aistudio that takes a student's enrollment context (grade, school, transition type) and produces a draft welcome letter in the family's home language. Communications staff revised every output before sending. In Weeks 02–05 we drafted 24 letters this way. In Week 06 we surveyed receiving families and the Communications team.

Surprise: Spanish and Korean letters needed less revision than English drafts, because the assistant defaults to plainer construction in non-English languages.

What we learned

  • Average drafting time dropped from 28 minutes to 9 minutes per letter — a 68% reduction, well past our target.
  • Family satisfaction (measured by 10-question survey, N=21) was statistically unchanged. Open-text responses praised the personal feel.
  • Staff revision time per letter averaged 3 minutes, mostly to add school-specific detail the assistant could not know.
  • The assistant struggled when families had multiple students transitioning simultaneously — a known gap we will solve in adoption.
Decision
Adopt district-wide for the 2026–27 school year

Effective immediately. Communications will roll out to all seventeen schools in November. We will revisit the multi-student gap in Cycle 02 as a small bet.

What others should know

  • The assistant lives at psd401.ai/aistudio as "Family Welcome Draft" — any district can fork the assistant template from our public library.
  • The key design decision was requiring staff to revise every output before sending. Removing that step would degrade quality fast.
  • Plain-construction defaults work better than literal translation in non-English contexts. Keep them.
  • Don't measure satisfaction by survey rate — measure by open-text content. Our survey response rate was low (32%) but the content was substantive.

§ III  ·  The fields, explainedWhat goes in each

Hypothesis — One paragraph. Restate the original bet from the team's Bet Brief at the start of the cycle. Include the success criteria as written. This anchors the rest of the brief in the question the team set out to answer.
What we did — Two or three paragraphs. The actual moves, with dates. Call out surprises. This is the narrative — write it like a short report, not a status update.
What we learned — Bulleted findings. Quantitative where possible, qualitative where it matters. Include what was confirmed, what was surprising, and what was inconclusive. Be honest about the gaps.
Decision — One sentence in the label position ("Adopt district-wide for X"), followed by a short rationale paragraph. Include the timeline, the owner, and any conditions on the adoption.
What others should know — Three to five bullets. The lift-and-shift instructions. Where the tool lives. What design decisions matter. What to avoid. Where there are open gaps.

§ IV  ·  How the Logbook helpsFrom cycle work to published brief

The team does not draft the brief from a blank page. The Logbook reads the team's Google Chat Space — six weeks of check-ins, working notes, debrief threads — and produces a first draft against this template. The team revises, the team approves, the team publishes. First-draft to publishable usually takes one or two passes.

A note on honesty The point of publishing the brief, even an Adoption Brief, is to let the next team build on what we learned — not to perform success. Include the surprises, the gaps, and the things you do not yet understand. That is what makes the corpus useful.