The Scaling of Innovations: Factors to Consider Beyond Professional Development

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The Scaling of Innovations Factors to Consider
Beyond Professional Development
Don Deshler University of Kansas Center for
Research
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Mission National Research Center on Learning
Disabilities

• To understand how alternative approaches to
  identification affect who is identified.
• To investigate state and local identification
  policies and practices and LD prevalence.
• To provide technical assistance and conduct
  dissemination to enhance state and local practice
  in identification.
• To identify sites that effectively use
  responsiveness-to-intervention as a method of
  identification.

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Context for remarks

• Mission of University of Kansas Center for
  Research on Learning
• Strategic Instruction Model (SIM)
• Shift from classroom to school
• Components
• Teacher and student materials
• International Professional Development Network
• Feeding the network

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Overview

• 1 Understanding the challenge
• 2 Toward a solution Elements to consider

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Understanding the Challenge

• How many things must change?
• How difficult is sense-making and
  reformulation?
• What will be the reaction(s) to the new
  innovation?
• How far from traditional staff development is
  your plan?

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Understanding the Challenge

• How many things must change?
• How difficult is sense-making and
  reformulation?
• What will be the reaction(s) to the new
  innovation?
• How far from traditional staff development is
  your plan?

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Determining the amount of change required
William Reid (1987)
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Intervention Framework
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Components of Organization Change
Mobilization
Passion
Readiness
Implementation
Vision Compelling Case Felt Need Magnitude Understanding Leadership Commitment Individual Capabilities (Tools/Skills) Organization Capabilities (Processes/Systems/ Structure) Stakeholder Response Resources Competing Events Roles Engagement/ Involvement Expectations/ Consequences Communication Planning Structure Monitoring Risk Mitigation Celebration
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Components of Individual Transitions
Ending
Searching
Engaging
Dealing with Loss Letting Go Saying Good-bye Dealing with Disruptions In-between Time Uncertainty Finding Support Opening a New Chapter Renewal Refocusing/ Recommitting
Transition Levers Transition Levers Transition Levers
Power Data Influence
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Understanding the Challenge

• How many things must change?
• How difficult is sense-making and
  reformulation?
• What will be the reaction(s) to the new
  innovation?
• How far from traditional staff development is
  your plan?

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Understanding the role of human
sense-making Successful implementation of
complex policies usually necessitates substantial
changes in the implementing agents schemas.
Hence, it is important to understand how
implementing agents construct ideas from and
about state and national standards. Most
conventional theories of change fail to take into
account the complexity of human sense
makingViewing failure in implementation as
demonstrating lack of capacity or deliberate
attempt to ignore policy overlooks the complexity
of the sense-making process. Sense-making is not
a simple decoding of the policy message, in
general, the process of comprehension is an
active process of interpretation that draws on
the individuals rich knowledge base of
understandings, beliefs, and attitudes.
Spillane, Reiser, Reimer, 2002
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Allowing time for reformulation No one can
resolve the crisis of reintegration on behalf of
another. Every attempt to preempt conflict,
argument, protect by rational planning, can only
be abortive however reasonable the proposed
changes, the process of implementing them must
still allow the impulse of rejection to play
itself out. When those who have power to
manipulate changes act as if they have only to
explain, and when their explanations are not at
once accepted, shrug off opposition as ignorance
or prejudice, they express a profound contempt
for the meaning of lives other than their own.
For the reformers have already assimilated these
changes to their purposes, and worked out a
reformulation which makes sense to them perhaps
through months or years of analysis and debate.
If they deny others the chance to do the same,
they treat them as puppets dangling by the
threads of their own conceptions. Marris,
1975
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Understanding the Challenge

• How many things must change?
• How difficult is sense-making and
  reformulation?
• What will be the reaction(s) to the new
  innovation?
• How far from traditional staff development is
  your plan?

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Street-Level Workers

• Workers
• Shirkers
• Saboteurs
• Cops, Teachers, Counselors Narratives of
  Street-Level Judgment by Stephen Maynard-Moody
  Michael Musheno

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Understanding the Challenge

• How many things must change?
• How difficult is sense-making and
  reformulation?
• How will different reactions to the change be
  handled?
• How far from traditional professional
  development is your plan?

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Professional Development Approaches

• Traditional
• Inservice on inservice days
• Enlightened
• Interviews, partnership learning, participant
  choice, in-class modeling, ongoing
• Instructional Coaches
• Enlightened Onsite coaching and collaboration
  for implementation

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Effectiveness of Staff Development Activities
Knowledge Skill Classroom
Acquisition Application
Present Information
40-80 10 5
80-85 10-40 5-10
Present Model
Present Model Practice Feedback
80-85 80 10-15
Present Model Practice Feedback Coaching
90 90 80-90
National Staff Development Council, 1995 Fullan,
1991 Joyce Showers, 1988 Mehring, 1999.
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Implementation Rates
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Overview

• 1 Understanding the challenge
• 2 Toward a solution Elements to consider

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Toward a Solution Elements to Consider

• Extensive follow-up
• Opportunities for continual learning
• Primary energy that drives school improvement is
  moral purpose
• Promote deep relationships
• Make innovations powerful easy
• Give lots of thought to the complexity of change

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Toward a Solution Elements to Consider

• Extensive follow-up
• Opportunities for continual learning
• Primary energy that drives school improvement is
  moral purpose
• Promote deep relationships
• Make innovations powerful easy
• Give lots of thought to the complexity of change

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Extensive Follow-up

• Support the process of reintegration and
  sense-making
• Assist in taking things off their plate
• Support skill acquisition
• Participate in problem-solving

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Toward a Solution Elements to Consider

• Extensive follow-up
• Opportunities for continual learning
• Primary energy that drives school improvement is
  moral purpose
• Promote deep relationships
• Make innovations powerful easy
• Give lots of thought to the complexity of change

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Opportunities for Continual Learning

• Complexity of change requires more than
  one-shot initiatives
• After initial staff development.make adjustments
  (after action reports)
• What was supposed to happen
• What really happened
• What accounted for the differences
• What do we do differently next time

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Toward a Solution Elements to Consider

• Extensive follow-up
• Opportunities for continual learning
• Primary energy that drives school improvement is
  moral purpose
• Promote deep relationships
• Make innovations powerful easy
• Give lots of thought to the complexity of change

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Focusing on the moral purpose

• Provide compelling reasons for making the change
• Most effective change occurs when the reasons for
  it are emotionally felt
• No sustained change unless things are done for a
  moral purpose
• Built to Last by Collins and Porras

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Toward a Solution Elements to Consider

• Extensive follow-up
• Opportunities for continual learning
• Primary energy that drives school improvement is
  moral purpose
• Promote deep relationships
• Make innovations powerful easy
• Give lots of thought to the complexity of change

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Promote deep relationships

• Goal is to develop a sense of personal
  responsibility for success of the innovation
• Professional Learning Communities
• No change occurs without relational trust.
  (Fullan)

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Toward a Solution Elements to Consider

• Extensive follow-up
• Opportunities for continual learning
• Primary energy that drives school improvement is
  moral purpose
• Promote deep relationships
• Make innovations powerful easy
• Give lots of thought to the complexity of change

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Make innovation powerful easy

• Ideas, values, technologies that do the job
  with the least demand on psychic energy will
  survive. An appliance that does more work
  (powerful) with less effort (easy) will be
  preferred (Csikszentmihalyi)
• Make powerful by
• gt Grounding in research
• gt Confirm social validity in multiple
  settings/conditions
• Make easy by
• gt Preparing materials
• gt Coaching
• gt Simplifying instructions/procedures
• gt Anticipating and removing barriers

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Toward a Solution Elements to Consider

• Extensive follow-up
• Opportunities for continual learning
• Primary energy that drives school improvement is
  moral purpose
• Promote deep relationships
• Make innovations powerful easy
• Give lots of thought to the complexity of change

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Consider the complexity of the changes

• Ongoing conversations are important
• To be successful, teachers need deep knowledge of
  the innovation
• Both explicit and tacit knowledge are required
• Need thorough understanding of tacit knowledge to
  create good explicit protocols.need well
  designed professional development system to make
  explicit procedures tacit

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Thank you!