The latest twist on spreading innovation one school at a time

Innovation can come to the rescue of failing schools. But school officials and the consultants they employ must do so on a school-by-school basis.

Hoping to strengthen and quicken efforts to help all students engage deeply in productive learning, educational policy makers at all levels are asking schools to embrace innovation. Slow and steady improvement, they argue, won’t produce significant changes in schools or in student learning and accomplishments. Bolder and more creative solutions must be found.

This focus on innovation has two related goals. First, schools move toward adopting specific policies, programs, and practices that research and experience have shown to be successful elsewhere. Second, schools redesign themselves as innovative organizations that continually identify and adopt programs and practices — including the requisite organizational structures and cultures — that help them better serve students.

Responding to that need, some school districts have encouraged school-based innovation and sought assistance from school development organizations that specialize in helping schools. New York City’s schools, for example, have contracted with several school development organizations to implement a program called iZone 360 in about 75 schools. Big Picture Learning is one of those external school development organizations working with iZone 360 and the organization with which the authors are affiliated.

We’re learning much through this work, some of which we share in this article. Don’t look for valid and replicable practices, however, because our successes thus far are fragile. We struggle along with the schools we serve to help them hone their innovating chops. Schools face difficult challenges embracing innovations developed elsewhere. Transforming themselves into innovating organizations is even more daunting, as described most notably in the work of such diverse scholars, change agents, and thought leaders as Michael Fullan, Seymour Sarason, and Clayton Christensen.

States and districts appear reluctant to create true alternatives to the existing system.

In our work with schools, we’ve seen the incredible overload on principals and teachers who — as some have described it — are attempting something akin to redesigning the plane while in flight under time constraints, inadequate and inflexible resources, and little experience. Such challenges are indisputable, but we believe the problem is a bit deeper. In our work, we’ve encountered a triad of conditions — timid and tepid changes, a culture of compliance, and unseasoned leadership — that make innovating so hard for schools and the external organizations that try to help them. Let’s discuss each of those particular challenges.

Timid and tepid changes

Given the limited success that many schools have had with traditional interventions, one would think they would face strong pressure to try something bold — more systemic and comprehensive, even a bit unconventional. States and districts, however, appear reluctant to create true alternatives to the existing system. Educators are wary of being charged with experimenting on their students, so they settle for more instructional time, better student performance tracking, or even changes in instructional methods. Those changes, alone or together, are unlikely to make a truly significant difference. Refined versions of current programs and practices will likely yield a gain of a few percentage points when double-digit increases are needed.

Culture of compliance

American education is currently in an era of unprecedented federal and state prescription. Increasingly, policy makers specify not only the outcomes that must be achieved and what evidence they will recognize as indicating success, but also the means schools must employ to achieve those outcomes. Schools and districts get to pick from a list of putative “gold-standard,” research-supported models. Leaving aside the questionable quality of that research and the shaky foundation it provides, we believe this tight specification of means as well as ends can promote the adoption of new programs and practices from some approved list, but may enervate efforts to nurture a school’s innovating capacities.

Time and again, the principals and teachers we work with tell us they intend to start working on innovating as soon as they get the “basics” addressed.

They tell us that they need to “do school” well before they can seriously consider innovative programs or practices, much less become an innovating organization. Their reasoning sounds much like that of a teacher one of us encountered many years ago who proudly announced that she loved computers so much that students who completed all their assignments in a given week could use the computers on Friday afternoon.

Complying with means requirements — minutes of instruction, scripted instructional practices, approved instructional materials, and testing-schedule-dictated scope and sequence charts, for example — consumes teachers’ limited time and other resources. So they settle for fine-tuning what they have in place. In this mode, school improvement teams focus on tightly scripted and formulaic responses to the student needs they observe, arguing that they are in compliance with district or state directives, or with the detailed prescriptions of external purveyors of validated programs and practices.

Policy makers find it difficult to resist the impulse to control for compliance when they discover something that “works” elsewhere. They give principals and faculty members mixed signals, telling them to innovate, but within tight boundaries. Often, in our experience, policies that specify both ends and means obtain neither, and actually diminish a capacity for innovating. Such policies also diminish school-based accountability for the ends because faculty can indicate that they complied with directives — so perhaps the directives, and directors, are at fault. Our guess is that such a situation moves staff to ask for the “10 specific steps” they must complete. They work at gaming the system they can’t control, often adopting a succession of innovations without enhancing their innovating competence.

Innovating — continually identifying and adapting programs and practices, as distinguished from an occasional one-off adoption of a new program or practice — requires an organizational culture and climate that encourages risk taking and entrepreneurial behavior. Yet the pressures to improve test scores and to implement specific, required practices work against such behavior. This is particularly the case in underperforming schools, where substantial numbers of students are performing poorly on tests. In such schools, faculty members are often as unhappy as their students and risk taking has been thoroughly rinsed out of the culture.

Weak leadership preparation

Innovating requires that principals and teachers take on the demanding leadership role of internal change agents. Yet few principal preparation programs and fewer teacher preparation programs prepare their students to lead innovating in their schools. Few district professional development programs — the iZone is an exception — address leading innovating organizations. More often, principals and teachers are caught up with managing data-driven instruction. Lacking sound preparation (education, training, and support), most principals find it difficult to communicate with teachers about innovating. Teachers consistently report being assigned to new roles and tasks that they feel poorly equipped to manage.

We work with many principals and faculty leaders who are inspired and inspiring. They understand that young people are more than what their test scores show. They want to develop or bring into the school many innovations that would make a substantial difference in the lives of their students. But these teachers and principals typically represent a minority of the professionals in a school, and school teams struggle to bring less committed faculty members to the work. The culture saps strong faculty commitment. Indeed, we are often surprised how much a committed principal and faculty team can accomplish in such toxic circumstances.

Innovating — continually identifying and adapting programs and practices, as distinguished from an occasional one-off adoption of a new program or practice — requires an organizational culture and climate that encourages risk taking and entrepreneurial behavior.

When and where such leadership skills exist, however, the challenges are enormous. Said one insightful but very new principal, “I want to blow up the whole thing . . . all at once and start from scratch.” Yet, he knew that such an approach was just not possible. Perhaps, he said wryly and figuratively, “I need to settle for one corridor at a time.”

Any external organization wishing to help schools develop or enhance their capacities for innovating, or even for adopting specific innovations, will need to address these three challenges. Yet many of these outside groups aren’t up to the task of enhancing a school’s capacity to innovate. Focused on helping a school replicate a specific program or practice, many external helpers leave the schools without having added to their capacity to continue innovating on their own. An important component of that capacity is a principal who builds with faculty members a shared vision and strategy and supports them in implementing that strategy.

One school at a time

How might school developers, serving as external helping organizations, address this trio of challenges? First, we recommend that they emphasize the helping role over the expert consultant role. Second, they should give equal attention to building a school’s capacity to innovate and to assist them in adapting specific innovations to their setting. Third, they should craft an approach that allows them to address each school uniquely, working within a broad framework that simultaneously builds each school’s idiosyncratic overall redesign/improvement framework and process and works on specific components of that school’s improvement design. We describe here what we consider the essential ingredients of this proposed helping strategy.

Relationships matter

School development organizations can’t help schools learn if they do not know them. Therefore, they must invest time in understanding their circumstances and contexts. They can learn what the principal and faculty value by helping them create a statement of mission, guiding principles, and vision. They can identify the key players, particularly the teacher leaders who serve as gatekeepers. We use the term helping deliberately. Yes, external helpers can provide training and support, but all services need to be framed by this helping orientation. The relationship must be developed and sustained over time. School developers must be patient and persistent. Building a relationship with school teams requires paying attention to the soft data — aspirations and concerns — as well as the hard, identifying gatekeepers who will lead the work, and modeling and coaching faculty collaboration.

Ownership matters

In their work with schools, external helpers must start with the school’s agendas and bring innovations and innovating to them. Developers must encourage school teams to own the outcomes as well as the work. They must encourage and support lots of prototyping and testing, gently nudging minor changes into significant ones. They need to avoid fixating on the innovations themselves and focus on the innovation process. They must focus on what the school sees as its needs and help teams develop a framework for ongoing change. In this way, teams develop fidelity to their own designs, not those of the developers who help these teams create their own innovative and innovating schools. Particularly in the early stages of the relationship, developers must provide teams with tools and processes for developing and evaluating their designs.

Enhancing innovating competencies

To support school teams in developing innovating competencies — knowledge, skills, and dispositions — school developers should consider assisting school teams to use design-thinking tools and protocols drawn from the work of IDEO and the d.School (also known as the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design) at Stanford University. This design-oriented approach to innovating ensures that school teams use both the quality of the student experience and valued learning outcomes to guide the changes they design.

Developers must gently resist the schools’ requests for the 10 steps they need to follow dutifully. Instead, they need to encourage and support school teams in adapting others’ prescriptions, in what we call “adapting with fidelity” to the core operational principles and design features of the innovation. Such adaptation is an important step in innovating. Developers should help school teams acquire specific design-thinking competencies: deep understanding and empathy gained through careful listening to and observing of students, rapid prototyping, failing quickly and smartly, and adapting intelligently. The focus needs to be on enhancing innovating mindsets as much as innovating knowledge and skills, and on addressing design principles regarding learners and learning as much as replicating implementation strategies.

Modeling and coaching

External helping organizations must embrace modeling and coaching as their core helping strategies. School teams appreciate partners who are willing to get their hands dirty. They want their external partners to work shoulder to shoulder with them and their students, sharing with them how they can use our strategies when we are not with them. This includes working alongside teachers using a new practice with their students or with a principal facilitating a design team session. It includes demonstrating how performance data can be used to guide changes in practice.

Inspiring and challenging

By building a relationship with school teams and starting with their agendas, school developers can earn the right to challenge them, to stretch them to the edge of their competence as innovators. They must honor the helpers’ creed: Take schools where they are, but never leave them there.

External helping organizations must see their responsibilities as including enhancing schools’ “account-ability” — their competence in providing an uncommon student learning experience. They must ask: Are you willing to do what is necessary? Are you ready to stretch beyond your comfort zone? Are you willing to make mistakes? They must inspire school teams to take their design journeys to create the best possible learning experience for their students.

There is art and science in helping schools with this work, requiring heuristics more than algorithms. It’s hard work, but we believe an artisanal strategy is the path to success for external organizations that want to support both innovations and innovating.

CITATION:  Moreno, C., Luria, D., & Mojkowski, C. (2013). The latest twist on spreading innovation: One school at a time. Phi Delta Kappan, 95 (3), 8-11.