Moving the Needle:: Proven Strategies for Successfully Implementing School Change

By Mike Muir

School improvement isn't a one-time event. As our world rapidly changes, so must we change how we "do school." Good school leaders are constantly re-evaluating how best to serve our students by identifying areas that need improvement and courageously working with colleagues and the community to facilitate and embrace change that aims to help students develop the academic and personal skills they need to be successful.
In this timely resource, Mike Muir offers
• Insights into the change process, including myths and challenges
• Ways to face the "we've always done it this way" mentality
• Strategies for bringing team members to embrace a mindset of being agents of change rather than victims of change.
• Details about every aspect of a successful change process
• Practical and doable strategies.
• How to develop shared leadership teams
• Ideas for engaging diverse stakeholders
• Tips for supporting team members
This book is one that every administrator, team leader, teacher leader, and counselor should get familiar with and use to make the change process a success for all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781560903017

Book preview

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1

Making School Change Happen

School Change Struggles

I’m guessing you are here because you, too, are struggling to make school change happen. You are working on a large-scale school change initiative. Or are about to start an initiative. Or know, one day, you want to play a critical role in implementing a significant initiative in your school or district.

It might be implementing advisory, or organizing interdisciplinary teams for integrated units, or working to personalize learning, or setting up a 1-to-1 technology initiative, or increasing the number of students who read for pleasure, or trying to help at-risk or unmotivated students do better in school, or ensuring that your teachers are effective, or switching to teaching math experientially, or improving the number of students ready for careers or college, or, or, or…

Are you working on one now? How’s it going? Are the changes moving forward? Are teachers putting into practice the strategies you’re promoting? Getting a large-scale change initiative going—the logistics alone—can be daunting. But ensuring it moves the needle for students or teachers is a whole different thing.

And how are you measuring success? How do you know it’s working? Has student behavior and attendance improved? Do students seem more engaged? Have grades or test scores improved? Are students and parents happier? Are teachers?

You are here because you, too, have some school change initiative you are struggling with, or getting ready to struggle with. You want teachers to succeed. You want the students to benefit from the initiative. You want teachers to feel successful. You want principals and district staff to have confidence with where the initiative is headed. You want to be successful and feel that you made a difference.

You want to move the needle.

This time.

You’ve been here before and you know how hard it is. We all have been part of initiatives that we have put enormous energy and effort into, but then seemed to make very little difference. We’ve been part of enough change efforts that we have probably started thinking of them as the flavor of the month. It is no wonder that some of our colleagues do little, waiting for today’s initiative to go away, knowing another is around the corner. Or doing just enough in a superficial way to look like they are going along, because their experience with initiatives has been that they are superficial.

Why Bother to Change When it May Seem We Don’t Need To?

And at the core of that struggle to get (almost) everyone in your school or district to work with you (authentically) on making the change happen, is the widespread belief that we may have no need to make any change. The question seems to be: Are schools working or not?

You listen to some and it sounds like they aren’t. Yet you look at other indicators and they are.

I was just starting my education career when the Nation at Risk report came out (Wikipedia provides a good overview, including a link to the full report). It was the report—or at least the first modern report—that warned that America’s schools weren’t doing the job they needed to to adequately prepare students, and seems to be the impetus for so many of the changes that schools have gone through in the last couple decades (at least the ones they were asked to make, as opposed to the ones educators and schools chose themselves).

Since then, there have certainly been a variety of reasons identified for why we need schools to change. These include improving achievement, better preparing students for a future (or present!) that is significantly different from our past, increasing engagement and decreasing the number of dropouts, and being able to better compete in a global economy. And there have been quite a few approaches targeted at addressing these needs, such as increased accountability (testing, and state and national standards), Highly Qualified Teachers, the introduction of computers and other new learning tools, and various pedagogies, such as curriculum integration, project-based learning, online learning, and proficiency-based or competency-based learning.

But those come more from a policy-level perspective, than a practical, field-based perspective. And educators in the trenches may have a hard time buying into the rhetoric out of Washington or the state capitol. They are more interested in what they witness in the classroom.

As educators, they see lots of students who show up every day, do their work, get good grades, graduate, and go on to college. And educators see the students who show up half the time, do little work, and maybe graduate (but barely), or just choose to drop out. Given the success of many of your students, it is easy to see why educators might identify this as a problem with the other students. It is no wonder that so many folks look at the first group and decide that schools are working and wonder why the second group can’t get it together.

Yet, other school districts, like Auburn, Maine, where I used to work, have decided that even though students and families certainly contribute to the challenges, the issue is a problem for the school to solve, not a student problem. Where others see our schools working for 70% of the students, Auburn sees their schools not working for 30%. They want their schools to work for all their children (or at least a whole heck of a lot more than they are now). They don’t see it as a school problem from the perspective of blame, but rather from the perspective of locus of control. They believe it is on them to address misunderstandings of how their schools do and don’t work for students and to identify systems, strategies, and approaches that can improve the rate at which they succeed with students.

Myths About How We’re Doing School Now

It is understandable that there is confusion about whether our schools are working or not. Our schools certainly do work, to varying degrees, for many students. But they also certainly don’t work, to varying degrees, for many students.

The confusion is fueled by several myths about how we do school now.

What follows are some of the things teachers have said to me that I believe to be myths. Mostly, I think, educators genuinely believe them to be true, and therefore think they’re reasons not to change. But, since I believe them to be myths, I don’t think they are authentic barriers to moving forward. (I also fully recognize perception may be more powerful than reality!)

Our schools are working just fine.

This one was alluded to above. Part of me understands that it looks like we are doing a good job and that schools are working when teachers look at some of the amazing successes of our easy-to-teach kids, or at the auditorium filled with graduates each June. But I am acutely aware that whether we look at graduation rates, test scores, or the comments from employers, there are way too many students for whom we are not successful. As some schools, such as Auburn Schools, believe, you can’t have 70% of your students succeeding without having 30% not succeeding.

It’s not 30%, you say! It’s only 20%. Or 15%… We could debate the numbers. But however you slice it, a system that purports to be set up to educate all the children of all the people doesn’t work for all the children. Should we be satisfied that our current approach only works for a percentage? Are we okay that it doesn’t work for more? Shouldn’t we be willing to explore what we do in school and where there are opportunities to reach more students?

Since some of our students go on to the military, we need to teach them to be compliant and follow directions.

This one comes up now and then when I have conducted a workshop on motivating underachievers and is used as a reason why educators should focus more on getting students to do what they are supposed to rather than on trying to motivate students who are disengaged. And enough of our students go on to careers in the military that I can see where we should be concerned about what the military might need from our schools.

A wonderful young lady and teacher, who I consider one of my daughters, is a military veteran. She served in the Army before going to college and getting her teaching degree. Our experience with the military was that they have an amazing, well designed educational system. It starts, of course, with boot camp, which does a surprisingly good job of teaching young people how to follow orders and take direction (even for those quite reluctant to learn the lesson). I’m not sure the military needs our help teaching compliance. In fact, I believe they would be much happier if we were simply better at engaging learners in general, teaching them basic skills, lots of content knowledge, and how to think and communicate.

Besides, people are better at taking direction when we do consider motivation and engagement, such as when they are working on things they are interested in, believe in, feel like they are contributing to, good at, and have had some choice in doing, rather than when those with authority simply tell them what to do.

Life isn’t about redos.

When educators start to work on approaches such as proficiency-based learning, competency-based learning, or customized learning, they begin to struggle with the idea of moving from pace being the constant and learning the variable to learning being the constant, and pace being the variable. How do we help students master the learning target and, recognizing that students learn differently, be flexible about how long it takes?

This often includes the practice of assessing where a student is in their learning, and if we discover that she hasn’t mastered the concept yet, that she goes back and works on it some more and is assessed again later. And educators sometimes interpret that as a redo. And we are so used to giving tests and quizzes, and are so used to a student earning whatever grade they get on those tests and quizzes, that the notion of getting assessed again doesn’t quite seem appropriate. Further, the notion of addressing the needs of 120 students all in different places in their learning, when we don’t necessarily know exactly how to do that, and we never experienced flexible pace practices as students ourselves, certainly makes the whole idea seem daunting, perhaps even undoable! At the very least, scary.

But the idea that life isn’t about redos is simply and blatantly false. Any teacher new to the profession knows you can redo the teacher’s exam until you pass it. It’s the same with the bar exam, and your real estate license, and your driver’s license, and the sergeant’s exam. If things in your life don’t work out the way you want the first time, you can go back and try again. Redos clearly come with consequences, and always take additional effort on the part of the learner, but they are both available and fairly common. And, in the real world outside of school, you almost always simply get credit for having passed, and rarely is there a ding for how many times it took you.

What about our Ivy League students?

There seems to be a concern that, for some reason, those students who have a shot at getting into better colleges will have their opportunity undermined by the school change you’re working on. I think the belief goes something like, those students know how to do school well now, and if we change how we do school they won’t do as well (and won’t be able to get into that really good college). Or perhaps it is the thought that if you change school so it works for a different kind of kid, like the ones for whom school isn’t working now, it will stop working for the students it works for now.

In truth, I have never seen an innovative approach to learning that works for reluctant learners but has not also worked for our best and brightest. Some honors students do occasionally get upset because they have been good at the game of school and now the game is changing, but once they get beyond that and figure out the new system, they do every bit as well as they did before.

I have experienced parents becoming upset because other students can now succeed, not only their children. They weren’t upset that their children were not being successful, because they were. They were simply worried that their children would not look better enough compared to other children, because others were succeeding now. Oh my…

I can understand a parent being worried that their child might not get into college, thinking that colleges only know how to judge the fit of students from traditional schools. But, in fact, colleges are used to reviewing student applicants from many kinds of educational programs and with many kinds of transcripts. When Maine introduced their requirement for a proficiency-based diploma, the commissioner of education at the time contacted more than 100 colleges (including Ivy League schools) to see if they would accept a proficiency-based diploma. All but one not only said yes, they would, but also that they were already accepting students from across the country and around the world who had proficiency-based diplomas. One Maine school, Massabesic High School, even had its first student in more than two decades accepted into Harvard. The student claims that it was only because of her district’s focus on teaching differently.

And frankly, this whole argument frustrates and angers me. What percentage of our kids go on to the best colleges? Even if people’s concerns were realized, are we going to avoid getting better at meeting the needs of all our students because of an incredibly tiny fraction of our student population? Does the perceived importance of that tiny (even mythical for many schools!) percentage outweigh the significant percentage of our students for whom school is not currently working, and for whom we have an opportunity to make a difference?

Even though I identify these as myths, I still think it’s important to be thoughtful about how we respond to concerns raised by students, colleagues, parents, and community members. Whether the concerns are, upon examination, legitimate or not, most people who raise them are genuine and are raising them because they are honestly worried about them—they come from the right place. And, while we deal with stakeholders with care and diplomacy, let’s also make sure those concerns pass scrutiny and the straight face test.

Schools Aren’t Broken - They’re Designed for the Wrong Thing

So, some people think schools are working and others don’t. Some believe that the statements I address above are real and legitimate, but I think they are myths. Are schools broken or not?

I don’t believe schools are broken. I simply believe they are designed for the wrong thing, an idea introduced to me by Bea McGarvey.

Bea McGarvey co-authored Inevitable: Mass Customized Learning, the book that paints a vision for proficiency-based learning, where schools meet the individual learning needs of every learner every hour of every day. Bea’s theory (and that of many others, including me) is that all children are born with an inherent will and motivation to learn, and her mission has been to create learning environments that do not extinguish this natural drive. She tells stories of working with schools on how to change, and of teachers coming to her and asking why they should try to fix schools if they seem to be working.

After really chewing over the question, she says she finally understood the reason: schools aren’t broken. They work great. They do very well at what they were designed for. The problem is that that design is no longer helpful to us; the goal for schooling has changed.

Schools were designed for Industrial Age needs, and the goal was to sort out talent and prepare the rest to be good at doing what they were told. We needed a few good leaders, but mostly we needed good clerks and factory workers and soldiers. And schools got really good at that.

But for this economy, in the Information Age, we need workers who can learn, who can problem-solve and communicate, who can identify new issues and solutions and share them effectively with their bosses and with their teammates, not just do what they are told. We need employees