How Adopting a Pilot Mentality Can Help Schools Innovate Under Pressure and Create a Quality Improvement Culture
By Jessica Hamman, CEO of Glean Education (Originally Published on Medium)
The United States public education system does not accept new things quickly or easily. Maybe you’ve heard the popular analogy that trying to create change in education is like trying to turn a barge at sea. But with the emergence of the Coronavirus mid-year 2020, the US education system has — in a matter of weeks — spun 180 degrees into waters of change.
With many of the nation’s school campuses closed indefinitely due to virus concerns, the US education system is trying something truly new: wide-spread remote learning. Without a doubt, the US education system is facing the single greatest opportunity for innovation and quality improvement in our in our lifetime.
Now we need to help school leaders and teachers to make good on it.
The Problem
Schools have been forcefully immersed in online learning, a platform they are mostly unfamiliar with. Online learning is obviously not a new concept, but many schools haven’t used it as an instructional medium and are facing major implementation hurdles. Paradoxically, schools have rushed into remote learning to “ensure access and continuity of learning,” yet many are noticing that students with disabilities and those without access to technology are being slighted or left out all together.
There is no doubt that there will be a steep learning curve for districts as they negotiate this new online territory, but they will certainly figure it out in time. Many districts are already putting the pieces together and finding success. The bigger issue is how schools and district approach this change (and other ones like it) without a clear strategy for innovation.
The Solution
Administrators can make the most of this opportunity (and place their schools on a track of continual innovation and improvement) by doing what start-ups and successful private companies do: run pilots and implement a quality improvement cycle. Schools need time to learn, test, and iterate and put this method into practice.
Quality Improvement is a research-based approach that creates a system to innovate, test, and improve outcomes in a continuous cycle. QI is used by organizations of all size — from small business start-ups to mammoth industries like healthcare where critical to their sustainability and success. This approach could and should be used in education organizations as well to support innovation and improvement.
Fillers, Bethany. (2019). Sensemaking in the Process of Inquiry: A Qualitative Case Study of a Networked Improvement Community. 10.13140/RG.2.2.22104.34569.
Dr. Fillers offers three guiding questions (see infographic) for administrators to ask as they design their pilot. “What are we trying to accomplish? What changes might we make and why? And how will we know that a change is an improvement?”
Here are the steps to follow when thinking about setting up a pilot:
Come up with an approach to test. (Plan)
Pilot the approach. (Do)
Collect data to see if the approach was effective. (Study)
Make changes to the approach based on the data and implement. (Act)
Administrators and teachers may wonder how this works in a school setting (and under pressure), but implementation is easier than you think. Here are four things
Promote a Culture of Collaboration through Transparency: School leaders don’t have to be experts in everything. Tell stakeholders that you are testing a new approach through a pilot (in this case remote learning) and will need everyone’s support to see if the approach is successful.Strong communication about the pilot helps to create a culture of collaboration that will help ensure future innovation down the road. Tell all stakeholders that they have a role in the success of the test.
Cultivate a Data-Driven Culture Where Feedback is Welcome: Historically, schools have not been a place that opens up itself to feedback from some key stakeholders, but experts argue that this is a key aspect of successful innovation culture. Let all players know that feedback matters and set up ways to solicit feedback so that it can be used to assess the pilot approach.
Collect both Qualitative and Quantitive Data: What does this look like for remote learning? You can collect qualitative data through short stakeholder surveys or interviews (like Google Form, Survey Monkey, or Typeform). You can collect quantitative data by using student assessments you may have used in the traditional classroom to see if the new approach is as effective at reaching student learning goals relative to their previous performance. This list from the Pell Institute has some great ideas on data sources.
Set Reasonable Testing Boundaries: Think about how long you will run the pilot test and be clear about the duration with all stakeholders. For example, “We are going to pilot this approach to remote learning for one week after which we’ll assess how it went and revise it based on what we learn.”
Consider Assumptions: Every idea has assumptions behind it, but they aren’t always conscious. When launching a pilot, consider the assumptions you’ve made when piloting an idea. This article from MIT’s Sloan Business School Management Review shows how testing assumptions will help you understand how and why the pilot was successful or unsuccessful and revise your pilot for future success. For example, in moving to a remote learning setting from a traditional learning setting, one assumption schools are making is that all students have technology. If this assumption is true and technology is not a barrier, then students can access their learning. But there may be other assumptions at play that create barriers to implementation. Make sure you consider all the assumptions that go into a particular idea.
The conditions for innovation have been thrust upon us. This could be the moment we have been waiting for. Now we need to support district and school leaders to learn how to use change to their advantage and so our education system comes out stronger on the other side.
Also posted on Medium.