Right From the Start: The Essential Guide to Implementing School Initiatives

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Dr. Jim Marshall. James Marshall, Ph.D., is Professor of Educational Leadership at San Diego State University, where he serves as the Senior Director for the EDD Program in PK-12 School Leadership. With over 200 publications to his credit, Dr. Marshall's scholarship encompasses a diverse range of works that include empirical research, program evaluation efforts, and policy development.

[00:38]

And he's the author of the new book, Right From the Start, The Essential Guide to Implementing School Initiatives, which we're here to talk about today.

[00:46] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:49] SPEAKER_01:

Jim, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:51] SPEAKER_00:

Hey there, Justin. Thank you so much for having me. Great opportunity to chat about something I love, programs and initiatives.

[00:58] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I'm excited too, because as school leaders, at some point we're all going to face issues implementing an initiative of our own design, and we're going to deal with implementing initiatives that maybe we didn't choose but are responsible for. So set the stage for us a little bit. What role do school initiatives play in the work of school leaders? Because certainly we could stay busy doing the day-to-day stuff if there were never any initiatives at all. Take us into the world of initiatives and set the stage a little bit for us.

[01:30] SPEAKER_00:

That is a great place to start. So I'm fond of saying that learning initiatives, learning programs, they shape who we become at this point in our life. It's super easy for me to look back to my elementary school days and middle and high and point to things that happened to me that made me who I am today, programs I participated in. And thankfully, there were quite a few programs I participated in that made me what I'm not today, which would include like a ballroom dancer and other things like that. So I think when we look as school leaders at the landscape in front of us, you can't not pay attention to the programs because they are part and parcel what you're doing, whether you are increasing the capacity of the staff you lead or working with the students in their classrooms. Whether you have created an initiative from scratch that you're excited about to fulfill a need you saw, or whether you are voluntold to implement an entirely new curriculum across the district, it is what we do.

[02:29]

And ultimately, the success of the people we lead rests upon these initiatives. They are part of our day-to-day work, as you so perfectly observed. And I would just kind of foreshadow my perspective on this by saying, I honestly believe when an initiative isn't well-planned and doesn't dovetail into the work we are responsible for every day, that's one of the biggest threats to them not being successful.

[02:54] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Jim, one of the things that I recall feeling and experiencing as a principal is the sense that initiatives are kind of a common touchstone for what we're doing, right? There's this sense among your staff that when we have an initiative, everybody is clear on what that is. Either we're implementing a new curriculum or a new approach or working with kids in some specific new way. To what extent is that really true that we're all talking about the same thing, that we're all having this common experience of an initiative? Because I think we've certainly all experienced the perils of misalignment or that feeling of, you know, I thought we were aligned on this and then we get into the details and it turns out we're not very aligned. Helps understand that issue of having a shared perspective.

[03:38] SPEAKER_00:

That is so important to everything we do and often encounter shortcoming of the implementation of initiatives that goes something like this. We have this new initiative, we wanna launch it, let's get everybody trained on it. And then school year begins, let's go out, let's do what we were trained on and nothing changes. So one of the things I believe very strongly in is that it takes a system to put an initiative in place Oftentimes, because we're educators and it's familiar to us, and frankly, it's what most of us went into the profession for, we love to teach people new things and increase their knowledge and their capacity. But so often we forget everything else. And one of those everything else's that you just mentioned is the way the initiative strategically fits into what we're already doing.

[04:29]

And every initiative should, because if it doesn't, that means that we have created something that is going to just be something we're doing off to the side that requires its own set of resources, its own set of oversight. And it's just going to fall by the wayside because it's not tied into the things we're being held accountable for, the things we believe in, our vision, our mission. And frankly, at the most fundamental level, something that we see in our school that we are being responsive for or an opportunity to. I don't want to be too deficit focused. There's always a balance there. But if we are truly addressing something core to the whatever the work is we're doing and the need, Then again, we are increasing the chances that it will get implemented, that people will come into alignment with the initiative and have a shared vision.

[05:22]

And most importantly, that we've increased the chances of positive and predictable results from what we set out to do.

[05:29] SPEAKER_01:

Right. And in the book, you talk about starting with needs assessment, which probably a lot of people hear that and think that would be nice if we could start with an actual needs assessment instead of just a mandate from some external person who is able to give us mandates. For system leaders who are, in fact, responsible for know imposing mandates on on their systems you know that's an essential part of the job to some extent how can that needs assessment happen at scale because you know i was a principal in seattle public schools and certainly you know if you have dozens or hundreds of schools you know no initiative is going to be a perfect fit for every single school and yet we have to act right we have to do things as a system to be coordinated to move forward so what can that assessment look like when there are a number of schools to consider

[06:15] SPEAKER_00:

Needs assessment, I think, is one of the most creative and enjoyable endeavors we as educational leaders partake of. The challenge, as you so rightly pointed out, is there's rarely time allocated to it. And often when people do a formal needs assessment, they encounter criticism. It's like, okay, well, why are you spending so much time studying this? Let's solve it. And that studying is so central to making a good investment, understanding the composition of an initiative, And especially based on your last question, just to follow up with that, establishing buy-in.

[06:57]

Doing needs assessment is about bringing people together to understand something and then make actionable plans that are measurable in terms of determining outcomes and building a program or initiative to it. So I agree with you that the sophistication and the kind of depth of needs assessment that goes on is oftentimes co-measure it with the size of the initiative. You know, if it's district wide, certainly we want to take time to understand our needs, what we're doing and how and predict how it's going to land in different parts of the district in your example. But I see school leaders specific to their own school site taking three hours, three days, three weeks to do needs assessment at an appropriate level. I often paraphrase needs assessment to getting smart.

[07:51]

I think that is ultimately what you're doing. You want to ask some good questions. You want to get into the shoes to the extent you can of the people involved and understand it so you increase the chance of making effective decisions. And you also have the lay of the land so you know when the needle moves, I know where we started and I see our well-informed plans are starting to make a difference. So it's not so much, I believe, everybody needs to do six months of needs assessment. There's examples of short and long needs assessments in the book.

[08:25]

But ultimately, I do believe any of us needs to get smart. And there's many reasons for that. But perhaps the most important is, I would argue nine times out of 10, it's not empirical data, but nine times out of 10, we do not, as a leader, we do not have the full picture of the situation until we intentionally set out to find it. We have a lot of ideas of what's going on in our head, and many of those are accurate, but we need to check them We need to confirm them. And I guarantee you, you will learn things you had no idea were happening out there that influence your approach to the initiative. And they can be good things.

[09:06]

They can be strengths of the system that you build on as you help your school, district, nonprofit, whatever it is, move in a new direction through an initiative.

[09:17] SPEAKER_01:

And I think you're drawing on some concepts that I recall learning about in the context of program evaluation. And I know you have a lot of experience and expertise in that field. And even for people who are not professional program evaluators, which is a research specialty and one that I had a front row seat on at the University of Washington, a lot of the faculty there had a lot of expertise in program evaluation. As system leaders, it is that same responsibility of really understanding what you're dealing with. What is it? the situation, what are the barriers, what are the strengths, and what do people need to do next to kind of productively move forward?

[09:55]

What are some of the maybe research skills or dispositions that you would like for system leaders to bring to that work? Knowing that most system leaders are not going to get technical training in program evaluation, what are some of the big takeaways? If you could kind of transfer some of those insights in rapid fashion.

[10:13] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, no, I'd love to. I am, first and foremost, a program evaluator. That's what I mainly teach at the university. And those are the adventures that led to many of the points in the book, including the emphasis on needs assessment, because so often when an initiative isn't performing, it's because it's not successful. positioned right. It doesn't have the right outcomes.

[10:37]

It doesn't reflect the audience or the participants it was designed for. So I love your question because I often think of needs assessment and program evaluation as kind of the yin and yang to each other. Program evaluation actually becomes needs assessment in the end because it's about continuous improvement it's about finding strengths of what's happening and then it's about using those strengths to continuously improve and optimize the initiative so indirectly i think i've named some of the things that are involved here but as a system leader if you are running initiative that sort of perspective or the practice of inquiry of a critical thinking of looking at what's going on and constantly asking yourself kind of cause and effect. If I see this happening, you know, is that likely? Is that the way we want it?

[11:28]

My favorite question, and this goes back to some of the earlier work in an area called evaluative thinking, which is coming back, it seems quite a bit. But evaluative thinking, my favorite question that folks have posed is, what if what I'm looking at is completely different than what I'm thinking I'm seeing? Like, what if my perspective is, you know, I'm from another planet and I don't know it and checking myself there. So I often tell my doctoral students who are out there, all of them, system leaders, central or site leaders, I often say you're doing program evaluation every day, just not in the formalized capital P, capital E sense. But these are skills as a leader, successful leaders have. So too with needs assessment.

[12:15]

Just asking good questions, wondering. Finding clarification, all of these things are things that we do naturally. And I think we just get a little intimidated occasionally when we formalize either needs assessment or program evaluation because it's seen as if it's this lengthy, detailed process. scary, numbery thing. And it can be. And the work I do certainly falls in that category.

[12:43]

But as leaders, we can do needs assessment light. We can do program evaluation light. And I would argue good leaders are already doing at least some of that every day they're on the job.

[12:54] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. And I think about the kind of mixed methods research that might be done in a formal way with proposals and institutional review boards and things like that, where we're looking at data and we're interviewing people. I mean, that's essentially what we need to do as system leaders as well, is look at the data, know the data, but don't just look at numbers. Actually talk to people, visit schools, see what people are doing, see what they're experiencing. And, you know, in almost any case where a program has failed or has been a bad fit, Probably it was one of those that didn't happen, right? Data was reviewed and proposals were considered, but the people who are actually responsible for implementing didn't necessarily get a chance to share their perspective.

[13:36] SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. I talk in this book a bit about using the data you already have, like pockets of data and evidence pockets that exist within our organizations. Sometimes we don't even think of them. And oftentimes the best data, and it quotes around best, in a moment where you don't have a lot of time, but you want to do something to forward your thinking, the best data is the data that's already in existence. So finding those pockets of evidence, pockets of innovation, where you have in your school site, say a couple of teachers, educators in classrooms who are doing novel things that you would have never known about. But that's best practice that could then be expanded and transferred across the site, across the district.

[14:20]

I mean, the research says in a big organization, you know, like IBM, let's say, or Facebook even, pockets of innovation, that practice stays wherever it starts for a minimum of two years. before anybody else even knows something great is happening that's improving the bottom line. I would argue in education, again, I have not done this research, but I bet it's even longer because there's so many competing things that keep us from deliberately setting our sights on finding good things that are happening that can then be leveraged to push us forward across our site, across the district. But again, the headline for me, at least in the good news, is these are all things that we as educators are good at. It's like, you know, asking questions, analyzing assumptions.

[15:11]

All of that are within our wheelhouse, most definitely. And I think they're things leaders need. do and can call on to affect change. And really that's what initiative does. It changes what's going on. So change management, part of it too, especially the implementation.

[15:28] SPEAKER_01:

Well, let's talk about designing and launching and scaling and, you know, all those implementation. And you said something that I found very interesting about requiring or expecting that a practice will run for two years before we try to replicate and scale it to make sure that we understand it, to make sure that it's actually working. And I don't know if you see this in your work, Jim, but I see a lot of enthusiasm in our profession these days to jump on a bandwagon and to be the first to do the new thing. And the older I get and the more waves of fads that I've seen come and go. the more I realize that sense of urgency to jump on the latest and greatest thing often leads us into things before there is evidence of their effectiveness. And that puts us in a very difficult and embarrassing place when we realize, oh, we got too aggressive about something that actually turned out to be a bad idea.

[16:23]

Or we didn't consider what would make it actually work, and we did it in a way, even if it was a good thing, we did it in a way that didn't yield the results that we wanted. So take us into some of that thinking. When we see an idea, it's promising. There's a lot of buzz about it. Maybe we have some people who are trying it. And I'm thinking in particular about curriculum adoption, which I had a lot of examples to see when I was in Seattle Public Schools.

[16:50]

You're constantly adopting new curriculum in different subject areas, different grade levels, and different schools are doing different things. So there's a lot to look at. There's a lot of examples to consider, a lot of data to look at. Help us think about how we might learn from the relevant sources of evidence when there's a lot out there and we are fired up to do something, right? Because we always have that fire under us as educators, as educational leaders to do something, to change something. How do we get this right?

[17:20] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Wow. That's such a great question. At the risk of at least initially repeating myself, I honestly believe it goes back to needs assessment. I mean, I may sound like a broken record, but whether it's the superintendent just went to a conference, talked to a vendor of a program that sounds great, and now they've mandated across the entire district.

[17:44] SPEAKER_01:

people don't know how much that really happens, right? Like one of these conferences, and that is absolutely how probably the majority of initiatives start, right? It's like a vendor is persuasive and a superintendent or somebody similarly positioned says, sure, sounds good, right?

[17:57] SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. And spoiler alert, but straight out of my master's program, I worked for a vendor creating educational software in the day, 90s, so quite a few years ago. But I've been on both sides of the fence. I've also been on the inside of the district advising on purchasing curriculum. So I know that happens. And but I think that is, while it seems like an extreme, it's it's fairly common.

[18:21]

And it really illustrates the oh, my gosh, you know, this program is just going to land here and we got to fend with it. And then there's the opposite of that, where it's like, okay, let's be very intentional. Let's study what's going on here, you know, like for a curriculum adoption. I think that's a perfect example. You know, what are our true needs? First, really documenting them and that outcomes that we seek.

[18:43]

If things went perfectly, how would our world be different five years from now? And asking those, defining those questions and then going out and looking for solutions. That's training and other things that match where we want to go, as opposed to starting with, okay, what are the reading curricula available today? Let's see which one do we like. So really kind of focusing inward first and then outward. I think that really helps.

[19:08]

But when it comes to implementation and change, It can't be understated that you need the buy-in of the people that you're working with. And the good thing is as educational leaders, we can be very good at that, but you have to set aside the time and be intentional about doing it. Training people on something new is not enough because the research shows when they go back on the job, oftentimes things don't change or they don't change very much. I think another component of what you described, let's say the superintendent does do what we were talking about and it lands in my school. Well, I can still do a mini needs assessment and ask some good questions because in the end, the implementation of that curriculum is only going to succeed when it's localized and tailored to be effective in my context, especially if my context is different than the school down the road.

[20:03]

So I think about things like the Pareto principle, which says that 80% of the effect comes from 20% of the action. And if you think about that, so here's, you know, say 100% of the implementation, you know, really like 20% is the import, the core. And beyond that, Again, it's going to vary, but rough numbers. But what then, beyond that 20%, can I customize and tailor to make it work in my context, with my teachers, with my kids, for my school? And I think we have to do that. My last response to what you said, and this is an area that I absolutely love, and I think we as educators need to continue to develop ourselves with, is the concept of de-implementation.

[20:49]

And Peter DeWitt wrote a fantastic book on it. But in the medical field, de-implementation is a big part of practice. If something's not working, we adjust it or they adjust it. I don't want to suggest I'm in the medical field. They adjust it or they stop it if it's harmful. And I think as educators and leaders, particularly de-implementation scares us a little bit because it's like, oh my God, we're just going to throw something out the window.

[21:16]

Well, no. Deimplementation can mean rearranging things. It can mean making new connections between an existing initiative and a new initiative. It's about optimizing the hours in the day so that you give space for an initiative to thrive. So I think all of those things figure into the work. And I would double down and go back to, I think it really just, for me at least, it requires a lot of critical thinking.

[21:41]

I have to give myself time to step back and think things through intentionally, vice react. So I think a lot of times we're in reaction mode and making decisions because we have to. This work requires a tad more thought and a consideration of inputs like data, needs assessment, how the program's going if it's already underway, all of those things.

[22:06] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, very well said. Very well said. And I'm glad you mentioned de-implementation because, you know, there's never any shortage of new stuff to do. And there's almost a certain, I think, embarrassment that educators have in even asking about de-implementation, right? I can remember staff members coming to me and saying, hey, Justin, you know that thing we were doing a couple years ago? Are we still doing that?

[22:26]

Because it seems like it's kind of the opposite of this thing that we're doing now.

[22:30] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

[22:30] SPEAKER_01:

And sometimes we have to say, yeah, actually, this is kind of the opposite. Or sometimes we say, no, we're continuing to do both of these things. Or maybe the relationship between them shifts a little bit or the role of something changes as we add new things and change what we're doing. But I mean, the reality is we can't keep doing everything we've always done forever, just in the same way that, you know, if you get a couch in college and then you get a new couch when you have your first apartment and you buy a house, like you can't keep all of your couches forever, right? You have to get rid of the old ones at some point or figure out how they fit into your life as things change.

[23:06] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it's fun that now I love your analogy. One that's coming out in a follow-up book that should be out this summer called Fixing Initiatives in Crisis, 24 Go-To Strategies. Nancy Fry actually is the one who brought this up one day when she and I were on a 16-hour flight across the Atlantic Ocean. She used the term swamping the boat. And I had no idea what it meant. But after studying it and I now have a swamping the boat tool coming out.

[23:35]

But the whole idea of, you know, when a boat's moving through the water, it's designed to be efficient. But if you overload it, then it goes lower and lower into the water. Eventually it'll fill with water and we're sunk. But as it goes lower in the water, it's less and less efficient with its bow in terms of prying through the water, which it was designed to do. And of course, the other part of that analogy that can happen is what if all the cargo, i.e.

[23:59]

initiatives the boat is carrying, all of a sudden there's a wave and they all shift to the back? I mean, you've got to find that balance and that efficiency in terms of moving forward. And I think good selection of initiatives followed by de-implementation where necessary, I think both are a huge part of that formula.

[24:20] SPEAKER_01:

Love it. Absolutely. One idea that I wanted to run by you and just kind of see how this lands is the idea of, I call it lean change, but the idea that not everybody has to do everything all at once, right? Like if we make a decision as a district to move forward with something, it's not necessarily that everybody has to go to the same training on the same day, whether we're talking about teachers in a school or schools across a district. Sometimes I see some value in having people who are ready to go first, make some first moves, get a little experience, work the kinks out and build some knowledge that can help everyone else. And I find a lot of resistance to that idea because it seems more complicated.

[24:58]

And when you're talking about the cargo shifting and the boat getting swamped, I think one thing that tends to happen with senior leaders who make decisions about implementation is the senior leaders almost ready to move on to something else by the time the work is really just getting underway for teachers. And I see a lot of just kind of misaligned timing where it's like, okay, we did that. Now what's next? And the teacher's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. We just started this other thing that you were excited about last year. And now you've already moved on to something else.

[25:29]

Um, So I get the sense that to really succeed with this, we're going to have to be okay with different things being on different timeframes. Like we can't just go one after another, after another, because that's how we got in the situation we're in now with just too much that needs to be cleaned up and tightened up a bit. So help us think as leaders, how do we recognize that need for time and pacing and all of those issues to be on the table?

[25:56] SPEAKER_00:

It's so critical to this work and change in general, in terms of not only defining in very specific terms the outcomes you're after and where you're going to end up, but that how you're going to get there and the deliberate steps you're going to take. And so I am very much a fan of phased implementation, which is what I would call it. I like your term better, actually. And I always joke around when I say phased implementation, it's like we're setting phasers not to stun. The whole idea of phasing is so we don't stun anyone. And I think phasing implementation also has huge advantages around a buy-in, around people's extent to which they accept change or they want to even be part of it.

[26:47]

And when you can point to early success Or as Jodi Spiro, who used to run the Wallace Foundation Educational Leadership Program, she calls them early wins. But you can point to these things that show both if the early wins are defined well, but they show the initiative's relevance. They show a better state of being for the people in it. When you can point to those things with confidence. Whatever you want to call them, early adopters, the pilot phase of an initiative, the people who go first, and you can work out the challenges that inevitably come up and perfect some of those connections we've been talking about that are key to success, as well as identify a thing to de-implement, by the way. I think that serves you well, and then phasing it and expanding it and scaling it.

[27:38]

term we used earlier, to new sites, if it's going across the district in reasonable terms. I'm doing a program evaluation on a new pretty big grant for a district, second largest district in California, and they're phasing by grade levels. So they want to provide it to everybody. And that to me, I don't know if it's your experience, but that really is often at the root of Like we got to do it all at once because they don't want to deprive anybody of something awesome. But if that something awesome is watered down by the fact that we're doing too much too fast for too many, then we actually have achieved what we were afraid of achieving. If we don't phase the implementation.

[28:21]

So they're doing it by grade level across six schools over five years, you know, do it by site is another way. But I do think that's very smart. Again, I would just say measurable outcomes and I love the concept of early wins. When I talked to Jodi Spiro about that, like my analogy is like, I've got a snowball and I'm going to start it rolling down the hill and I want it to get bigger and bigger and bigger. And those early wins are how we build the size of the snowball and get people excited and more importantly, proud. Of what they're doing.

[28:53]

I mean, that's how you optimize an implementation. And, you know, I don't know about you, but when's the last time anybody in my organization looked down and was like, it made my snowball grow? Not often. So just noticing as leaders and saying, wow, what you guys are doing out there with that new curriculum or that new program, that's amazing. Or I was talking to a parent the other day and they mentioned it. Just closing the loop on that informal dialogue and that informal evaluation, if you want, program evaluation, if you want to call it.

[29:23]

I think all of those things as leaders are simple, overlooked, and can have a huge effect on change and implementation.

[29:33] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. And you have so many specifics in the book. I think this is just going to be very powerful for people to know what to look for, where to go, what to prioritize in designing and conducting that needs assessment, designing an initiative and scaling it and assessing its impact. I wonder if we could close by talking about evaluation just a little bit, because this is the part we never want to do, right? We want to declare victory at the beginning and then do something different in the future and declare victory at the beginning of that and never really look back and say, well, wait a minute, that thing that we've been doing for a couple of years and spent millions of dollars on, how's that going and how should that inform what we do next? Help us understand the role of evaluation.

[30:15] SPEAKER_00:

Well, of course, you're asking probably the worst person because I'm an evaluation evangelist. But you might be surprised to hear me say I don't believe all initiatives need detailed evaluation. I think there are right times for districts and school leaders to bring in someone like myself who's expert at it. I think there are other times when the district's accountability or assessment or whatever office it is, can provide data and do a good job. And I think there's informal evaluation that we've talked about that goes on each and every day. In the end, I think it's been said, I don't know that I fully agree with this, but it's been said, research is to prove, evaluation is to improve.

[30:59]

So the whole intent of program evaluation is is to continuously improve things. And isn't that the business we're in? So I kind of think we're doing it. The question is, are we formalizing it? And the bigger question is, are we doing anything with the results we get? Whatever the scale of our evaluation effort is.

[31:20]

I talk a lot about something I call the attention span crisis that you so nicely described. defined a minute ago, where it's like, oh, we're already moved on to something else and they're barely just implementing back into school. And so that attention span of our central office leaders, perhaps, or even school leaders, like it wanes so quickly. And program evaluation is a perfect tool to hold that attention and sustain buy-in when we're feeding results and we're demonstrating the value of the initiative we've made the investment in, we've committed to, we're leading. And we want to keep it in place. We don't want something stepping on it and, you know, and moving on to the next thing because it's working.

[32:04]

So I think program evaluation has all of those roles. And I don't think it's far outside the wheelhouse of an educator. I think, fortunately, it's perceived that way. But I mean, just doing good action research, which is you studying the context you're in and asking questions, that can be program evaluation. So we need to do more of it, is what I'd say. But if you're having an attention span crisis or a buy-in crisis where you're losing support, it's probably because, at least in part, you haven't collected the data and demonstrated the value of the program.

[32:40]

And frankly, I've done that in programs that are three months old, and I've done that with programs that are 10 years old. There's always something there you can use to demonstrate your program's efficacy to the leaders involved. to the participants. And I'd close with that thought. If you're collecting data to demonstrate your program's worth and you haven't, made it priority to share it with the people involved. If it's in a classroom, both the teachers and the students, and in age-appropriate ways, share that data and the work they've been doing.

[33:14]

That is a quick way to lose the buy-in of the very people you want most buy-in to doing the initiative. So, so often we ask for opinion and data and we don't circle back. to share it with the very people who privileged us with their voices to understand it. And so I just would say some of the most satisfying days of my career as a program evaluator are the rare instance the district or nonprofit invites me back to share with the very people doing this work what impact they've had and what I've seen as an external observer. I will tell you more often than not, there are tears in the room. when they see the impact they're having.

[33:58]

And I always hear nobody else has ever done this. So we need to do more of that. Let's build those strengths and show people in tangible terms the impact they're having.

[34:09] SPEAKER_01:

I love that. You said so much there that was so valuable about evaluation being about, you said improving the initiative, right? Research is to prove Program evaluation is to improve. And I think that gets at probably the main hesitation that senior leaders have about program evaluation. Like we don't want to commission a study of how we just wasted a whole bunch of money, right? That's not the goal.

[34:31]

That's not what we're doing here. But we are striving to improve.

[34:35] SPEAKER_00:

We're scared of what we'll find. But I'll tell you, Justin, it's really interesting. I did a study in about 2014 or 15, and it was on evaluation practices. And I looked at them in corporate, nonprofit, government, military, and K-12. And we were like, so what are the barriers to doing program evaluation? And While that was many years ago and my recollection of all the barriers is a little low without refreshing my memory, the one thing I expected to hear that was not a barrier was we're scared what we'll find.

[35:12]

I honestly believe that people didn't do evaluation and justified it at times because of their fear of outcomes. But that was not one of them. And that made me really happy. So I'm guessing it's more a perceived resource issue. Like we don't have the capability. And I say perceived because I would argue you do.

[35:33]

You just have to give it a try.

[35:35] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is Right From the Start, The Essential Guide to Implementing School Initiatives. And Dr. Jim Marshall, if people want to get in touch with you, learn more about your work or evaluate it, a program or assessing needs in their organization prior to an initiative, where are some of the best places for them to go online to get in touch with you?

[35:54] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so I would welcome anybody reaching out to me. I'm, as we know, Professor of San Diego State. My last name, Marshall, at sdsu.edu. And then my website, jamesmmarshall.com.

[36:08]

So James Marshall with an M in between the S and the M. So all of those are great ways to be in touch. And the website gives you even some examples of program evaluation reports and findings from districts and organizations I've worked with in the past. Kind of fun to see examples of that. And maybe that will inspire some of your listeners to take up the program evaluation charge and better their initiatives through data.

[36:35] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Jim, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[36:38] SPEAKER_00:

Always a pleasure to talk with somebody so like-minded with how we can make the world around us better. It's exciting work.

[36:46] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.

[36:53] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you.