School Improvement Isn't About Doing as Many Initiatives as Possible
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that real school improvement comes from doing a few things well rather than spreading resources across dozens of programs.
Key Takeaways
- Less is more - Schools that focus on a few high-leverage practices outperform those that adopt every new initiative
- Initiative fatigue is real - Staff can't implement 20 programs well; they end up doing none of them well
- Depth over breadth - Sustained focus on instruction, safety, and a few key priorities produces better results than a long list of initiatives
Transcript
School improvement is not about doing as many things as possible.
School improvement is about doing a few things well.
And I don't know exactly what it is that makes school leaders and central office leaders sign up for everything, say yes to everything, get their staff committed to everything.
But I think we have a problem with this.
I think we have a problem with being acronym collectors, right?
We have to have an initiative for everything and we have to have an acronym for every initiative and the more the better.
I think if we want to succeed, if we want people to actually improve, if we want the experience of our students to actually improve, we have to be selective.
We have to make choices.
We have to be careful and budget and set aside the time and resources that it takes for things to succeed.
And leaders have a different timeframe than teachers do.
And this creates a problem, right?
As a leader, most of your decisions about a new initiative are on the front end.
Most of your work is on the front end.
Arranging the training, setting aside the money, all of that happens very early on in an initiative.
But for teachers, the work drags on for years, right?
You get the training and then you implement the training and then you continue to work on it and then you get some more training and then you get some coaching and you continue to work on it.
And you may be working on an initiative two full years after your leaders have moved on.
But when your leaders move on from one initiative, they don't just sit on their hands.
What do they do?
They start collecting more acronyms, and that means more work for you.
So I think we've got to get in alignment about this.
And the core symptom here, the core problem is that leaders often just don't know what teachers are going through.
They don't know how much work it is still to implement the last initiative.
And that's why people are overwhelmed.
That's why people are saying, I'm not sure if we're ready for this.
I'm not sure if we have the bandwidth for this because they're still doing the last acronym and they're not ready for the new thing.
It's not resistance.
They are just overwhelmed.
Let me know what you think.