Pathways to Personalization: A Framework for School Change

[00:01] SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high-performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Kathy Sanford and Sean Rubin. Kathy leads research and development efforts at the Highlander Institute, and Sean is the chief education officer at Highlander Institute, and they're the co-authors of Pathways to Personalization, a Framework for School Change.

[00:35] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:37] SPEAKER_00:

Cathy and Sean, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:39] SPEAKER_01:

Thanks, Dustin. It's great to be here.

[00:41] SPEAKER_02:

Thanks for having us.

[00:42] SPEAKER_00:

I'm very excited to speak with you. We've had a lot of guests on the show talking about personalized learning, personalized education. But given your position and the way that you work with schools and districts, you've had kind of a front row seat to the change efforts in a lot of organizations. And you have a particular lens on the work of change that I'm very interested in. So I very much look forward to talking with you about that change process, and specifically with regard to personalized learning. So take us into kind of the origin story of the book, the work that Highlander has been doing with schools and districts around change, around personalized learning, that kind of led up to this book.

[01:24] SPEAKER_01:

Sure. So I think it's probably good to start with the elephant in the room, which is how we define personalized learning. And we really believe that it's important for local schools and districts to define personalized learning in a way that's relevant for them. So we don't have a stock definition, but we really push schools and districts to develop a vision that really improves the student experience. So something that they're doing around differentiated instruction or student ownership and agency or pacing really improves the student experience, which is more than just achievement. It's like their happiness, their motivation, their engagement.

[02:01]

And so we started off by going into classrooms and working with really amazing teachers who were doing incredible things with kids. They were pushing on pacing. They were differentiating instruction. They were using a ton of formative data. Kids had choice and voice. They had incredible classroom cultures.

[02:18]

But we realized that it was very hard to scale those model classrooms to the entire school. There were some challenges involved and that traditional change management practices weren't really supporting that work. We needed a new framework for that kind of change.

[02:34] SPEAKER_00:

And to a lot of our listeners, that wouldn't be a surprise that what's working really well in a very innovative teacher's classroom would have difficulty scaling, right? Like we've all had that experience of something going really well with one teacher, but there's something special about that teacher. So when it comes time to kind of roll that out more broadly, or when it goes from being optional and something that one teacher opts into, into being a mandate or being something that's rolled out more broadly, we don't get the same results. And that's very frustrating to us as leaders because we think, well, this is working. I want more of it. And in the book, you offer a framework for doing that, for getting more of what's working.

[03:10]

And it doesn't seem to involve just cloning magical teachers, right? There's more of a process to it than that.

[03:16] SPEAKER_02:

What it comes down to, honestly, is bringing more voices to the table and really more deeply understanding before you even get started, where you are in terms of what's working well with regard to personalization. What personalization challenges are you currently already solving across your building and which ones are really not even close to there? Are you really in a position where you're much more teacher centered in terms of the majority of your classroom environments? And so, you know, we do that by creating what we call a design team that's really set out to do this. And it should have representation both from the district level, the building administration level. You want some teachers to be sure as drivers that are on that on that team.

[03:53]

And then you want to bring parents and family members to the table as well as student voice and community voice. And then you can really start to structure what aspects of personalized learning are important within your local context. And then as you start to do that, you get more and more granular and you start to articulate exactly what those shifts are going to be at the classroom level. And then as you do that, you do need teachers with the right mindset in the early days who are going to actually take the bumps and bruises of the messy process. And then once you start to study that process and study those initial pilot implementations, that's where the things that actually are working start to emerge. And then what we found is that teachers across the adoption curve, we like to talk a lot in the book about Rogers adoption curve and positioning folks who are innovators and early adopters on one side of a chasm against folks that are maybe in an early majority or late majority on the other side of this really difficult chasm.

[04:48]

that kind of is what we were talking about when we alluded to the scaling of model classrooms, it's difficult. But what we found is that you may not be able to scale the entire classroom, but if you do a really good job of documenting particular strategies or studying particular resources as they roll out within implementations, and if you have really good coaches that are able to kind of understand how those teachers implemented them and collect video and collect photo evidence of what it looks like in action, that's when the professional learning on the other side of the chasm becomes super clear and super clean and you're not actually asking people to sign up for something that is like unicorns and fairies, but you're asking them to sign up for something that they can go across the hallway and see and then actually have somebody who actually lives and breathes within that same building who can support them in the actual implementation.

[05:38]

It's a much slower process. The arc of change is much longer, but what we've found is that the stickiness and the traction that you're able to get will actually last beyond a building leader or beyond a district leader who may, you know, from a more traditional legacy model, bringing in a top-down system usually goes out baby with bathwater when those leaders leave.

[05:57] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, absolutely. And if I think about the changes that occurred in my school when I was a principal and the ones that I'm almost sure are still there, they were the changes that we went slow to go fast on. You know, we took our time, we had those pilot teachers, we built that capacity and and it would have been unthinkable for people to say, yeah, that was last year, let's try something new this year. You know, like there was absolutely zero chance of that happening, but I think that's always teacher's fear, right? That this is gonna be the flavor of the month, and then next month or next year, if we get a new superintendent, it's gonna be something new. I wanna go back to a very important phrase that you used, around what's working, because we have a very particular vocabulary around that in our profession.

[06:39]

And in some cases, we're looking at research like from the What Works Clearinghouse. In some cases, we're looking at research like John Hattie's meta-analysis studies of effect sizes and things like that. And often, what we know, quote unquote, works, does not succeed in convincing teachers that it will work in their classroom. We can pull something out of a book and say, hey, according to John Hattie, this has an effect size of whatever, therefore you should do it. And for any of our listeners who've ever tried that as a principal, you know that's not a terribly effective strategy. It's not enough to actually get teachers to believe that it works for them, that it will work for their students, that they can do it, and that they should do it.

[07:19]

And one of the lesser known Hattie-isms that's out there is that everything works So I want to ask you, what do you mean when you say that a school sees something that works and they want to scale it? What's that kind of working definition of what works?

[07:34] SPEAKER_01:

That's a great question. And we spent some time looking at improvement science, particularly through the Carnegie foundation to think about exactly what you're talking about. So Hattie could say that it has a great chance of working, but there are conditions within classrooms that are really important to study that could help or hinder a strategy from being successful. And our pilot process that Sean was talking about gives really enthusiastic, talented teachers the time and space to figure out what those conditions are. So if you want to improve student collaboration, there's a lot of scaffolding that you need to do to teach your students how to collaborate. We can't just say, do more collaboration, go with it.

[08:16]

We need to understand the routines, the systems, the culture. We need to understand what kind of tasks are good for collaboration, at what grade level, for what content area. And so we have three measures that we use to kind of study and like vet practices that we're really excited about. One is process measures. And so process measures is whether you can go into a classroom and see a change. You can go and see more student collaboration and you can say, yes, it's happening with more frequency.

[08:46]

Then we look at student outcome data. So it might be summative data within a school or district. It might be benchmark data like STAR or state testing data. You know, there's pros and cons to each source, but we try to see if more frequent student collaboration has moved the dial on student data or outcomes in any way. And then we have balance measures, which I think are most important, which are do students and teachers actually like the change? Are they enjoying collaboration?

[09:15]

Is it bringing more engagement, more motivation, more joy into the classroom? And is it worth pursuing? And so taken together, those three things really let the cream rise to the top in terms of which personalized strategies are really getting the most traction in classrooms.

[09:32] SPEAKER_02:

Going back to your question about effect size and how that is a motivator or not a motivator for teachers to actually embrace things, we actually I kind of would look at it as like external motivation versus internal motivation in terms of what works. So you don't want to ignore national research. And national research has actually been a huge driver of where we start in that visioning process. When I describe bringing together that design team, we use what we call our priority practices tool, which essentially is like a series of 28 practices that all get at different levels and different activities within personalized learning. And those practices are all informed. through national research, through things, through effect sizes, through things like Hattie's work and research.

[10:12]

And so that when you start with those research-based practices and you really are building your initial foundation upon things that have been proven to have greater impact for students, for example, you know, the Bloom Two Sigma where, you know, the individual tutoring had such a large effect. So you can actually put in statements that align to that and then you're starting from a place of solid foundation. But then you get to what actually matters to teachers. And, you know, this is kind of like new change management in a lot of ways for principals and building leaders and district leaders. They're going to have a lot more belief in something that worked across the hallway from them with the same students, with the same resources, in the same building, rather than they are if you tell them about something that worked across the country in California that now is being brought into their classroom, that they should be all excited because some kids in California did really well with this. And so that's where the measures that Kathy's describing come into play.

[11:05]

If you have a design team that's actually supporting the data collection across those three measures is able to kind of bring to bear the actual impact that the implementation and some of these pilots is having with teachers that they know in ways that they can be supported by those teachers in an ongoing capacity. I think that's when teachers actually do start to perk up and say like, oh, man, what's happening across the hallway? That's actually now interesting to me. and you've got data to show that it's working better than what I'm doing, that's where I think you actually start to shift those teachers to believe in that data.

[11:34] SPEAKER_01:

I think the other piece that's really important for me, like thinking about the Bloom to Sigma, I mean, that's fabulous that tutoring gives you great impact, but if I'm a teacher, how am I supposed to do one-on-one tutoring in my classroom? I believe that it would be fabulous. But if I have a teacher next door, an early adopter teacher who's thinking about it in different ways and using collaborative activities to free up time to meet with students one-on-one or setting up opportunities for kids to be peer experts in certain strands of strategies or skills, Then I'm like, oh, I see a pathway that I could actually bring back to my classroom.

[12:12] SPEAKER_00:

So if I could paraphrase those measures, because I think that was a really good and concise list. You said basically the process measures, are we doing it? Are we actually implementing this? Does practice now look different than it did before we supposedly implemented it? And then outcome measures. So second, are we getting the data?

[12:29]

Are we getting the results that we said we wanted to get? And then third, do we like it? Do teachers like it? Do students enjoy their learning experience after this change? I think that's such a powerful and, hearing it, obvious list of things that matter. But often we focus only on the second.

[12:46]

Right. We only look at the data and say, are our scores going up or down? And we don't ask, you know, are we actually doing the thing that we said we were going to do? Did we buy Chromebooks and then not use them? Because that would definitely impact our theory of action a bit. And then is this something that we want to continue and how do we feel about it?

[13:03]

Those are such local considerations and such organization specific considerations that I'm glad you mentioned. thinking process that teachers have and that administrators have about, you know, will this work here? And needing to see evidence, not just from another state across the country, but from down the hall, right, of is this working with my students? And I wonder if we could talk a little bit more about Rogers' innovation curve, diffusion of innovations, and this idea that in every school there are early adopters, there are people who are ready to jump on change as soon as it's You know, the words are even out of someone's mouth. They say, yes, sign me up. Just because, you know, it seems like would rather be dragged kicking and screaming to their, you know, to their retirement than make a change.

[13:48]

And if we don't really understand that distribution that every staff has, we do change in kind of a one size fits all way where we say, okay, it's August 1st. That's when our go live date is. And the old is gone. The new has come. Go forth and implement. And often we're surprised that that does not work.

[14:07]

So take us into a little bit of the thinking that you have around the differences between those different teachers. You know, maybe it's not a personality so much as a role that they're playing in a particular initiative. But how does that play into a change in your work around personalized learning?

[14:20] SPEAKER_01:

So there's five kind of profiles. The smallest percentage, I think it's two or 3% are innovators and innovators are really out there. Like I don't think most teachers can even keep up with them and almost they can't keep up with themselves because they are trying something new at such a ferocious pace that nothing ever stays the same in their classroom. That's why the next category of early adopters is kind of our sweet spot for pilot teachers Because they take the time to find value in change. And they'll iterate and explore and really translate an idea into something that can be implemented by any teacher. And then across the chasm, we have early majority teachers.

[15:00]

And early majority teachers are very willing to try something new. They just need some proof. They need some evidence that it's going to be worth their time. Then we have late majority teachers who really aren't as enthusiastic. But if you give them enough guidance, support, resources, if you make the workflow easy for them, they will get on board. And then you have laggards who are probably not going to participate under any circumstances.

[15:25]

And focusing on them isn't really worth a lot of time and energy.

[15:29] SPEAKER_02:

But there's several other factors that we consider as well when we think about who are the ideal pilot teachers. We actually go really deep into this in Chapter 5 of the book. You know, the INACOL did a paper in like 2014 that we still kind of hold dear to our hearts. They identified what they call the INACOL blended learning teacher competencies. And if you actually break down, there's like four kind of competencies that they value, but they really have, they designed it in a way that we thought was really powerful from the sense of these, really the mindsets being the most important aspect of thinking about those teachers that are going to be driving that change. And then some of the qualities of those teachers, or do they have the ability to like fall down and get back up again?

[16:09]

Do they have that grit to kind of stick with it? So once you know that you have a teacher that has like, understands that there has to be a new vision for teaching and learning that, that the model of teacher centered, where the teacher is doing the majority of the talking throughout the course of the class period, and the students carry none of that ownership themselves is not going to work as we move forward. So it is about the kind of mentality around change. But it's also about whether or not they have these particular qualities and mindsets. And then there's all these – there's technical skills and there's adaptive skills as well, which really is about how well do you share and how well do you open up your classroom and how willing are you to be observed and to take feedback. And then there's a whole other range of just kind of like interpersonal skills that are super important to personalized learning.

[16:54]

The ability for a student to feel like they're valued when they walk into that teacher's classroom, like that teacher actually has a desire and an inclination to know them as a person, to know them from their identity, to know them through their interests, to want to get to know them through their family. And so there's aspects of those types of practices as well that need to be codified, that need to be studied, that need to be actually, you know, the resources and strategies that teachers are using to communicate that and to the actual activities and tasks that students are doing in the classroom that relate to that also are things that need to be scaled if we expect those late majority and laggards to be able to actually pull off some of the other practices that might be more technical. So there's all ranges of types of qualities and competencies of teachers. And we really believe that if you want to have these successful pilots that are going to ultimately lead to scale,

[17:45]

You've got to be starting with the right folks who are going to kind of carry that water. And what we call in the book really become your R&D engine for your school because it doesn't stop after the initial pilot. There's going to be continuous improvement that needs to happen for forever. There's not like you do this for three years and then you've got a model and then you stick with that model for the next 15 years. You're going to need these teachers to be continuously looking and improving and upon what is going to be sent across that chasm to the next set of teachers on the other end.

[18:14] SPEAKER_00:

I think that's such an important realization for people to have going into a change effort that the pilot is not going to simply prove it to everyone and then they're going to kind of jump on. It's going to be an ongoing kind of learning process. And I definitely want to encourage people to check out chapter five of the book because Understanding those different profiles of teachers and their readiness and their contributions that they can make to a change is so critical. But I think what we typically do in our profession is we find the teacher who uses computers the most and we say, you. you're the one who's going to go with this. And typically they are someone who says, okay, yeah, sure.

[18:52]

I'll try, I'll try the new thing. But you're talking about a set of competencies, mindsets. You're talking about, you know, in some ways the respect of colleagues to, you know, to be the guinea pig and then lead others in that role. So I definitely want to encourage people to check that out because it's not just the person who used computers first in their classroom and tries the new app first. It's very much about, you know, really, I think we need to include that in our definition of instructional leadership, that this kind of teacher plays a really critical role that's not just about being tech savvy, not just about the instructional ADD of jumping onto some sort of new fad, but really has a commitment to learning and to sharing that professional learning and leading it among the staff. And looking back on the staff that I worked with, I would certainly say that those were the distinguishing characteristics, that willingness to take risks, willingness to fail, willingness to get back on the horse and try again.

[19:47]

and then willingness to lead others. And it was almost never a question, you know, hey, this is working in your classroom, will you lead a little session for it on this for our staff? Of course, you know, like that was just who these people were that they would love to share that. So I wanna, if we can get a little bit more into the idea of piloting, because I think people have different ideas about what a pilot means. And sometimes, honestly, I think as principals, we sometimes use the word pilot when someone has an idea that we don't want to shut them down on, but we don't really want to go with it. So we just say, well, you do a pilot and then we'll vote.

[20:23]

And then everybody will vote against your idea. We have all these different ways of using pilots. Sometimes if we want something to happen, we'll do a pilot and, and we'll frame it as having worked. And then we say, okay, the pilot was successful. So we're going to go for it now. But people hear very different things when they hear the word pilot.

[20:39]

So how does that work in your framework?

[20:41] SPEAKER_01:

it's really more of a research and development effort. So now we talked today in a meeting about this sweet spot between looking at national models and frameworks and tools that are working and that people are trying to scale. And then also looking at your local context, what you believe that you want for kids. And the pilot is really a chance for your early adopter teachers to iterate on national models that you think are relevant to make them more compelling for your local context, to really look and study and try and explore and then measure and see what's really working. And so some practices will continue in that churn because we haven't figured out how to address the obstacles that pilot teachers are facing. And we don't want something to cross the chasm with a ton of obstacles that need to be addressed.

[21:28]

So it's really a chance to dive deep and explore. And then when things are ready, we have started to create the policies, the resources, the workflow to allow the next set of teachers, because we understand it. We've really been studying it. The next set of teachers are going to be way more successful.

[21:45] SPEAKER_02:

And you're 100% right. Like we've debated back and forth on whether to use that term because that term is so spoiled within the education space, but we kind of want to reclaim it. We want to reclaim pilots, not as like, I've already made a decision to buy this curriculum, but I'm going to pretend like we're testing it so that you feel like you have some voice in this. Like That's the opposite. And so if you are in an environment where you feel like that term has been ruined, then use a different term. Don't use pilot.

[22:13]

But for us, it really is what it's about. You are essentially having, we're really trying to do aspirational change here. We're not just tinkering with tiny little tweaks on a traditional model, but we really have a vision for a new way of doing education in our schools. And we really believe in school change, not just better teaching. We have to understand that you cannot do change at scale. Change at scale is going to fail every single time because there are going to be people that it's just too much, too fast.

[22:40]

They have a lot of power and they have a lot of ability to undermine that. And so the idea of a pilot, it really allows for that safe space. We talk in the book about the idea of a nest and that the pilot really is ultimately also this kind of egg that needs to be protected. And so you need to have your coach that's going to be able to support it. You need to have your design team that's collecting the data and really cares about it and is giving that teacher the space to try new things, but also is interested in what the teacher is doing so that the teacher knows that they have an incentive to keep trying. And so the pilot really is something that you have to nurture, you have to take care of.

[23:16]

But ultimately, as Kathy was saying, at the end of the day, it's just research and development. It's trying new things. It's looking at them closely and analyzing them closely. It's what teachers, really good teachers, do really, really well already. But when you add the additional supports of a design team around them, then you actually have something that you can codify enough to be able to think about scaling.

[23:37] SPEAKER_00:

And I love that framing as a pilot as research and development, or even the change process itself as research and development. And I like to use the language of organizational learning, that improvement is about learning how things work in our school and learning how to get better results, how to get more of what's working. Because if we see a pilot as, well, we're going to test this and see if it works in our context, You know, it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? You know, if I want this to fail, it's going to fail. You know, I'm not going to be able to get it to work with my students. So the pilot is, you know, is going to crash and burn.

[24:11]

And if we want to get better, if we see this as an opportunity to learn about how things are working for our students, how our organization is functioning, then we're going to see much better results. Well, Kathy and Sean, let's talk about what happens after the pilot, because obviously if we know that something is working, we know we want more of it and we want to scale it up. What happens next? What are the next steps in your model, in your framework for school change?

[24:35] SPEAKER_01:

I think there's a couple of steps. One is really bringing in the administrative team. So you have a design team, but now you need to bring in kind of the heavy decision makers because we need to look at policy. We need to look at competing initiatives. We need to understand how this work fits in the greater classroom. school district picture.

[24:53]

We talk about a campaign for storytelling. So going around and talking about the successes and lessons learned from the pilot and going right into pilot classrooms, having tours, having students talk about how the experience felt, having teachers share what they're doing.

[25:09] SPEAKER_02:

There's kind of two most important components are you've got a data story, But then that actually tells the very specifics across those three measures that we were talking about earlier that is going to actually resonate with those early majority teachers. And then once those early majority teachers start to get going, it might actually resonate with some of those late majority teachers. And so that data story, making sure that's clean and clear, making sure you actually have some of those outcome measures, or if there was actual change in what you saw in the classrooms or what Kathy was saying, what were the balance measures where people were really super excited about something. But the next thing, and this is kind of a really new idea that we're playing around with. And so we don't necessarily have a lot of great examples of this, but we believe that if you're like a squirrel kind of running around during these pilots gathering nuts, like it's winter is coming, that you're going to actually end up with a lot of really rich resources that need a place to be stored.

[26:00]

And so what we call those are implementation pathways, which are basically like menus. If you go into like a restaurant that has like a ton of different options, And those menu options are aligned to those priority practices that you initially set out to try and accomplish. And so they might be protocols for how to do collaborative activities. They might be actual resources, adaptive softwares that you use to be able to get at certain differentiated practices. They might be videos that worked really well to get at formative assessment opportunities for students. So whatever it was that was working that was getting at those pieces that actually showed better outcome measures and that students and families appreciated, those should be listed somewhere so that teachers on the other side of the chasm have a choice in selecting which ones they want to receive professional development around.

[26:50]

And then you're actually increasing their agency in terms of what it is that they're going to grab onto. Because the idea, again, that you're going to actually scale the entire classroom model is really misguided. And so when you have these things actually kind of broken down into the nuances of what worked and where the teachers actually claim this worked, I think this is what led to the change. You should have this in that implementation pathway. This is the thing that everybody should be trained on. Then you can start to actually move those pieces across the chasm.

[27:22]

almost step-by-step as they're being requested and as they're being called for because the demand is actually what's driving versus the top-down push.

[27:31] SPEAKER_01:

I think also thinking about the early majority teachers that are going to be the new implementers, they're going to be more excited than the late majority teachers. And so your strategy for scale needs to consider that late majority teachers are going to need more. And so as early majority teachers get going, now you have curriculum that they're building that they can share with their grade level or subject area cohorts. There's a lot more scripted guidance around some of this work that will help late majority teachers be able to make it happen. So it's really a staggered growth model. We don't actually encourage people to go whole scale right away with anything.

[28:10]

And then at the same time, things that didn't go so well are still being explored in that research and development pilot model. So what policy would make this easier to implement? What resources do we need here? What scheduling would work with this? So now it's like a three-ring circus, kind of, as you start to build momentum.

[28:29] SPEAKER_00:

Well, and this is challenging work, right? It's complex work. We're not talking about changing the reader board out in front of the school and saying, now we're doing personalized learning. We're talking about things that really get at the heart of people's practice, at the heart of how people interact with one another. and how we do things as an organization. And that development, that research, that learning really is at the heart of our work as instructional leaders.

[28:51]

So I'm grateful that you've put the work in to communicate this, to share some of your findings from the Highlander Institute in the book, Pathways to Personalization, a Framework for School Change. So Sean and Kathy, if people want to learn more about your work at the Highlander Institute or potentially get in touch with you, where's the best place for them to find you online?

[29:11] SPEAKER_02:

Well, you can always go to highlanderinstitute.org. We've got a ton of resources there, but we actually created a website for the book that actually breaks down resources chapter by chapter called pathways to personalization.com. If you're on Twitter, you can find me at Sean C. Rubin.

[29:25]

Kathy is CSanford42, the Highlander Institute at Highlander Inst. And we use the hashtag pathways book. So if you want to start talking about the book or collaborating around the book, because we do believe that sourcing of ideas across Many people who are using the framework as their model, it was the best way for us to actually increase the relevance and rigor of this process. So please, please reach out. Let us know what you're using, what's working, where you're struggling. We want to hear all about it.

[29:51]

So we look forward to hearing from all of you.

[29:53] SPEAKER_00:

Kathy Sanford, Sean Rubin, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[29:57] SPEAKER_01:

Thanks, Justin.

[29:59] Announcer:

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