Image framework courtesy of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
Audience question: Once the program is launched, how do you know whether or not you’re achieving fidelity?
Carlye Norton, KickUp:
[The above image] is a pretty typical approach to change. We have an idea for change, we put really good planning into place, and we frequently still don’t get to quality that’s also reliable at scale. What implementation improvement science really argues is that the missing piece there is data, and cycles of data that allow you to get feedback iteratively and make those changes as you’re going. But again, that’s the science, and we’re here to talk about what practitioners actually doing.
Greg Kibler, Youngstown City School District:
When we started rolling out, the Gradual Release of Responsibility framework has some sub-components to it. We started with just some of the basics and kind of created our own little learning cycle with it. We would train our administration and coaches first; the next week we would train our teachers; and then we would kind of say “Okay, let’s go do it and let’s see what we’re what we’re actually doing.”
We had a requirement to see every teacher once a week and provide feedback on that bite-sized action step. So that really helped us collect a lot of data and allowed us to see where, among a building or a district or a grade level or a team, the people that are struggling with it. That was kind of our immediate feedback: we were taking it a little bit slow, going back to that in-depth kind of knowledge, making sure everybody’s on the same page before moving forward the whole framework. We [also] set internal goals of how much data we wanted to collect, and once we got there we would produce a regular review of it, so every five weeks we were looking at this data along with some other points to monitor how it was coming along.
When we would review [the data] we would look for what we were seeing in the classroom outside of our visits as well. Is this something we’re seeing when we’re walking through? Is it a change that happens when we just kind of walk by and don’t actually go in the classroom? So some of those outside-the-data implementation notes were taken into consideration as well.
Swartz:
When we go out and do observations, we meet with either the administrator and the coach or sometimes a leadership team, and pull up the data to see where where they’re at. We’ll slice it and dice it in lots of different ways, but we always have those conversations so that we know what the next steps are based on what we’re seeing right now.
We never had the opportunity to do that before, because we didn’t have the data to look at. [KickUp] has really given us the opportunity to be able to do that.