How do you organize your days, your weeks, or your years? I find it very interesting how various members of my team approach their daily tasks. We all utilize shared and accessible Google calendars. Some also like to keep a written journal, others work with post-it note reminders, Notes apps, and even white boards showing to-do lists. As varied as our approaches my be, our common goal is to serve our school partners to the best of our abilitites. In the whirlwind of daily to-dos and updating calendars, though, it is easy to lose sight of the big picture and long-term goals. The following is how I will guide my team through my innovation plan using the strategies learned in The 4 Disciplines of Execution (McChesney et al., 2016). For this piece of the plan, I've chosen to focus on the fidelity and usage of the online Waterford Reading Academy program. Without proper usage, teachers will not have data to guide their classroom plans, nor will we have data-driven resources to share as part of the blended learning classroom. I will also need to utilize strategies learned from Maxfield et al. (2013).
Focus on the Wildly Important Goal (WIG) &
Stage 1 of Change ~ Getting Clear:
Our WIG: All members of the Waterford Professional Learning (PL) team will lead 80% of school partners to reach usage goals in Waterford programs as we guide educators in a blended learning environment. We want to achieve this WIG by August 30, 2025, which will be the end of the 2024-2025 fiscal year for our organization.
Act on the Lead Measures & Stage 2~ Launching:
Our primary lead measure will be generating and analzing usage reports for each classroom with which we partner, on a monthly basis. We must know where support is needed and where to celebrate, on a regular basis. To launch, I will need to ensure all members of the PL team are comfortable with accesing this data piece and associated tools listed below.
Three points will assist with this activity:
Provide teachers with a document showing usage goals for each month. The goal will vary by month depending on the school's calendar, but teachers need to know how many minutes they are striving for, as early as possible.
Provide students with usage tracking tools. We can guide teachers to project Waterford Dashboards while students work on Waterford each day, so that they will stay on task and be able to view and/or track their weekly progress. We will encourage usage of tracking tools like this one.
Celebrate classrooms who meet usage goals with a monthly Goal Getter certificate. If the school partner is within driving distance, hand-deliver and celebrate the class or coordinate with the school administrators for classes to be spotlighted on announcements, newsletters, etc. Encourage teachers to display certificates on their doors or where they are visible in hallways. We want to create a culture where, "Waterford is spoken here" and passers-by know exactly what those certificates celebrate.
I'll also need to make clear that these monthly events are necessary to ensure our lag measures are met. Lag measures include mid-year reviews with district decision-makers and renewal plans, license packages, and service recommendations that generally occur yearly.
Keeping a Compelling Scoreboard & Stage 3~ Adoption:
We will need to keep a compelling and visible scoreboard both internally and for administrators of each school partner. Once this practice is in full-swing, the buy-in and adoption will depend on each PL consultant following-up on the montly data points.
Internally, we track training days and virtual trainings using Salesforce and PowerBI reports. I'll work with our PowerBI team to create a report that pulls from campus usage reports found within the Waterford Reading Academy Manager. This will allow consultants and directors to quickly see which districts, schools, and specific classrooms need support in the following month. This will also be an early indicator for a district's engagement and renewal potential, so this will be a useful tool for our sales and partner success teams, as well.
We currently have a District Level usage report that can be generated for administrators and decision-makers at our partner districts. We will ensure this report is shared on a monthy basis and support plans adjusted and approved accordingly.
Create a Cadence of Accountability & Stage 4 ~ Optimization:
Continue to conduct 1:1 meetings with each consultant on a weekly basis. This is a practice already in place and provides a time for Directors to ensure the usage scoreboard is up to date and progressing as expected.
Directors meet weekly, as a group, with our department's VP, and we can add this scoreboard to our weekly discussions and data points. When a partner is failing to meet usage expectations, we will brainstorm as a group and provide feedforward to the lead consultant or team, while also ensuring no implementation falls through the cracks or gets neglected.
Cross-team collaboration will be needed if a district becomes non-responsive. We will pull in sales team members and partner success managers to assist, if needed. While the PL consultant tends to be the face and boots on the ground of each implementation, the full team needs to be aware when a plan is going awry.
Change Stage 5~ Habits:
Beyond the WIG, my goal as a director and influencer for my team is that this will create a habit and culture of constantly using data to drive teacher support and implementation fidelity. Anyone can read a powerpoint and tell participants where to click on a screen. I hope to equip my team with the tools and insight to truly guide a project in an individualized manner, not as one-size-fits-all. Just as teachers must adapt to individual student needs, so must we adapt to the needs of our classroom and overall district partners. The influencer model will come into play on several levels: first, as I introduce and share this plan with my team and second, as our team goes out into the field to support and celebrate our teacher partners.
Maxfield, D., Grenny, J., Patterson, K., McMillan, R., & Switzler, A. (2013). Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change, second edition (Hardcover). McGraw-Hill Education.
McChesney, C., Covey, S., & Huling, J. (2016). The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals. Simon and Schuster.
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