Scaling Innovation by Charting, Not Choosing

Our View

Any superintendent will tell you that making strategic leadership decisions feels like a tug-of-war between competing priorities. This is amplified when scaling a new instructional innovation, particularly if it requires teachers, parents or students to change the ways they work and interact.

Teachers may be eager to embrace new ideas but loath to be told which new ideas those should be. School leaders may resent any loss of autonomy that accompanies a districtwide initiative. Meanwhile, superintendents are working to achieve equitable access for all students, which requires coherence and consistency.

Even though no two districts are the same, leaders face similar strategic challenges when trying to implement innovation across the district.

The Learning Accelerator, a nonprofit organization that supports educators in adopting new teaching and learning approaches, undertook an eight-month project to understand the important decisions of school leaders who implement blended and personalized learning. Through interviews and a national survey, we asked more than 100 leaders from 60 school systems across the country to describe the decisions they had to make when taking personalization to scale.

We found leaders reporting several hard choices that had to be negotiated, such as whether implementation should be customized or standardized, how to balance external procurement and internal capacity building and whether to move fast or with more caution. How can leaders navigate through competing priorities?

Your Own Path

The most important thing we learned is that instead of viewing strategic decisions as choices between competing priorities, leaders leveraged the benefits of each option. For example, our research found that one of the key challenges was the tension between conducting a centralized versus decentralized implementation effort. How did some districts find their path?

In Henry County, Ga., district leaders began with a decentralized implementation of their personalized learning program, which had the benefit of granting school leaders the freedom to address the unique needs of their students. This also led to increased teacher engagement. But over time, leaders realized they also needed to develop stronger, centralized “guardrails” (such as a personalized learning implementation rubric at the school level) to help schools navigate their transformation and provide more consistency across the district.

In the Greeley-Evans district in Colorado, the leadership team took a different approach by developing its own capacity in design thinking and then leading schools through design sessions to craft their individual implementation plans. This offered some consistency of process while allowing for schools to self-determine their goals and strategies.

In the Dallas Independent School District, leaders deliberately orchestrated school feeder patterns, linking schools to create consistency of learning for students and strengthening the teacher network. Within these feeder patterns, however, teachers have the autonomy to engage in communities of practice that provide ongoing opportunities for learning.

While some districts leaned more toward centralization than others, few leaders we spoke with chose a side. Instead, they explicitly named the competing priorities and charted a path through them that honored the value of each. They also highlighted that each implementation decision should always emerge from clear values and objectives related to a broader district strategy.

Similar Challenges

We discovered several other implementation design choices that leaders face when implementing innovation across school systems, which we detail in our publication “Look Both Ways.” It provides a framework for educators navigating through competing systemwide approaches. This work shows how others have tackled these challenges to chart a successful path for their schools.