Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]
In an earlier blog, I said that planned educational changes are not doomed to failure if risks are anticipated and mitigated. Among the risks I addressed in that blog were: failure to recognize and plan to overcome resistance to change, asking people to make changes that are a leap too far, managing changes when political regimes change, allowing seemingly urgent issues divert attention from the change agenda, lack of signal continuity, and poor implementation.
I will try to address here the risks I did not address in the earlier blog: pilot-testing slight of hand, failing to calculate the challenges of implementing changes on a system-wide basis, lack of fidelity of implementation, and failure to monitor progress and evaluate.
Let me explain what I mean when I say pilot-testing slight of hand. There is great value in small-scale implementation of changes for the purpose of seeing if they work. Showing the ‘proof of concept’ and learning from the small-scale pilot-tests can prevent the implementation of something that does not work as intended. I am not talking about such pilot-tests.
When I say ‘slight of hand’ I mean conducting pilot-tests to be able to say that one is doing something when there is no real intention of implementing the changes even if they are successful. Though this occurs infrequently, there are instances in which pilot-testing is merely authorized to “look like we are doing something.”
An example of pilot-testing sleight of hand occurs when politicians are unable or unwilling to stand up to a powerful advocacy group. “Let’s give them a pilot test” is the resort of a weak politician to a powerful advocacy group’s request. A variation on that cynical theme is “Let’s give them money for a pilot.” It occurs infrequently, but it does occur.
Genuine pilot tests can be very useful, especially if attention is paid to what it will cost to implement the piloted change on a system-wide basis. You’d be surprised how often this is overlooked. It is obvious to me that the problem can be avoided if someone asks, “what will it cost to implement this change on a system-wide basis, if the pilot is successful?” If it is not fiscally manageable, there is no point in undertaking the pilot.
In addition to costs, real pilot tests can provide very useful information about the challenges of implementing a planned change. Knowing the challenges is only useful if one plans how the challenges can be avoided when the pilot is brought to scale. Failure to recognize the challenges, and failure to mitigate them, typically leads to the failure of planned change because of implementation.
Educational change is like baking. Change requires specific ingredients that are combined in a specific order. If you leave out an ingredient, the outcome will not be what you intended. Combine the ingredients in the wrong order and you might as well not put it in the oven. It won’t turn out as you expected. Most change is like that. You must use the correct ingredients and proper procedure. When that doesn’t happen, we refer to that as lack of implementation fidelity.
If you aren’t a baker, think of it as planning a route to a destination. If you don’t take the right route, you won’t get where you want to go.
Sticking with the travel metaphor, one of the failures of planned change is not monitoring your progress along the route planned. Recognizing when you are headed in the wrong direction is essential. Knowing the progress markers is important too. “We should be passing point X about now.” Using GPS for route planning helps to avoid drastic mistakes, but dependence on the GPS sometimes leads to dead-ends.
A relative of failure to monitor progress is the failure to evaluate results. Even faithfully implemented planned changes that have been carefully pilot-tested must be carefully evaluated. And not just once!
Avoiding the risks associated with educational changes can be
achieved by anticipating them and making plans to manage them. It is
unfortunate that doesn’t happen more often. If it did, planned educational
changes might be more successful.
I'm taking a Spring Break. I will resume this blog the week of March 27th with the third part in this series about the failure of planned educational changes.