Thread by @nikable

Thread: What I took from 'Reduce Change to Increase Improvement' by Viviane Robinson.
Firstly lots of leadership training has focused on change management and leading change without considering the usefulness of change in the context of improvement.

Rather than 'taking for granted that change will lead to improvement, we should... believe that change will not deliver our intended improvement unless there are structures and processes in place for ensuring that all involved can learn how to turn change into the intended imp'

Couple of key things here... What is the intended improvement or outcome of the change being made? What processes/structures are required? Who are the 'all' that will be involved? All questions worth asking when engaging in a process of improvement (see how I didn't say change?)

Change is disruptive and costly, it is not surprising that people resist it. Often the person requiring the change is not the implementing agent - when we ask teachers to implement our change we are often asking a lot of them. So we have to do it for the right reasons.

The right reason is improvement and improvement here is defined specifically as impact on learners. We often have proxies for this so we need to really think about what the impact is that we are looking for and how we know we will get it.

This is of course context dependent. Robinson references her 2011 work 'Student Centred Leadership'. From this we know that average effect is higher for leading teacher learning than for ensuring a safe env. BUT if you don't have a safe env, you have to prioritise this.

So assuming we accept all this, the key part of understanding why change does/not lead to improvement lies with understanding theories of action. 'Practices that are the target of change are the outward manifestations of a tacit personal theory about how to achieve one's goals.

Dear reader, this was the lightbulb bit for me.
A theory of action has 3 components - action (or the behaviour), the beliefs/values that underlie the behaviour and intended and unintended consequences of the beliefs and actions.

So when implementing an intended improvement that is not having the impact we hoped for, we often look at the teachers behaviour (eg misapplying the intervention) and draw a conclusion from this. What we actually need to do is understand the belief that underpins the action...

...and work with this belief to achieve the improvement. If a teacher thinks that x is not their responsibility but complies with a directive on x, they may well deliver the directive but the outcome will not be as good as it could be if they were fully engaged.

Sidenote - there are two elements to theories of action - espoused and in use. Or the talk and the walk. We want to reduce the gap between what we say we want to do and what we actually do. And maybe understand the reason behind any gap.

Understanding this is crucial because if you want to introduce something and your key people are aligned with your thinking this only requires single loop learning (an upskilling or training package) but if values are not aligned, you need to work on double loop learning...

...where you bring people in line with the commitment first at a level of beliefs/values, before introducing the upskilling/training. You may have to convince people as to what you are doing what you are doing and why you need them to commit to. And you may have to compromise.

When leaders are leading improvement they adopt one of two approaches - bypass or engagement. That is they either engage at the beliefs stage and engage their change agents or they just tell them what to do and assume they are on board leading to a bypass approach.

In an engagement approach 'inquiry into the tacit theory that sustains and explains current practice produce a dialogue between two theories of action: that of the leader... and of the person they are attempting to influence'.

There are four main stages of the engagement approach.
1. Agree on the problem to be solved.
2. Inquire into the relevant theory of action.
3. Evaluate the current and alternative theories of action
4. Implement and monitor the action

There is so much good stuff in this chapter and I highly recommend reading it... But I particularly liked the section on evaluation. Bryk et al in 'Learning to Improve' said 'learn fast, fail fast and improve fast'. How often do we give something a year and then get frustrated?

Be present and have a look to see if it is working BUT before you do make sure you know what you are looking for. Invest time in defining predictors of success. Learn how to critique in a constructive way.

So there's a wee snapshot. The book also covers coaching and then demonstrates how all these points could be used to lead professional development. It has examples and flow charts throughout as well as question for reflection. This would be a great text for leadership PD.

In terms of my personal takeaway though... I want to make a change. I need to identify why - what is the problem? I need to find out if my teachers agree it is a problem and do some work around their beliefs and values on the topic. I need to be really clear on what impact I...

...expect to see. I need to ensure all staff are on the same page - double loop training. Beliefs and skillset. Then I need to get in there. Early. Evaluate whether it is having a positive effect. Be a coach, help those struggling without imposing judgement. Monitor and adapt.

It's a great book. An easy read. Well structured and with helpful ideas to structure your own improvement. These tweets may not in any way reflect the content of the book only what my brain took from it. But I loved it. End.