During the annual conference of the Consortium for School Networking, an association for K–12 chief information officers, we hold an event known as "Fail Fest." It's a chance for edtech leaders to come together and learn from one another's mistakes.
Each speaker during Fail Fest has five minutes to tell a story about an edtech project gone wrong. It can be cathartic to bare your soul to colleagues, share a laugh about your missteps, and know that you're not alone. We can all relate to such errors in our working lives.
Two key themes have emerged from these annual Fail Fests. First, leading an edtech project can involve unforeseen challenges. Introducing change of any kind often makes people uncomfortable and can be fraught with difficulties. Second, the biggest reason many edtech projects go awry is that leaders underestimate these challenges and don't pay enough attention to change management.
Change management is the process of transitioning employees and organizations to new ways of doing things. At the Metropolitan School District of Wayne Township in Indiana, our work in adopting a new platform for transforming curriculum, assessment, and instruction has shown us how important change management is to ensuring success. We took six key steps to help the change process succeed in our district.
Step 1: Understand Needs
Before we began our instructional transformation project, we spent a year communicating with staff to discover and understand what their needs were. For instance, we learned that teachers wanted a platform that could tie together curriculum resources, assessment, and instruction within a single easy-to-use system, while extending students' learning beyond school hours and encouraging them to think more deeply. This information was essential for delivering a solution that would meet those needs.
Never assume you know what your teachers need. Good communication isn't just about telling people what you plan to do; it's a two-way feedback loop. And it shouldn't start with telling people anything. Rather, it should start with asking questions.
The kind of questions you ask depends on the culture of your school district and the relationships between the curriculum and IT departments. But you need to develop those relationships; otherwise, IT leaders can't understand what teachers need. And I don't want to deliver something I think will work; I want to deliver a spot-on solution.
Step 2: Choose the Right Solution
Based on our conversations with teachers, we knew we needed a technology platform for managing the entire K–12 learning process within a single easy-to-use system. We also knew the kinds of activities teachers wanted to do with this system to support their instruction. So we began evaluating learning-management systems to find one that could accommodate those needs.
The features of an edtech solution are important, but the flexibility and responsiveness of the provider are just as critical. Some edtech providers only offer a boilerplate solution that should work for most schools. We needed a full partner, prepared to work closely with us to help us make this core instructional platform what our staff and students expected.
Step 3: Form a Plan
Once you've chosen the right solution, it's important to have a detailed implementation plan. Your plan should define the steps involved in the transition and clarify who is responsible for completing each step. It should also include a timeline for the project and milestone markers to measure progress.
It's important to name a project leader who will manage the process. We have two project leaders for our implementation of the Wayne Learning Hub: one leader on the curriculum, instruction, and assessment side and another on the e-learning side. These individuals are responsible for directing the work and communicating with stakeholders. I'm the executive sponsor, and my role is to oversee the entire transition process and monitor our progress.
In forming your plan, you'll have to answer several operational questions. For our Wayne Learning Hub project, the questions we needed to address included: How would we transfer information from our legacy systems into the new system? Who would be the first staff members to use the system, and how would we pilot it to make sure it worked and met everyone's needs? How would we move our courses and content to the new system? How would we integrate the Learning Hub with our student information system and other software programs? We had to answer all those questions before we could begin the implementation process.
Step 4: Ensure Buy-In
If you've been communicating with your staff and understand their needs, you shouldn't have any problems getting them to buy in to the change. But it also helps if you choose a solution that's easy to use and simplifies their jobs—while empowering them to do their jobs more effectively. Teachers should be spending their time teaching, not learning some complex system we've designed for them. Typically, teachers use different systems, each with its own login, to find instructional resources, design and deliver assessments, and look at student data. That's too complicated. Now, we'll be able to house all our resources within the Wayne Learning Hub, and teachers will be able to use a single login for their digital resources, curriculum, lessons, and assessments. That's huge. It allows busy educators to be more efficient and productive in the limited time they have.
In making things easier for teachers, it's important to consider which processes and technologies you're willing to eliminate. Adding more systems or responsibilities without removing others isn't a realistic model for success. In moving to a single platform for curriculum, assessment, and instruction, we've identified some legacy systems we can strategically abandon as we introduce our new system. We'll be moving away from a separate curriculum repository; we'll require less professional development for each separate system, because those will be centralized; and we'll get rid of legacy resources that no longer have the value they once did. All told, we took six months prior to launch to modify and move our Course Curricular standards into the Hub.
To ensure buy-in, it also helps to give teachers some "easy wins." In other words, show them how they can immediately influence student learning with a few simple steps. An example of an easy win is allowing teachers to codevelop courses in a common space in our Learning Hub. This will enable them to share the load and feel the pride of contributing to a shared instructional resource. Being able to do, say, 10 percent of the work and have a product that is 100 percent ready and customized for your lessons is a big win for minimal effort. If you make teachers' lives easier and give them easy wins, the system will sell itself—and you'll have less trouble getting teachers to adopt it.
Step 5: Train Staff
Because we have different types of users, we've designed different levels of professional development tailored for each of these groups. Our online teachers were the first ones to learn the new system last fall because they needed more time to adapt their courses and make sure everything worked as expected. This spring, we're training the bulk of our "brick and mortar" teachers. We've offered the professional development opportunities online so that teachers can take them at their convenience, but we also have an on-site facilitator to help as needed.
We also gave teachers a "sandbox" environment so that they could experiment with the new system and build courses, and then delete them. Our teachers love having that opportunity. They want to get in and put their hands on it, but they don't want to mess anything up as they're learning the system. The sandbox environment gives them that freedom to try new things.
Step 6: Be Realistic
We didn't think we could accomplish our instructional transformation in just a few months. That wouldn't have been realistic. The plan we came up with gave us plenty of time to assess our needs, choose the right solution, complete all the integrations, train staff, and implement the system effectively before flipping the switch. Too many districts rush to complete edtech projects or underestimate how long the change-over process will take—and that's where they fail.
I'm excited for the next school year. We're building so many powerful learning resources into the Hub for our teachers to manage the instructional process and reach kids in new and profound ways. And that's what I live for—providing great resources so that great learning can happen.