Beyond the Shiny Object: How to Assess Your System’s True Innovation Readiness

Education’s challenges are not due to a lack of new ideas. Every veteran teacher knows the feeling when the next “shiny object” emerges and the school or district jumps on it. While these initiatives are almost always launched to improve student outcomes, they often end up in the alphabet soup of school change. Parallel to this are top-down mandates from the state or federal level that fail to recognize the context on the ground. The tension between centralization and decentralization is the hallmark of the United States education system.

We built the Learning Innovation Wayfinder to provide coherence for redesign efforts, but these efforts are only successful when capacity, commitment and conditions support strong research and development efforts prior to widescale implementation. Past Getting Smart publications have explored the nuances of improvement v. innovation. More recently, we have written about the implementation of design sprints  as a research and development approach within networks and districts, as well as the containers within which innovation might happen. And, the reality is that there is little evidence of widespread research and development efforts within the education sector. This needs to change if we want to intentionally redesign learning systems to ensure every Generation Alpha student reaches their full potential in spite of massive shifts in the world.

The Policy Perspective: State-Level Support for Ground-Up Innovation

Two recent publications are worth building on and unpacking for school leaders. First, a Hoover Institute paper You Cant’ Get There from Here  by Rebecca E. Wolfe published by the Hoover Institution and second, Seizing the Opportunity for State-Level Research and Development, a collaborative policy paper by Sarah Bishop-Root and Leslie Colwell from Education Reimagined and Full Scale. While both are worth reading in their entirety, they can be summarized as follows.

Bishop-Root and Colwell came to the following conclusions:

• States should develop and publish a statewide strategic plan and public research agenda that explicitly prioritize innovation and education R&D, co-created with educators, families, students, and workforce partners.
• Leaders must establish a dedicated state office for education R&D with a director and research staff to lead infrastructure development, manage research requests, and translate findings into practice.
• States need to empower districts and schools through statutory innovation programs or zones that bake in policy flexibilities like waivers and budget flexibility.

Wolfe argues, based on strong research, that very few innovative ideas that improve student outcomes have failed to emerge over the last fifty years. Innovative ideas need a catalyst (to emerge), spread (to replicate), and finally scale and sustain.  Successful innovation includes

• Redesign, Don’t Tinker: Stop layering fixes on an outdated model; redesign school around learner needs and real-world outcomes.
• Align Systems: Make curriculum, assessment, scheduling, staffing, and funding pull in the same direction instead of working at cross-purposes.
• Lead for Conditions: Focus leadership on creating the conditions, such as culture, time, and structures, that let effective practices spread and stick.

The 5 C’s of R&D Readiness

Our work with systems around the country continues to reinforce the need for strong research and development programs in every district and school. But, for this to happen, the humans involved need to be committed, have capacity and operate with supportive conditions.

Before embarking on transformation, teams must evaluate their readiness across five key areas:

• Catalyst: The motivating rationale and reason to make change happen.
• Conditions: The environment within which the change happens.
• Capacity: The knowledge, skills and resources of those implementing the change.
• Commitment: The commitment of those implementing the change.
• Container: Where research and development happen.

The Catalyst is based on observation and noticing and Container is a technical solution. We can connect Capacity, Commitment and Conditions with an Innovation Readiness Tool that can be used before and during transformation research and development efforts. Through this tool, a leader or design team can evaluate where they fall individually, as a team or as a system on the eight different archetypes.

The 8 Archetypes of System Readiness

These elements lead to 8 archetypes of understanding the readiness of your system for Research and Development to advance transformative models. Here are the 8 archetypes from the assessment, determined by High (H) or Low (L) scores across Commitment, Capacity, and Conditions:

1. The Vanguard (H-H-H): Your system has the rare combination of staff who believe in the work, know how to do it, and operate in an environment that supports it. You are positioned to scale boldly and become a model for others.
2. The Frustrated Pioneer (H-H-L): Your educators believe in the change and know how to implement it, but your policy environment, leadership support, or structural conditions are blocking progress. This is a talent-retention crisis in the making.
3. The Eager Apprentice (H-L-H): Staff are bought in and your conditions support the work, but the practical know-how to execute redesign is underdeveloped. You have a great foundation; focused, applied professional learning will unlock momentum.
4. The Capable Skeptic (L-H-H): Your environment is supportive and your staff have the skills to execute redesign, but the ‘why’ hasn’t landed. Without genuine commitment, capacity and conditions will go unused.
5. The Hopeful Dreamer (H-L-L): Your staff want change, but without the skills to execute or the structural conditions to support it, that energy will dissipate quickly. You need to build the runway fast.
6. The Lone Expert (L-H-L): You have staff with the skills to redesign learning, but neither the motivational buy-in nor the structural support to make it meaningful. This system is at risk of losing its best talent to other systems or to burnout.
7. The Compliant System (L-L-H): Your conditions and structures support innovation, but your staff don’t yet believe in it or know how to do it. The enabling environment is a genuine asset; the work now is to fill it with purpose and skill.
8. The Frozen System (L-L-L): Your system faces challenges across all three dimensions: limited staff commitment, underdeveloped capacity, and a restrictive environment. Transformation begins with honest diagnosis.

3 Ways Education Leaders Can Use This Tool

This reflective tool can be used in a variety of ways to constantly evaluate the readiness of a system, including: 

• Pre-Transformation Assessment: Utilize this tool prior to launching wide-scale implementation to ensure your system has the proper foundation for R&D.
• Facilitate Team Self-Reflection: Have all team members engage in self-reflection using the assessment questions to increase the probability that the system will find success in redesign efforts.
• Diagnose and Adapt: Use the 8 archetypes to honestly diagnose your system’s starting point so you can tailor your approach, whether that means building skills, securing buy-in, or changing policies.

Which archetype or you? Which archetype is your system?