Adaptive Implementation

Navigating the School Improvement Landscape

By (author) Ryoko Yamaguchi With Laureen Avery, Jason Cervone, Lisa DiMartino, Adam Hall

Publication date:

28 July 2017

Length of book:

112 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781475833485

After decades spent pondering basic questions about adopting or implementing ‘best practices’ in education, educators have assembled a canon of evidence-based strategies and programs that should consistently produce good outcomes. So why is the work of educating students still such challenging work for so many? The best, most skilled educators adapt programs every day to meet the changing needs of their students. One size does not fit all, and one textbook, teaching strategy, or program will never meet the needs of all teachers and learners. Adaptive Implementation: Navigating the School Improvement Landscape focuses on how practitioners and researchers together continue to improve their craft by systematically collecting data on adaptations, testing them out, and figuring out what works. We provide a framework for building an adaptive implementation process in education, with tools and templates for practitioners to use. In the end, we hope that this book sparks a dialogue among educators as they continue to create adaptive implementation processes that work for their context.

Preface
Introduction
Schools: A combination of technical and adaptive systems
What are your core goals?
Are you Scaling Up? Or Scaling Down?
Adaptive Implementation (AI) Team
Adaptive Implementation (AI) Cycle
Step 1: What do we need to see?
Step 2: What resources do we have?
Step 3: What will we do?
Step 4: What did we do?
Step 5: What did we learn?
CASE STUDY: PROJECT EXCEL
The ExcEL model
STEP 1: WHAT DO WE NEED TO SEE?
How Ambitious Should We Be?
Identify Waypoints
Create your roadmap
Five Characteristics of Strong Waypoints
Project ExcEL Example
STEP 2: WHAT RESOURCES DO WE HAVE?
Assess what you have
Assess what you don’t have
Assess what you could have
Project ExcEL Example
STEP 3: WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO?
Conduct Pro and Con Assessment (PCA)
Create a Design and Action Plan (DAP)
The problem with logic models
Process for developing the DAP
Identify the group of activities using the PCA
Determine the relationships and synergies of activities
Map out the activities
Conduct a series of face validity meetings with stakeholders
Revise, revise, and revise again
Project ExcEL Example
STEP 4: WHAT DID WE DO?
Annotate your roadmap
What to annotate and document?
Annotating is not evaluating
Project ExcEL Example
STEP 5: WHAT DID WE LEARN?
Will we do it again?
When we do it again …
Scaling Up
Scaling down
Learning through reflection
Project ExcEL Example
CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION
To use or not to use?
Who’s at the table?
A note to evaluators – and funders
Making the time
The final word – momentum
Appendix
Adaptive Implementation (AI) Tools:
Templates for the AI Process
Adaptive Implementation (AI) Process Template
Step 1: What do we want to see? Five Characteristics of Strong Waypoints Checklist
Step 2: What resources do we have? AI Resource Management Tool
Step 3: What will we do? Pro/ Con Assessment (PCA) Template
Step 3: What will we do? Design and Action Plan (DAP) Template
Step 4: What did we do? Data Review Sheet
Step 5: What Did We Learn? Discussion Protocol Tool
REFERENCES

For those of us who seek to advance an improvement science in education, this book promises an important contribution. It is conceptually rigorous, practically feasible, and methodologically transparent. It addresses one of the most widespread and common of improvement challenges -- how to get good ideas to work in practice, even across diverse contexts. It is a science. But don’t be afraid of it, it is the answer to the problem of how practitioners can get good answers to their problems.