Moving Forward!
In our teaching oasis, implementation would make sense. This week’s blog topic is implementation of school/district initiatives. No Child Left Behind has created more accountability for what we do (understandably). We know that for initiatives to be successful you have to be accountable for what you’re doing in the classroom. However, we feel like we’re not moving forward in our work. We are stuck in first phase of everything we implement. Hall & Hord (2006) labeled the stages of implementation of an initiative, “The Levels of Use.” (see attached…we’re still learning how to blog!).To illustrate a district’s level of use with a strategy consider the following. Let’s use comprehension strategy instruction as an example. District A decides to implement Keene and Zimmermann’s (1997) comprehension strategies. Teachers are trained, materials are purchased, some modeling and demonstrating takes place, and guidelines for implementation are set. Of course, teachers should be held accountable to teach comprehension strategies…so…a form is created to simplify teachers’ reporting to their administrators in the attempt to reflect their level of use of the strategies. Long story short….six years later District A’s teachers are still filling out the same form and even worse, the levels of use are still at the beginning stages of comprehension instruction. Everything is at the mechanical stage. We need to move on. In future blogs we’ll discuss what we can do about this but this week, please share with us your thoughts and experiences. To help you reflect, here are three questions:
1. What is your district’s initiative?
2. How are you being held accountable for doing it?
3. Using the adaptation of Hall & Hord’s Levels of Use, what level are you at with your initiative and how long has it taken you?
In conclusion, it’s smart to build in data pieces such as implementation paperwork but the heart is lost when data collections aren’t used in ways to help us move forward in our levels of use! Teachers become frustrated because they are asked to do the same things over and over again and don’t understand why.
