Get Ready, Stay Ready: Will and Capacity Checks Along the Improvement Journey
Readiness for change is not a pre-existing condition but something that must be cultivated and tended to over time. A critical function of improvement teams is conducting data-driven assessments of their own and their system's readiness to implement change at the various stages of the continuous improvement process.
We were going to study all the little things that we did and that was just not something we were familiar with before. We know now that it’s a really powerful way to do the work and a really powerful change agent for us as far as seeing the growth for our students
Glynis Shulters, Improvement Lead, Green Dot Public Schools
Continuous Quality Improvement
“Readiness” is often defined as being either willing or able to do something; however, when it comes to continuous improvement in school contexts, it’s a bit more complicated than that. Although willingness is certainly a critical component to improvement work, a concerted effort is needed to determine whether a team, the system it works within, and the people who will ultimately be responsible for implementation have the skills, knowledge, and capacity to advance and sustain improvements.
Furthermore, when we attempt to make changes to and within a complex system for the purpose of undoing persistent inequities, checking for readiness can’t be a one-and-done exercise. Teams work over months and years to deliberately and incrementally bring about improvement. First they test relatively small ideas, and then they spread and scale them so those initially small changes can have broader, sustained impact. This process requires readiness checks at key points in the improvement process and at multiple levels of the system.
Key Considerations
During the 3-year Networked Improvement Community, the charter management organizations and technical support teams learned a number of lessons about readiness and used various tools and processes to assess both team and system readiness. The key learnings about readiness fall into the following three areas:
Improvement team readiness: The initial readiness of the team responsible for planning and coordinating implementation of the change work is based primarily on the team’s understanding of its system and the problems it seeks to address; as the team implements its plans, ongoing checks of team knowledge, skills, and bandwidth support ongoing readiness for each phase of implementation and help identify areas of need for the team to address.
Readiness of change ideas: The planning phase of Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles is where the initial readiness of a change idea for effective testing is determined, and the thoroughness of the plan can dictate how much learning can occur in subsequent phases. Once a change idea is found to be promising, the team must then consider its readiness to be spread and scaled more broadly within its system and determine where and what adjustments are needed.
Readiness of the system: Context matters, and taking steps to understand a school system’s initial readiness to undertake equity-driven change and to identify opportunities within that system is worth the effort; continuing to monitor the ability of the system to support effective implementation allows improvement teams to identify both opportunities to leverage and barriers to address.
Explore More Findings
Topic 1
Systems Change to Support Students with DisabilitiesExplore Topic 1
Topic 3
Champions for Change: Two Essential Roles for an Effective Improvement TeamExplore Topic 3
Topic 2
Centering Students with Disabilities to Create Powerful ChangeExplore Topic 2Topic 5
Get Ready, Stay Ready: Will and Capacity Checks Along the Improvement JourneyExplore Topic 5Stay Informed about Research Updates
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