Go Slow to Go Fast: Stop Constantly Starting New Initiatives

Slow down.

To succeed with almost any kind of change in education, I believe we need to slow down.

We need to go slow to go fast.

There's almost no type of change that we can make in education that takes less than one school year, right?

Most substantive changes are a multi-year process.

And over and over again, I've seen districts try to take on too much at once.

Schools tried to take on multiple huge initiatives at once.

And of course what happens when we try to do that is none of them succeed, right?

We get too much on our plates.

We get too much change happening at once and people get overwhelmed and the change fails and we're doing another change at the same time.

And that one fails too.

And Oh, before the first two are done, we start something else.

Like we're constantly starting new things and that jeopardizes the success of everything that we already have going on.

So I believe we really need to take a serious look at the pace of change And I get that we have a sense of urgency.

I think a sense of urgency can be a good thing for starting a change.

But we do way too much starting and not enough finishing the changes, seeing them through to the point where they're successful and having the discipline to not start something else new right away.

And I was thinking about this earlier today that like every year senior leaders get a new budget, right?

You get a new budget every year.

It's just part of how school funding works.

You get a new pot of money every year.

And for a senior leader, the last change they made is done to them.

Like to the teachers who are actually implementing it and the principals who are supporting it, it's still underway.

In fact, you might just be getting into the difficult part with the change on something that senior leadership has moved on from a year ago, right?

Because they already made the decision.

They already spent the money.

They already wrote the check and brought in the trainers and And now the trainers are gone and the hard part begins for teachers and administrators.

The change is not done.

We're absolutely nowhere near mission accomplished.

We're just getting into the thick of it.

And now senior leadership has new money and they have new ideas.

They've been to some conferences and they're ready to start something new, even though it's been less than a year since the last huge change.

This dynamic has been playing out for decades over and over again.

I've seen this.

where senior leaders just want to constantly start something new because their part of the change initiative is done.

They wrote the check and they don't necessarily know how much work is left to do in the classroom to successfully finish implementing that initiative.

So I think we've really got to exercise some discipline and really as a society, we have got to remove some of the pressure on senior leaders to always be coming up with something new.

Like the idea that a leader would say, well, our strategic plan this year is to do nothing new and keep getting better at the stuff we're already doing and see through to completion the stuff we started last year.

Like if you say that as a senior leader, you look like an idiot.

You look like you're not trying, but that's not how it works, right?

We need that discipline to not always be starting something new.

Let me know what you think.