Stay the Course or Change Course? Knowing the Difference Matters

Welcome Back, Educational Leaders!

Educentric is officially back for another school year, and so are our conversations around school improvement, breakthrough performance, and the work happening inside schools every day.

Our team spent much of the summer doing exactly that work. We have been on the road, launching new partnerships, welcoming new districts, and training School Breakthrough Teams as they begin their journey with Educentric. To all of our new SBT members, welcome! You give value to this work and make conversations like these worthwhile. The ideas we share here mean much more when we know there are leaders putting them into practice in real schools, with real students, every day.

For this edition, we want to start the school year with a conversation inspired by an episode of The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish and performance psychologist Dr. Gio Valiante. Their discussion wasn't specifically about school improvement, but one idea immediately made us think about the work our Navigators and School Breakthrough Teams do together.

People naturally return to what is comfortable.

And schools are made up of people.

Comfortable Is a Powerful Place

Think about what happens when a school year gets difficult.

A strategy isn't producing the results everyone expected. Student data comes back lower than hoped. Staff members are frustrated. Something that sounded great during planning isn't quite as simple once hundreds of students and dozens of adults are involved.

There is usually a strong temptation to do something.

Maybe we add another initiative. Maybe we schedule another meeting. Maybe we abandon the strategy and replace it with something new. Sometimes we keep doing exactly what we've always done because it's at least familiar.

There is a reason for that. Comfort is powerful, especially when pressure is high.

One of the ideas that stood out from Dr. Valiante's conversation was his description of discipline as a "habit of mind." In schools, that discipline eventually has to become a behavioral habit. A productive conversation during a leadership meeting is valuable, but the conversation itself does not change student outcomes. What happens afterward does.

This is where the work becomes much more interesting.

Because disciplined execution does not mean changing course every time the work becomes uncomfortable.

Sometimes the most disciplined decision a school can make is to stay the course.

Before You Pivot, Look at the Evidence

There is a question we could easily imagine asking during every Navigation Huddle:

What will we do differently before we meet again that should produce different evidence of student learning?

It sounds like a great question. But there is a problem with asking it every time.

If teams are constantly trying to do something differently between Huddles, nothing has enough time to stick.

A school can become so eager to improve that it accidentally creates its own instability. Strategies change. Tactics change. Expectations change. Teachers barely have enough time to become comfortable with one approach before another arrives.

This eventually becomes churn.

Evidence then matters when this happens.

If your Key Progress Indicators show that students are responding, the conversation should probably focus on consistency. What is working? How do we strengthen it? What needs to happen for us to continue executing it well?

If the KPIs are not moving, then the conversation changes. Is the strategy actually being implemented as intended? If it is, and students are still not responding, perhaps there is now a reason to pivot.

The goal is not to change for the sake of change. The goal is to know when change is necessary.

Adults Do the Work. Students Tell Us Whether It Worked.

This distinction may be one of the most important ones for school teams to understand. We coach adult behavior, but we measure student outcomes.

Schools are very good at counting activity. We can count how many intervention sessions were delivered, how many walkthroughs were completed, how many PLC meetings occurred, or how many teachers participated in professional development.

Those numbers tell us something useful. They tell us whether the work happened.

But they do not necessarily tell us whether the work worked.

That requires looking at students.

If a school implements an intervention strategy, what percentage of participating students show growth in the targeted skill? If teachers are focusing on an essential standard, what percentage of students are demonstrating mastery? If a team changes an instructional practice, what is the earliest evidence that students are responding differently?

Implementation still matters. In fact, we need to understand it to diagnose what is happening. When student evidence remains flat, leaders need to know whether the strategy itself is ineffective or was never implemented with sufficient consistency to receive a fair test.

Being busy tells us that adults are doing something, but it really is student evidence that tells us if that “something” is making a difference.

Don't Wait Until the End to Find Out

There is another reason we care so much about KPIs at Educentric.

Schools should not have to wait until the end of a semester, a quarterly benchmark, or a state assessment to discover whether their strategy is working.

Imagine putting months of effort into a strategy and only then learning that students were not responding the way you expected. By that point, valuable instructional time has already passed.

Good KPIs give teams an earlier signal.

They allow leaders to see small changes in student learning before it is too late to respond. They also allow teams to recognize something equally important: progress.

This matters tremendously in schools that have experienced repeated disappointment. When a team has spent years seeing the same results, confidence can become fragile. A small piece of evidence that says, this is working, can begin rebuilding belief.

You do not have to wait for the North Star Metric to be attained before recognizing that the school is moving toward it.

Small wins give people a reason to keep going.

What Should We Be Asking?

As our Navigators and School Breakthrough Teams move through another year together, perhaps the most valuable questions are not always about what we should do next.

Sometimes we need to ask: What measurable evidence shows that students are responding? What does that evidence tell us about our current strategy? Are we seeing enough progress to stay the course? If students are not responding, is the problem the strategy itself or the way it is being implemented? And if the evidence tells us a change is necessary, what should we adjust now?

Ultimately, all of those questions lead us back to one larger question:

What evidence do we have today that convinces us we are making progress toward attaining our North Star Metric?

That is the conversation we want our teams to keep having.

School improvement will always involve new ideas and challenges, but improvement also requires the discipline to give good work enough time to become great work.

So as another school year gets underway, don't assume that progress always requires something new.

Look at the evidence.

If it tells you to pivot, have the courage to pivot.

And if it tells you the work is moving students in the right direction, have the discipline to stay the course!

We are excited for another year of learning, challenging our thinking, and pursuing breakthrough performance alongside you! Follow us on our social media accounts for real-time updates.