By Peter Metsopoulos and Meredith Monk Ford
As a consultant to nonprofit organizations through Arcadia Strategy Group--and as the executive director of the Center for Theory of Change–I'm often in conversations with organizations striving to map out strategic direction, engage in assessment, and build toward change. My advice and my method is to begin at the end: in a manner of speaking, to take it from the top.
The very last thing educators have the time to be thinking about right now is last school year. As a recovering 18-year teacher, administrator, and school founder, I get it. I really do. I mean, really.
For any organization, building in timeline points for reflection is essential–and yet it almost always feels like it's the wrong time; something we'll do "later". That's certainly true for schools: educators always know that the next school year is coming, and it requires 117% of a teacher’s time. So there’s little time to step away from the rush of start of the year meetings in order to gain perspective–there is always something more urgent (though often not more vital) that takes priority. And yet: while time for reflection often feels scarce, it's essential for effective planning.
So how can you as a school leader make professional goal setting this year meaningful and a good use of time when teachers are eager to set-up their classrooms and meet with their departments? The simple answer: Theory of Change. In the field of social change, Theory of Change is used to enhance the capacity of organizations and initiatives so that they can achieve their goals and demonstrate their impact. It grounds planning and strategy in the reality of what is necessary to achieve change.
Essentially, Theory of Change is Backward Design on steroids. It provides a roadmap from the present to future aspirations and is essentially a comprehensive illustration–and then a description–of how and why a desired change is expected to happen in a particular context. By focusing on long-term goals and working backward to fill in the “missing middle” between aspirations and actions, educators can create more cohesive and impactful learning experiences.
Backward Design tenets–as part of the Understanding by Design pedagogy that guides so many of us–would suggest that we create the time to define those long-term goals at the very start of building curriculum and lesson plans.
That we begin at the end, thinking from the start about the results we'd like to produce in students. Here's what I'm not suggesting: Curriculum-writing; standards work; rubric work and all the rest. In fact, if it feels like school, don't do it.
This isn't about traditional curriculum development or assessment. Because what we really teach students isn't about school. The Words on the Wall at each of your schools aren’t about a subject or a set of academic skills–those Words are about helping students to be the best human being they can be; what we teach is, at the heart of it, about fostering qualities like confidence, vulnerability, and resilience in students. So perhaps we find time to think about how we'd work from those concepts back through to the work we do in classrooms. What if educators took school-enforced time before school begins and assessments are written to think about what we want to ask students as fellow travelers in learning?
A former colleague of mine did this kind of reflection at key points during the year with her students in order to understand who her students were becoming and her role in that becoming–and she helped them create ways to talk about their own experiences of learning; as a final great result that shows academic skills and values are intertwined if we teach them that way, this reflection gave the students more ways to talk about the texts on a formal final exam. Educators can use the combination of qualitative and quantitative data collection as the starting point for an hour of brainstorming and collaboration around what it could look like if reflection, self-evaluation, and self-worth were at the heart of everything.
A theory of change diagram like this one helps teachers reflect on their practice in order to incorporate what they actually want students to learn into their professional goal setting and curriculum design for the coming year.
Schools, like all organizations, often find that the best methods are already in use under their roof in a quiet way–it's a matter of making it standard operating procedure that pulls the best practices into regular use and elevates the organization's work.
For schools that have made professional goal setting a standard practice or those that are just beginning to make this a priority, creating space and time for teachers to reflect and collaborate on their practice is the first ingredient to effective goals. The activity above could be used in opening faculty meetings as a way of ensuring last year’s work informs this year’s goal setting process. It would provide continuity and context in which teachers can write goals that not only matter to them but are also grounded in student performance.
This signals to teachers that change doesn’t have to be monumental–that, in fact, incremental change that directly impacts learning outcomes and the student experience is the expectation.
Rich, collegial conversations about student learning outcomes rather than sitting through meetings that could have been emails sounds like a more energizing way to start the year and will result in Folio goals that you, as their leader, can get excited about too