Listen to the interview with Max Yurkofsky and Jal Mehta (transcript):
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Imagine this: You go to your first faculty meeting of the school year, and after a few welcoming remarks, your principal says, “This year, I just want you to keep doing what you’re doing. No changes.”
If that has ever happened anywhere, at any time, I’d love to hear about it, because as far as I can tell, every school for all of eternity has been trying to improve in some way. It’s part of our nature as humans to keep looking for ways to make things better. And schools are such complex ecosystems that there’s always going to be room for improvement.
These efforts vary in size and scope. Sometimes we’re just fine-tuning, on our own or with a group of colleagues, reflecting on our practice and making things a little better by degree. This kind of improvement tends to be pretty organic; we identify a need, make an adjustment, see how it goes, and keep refining.
Then there are the big, school-wide or district-wide efforts: a new curriculum, a branded leadership program, a whole new set of practices everyone is expected to start using. These often follow a familiar pattern. The initiative rolls out, everyone invests time and energy into it, and a few years later it’s replaced by something else. The churn can be exhausting.
Some of that is inevitable. We’re working with complex problems, the solutions aren’t always obvious, and there’s bound to be some trial and error. But a big reason these initiatives keep getting replaced is that they often don’t get the results people hoped for.
In recent years, schools have turned to improvement models that work differently. Rather than bringing in a prepackaged solution and asking teachers to ust implement it, these frameworks give the people closest to the problem a process for studying it, trying possible solutions, seeing what happens, and adjusting from there. In theory, these approaches should get better results: The people doing the work have a hand in figuring out what needs to change, and the solution develops through a process of learning and adjustment.
But they don’t always work that way in practice. Sometimes the framework itself becomes just another thing handed down from above, another set of steps people are trained to follow, with more attention paid to following the process than to creating the conditions that make real problem-solving possible.
And yet, in some places, they really do work the way they should, leading to the kinds of improvements people were hoping for.
So what’s happening in the places where it’s working? What allows this kind of improvement work to actually become a way for people in schools to solve problems together, rather than just another program that eventually gets replaced?
Jal Mehta and Max Yurkofsky have an answer to that question. In their new book, A Chance to Solve Their Own Problems, they take a close look at how these kinds of problem-solving approaches play out in real schools and districts, examining why they succeed in some places and falter in others. Through that research, Mehta and Yurkofsky identified a set of conditions that seem to make the difference.
On the podcast, they explained what those conditions are, why so many well-intentioned improvement efforts fail to create those conditions, and what schools can do differently if they want improvement to become something people actually do, rather than another initiative they’re asked to implement. You can listen to the full interview above, read the full transcript here, or get the highlights below.
Why School Improvement Efforts Go Wrong
In their research, Mehta and Yurkofsky saw a few patterns that repeatedly got in the way of successful improvement efforts. Here are four of the most common.
The People Closest to the Problem Are Left Out
In many school improvement efforts, the problems to be solved are identified by people at the top, then handed down to educators to work on. Mehta argues that this leaves out the people who are in the best position to see what needs attention in the first place. “We’re not actually trusting the people who are closest to the ground to sort of say, ‘Hey, I have an inquiry question.’”
That trust matters because people are far more likely to engage in improvement work when it addresses a problem they actually experience. “Are you addressing a problem that teachers think that they have,” Mehta says, “or are you addressing a problem that you think teachers have? Because if ultimately this is a process that’s going to be taken up by educators, educators need to feel really connected to the problem.”
We Focus on People Instead of Systems
Schools often use data to identify which teachers, students, or teams are struggling, then focus their attention there. Yurkofsky argues that it’s more useful to look beyond the individual and examine the system around them.
“What’s more helpful is to go one layer deeper and think about, why is this particular teacher struggling with those standards? What part of the system is contributing to that outcome continuing to happen? . . . How is our instruction set up to support this teacher? How are we coaching and onboarding? What kinds of curriculum are we using? Where might that be falling short? When you address that, you’re not just helping that one teacher, but you’re trying to make an improvement for anyone who’s impacted by that system.”
Shifting our focus to systems can also make it safer for people to be honest about what isn’t working. “It kind of liberates folks to share where they’re having trouble, to say, hey, I’m struggling with this, our curriculum is actually not that strong here, the activities we’re using could be improved here.”
We Focus on Fidelity Instead of Learning
When schools adopt a new curriculum, program, or initiative, a lot of attention can go toward whether people are implementing it the way it was designed. Yurkofsky says this emphasis on fidelity can get in the way of something more important: learning from what happens when we actually put it into practice.
A program that wasn’t written for a specific context will never be perfect, he says, so making it work requires iteration. “The only way we’re going to make [it] better is by trying to do what we can, hollering when something’s not working, … and then adjusting and revising it so that it can be better tailored to our system.”
That means making a real commitment to trying something, but continuing to share where it falls short and adjusting it along the way. “Fidelity is never the point,” Yurkofsky says. “Fidelity means we’re not learning.” Instead, he prefers the term adaptive integration: “You’re integrating something adaptively into your system to make it work for your system. And that’s a continuous process.”
We Jump to Solutions Before Fully Understanding the Problem
Sometimes schools commit to a program, curriculum, or improvement method before they’ve fully defined the problem they’re trying to solve. Once that investment has been made, it’s easy to start shaping the problem around the solution instead of asking whether that solution is actually the right fit.
Mehta illustrates this with an example from a design thinking exercise he did with his students. Their task was to look for ways to improve the physical space in their education school, so they interviewed people who used different parts of the building to find out what was and wasn’t working. When they came back, one group reported that the school needed phone booths or small rooms where people could take Zoom calls. Mehta pointed out that they had already jumped from the problem to a solution: The actual problem was that people needed private spaces for Zoom calls.
Once the problem was framed that way, many more solutions became possible. “You want to define the problem in a way that opens up enough space that there are different solutions,” Mehta says, “ then see which one actually helps you move forward.”
The Building Blocks of Effective Improvement
So when school improvement initiatives do work, what does it look like? Across the different approaches they studied, Mehta and Yurkofsky found that three elements need to work together: mindsets, routines, and practices. Having one or two isn’t enough; successful improvement efforts depend on all three.
Mindsets
Mindsets are the beliefs and assumptions people bring to improvement work, and they can have a big impact on whether that work goes anywhere. Yurkofsky gives the example of a school trying to improve literacy: Even with a strong curriculum and good supports in place, progress will be difficult if teachers believe that teaching literacy isn’t part of their job.
“You might have secondary teachers who say, ‘It’s not my job to teach literacy. They should have learned this in elementary school,’” he says. If that mindset stays in place, simply giving teachers new practices or routines won’t be enough. For the work to be successful, the people involved need to believe in the problem they’re working on and see themselves as capable of helping to solve it.
Routines
Routines are the structures that allow educators to work together on a regular basis. These might include regularly looking at student work or other data together, observing one another’s classrooms, or meeting to decide how students should be grouped and regrouped.
Without these routines, improvement can become something people pursue on their own rather than something they learn about together. In one district Mehta studied, people were encouraged to experiment and innovate, but without clear routines, “people who were innovating felt like they were a little bit on an island and that they weren’t in common conversation with other people in the system.”
Practices
Practices are the actual strategies, methods, and resources educators use to make the improvement happen. If a school is working on literacy, for example, teachers need a clear picture of what good literacy instruction looks like, along with strong instructional materials and people with the expertise to help them use those materials well.
This piece can easily be overlooked when a school is focused on getting the improvement process right. Mehta points out that if you’re trying to make a significant change in instruction, “you’re not gonna, like, PDSA cycle your way” from one kind of teaching to another. At some point, he says, you need “some infusion of . . . disciplinary expertise.”
That expertise might already exist within the school, or it might need to come from somewhere else. The important thing is that educators have access to knowledge and practices that can actually help them solve the problem they’ve identified. As Mehta puts it, “the ideas have to come from somewhere.”
Cultivating the Right Environment for the Work
Having the right mindsets, routines, and practices isn’t enough on its own. For those pieces to actually work together, they need to exist in an environment that supports them. That means school and district leaders need to create and protect the conditions that allow people to take risks, learn from one another, and stay focused on meaningful improvement over time. Mehta and Yurkofsky point to three ways they can make that happen.
Protect Time and Space
“The first thing to recognize is that teachers are time-starved,” Mehta says. “There is no greater scarcity in our system than time for teachers.” Real improvement work requires time to step back from the immediate demands of getting ready for tomorrow and look for larger patterns in what’s happening. “Somebody with some authority has to protect the space and time to really do this kind of work.”
Make It Safe to Learn
Improvement also requires people to feel safe admitting when something isn’t working. “Learning requires trying things and sometimes failing,” Mehta says, but in some of the schools they studied, people felt that “it’s just not safe to fail here.”
If teachers are expected to have everything working perfectly, they can’t openly examine mistakes, experiment with new approaches, and learn from the results. As Mehta puts it, “That’s not the kind of environment that will produce learning.”
Make Improvement Part of a Larger Strategy
Finally, improvement methods shouldn’t become ends in themselves. Mehta says the most successful efforts are part of a larger strategy with “some direction and purpose” and the resources needed to achieve it. Instead of deciding, for example, “we’re gonna do rounds,” schools should start with a clear goal, then use improvement processes as one part of a larger plan for reaching it.
If all of this feels like a lot, that’s because it is. None of these changes can be made overnight, and trying to tackle all of them at once would probably be overwhelming. So where can a school leader start?
Yurkofsky suggested reframing the way we think about problems.
“We can’t learn if we’re not raising problems,” he says. “That’s what drives improvement.” In fact, he encourages leaders to “view problems as a gift.” When teachers are willing to say what isn’t working, it’s a sign of trust. And how leaders respond in those moments, with curiosity rather than defensiveness, can determine whether people will keep bringing problems forward.
Maybe that’s the simplest place to start: Make it safer for people to tell the truth about what isn’t working, listen carefully when they do, and give them a real chance to help solve the problems they see.
You can read more of Max Yurkofsky‘s writing about education on his Substack and explore Jal Mehta‘s work through Harvard’s Deeper Learning Institute, including its annual Deeper Learning Educator Camp.