Cale Birk on...We are too Busy Already - Why Should we 'DO' Observable Impact?

If one were to read the thousands of articles, news stories, blogs, and tweets that float around the media about the current state of education, they might come to the conclusion that schools are in crisis. The headlines we see and the conversations we hear tell us our students are falling behind in literacy and numeracy, graduation rates are low, and students are unable to think critically or communicate beyond 140 characters. If they do make it through the K-12 system, we are told our kids will emerge lacking the skills and resilience to be truly prepared for the rigors of ‘real life’ (whatever that term might actually mean), let alone a world where “we are currently preparing students for jobs that don't yet exist, using technologies that haven't been invented, in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet.”1 And now mix in the learning complexities that have surrounded the COVID pandemic: gaps in learning have become chasms, and the reality of student engagement stares back at our teachers as a checkerboard of black boxes from cameras being turned off in our Zoomified classrooms.

And therein lies the tension, doesn’t it? Superintendents, principals and teachers constantly hear from their communities that we need to change the education system ... but just not too much. Time is of the essence ... but don’t go too quickly. Our kids need voice, choice, and flexible deadlines ... just make sure they graduate with their friends. We need to take risks and be innovative ... but let’s not get crazy here. We need to experiment and try new things ... but try them on those other kids and see if it works first before you try it on my son or daughter. Do something different. We’re just not sure what.

Yet we really need look no further than our own school experiences to recognize that student success is directly connected to what happens in the classroom with teachers. In Embedded Formative Assessment (2018), Dylan Wiliam argues, “The greatest impact on learning is the daily lived experiences of students in classrooms, and that is determined much more by how teachers teach than by what they teach.”2 In Visible Learning (2009) John Hattie found a number of factors that influence learning including; the connections between students and educators, the design of the tasks and feedback and a climate where educators believe that their efforts have impact. These factors can largely overcome many obstacles that are often beyond the locus of control of the school, such as student socio-economic status and home environment.

But how do we actually influence what happens in the classroom? What do we teach? How do we teach it? Who decides? What’s working? What’s not? How do we know? Common Core. Literacy skills. Numeracy skills. 21st century competencies. Social responsibility. Digital citizenship. Formative assessment. Differentiated instruction. PBL. PBIS. STEM. STEAM. RTI. Trauma-informed instruction. The list goes on. What do we start doing? What do we stop doing?

To be clear, we have never been here to cast stones at any efforts to have teachers work together to improve their practice or provide students with better opportunities to learn. If you have been doing these sorts of things in your school or district, you are doing the right work! Instead, through the Observable Impact (OI) model, our goal has been to help you reflect upon the work you are doing through a different lens—the lens of IMPACT. And not ‘impact’ in some ethereal, gaseous state that wafts so easily through educational conversations yet is so painfully difficult to grab onto, but OBSERVABLE IMPACT, the impact that you can actually SEE in a classroom. We believe that by making the products of improvement planning, professional learning and teacher collaboration observable, we can actually determine what is having true IMPACT in our classrooms. By doing this, we can become hyper-focused on our actions that actually produce an observable difference in teaching and learning. In other words, our aim has been to help districts, schools and their teacher teams to get clarity for themselves on one question regarding their work:

“What is the observable impact of _________ in our schools?”

Since the original edition of this book in 2019, we have spent hundreds of hours talking to teachers, administrators, district staff members, trustees, parents, politicians, business people, and just general folks from around the community. What we have come to recognize is that the Observable Impact model does not just apply to our initial work around teacher collaboration, it is a framework that we can use to examine the impact of nearly anything we do in schools. Let’s plunk in a few possibilities, and you’ll see what we mean:

What is the observable impact of staff meetings in our schools?
What is the observable impact of school improvement plans in our schools?
What is the observable impact of parent teacher conferences in our schools?
What is the observable impact of our assessment and grading practices in our schools?

We ask questions like this not to imply that staff meetings, school improvement plans or other initiatives have zero impact in our schools (albeit you might get a pretty good argument about that on a Friday evening in the pub after a long week). We ask questions like this because, as practitioners, we are also honest and realistic about our successes and failings. We know that students are busy, busier than they have ever been with after school (and before school) activities, jobs, and connections to the social media world that bombard them 24/7/365. We know that teachers don’t want another initiative added to the menu of flavors of the month or to chase after the next and newest shiny object. We recognize the role of teacher has morphed into surrogate parent, counselor, advocate, playground supervisor, career advisor, parent liaison and runny-nose wiper—and that’s just before recess. We know that administrators have job descriptions that include bullet-points like ‘instructional leaders’, yet the unwritten duties actually require a Master’s Degree in locker assignments with double minors in social media and private investigation. We know that while parents are keenly interested in their children and their education, they have jobs to do, households to run, practices to drive to, and recitals to see. Therefore, we need to make sure that every bit of time that we have is not based on ‘action’--we have plenty of action already!

The ACTION of teachers collaborating might be important, or the ACTION of creating a school improvement plan might provide a vital roadmap for us to follow, or the ACTION of having parent teacher conferences can be a conduit for communication with our community, each of us knows that ACTION DOES NOT EQUAL IMPACT. If the scientists who gathered from around the world to fight the COVID pandemic would have told us they had incredibly collaborative meetings and developed highly detailed plans complete with SMART goals and targets (ACTIONS) but didn’t lead to the production of vaccines and an understanding of why they led to a decrease in deaths and hospitalizations (OBSERVABLE IMPACT), how would we have responded? Much like our collaborative teams, improvement plans and initiatives in our schools, how can we ensure that we aren’t just working hard, but that we are working hard, making an observable difference, AND knowing why that difference is happening in our context?

The Observable Impact Model has been designed to move schools not just from research to practice, but from research to IMPACTFUL practice that is observable, understandable, scalable and DO-able for today’s educational system. In the Observable Impact model, we define observable impact as “the changes in practice that are observable in the classroom and lead to improved outcomes for all students.”

The Observable Impact model is not another initiative. The OI model is a framework that allows us to determine the impact of any action, initiative or policy or structure that we choose to implement in our context. We don’t ‘work on’ Observable Impact, we work on ‘literacy’, ‘numeracy’, ‘SEL’, ‘universal design’ or whatever it is that we are doing in our educational context. We USE the OI model to tell us if our actions are leading to the impact that we want to observe in our schools and the reasons why we are observing that impact, even if that impact is negative.

So why ‘do’ Observable Impact when we have no time to do one more thing in our busy days? Consider the following analogy.

Let’s pretend for a moment that you were taking a trip to a large city, say Chicago, and you wanted to find the ideal hotel room. Can you imagine if you had to check in to each and every hotel in the city to determine which one was right for you? To do this would be absurd--time, cost, practicality, no one would ever dream of doing such a thing. So what would you do? You could go to the hotel that advertises themselves as being ‘Chicago’s finest hotel’, but you notice that almost every hotel advertises themselves as ‘Chicago’s finest hotel’. Like most of us, your next stop would likely be to a website like TripAdvisor or similar to look at the reviews that other travelers had written about the hotels you were considering. But some of the reviews are much more descriptive than others: the ones that have one star and say ‘Terrible.’ tend to be just as unhelpful as the reviews that give five stars and say ‘Amazing!”. When the reviewer is specific and descriptive, we get a picture of the experience that we might have. And when dozens of reviews from folks just like us give similar reviews, that picture resolution gets higher and higher. And while we know our own experience with the hotel room might not be identical to those who write the reviews, those other travelers have saved us from having to check into every hotel room to figure it out on our own.

When it comes to initiatives in education, sometimes it feels like each one is like an ‘educational hotel room’ in a busy and densely populated city known as ‘School Improvement’. Each of us ‘checks in’ (either voluntarily or as a result of being driven there by our tour bus driver/school leader) to the initiative, spends some time, and checks out. We tell a few of our close friends how the experience was, and we wonder where we are headed on our next ‘trip’. Sometimes we go back to that hotel room, sometimes with a few friends, and other times we don’t, depending on how we felt about our trip. We say things like “It was awesome! You should go!” or “Eww, it was awful--a complete miss”. And then we move on to the next initiative. The challenge is that there are too many ‘educational hotel rooms’ out there and for the most part, we really like staying home.

Checking in and out of every hotel room in the ‘city’ of school improvement is something we can change. Using the Observable Impact Model, we can become the ‘educational TripAdvisor’ for initiatives when we are specific not about the ACTION, but about the OBSERVABLE IMPACT of our initiatives. When the biggest commodity that we have for educators in the school system is time, using the OI model to determine WHAT is having an impact in the classroom and WHY we are observing that impact actually creates time by getting us hyper-focused on the things that are actually making a difference.

So why ‘DO’ Observable Impact? When time is of the essence, knowing what is having impact is key--we don’t ‘do’ Observable Impact, we USE the Observable Impact framework to help our educators know that their actions make a difference where it matters the most, in the classroom with kids!

1 Fisch, K (2006) Blog Post, retrieved January 11th, 2019 from http://www.thefischbowl.com/2006/08/ did-you-know.html

2 Wiliam, D. (2018). Embedded formative assessment. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.