At EdScale, we support partners in getting better results through implementation.
To do so, conversations begin with two key questions:
- Results: How are students doing?
- Implementation: What is contributing to these results?
The answers to these questions shape the driving questions and emphasis of support.
Results: How are students doing?
The first question is about results. It’s important to ground on the current data, bright spots, and opportunities — looking at the overall data and drilling into subgroups and specific subsets of schools. There are classrooms and schools in every district and state that are getting incredible results for students. Looking at these “bright spots” provides insights into the practices and supports that might inform strategy and implementation. Exploring opportunities for improvement where students are struggling informs priority development.
Implementation: What is contributing to these results?
The second question is about implementation. How do current strategies and implementation align with research and effective practice? Where students are seeing exceptional success, do we understand why? Where students are struggling, can we identify the challenges? In education, there are so many contributing factors influencing a student’s growth and development. The opportunity is to identify the things that are within our control and explore how those factors are contributing to student success or challenge.
Putting results and implementation together
When we combine what we know about current results and what is contributing to them, we land on a driving question. Depending on your answers to the results and implementation questions, you land in one of the four quadrants of the 2×2 below. Each quadrant suggests a driving question to get better results through implementation.
Map your organization, team, or project on the 2×2
Which driving question is most relevant to your organization, team, or project?
No matter where you are on the 2×2, there is a question to help drive continuous improvement:
- Strong results, strong implementation: How do we scale for greater impact, while considering sustainability?
- Strong results, weak implementation: What’s working and how we do replicate it?
- Weak results, strong implementation: Are we in the implementation dip or are we doing the wrong things?
- Weak results, weak implementation: What do we want to do? And how will we do it?
Based on where you land on the 2×2, there are different growth opportunities and different roles you might need a partner like EdScale to play in supporting your path to getting better results for students. The 2×2 below displays the primary opportunity and role a partner might play.
Which growth opportunities are the priority in support?
- Strong results, strong implementation: Opportunity- Scaling Up and sustainability to take what’s working and ensure sustainability and scaling to others (to increase student impact)
- Strong results, weak implementation: Opportunity- Learning, training, and replication to understand what’s causing the results and transfer these practices to others
- Weak results, strong implementation: Opportunity- Throughput on delivery chain and strategies to identify where things are breaking down in implementation, to explore stage of implementation for the strategies, and understand alignment and coherence
- Weak results, weak implementation: Opportunity- Implementation systems and capacity building to provide clarity of strategy and build implementation systems and capacity
Thankfully, there are proven lessons and tools to support an organization, team, or project wherever you currently find yourself of the 2×2 matrix. EdScale partners with ambitious leaders as a consultant, coach, and trusted advisor to increase alignment and coherence across all these scenarios to get better results.
Go Deeper
Explore these ideas and supports further.
Read our top articles:
Dive into implementation:
- Test your implementation health Explore the lessons in the book through the lens of your current organization, team or project. Answer 15 questions to get a personalized report with insights to improve implementation.
- Buy the book If you find the top articles and implementation assessment helpful, you will love the book. It’s a quick read — under 100 pages — distilling the practices of implementation into digestible chunks to apply today.
- Explore the workbook Get the free workbook aligned with the lessons in the book.
