School Leaders: 3 Steps to Making Change Work and Stick

If you are like many school leaders working in education, you are a good person leading in schools with good students who are probably displaying “bad” behavior.?Well intended, you might purchase behavioral curriculum and call in a number of district professional developers or outside agencies to provide training in behavior or crisis management, but it doesn’t seem to work. If it was working, you likely wouldn’t be reading this article! ?Even if the training was good, little evidence of what was trained can be found across the hallways and classrooms as faculty and staff fell back into their old habits, and behavioral issues continued.??

If this resonates with you and you desire a school culture characterized by good behavior, strong relationships, and regular student achievement, keep reading this article for an overview of 3 practical steps rooted in the science of human behavior for engaging your faculty and staff, making training work, and otherwise getting any training to stick - especially those related to behavior and crisis management.?Understanding this simple formula is like figuring out why your car keeps breaking down only to find out that you haven't been maintaining the oil and having it tuned up regularly. While these steps might seem simple and make common sense, the application of them in many school and organizational settings is actually uncommon, yet critical to a culture characterized by "want to do" faculty, staff, and students, vs "have to do."

First, let's start with engagement. If you faculty and staff aren't engaged in any initiative you have, they are very likely going to do just enough to get by, and only when you are looking. These "have to do" behaviors are essentially compliance driven. In other words, people are doing them just do get out of trouble or to avoid some penalty, which is the same reason most of us do the speed limit on the way to work - to avoid a ticket! And as a valued leader, you certainly do not want that type of culture as you know this will negatively impact the students.

Engagement

1. With your team, determine:

• Shared Values
• Shared concerns?
• Unproductive behaviors that lead away from shared values
• Committed behaviors that will move the individual and the group towards the shared values
• Value drive goals

Once you've determined what your shared values are, determined goals driven by these values, and then figured out what everybody needs to do more, less, or differently in alignment with these values to achieve targeted goals, then you must figure how to get these behaviors going in the right direction. This often requires a plan and some sort of training. Whether it be training in the plan, or training in behaviors required to implement the plan, people need to know what to do, how to do it, and when to do it.

Making Training Work

2. When engaging in change initiatives, if you are going to create habits that stick following the training, use principles of institutionalization which simply means involving the group in the design and implementation of the action plan as an intervention.?This can be accomplished by (Sigurdsson & Austin, 2006):?

• Training and involvement of in-house staff in developing an action plan
• Training of internal staff in the implementation of the action plan
• Involving internal staff in collecting data on performance measures and reporting out
• Involving in the dispensing of consequences (e.g., positive feedback, corrective feedback)

Institutionalization can be thought of as changing "the way we do things around here." It just becomes part of the culture as everybody is involved in it. The old saying goes, "if they author it, they'll own it." Involving people in developing change initiatives, to making them work, drastically increase the likelihood they will happen. But ultimately, if you want it them to stick, you have to leverage the most powerful tool in your toolbox for bringing out the best in people: positive reinforcement.

Getting Training to Stick

3. If you want training or any change initiative to stick, you must provide employee’s regular recognition and rewards (find out what is meaningful to them!) as a means delivering positive reinforcement for the achievement of accomplishments and sub-goals.?Accomplishments might be measured by the number of tasks that have occurred associated with their responsibilities and duties like: the completion of a plan, the number of people who have been trained, the number staff observed, the number of staff provided feedback related to the training, the number of times data was collected and reported out, etc. It can also be measured by the number of positive relationships that have been developed over time (check this article out for more on positive relationships).?This let's them and you know that things are moving in the right direction, which puts you in a position to deliver positive reinforcement. By the way, when accomplishing things in and of itself often serves as positive reinforcement if the goals you've collaboratively determined are indeed rooted in shared values.

Recognizing sub-goals on the way to the achievement of goals is just a way to put you in the position of delivering more positive reinforcement to faculty and staff for their hard work. ?And as I mentioned, if you've done it correctly; if there are truly value driven goals that have been established with faculty and staff, then it creates a true “win-win” situation as the individual, the students, and the school as a whole all benefit. Using strategies involving positive reinforcement is the only way to get "want to do" behavior, as opposed to using strategies using negative reinforcement (fear of consequences) that create "have to do" behavior. While they both get behavior change, only positive reinforcement results strong learning culture characterized by people going above and beyond. We've seen the frequency of behavior issues in schools that used these approaches drop drastically. Meanwhile, student achievement and teacher retention increased dramatically.

I hope I’ve given you something to think about in terms of employee engagement and getting trainings to stick! At the Professional Crisis Management Association , we have actually outlined the 3 conceptual steps above into 9 concrete steps for getting your crisis management system to work.?More over, our entire crisis management system is grounded in the use of positive reinforcement. The choice is yours. If you want things to stay the same, keep doing the same thing. But if you are interested in learning more about the application of the practical application of behavior science for behavior and crisis management to make a positive different, make sure check out crisisintervention.com. And please be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel for more tips on preventing and managing behavioral issues.

References:

Sigurdsson, S. O. & Austin, J. (2006). Institutionalization and Response Maintenance in Organizational Behavior Management. Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, 26(4), 41-77.