I was listening to an interview with a coach discussing the power of small change over time. He preached making 1% improvements daily and explained how sticking to it for a week would yield a 7% improvement, sticking to it for a month would yield a 30% return and so on. If you stuck to improving 1% each day for a year he said, you'd wake up and look in the mirror at someone that was 3.65 times (365% growth) the person you were just 365 days ago. It sounded great and I could imagine some of his players immediately started buying in to this theory. There was one problem. He was selling the theory massively short.
There are a lot of examples of misleading statistics being used to influence or persuade where the truth isn't nearly as great as it's pictured to be. (If you are looking to avoid being misled or are looking to do some misleading yourself I'd recommend the book How to Lie With Statistics by Darrell Huff). This situation on the other hand was the exact opposite.
Small, daily improvements and wins compound over time. When we commit to small, daily improvements we are improving on where we were yesterday, not where we were when we started. Self-improvement is really exponential growth, making it all the more powerful. The mistake made earlier was an assumption that personal growth is linear. How big of a difference is there between linear and exponential growth?
As a washed up math teacher I always have my abacus ready to rock and roll so I moved some beads around and did the math. The true result for an entire year of personal improvement (assuming exponential growth) would be approximately 3778% growth or 37.7 times the person you were at the beginning of the year. That's a pretty good ROI.
The cool part is the leverage for positive change in education doesn't rely on each educator making 1% improvement each day (although the results of that would indeed be massive). There is power within a system of each teacher making a small 1% improvement each school year. Collective efficacy within a PLC, grade level, building or district can grow exponentially just as it does with personal growth and it doesn't have to be daily. It could be weekly, monthly, quarterly or even yearly. Current students will certainly reap the benefits of these small improvements from their teacher, but they'll also experience the benefits of teachers they may have down the road and by then the improvements will have compounded. There is true power in improving the K-12 system through small, 1% improvements.
The tricky part is linear growth and exponential growth do look similar for a little while. Massive changes aren't going to happen overnight and it's easy to get discouraged when the reward isn't immediate. In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear talks about this "valley of disappointment" which is embedded in what he calls The Plateau of Latent Potential. I can recall several times as a classroom teacher I tried something new, only to toss it aside after a few attempts because it "wasn't working". I wish I was a better model for this growth I'm preaching but the truth is I too often fell victim to the valley of disappointment.
As educators we want to experience the immediate reward when we try new things, as do students. We know from experience it doesn't always happen that way and sometimes the results take a little while to make themselves present, assuming we stick with them long enough to bear the fruits of our labor. We also know that there are a lot of factors that influence student achievement and it can feel like we are kicking at a moving goal post. This begs the question, what are these 1% improvements and how do we measure them?
In many cases the research on effectiveness has already been done, it's simply a matter of putting best practices into action. In Atomic Habits Clear writes "If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead." Before educators everywhere rejoice internally at the thought of no longer writing professional goals, I'm going to chew on Clear's statement just a bit.
For ages educators have written professional goals, SMART goals, PLC goals, some may even have #squadgoals. Over time we've become better at tying them to data and making them specific. If you stroll into your local elementary you may see a Kindergraten PLC goal as follows: "80% of Kindergarten students will know all letter names and sounds by the end of the school year." Goals like these are common in PLCs and classrooms across education. They are common goals, they are solid goals and I'd venture to say that students are better off as a result of their teachers having a goal such as this compared to "Kindergarten students will improve their knowledge of letter names and sounds". The issue is goals like these are outcome based. Outcome based goals aren't inherently bad, I just think there is a power in thinking smaller.
What happens when 80% of the students have reached it? Do we pack up and move to the next goal? If we get to the end of the year and only 75% of students met the benchmark is it a failure? In many cases this goal can lead to more questions than answers and at the end of the day, the most important part is missing! How do we plan to help kids reach this goal?
Rick DuFour popularized the four guiding questions of a PLC:
What do we want all students to know and be able to do?
How will we know when they learn it?
How will we respond when students do not learn?
How will we extend the learning for students who are already proficient?
While this outline above can certainly help guide educators and PLC's forward I wish it touched on one additional and critical piece. How do we get from the first step to the second step? In other words, what is the most effective way to help kids learn these skills at the Tier 1 level?
This is the area that I think 1% improvements can have the greatest impact and why professional goals should gear more towards small, short term, process based outcomes that can influence habits and set the teacher up for exponential growth. As an added benefit these habits have a better chance of sticking past the maturation date of any outcome based goal and can easily be scaled up to make a greater impact. When educators commit to a 1% improvement focused on their process and habits they are not only improving their practice for that school year but also for the rest of their career.
Like students, teachers walk in the door with vastly different sets of tools. Small improvement is going to look different for every teacher. For some, it may mean assigning or adjusting a seating chart. For others, it may mean assessing the vocabulary used on a rubric to make sure every student has a clear picture of what's expected.
Can starting this small really work? From my experience, yes. One of my personal goals at the beginning of the year was to write 20 blog posts. After a month of producing a total of zero posts I adjusted my goal to be process based. I decided I would write for 20 minutes per day. While I began to write more, I hadn't really produced anything of substance. I also started using a very liberal definition of writing (grocery lists count right?). It wasn't until I changed my goal to writing one sentence per day that my first post hatched out of thin air like a Pikachu in Pokemon Go.
It has changed my outlook on goal setting and made it much easier to stick with it on days that I'm not feeling up to it.
Well, we've reached the idea section of the blog and as always take these with a grain of salt, especially if you have high blood pressure. Here are a few ideas to generate small wins,1% growth and potentially blow away any outcome based yearly goal you could have imagined. Many of these I've seen first and second year teachers put into action this school year.
Have a colleague chart your praise to criticism ratio once per month/quarter
Make the shift in one lesson from "Are there any questions?" to "What questions do you have?" or even better "Let's brainstorm two questions our peers may have."
Plan one high level depth of knowledge question for an upcoming lesson
Create a Twitter account
Participate in one educator chat on the platform in the next month
Incorporate one prompt for students to provide you feedback on your next assignment/assessment/project
Have students self-assess using the provided rubric on an upcoming task
Invite a colleague to record your wait time over a 15 minute time frame
Ask your staff for small wins and 1% improvements and send out in an upcoming e-mail update
Send one hand written note of gratitude to a colleague in the next week
Identify an element from your district's framework (Danielson, Marzano, Core Teaching Capabilities) and self-evaluate your placement on the continuum.
If reading this generated some additional questions, you're not alone. Here are a couple of questions I plan to explore in upcoming entries.
How do you balance innovating to improve practice and exploiting strategies that you know work well and produce results?
Are the four guiding questions enough for PLC's? What does it look like and what kind of impact does it have when PLC's collaborate on instructional strategies?
I've made a tiny change, but haven't seen any results. How do I know to whether to keep with it or shift course?
I'd love to hear your thoughts, such as what you agreed and disagreed with, but I'm most excited to hear what 1% improvements or small wins you've experienced in this difficult year. Share away!
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