Four Assignments to Avoid the “Research & Duplicate” Pitfalls

Did you do your homework?

Picture this scenario: A higher education leader goes to a conference and hears another practitioner on a panel talking about something innovative they did that improved student success. The leader gets a copy of the slide deck and the contact information for the panelist and rushes back to campus to start implementing this for their own students. Does this sound familiar? Is it something you have done, or something you’ve seen happen in your own career? This scenario is actually so common that I’ve often heard it described as “R&D: Research and Duplicate.” 

It is a very good thing when successful strategies become well-known and documented as best practices, and when leaders are motivated to implement them. But an important element of change management is lost in the “Research and Duplicate” approach: the informed and intentional customization of the strategy to an institution’s culture, context, and students. To do this well requires something we know a lot about in education: doing your homework.

Just like professors in a college classroom assign homework to help students internalize learning from a lecture, institutional changemakers must do some homework to take what they heard at a conference and apply it in meaningful ways for their own students. The homework includes a focused set of four activities to facilitate the shared understanding that will pave the way for the successful design and implementation of an institution’s approach. We recommend the following “homework assignments” to institutional leaders and the committees or teams charged with implementing one - or likely many - structural changes to advance student success.

Homework Assignments

#1: Understand the basics.

You don’t need to know everything there is to know about the strategy you seek to implement, but you should know the high-level stuff. What problem does this strategy solve? How does it solve it? What is the most relevant and reliable research done on this strategy, and what are the key findings? It is important that everyone who will be involved in moving this priority forward has a common, fundamental level of understanding of why the strategy has proven successful.

#2: Examine your data.

Once you know the problem that the strategy will solve for you, spend time with your data to better understand what that looks like on your own campus. If you are considering a new policy that uses multiple measures instead of a single exam for placement into college-level math and English courses, examine the group of students who are currently placed into developmental education. What are their demographics? How do they perform in college-level courses in other subjects? How do their retention rates compare to those of students placed directly into college-level math and English? Do their other academic measures, like high school GPA, tell a different story than the placement exam score about their preparation and ability to succeed?

#3: Agree on your purpose. 

Once your implementation team has a firm grasp on the problem you will be able to solve with this strategy and can articulate how that problem presents itself on your campus, your next assignment is to craft a clear purpose statement for why the change is important. We suggest framing the purpose statement to center students, but it can also be helpful to tie the expected results to broader institutional goals or initiatives. The purpose statement ensures that your implementation team is aligned on what you are trying to accomplish, which can make it easier in the long run to make informed implementation choices. The purpose statement also serves as the foundation for the work you will inevitably need to do to engage the decision-makers and influencers who can either serve as champions or detractors - the agents of your success or the impediments to it. 

#4: Define success.

Student success efforts often move forward without a plan in place to define and measure success. This results in missed opportunities to validate the efforts of the changemakers, celebrate successes, inform continuous improvement efforts, and serve on the next convening panel, inspiring the next group of leaders. 

Before diving into implementation, your team should set goals. What is the metric you will measure? For example, if you are implementing Credit for Prior Learning, will you measure success based on the total number of CPL credits awarded or the percentage of students who receive them? Then, set a target. In this example, if you choose the second metric and only seven percent of your students currently receive CPL, is your goal to double that percentage? Triple it? Quantifying your goal can help rally people behind it, while also allowing you to measure progress and prove your success.

With limited capacity in many institutions and structural transformations often being “other duties as assigned,” it is crucial that changemakers approach implementation in ways that are most likely to yield the desired results and be sustained over time. These four homework assignments may add a month or two to the process, but they consistently prove to be time well spent. When strategies are implemented in ways that work best for the institution’s culture, context, and students, everyone benefits.

What’s the next ‘homework assignment’ your institution needs to tackle? Share your thoughts with us.