A Phased Approach to Implementation

Also note that at the sustaining (4) level of the customized high reliability scale, school leadership has identified data they can collect relatively quickly regarding this indicator. Those types of data include conversations with various constituent groups, remarks made during focus group discussions, and systematic review of reports that are readily available relative to the school’s safety, order, and supportiveness.

A Phased Approach to Implementation

Having discussed the high reliability leadership process with respect to individual school-level indicators, we now turn our attention to the process of implementing all sixteen. There are many ways to organize the sixteen school-level indicators in the Marzano Academies model. In the book Leading a Competency-Based Elementary School, Robert J. Marzano and Brian J. Kosena (2022) organized them into categories that involve similar outcomes. For the purposes of this book, we organize them into phases of implementation. A phased approach is particularly useful in secondary schools because of their departmentalized structure. Many large comprehensive middle schools and high schools have a history of working in departments that have little interaction with each other. In contrast, the Marzano Academies model operates on the assumption of extensive interaction between departments and shared responsibility for decisions about individual students. This shift does not happen in a single moment or a single year. Continuing the circuit-board analogy, we believe that secondary school leaders should switch on the sixteen circuits (that is, school-level indicators) in a specific order to avoid disrupting the system so much at the beginning that it creates resistance to the overall process. Figure I.4 depicts our recommended four-phase organization of the sixteen school-level indicators.

Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4

Safe, Orderly, and Supportive Environment (SLI 1) Student Efficacy and Agency (SLI 2) Inspiration (SLI 3) Flexible Scheduling (SLI 16) Measurement Topics and Proficiency Scales (SLI 9) Classroom Assessment (SLI 13) Reporting and Grading (SLI 14) Instruction and Teacher Development (SLI 5) Cognitive and Metacognitive Skills (SLI 10) Vocabulary (SLI 11) Blended Instruction (SLI 6) Explicit Goals for Students’ Status and Growth (SLI 12) Personal Projects (SLI 4) Cumulative Review (SLI 7) Knowledge Maps (SLI 8) Collective Responsibility (SLI 15)

FIGURE I.4: Four phases of implementation for the Marzano Academies school-level indicators.

Using this phased approach, leaders should have adequate time to train the faculty and staff and manage available funding and other resources effectively. Teachers will have time to concentrate on specific indicators rather than tackling the entire model at once. Finally, the school will have opportunities to celebrate smaller milestones along the way.

It is important to note that the phases are not necessarily equal in their duration. Stated differently, leaders should not assume that each phase requires an entire school year to fully implement the new indicators. While it is useful to think of each phase representing a single year, it might be the case that some phases take more than a year and other phases take less than a year. Also, phases can overlap. For example, a school leader does not have to completely implement the school-level indicators in phase 1 before beginning phase 2.