It was Friday at South Brooklyn Community High School (SBCHS), a transfer school in Red Hook, which means it was Crew day. Jonny, a “Crew Coach” at NYC Outward Bound Schools, had worked with staff at SBCHS to design Friday’s Crew lesson to be both fun and collaborative, as well as introspective. He was on site at SBCHS, eager to observe how things were going during the Crew implementation process. 

Students at SBCHS had come to love Crew—a supercharged version of advisory, a typically non-academic class period in which groups of 8-15 students met for 55 minute sessions once a week, with an additional Crew advisory check in every day during the first period. So there was a feeling of excitement as the Friday Crew session kicked off with an interactive and competitive name game. Students across all Crews got into the game, and the energy only increased as time went on.

After this opener, students moved on to the reflective part of the lesson. They were asked to write on post-it notes the hopes and fears they have in the short term (the remainder of the school year) and hopes and fears they have in the long term (the next 5 years), and to stick them on the wall. The first Crew Jonny observed took to the task with a quiet fervor. Students took turns reading out the hopes and fears posted on the wall and sharing connections with other students, as well as offering words of encouragement and support when needed. 

When Jonny visited another Crew classroom, the energy was very different. While this Crew had indeed added their post-its to the wall, the students were sitting down quietly and no longer participating or offering encouragement and support to one another, despite the Crew Advisor’s best efforts to elicit engagement. Jonny realized that while the structure and lesson planning of Crew were in place in both classrooms, there were gaps in implementation and facilitation for this Crew. Throughout the school, Jonny noticed the same phenomenon: though everyone was following the same plan, the results were highly variable — with varying levels of effectiveness. Clearly, there was still work to be done.

Improving conditions for young people in schools is complex work, and day to day, it can be easy for educators to get stuck in the implementation of practices or policies and lose sight of why we’re doing the work. NYC Outward Bound Schools is a nonprofit that partners with public schools to problem solve and respond to challenges within their systems. Over the past two years, we’ve led an improvement network of 50 schools who are looking to increase a sense of belonging in their school communities by implementing Crew, the signature advisory structure in all NYC Outward Bound schools and schools in the national EL Education network, which has its roots in Outward Bound.

Through this work, we’ve developed a new version of the Lippitt-Knoster model—a visual tool used to manage complex change—that is specifically designed to support school leaders, teams and networks as they work towards improvement for equity (see figure 1).

Figure 1: The NYC Outward Bound Schools Version of the Lippitt-Knoster Model

During our first year of Crew Initiative, NYC Outward Bound Schools was flying the plane while building it — our whole team was new, our partners were new to working with us, and the idea of an improvement network was new. In order to clarify the work, we divided up the 50 schools into smaller cohorts based on their entry point. For instance, schools who already had an advisory, but were looking to revitalize it coming out of the pandemic were grouped together, and schools just starting the Crew journey were grouped together.

As we mentioned before, “Crew” is a type of advisory—a concept by no means unique to NYC Outward Bound Schools. The term Crew was coined by Outward Bound founder Kurt Hahn, who famously stated, “we are crew, not passengers.” This phrase has become the unofficial motto of our schools and EL schools that utilize Crew as a structure to promote a sense of belonging and agency among students. Other schools boast similar structures like town hall, morning meeting, or family group.

What differentiates Crew is the fact that it is both a structure to support the development of collaboration, empathy, trust and agency among students, and a word that signifies a community ethos. The spirit of “crew not passengers” demonstrates that we are stronger together than we are individually, and that we’re all working toward a common goal. It’s not a “quick fix,” but we’ve seen powerful results in student belonging, engagement and academic performance across schools that implement Crew successfully.

We invited Crew Initiative schools to come together during convenings to plan change ideas based on their readiness, but we quickly realized even with similar starting points, the conditions and challenges that schools were facing were unique to each setting. In our second year, we redesigned our groupings so that they were based on common problems of practice—such as Crew Advisors needing more support, a lack of full school engagement in Crew, or a lack of structures in place to support Crew. Through this redesign, schools were able to select change ideas more aligned to their common problems and have similar improvement journeys.

It was through the conversations at our convenings that we realized our Crew Initiative schools were running into myriad challenges in the change process—from staff pushing back against added responsibilities to students not “showing up” emotionally, or sometimes even physically.

Back at South Brooklyn Community High School, for example, leadership and staff struggled to implement some of the ideas coming out of the Crew Initiative program. There seemed to be a pervasive misalignment between the student experience of Crew (positive, as reported in surveys) and the staff experience (much more negative). As we investigated this, we found that the issue wasn’t philosophical, but logistical: without a consistent calendar, staff weren’t sure if scheduled Crew events were happening. There was also an attempt to implement academic support in Crew, but without a consistent strategy or staff plan, the support fell through. Jonny (the “Crew Coach” from the start of the article) and Kelley (the staff member leading the work) felt that communication needed to be more streamlined and believed that these breakdowns in communication would soon impact students.

We knew we had to support schools in managing change. In conversation with Crew Coaches like Jonny, it was clear that not only were schools struggling to think deeply about how to use data in meaningful ways; they were also simply getting stuck in the implementation process. Much of the support we were providing at that point was plugging holes in the dam, tackling each new challenge as it arose. Our network-wide convenings became spaces for venting about issues, with little problem-solving happening. And, we grew worried that as schools got stuck in the implementation process and didn’t see a quick fix, they could slide into the “adopt-abandon” cycle that has plagued so many improvement efforts.

We began to think systematically about the challenges. Where were they arising? How could we support schools to think about these challenges through an improvement lens? How could we think about the right conditions for improvement to take hold?

Educator, scholar and improvement expert Dr. Brandi Hinnant Crawford reminds us that there are two key questions to any improvement work: “Who’s involved” and “who’s impacted?” These questions were central to the work we were doing with schools in the Crew Initiative. We considered how we centered school and student voice in our change ideas, and how we worked with student survey data—but still we struggled to make the improvement work feel manageable. Through several conversations with Crew Coaches and schools, we developed our variation on the Lippitt-Knoster model (Figure 1).

The Lippitt-Knoster model (Figure 2) was first developed by Dr. Mary Lippitt, a leadership consultant in the late 1980s, as a way to support organizations navigating complex change. She suggested that if an organization has the vision for where they are headed through the change process, the skills needed to implement the change, the incentives or motivations to take on the change process, the resources to implement and support changes, and an action plan for how the change will happen, then the organization will be successful in their change process. Any one missing element will lead to a variety of problems, but if an organization is able to identify which element is missing, they can address the problems and navigate the change process. In 2000, Professor Dr. Tim Knoster added a 6th key area for change: consensus in the change and in building a collaborative process. This model has been used by a variety of organizations over time as they manage complex change.

Figure 2: The Original Lippitt-Knoster Model

Our model builds off the Lippitt-Knoster model in four important ways:

1. Central to our new model is the idea that stakeholder voice is key to any improvement work, particularly if the improvement work is to be equitable for all students.
2. Our model is a way to diagnose where schools are in the improvement process, acknowledging that there are two things happening at once—one is the learning and implementation of the content (in this case, Crew), and the other is engaging in the continuous improvement process.
3. Our model centers continuous improvement for both the school (client) and coach (provider of services). Without this critical piece, it can be easy for coaches to work with individual schools and lose sight of the overarching network goals and learnings. Instead, we wanted to focus on growing sustainable practices across multiple schools through coherence and alignment. This builds on the learning from Generating Traction with Continuous Improvement (Pace, 2022) which cites one of Coburn’s four dimensions of spread: that in order for a reform to gain traction, it must be taken up by increasing numbers of people/schools across a system and embedded into the culture.
4. Our model highlights the importance of collective efficacy that is built as teams work together to shift and improve practices, mindsets and policies in schools. This collective efficacy is important for any practice to take hold and lead to improvements for students.

To understand what this looked like in practice, let’s return to Jonny’s experience:

Jonny knew he needed to discuss progress with SBCHS and find ways to build momentum in their improvement journey. In preparation for a meeting with SBCHS leadership, Jonny anticipated the school’s strengths and areas of growth, and built an agenda that would push folks to be honest and reflect carefully on their progress. With this new model in hand, Jonny sat down with the school’s leadership team to review how they were working to improve Crew implementation at the school, Going through the document column by column, they discussed the vision, how they were engaging stakeholder voice, their strategy for implementing Crew, what resources they liked best, and how they were building coherency and consistency across the team. 

Using the document as a note catcher to identify the changes in place illuminated where leadership had thought through their improvement effort, and where they still needed to devote time and energy. For example, the SBCHS leadership team and Crew Guide were able to easily write down their vision for the work, but were stuck on the stakeholders and strategy — tt became clear that staff and students hadn’t fully adopted vision, mostly because there wasn’t a set strategy for the work — leading to some of the inertia. And while staff had the resources and training they needed, their lack of collective efficacy was leading to blind compliance without trust, which was damaging the program’s effectiveness as a whole. 

Jonny asked everyone at the meeting to verbalize their collective desired outcomes, understanding of the strategy, and hopes for Crew. Using the model together gave them common language and helped them identify the systemic gaps that needed to be addressed, allowing all stakeholders — administrators, teachers, and students — to share the responsibility. As a whole, this pivotal exercise helped the challenges come into focus and provided a roadmap of where to go next.

Thinking about the model also helped shift network convenings. The Crew Initiative team was able to respond to schools by systemically creating the necessary conditions for success. These conditions still maintained an aspect of connecting over shared challenges, but also included protocols and means to understand the root causes of the challenges, and surfaced potential avenues to address them via collectively determined change ideas.

While improvement work is never easy, the Managing Change for Equitable Improvement Model can help coaches and school partners to lift their gaze, determine where they are strong and where they are in need of attention, and ultimately, create a plan for how to continue towards equitable conditions for all students.

References:

Gallagher, H. A., Cottingham, B. W., & O’Meara, K. (2022, July). Generating traction with continuous improvement: Lessons from two learning networks [Report]. Policy Analysis for California Education.