Start before you’re ready
Mark Armijo High School’s
Innovation Plan
Monica Aguilar | Bernadette FrietzE
Cydelia Chavez | Diana Garcia
“We serve fewer than 200 young people, and we’re here because we want every single one of them to have the personalized high school experience they want.”
This is Your 4- Step Journey.
1. Dive in with data
Your journey begins in August with a consultation with your coach: Together, you’ll work to collect data that provides an accurate picture of where you’re at today.
2. make a “diagnosis”
Using this data, you’ll work with your coach in September to identify the core questions and root concerns you’ll address during your journey. Every school is different, and your journey is tailored to your unique story.
3. craft a “Treatment Plan”
The diagnosis will drive your “treatment plan.” Think about this stage as one where you will set goals with your coach and design a playbook full of tactics during the first convening that will move you towards addressing the diagnosis.
4. Do it - test it - do it - test it
This is where the rubber meets the road: Most of your journey (October-April) will involve the hard work of implementing your plan, assessing it, making changes, and implementing again.
Dive in with Data
Like personal trainers and nutrition coaches, your coach will work with you to establish a “baseline” understanding of your school’s conditions for innovation. To what extent is there broad conviction school wide for the need to reimagine school? Is there a sufficient level of stability in leadership, which is an indicator of capacity? There are no right or wrong answers here: We just believe it’s important to get a clear picture of where your journey is beginning.
What does the data say about your conditions for innovation? You’ll work with your coach to paint a “baseline” picture using quizzes, videos, empathy interviews and other methods of your choice.
Invite each member of your team to take this “innovation conditions” self-assessment.
Document a day in the life at your school. What is the student experience, the teacher experience, and the “leadership” experience like? Consider a video, a diary, or shadowing a student.
Tell us the critical moments in your school’s story. Where are we entering? Have you launched other innovation/change efforts? Why now? Who are the players? What do you imagine for yourself in five years? Which schools, educators, books inform your perspective?
What’s your hunch about what you want to change, and about the obstacles that stand in your way? What’s the best-case outcome for our engagement together? What do you fear? What’s worked well with “consultants” in the past? What hasn’t? How does your school communicate (google docs, outlook, etc)?
2. Make a “Diagnosis”
This stage is about synthesizing the data and getting on the same page about the root questions and concerns that will animate your work.
Successful engagements are built on a shared mission and commitment for the work. Work with your coach to study your data and align on the problem of practice you want to address moving forward.
Frame your root questions and concerns as a positive challenge that will drive your journey. Allow the data from step one to push the assumptions you might have had about the direction of the journey.
You aren’t alone! With your coach, make connections to other folks who have grappled with similar challenges. You might identify book recommendations, case studies or reach out to other schools.
3. Craft a “Treatment Plan”
Your positive challenge will drive your “treatment plan.” Think about this stage as one where you will set goals with your coach and design a playbook full of tactics during the first convening that will move you towards addressing the diagnosis.
This is your opportunity to commit to a plan for the work ahead.
Building on your data and “diagnosis,” what are the outcomes your team is driving to in this engagement? How will you know if your work this year is a success? What will you feel like in May, and what do you want to be prepared to do next year?
Meet with your coach and design team to identify the major milestones for the year: Convenings, check-in calls, in-person visits, school milestones. This isn’t just about logistics – it’s also about making a formal time commitment to this work and to each other.
You won’t be able to take this journey alone: Bring your community on board via a faculty meeting, a school board update, or a back-to-school design workshop. The sustainability of change efforts depends on widespread support, and you already have a lot to share.
4. Do it - Test it - Do it - Test it
This is where the rubber meets the road: Most of your journey (October-April) will involve the hard work of implementing your plan, assessing it, making changes, and implementing again.
In general, you’ll engage in this cycle in three phases: Discover, Build and Test. The tactics you’ll use to address your positive challenge (“diagnosis”) in these three phases can be found in your toolkit. Our convenings will prepare you to use and facilitate these tactics back at home on your campus.
1. Discover
Begin by collecting research grounded in your own community about the imperative to redesign school now. You’ll conduct empathy interviews, shadow students, and collect data that will help you to craft your own unique case for change.
2. Build
Translate your research into actionable insights by preparing a graduate profile, developing design anchors, and building a working vision of your new model. You’ll capture this work in a canvas, which is a virtual sketchbook designed to collect your experiments.
3. Test
Transform your insights into action by designing and testing a signature experience that captures a small part of your larger vision.
That’s it. What isn’t here but should be here:
Some kind of combination of https://www.toolsforbuildingschools.com/esnm (custom site with coaches info, convening info, etc) PLUS https://www.toolsforbuildingschools.com/esnm (all the methods) PLUS https://www.toolsforbuildingschools.com/esnm-prework (don’t want to call it pre-work anymore, but the “home” work in between convenings
A place (Google Drive) to house the real work/data
A place to address the other products - eg Canvas. This also doesn’t really consider how the Canvas / Notebook / etc fits in.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14Qe6aDe4t9NJ7WjLWhFFHNYv-rdFoX_MJJn4c9_Y_XQ/edit#slide=id.p - CYNTHIA
Next steps
paragraph
A treatment plan (data, diagnosis - blueprint for current model, plan) IN
B doing it (research cycle) - CANVAS, IN