Strengthen Your Continuous Improvement Muscles
A free resource for education teams
The goal of Impact Florida’s Workouts is to help teams strengthen their continuous improvement muscles by making these practices easier to pick up and implement in any education leadership role, from instructional coaches in a Professional Learning Community to Chief Academic Officers with their teams. The workouts take 90 minutes or less to complete, and are designed to stand alone or work as an iterative process from beginning to end of an implementation effort. The workouts are self-facilitated activities that help guide teams to strengthen their use of data and build a culture of continuous improvement in Florida schools.
- Workout 1: Defining the Problem
- Workout 2: Testing Assumptions
- Workout 3: Implementing a Solution
- Workout 4: Go/No Go Decision-making
What the workouts include:
- Each workout stands alone to help teams tackle a specific challenge, but also clearly shows the steps are part of a series.
- Each workout has a simple, six-step process designed for a team to complete in less than 90 minutes.
- Each workout includes an example inspired by a real-life situation in a school, which runs throughout all four workouts.
- Each workout includes a facilitator’s guide, to help prepare a team lead to conduct the workout with their team.
About the Covid Recovery Cadre
The Covid Recovery Cadre used continuous improvement methodology in partnership with Proving Ground at Harvard University to both respond to the immediate crisis of COVID-19 and build capacity that would serve students long after. District leaders from Palm Beach County, Pasco County, Highlands County, and Collier County decided their own focus: implementing evidence-based interventions to help vulnerable students in math during the transition from eighth to ninth grade, a critical lever for education equity. They committed to significant measurement (a randomized control trial or program evaluation) to be able to analyze the impact of those interventions. There were three main takeaways from the experience:
- The interventions showed significant promise to improve student learning in math at this critical juncture in their K-12 education, even in the midst of a pandemic.
- The impact on students could be significantly better if districts worked through implementation problems.
- A continuous improvement approach to implementation is powerful and essential.
In response to this learning, Impact Florida developed this series of workouts in partnership with Education Elements to make continuous improvement practices easier to pick up and implement in schools and districts.
We want to hear from you: How did the workouts go?
Take our short survey to tell us how you used the workouts with your team and we’ll enter your name in a drawing to win an Impact Florida jump rope.