In preparation for the roll out of the one-to-one device initiative in my school district, I was trained to be a digital leader that would manage the digital team at my school. For this project to be successful, I had to create a timeline of multiple training sessions for staff and students that would roll out before the beginning of the next school year. My team met twice a month for training to be digital trainer sessions and twice a month to prepare our digital training curriculum for our staff.
After several months of work and with the project prepared to launch the curriculum, we attended a digital trainer session where the district lead announced that their district team put together the curriculum, presentations and materials for our school based staff development trainings. We were told this was an idea from one of our school board members who believed it would be best to have one training across the entire district. My team and I were dumbfounded by this new development. We spent months preparing our own curriculum, presentations and material that we knew would work best with our staff and school culture. Our principal was upset by the news after all the time and work we put into the project only to be overridden by a school board member.
My team met with the school’s administration team to discuss the changes, reviewed the details from the district and scrambled to rewrite all our timelines, grouping of staff and reviewed the training materials. We only had a couple of weeks to prepare before rollout. I spent countless hours making corrections in the curriculum and training materials. We truly floundered at the beginning of our instructional training as there was just not enough time for us to adjust to the new material for us to teach confidently.
Looking back at this now, there were things that could have been handled differently to better manage this scope creep. I believe my team should have taken the time to merge our training curriculum and material together so it would best suit our school culture. This would have allowed the team the confidence of knowing what they were doing when conducting a staff development digital training. I also believe it would have been beneficial if we asked for a push back on the district timeline so all the teams could feel better prepared to handle the changes. This was an unexpected change that left us feeling flustered. We should have step back and looked at the bigger picture which would have shown us how having districtwide uniform trainings kept us all on track. It was a lesson learned of how scope creep could shake the very foundation of a project.
Wow!!! What a difficult/frustrating situation to be in. Many can relate to copious amounts of work being done to then find out you are going in a different direction. It can be frustrating seeing all of you work be reworked in a different direction. I feel you should have been informed immediately with the direction of your district. Communication was clearly missed in your scenario, but I feel you did a great job pivoting and taking on the new direction, which was suddenly brought to you attention.
ReplyDeleteHi Lori,
ReplyDeleteThis seems super frustrating. I think that the scope creep would have been better managed if the district office had taken a top down scheduling approach. THey could have had better communicaiton to inform everyone that their team would be preapring the curriculum and materials. Then your team would have had more time to learn the material instead of wasting time trying to change your materials to fit theirs.
Hi Lori, I really appreciated your post this week. As an educator I've gone through this same thing in my career. There is nothing more frustrating than having to do something that isn't going to fit your school climate and culture. In my district there have been times that we had to completely change curriculum in the middle of the school year with only 1 day of training. How did the expect us to confidently teach something that we had barely even seen? We didn't have the time or resources to be ready for implementation, but we didn't have a choice.. Our district had decided to use this new curriculum and we had to roll with it.
ReplyDeleteBest,
Derek
Hi Lori,
ReplyDeleteI can relate to this daunting task. I was apart of the tech team device roll out for my school as well and not to mention we were one of the first schools to kick off the device roll out plan. Climate and culture of a school is of very importance. Honestly, if the climate and culture is off it can hurt the moral of the school. we had an issue of the climate and culture in our school and now we are in the rebuilding stages of fixing it through several PD workshops.
-Jacquisa Gibson