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a ready-to-run workshopScaling What Works
Leadership & Coaching · Workshop

Scaling What Works (Workshop)

Everything you need to lead this with your staff or PLC: a minute-by-minute run-of-show, what to say, what to hand out, and how to make it stick. Pick the length that fits your slot.

Key takeaway

A practice that works beautifully in one classroom rarely spreads across a school on its own, because scaling is a distinct and difficult problem, not an automatic consequence of success, so spreading what works means deliberately attending to the conditions, support, and adaptation that let a good practice take root in many different contexts.

Format
Leadership / school improvement
Length
45 minutes
Group size
Any (works 4-40)
Who can run it
Instructional leader or team
You will need
Slides (5)Printed handoutA practice that works somewhereA timer
Aligned to
Learning Forward: Learning CommunitiesInTASC 10: Leadership & CollaborationResearch on scaling, spread, and improvement
Share / assign

Why it works

Every school has pockets of excellence: a teacher whose approach produces remarkable results, a team that has cracked a persistent problem, a practice that works beautifully where it lives. And every school struggles to spread that excellence, so the great practice stays an island while the rest of the school carries on unchanged. Leaders often assume that a practice good enough to work will naturally spread, that others will see it and adopt it, but this almost never happens, because scaling, taking something that works in one place and making it work in many, is a distinct and genuinely hard problem that requires deliberate attention, not an automatic consequence of a practice being good. Understanding why scaling is hard points to what it takes. Context matters: a practice that works in one classroom or team depends partly on conditions, the teacher's skill, the particular students, the relationships, resources, support, that do not automatically exist elsewhere, so what spreads cannot be a rigid copy but a core adapted to each new context. Adaptation versus fidelity is the central tension: scale too rigidly and the practice does not fit new contexts and dies; adapt too loosely and the essential ingredients that made it work are lost, so the task is to identify the core that must be preserved and the surface that can flex. Support and capacity are required: teachers adopting a new practice need learning, time, coaching, and resources to do it well, and a practice dropped on them without support predictably fails and then gets blamed as not working. Buy-in matters: people adopt what they have had a hand in and understand the value of, so spread works better through engagement than mandate, and starting with willing adopters and letting results build credibility beats requiring everyone at once. And the originator's tacit knowledge is a challenge: much of why a practice works lives in the head of the person who developed it, so capturing and transferring that, through modeling, coaching, and documentation, is part of scaling. The practical approach is to treat spreading a practice as an improvement project in its own right: identify what actually works and why, distinguish the core from the context-specific, provide the support and capacity adopters need, build buy-in, start small and learn, and adapt as it spreads. The workshop helps leaders take a practice that works somewhere in their school and plan to scale it deliberately, preserving its core while adapting to context and providing the support that spread requires.

The research: Research on scaling, spread of practice, and improvement science.

The run-of-show

Choose your slot. The agenda, timings, and length update to match.

    The core activity: scale a practice by preserving its core and supporting adoption

    The heart of the session is identifying what makes a practice work and planning to spread it with the right core, adaptation, and support.

    Good practice does not spread itselfScaling is a distinct, difficult problem, not an automatic consequence of a practice being good. Preserve the core, adapt to context, provide real support, and build buy-in, or the island of excellence stays an island.

    Facilitator notes

    Capture the tacit knowledgeMuch of why a practice works lives in the originator's head; transferring that through modeling, coaching, and documentation is part of scaling, not an afterthought.

    Adapt it

    Participant handout

    One page for every teacher. Print it, or save it as a PDF.

    K12 Academics · Professional Learning

    Scaling What Works: core, adaptation, support, buy-in

    Spread a practice deliberately: identify its core, adapt to context, provide the support adopters need, and build buy-in rather than assuming good spreads itself.

    1. A practice that works somewhere in my school:
    2. What actually makes it work (the core to preserve):
    3. The context-specific parts that can flex:
    4. The support and capacity adopters will need:
    5. How I build buy-in and start with willing adopters:

    Make it stick

    Scaling is an improvement project in its own right. Close by setting the follow-up:

    Common questions

    If a practice works, won't other teachers naturally adopt it?
    Almost never, which is exactly the misconception that keeps islands of excellence isolated. Leaders often assume a practice good enough to work will spread on its own as others see it and adopt it, but scaling is a distinct and genuinely hard problem, not an automatic consequence of success. Other teachers may not see the practice, may not understand why it works, may lack the skill or resources or support to do it, or may not be bought in to changing what they do, and any of these stops natural spread cold. The practice that works in one room also depends partly on conditions that do not automatically exist elsewhere. So spreading excellence requires treating it as a deliberate improvement project, identifying the core, supporting adopters, building buy-in, rather than simply hoping that good practice is contagious, which it is not.
    How do I decide what to adapt and what to keep fixed when scaling?
    By identifying what actually makes the practice work, its core, and distinguishing that from the context-specific surface, which is the central tension in all scaling. Scale too rigidly, insisting every detail be copied, and the practice fails to fit new contexts and dies; adapt too loosely and the essential ingredients that made it work get lost, so you spread the name without the substance. The task is to analyze why the practice works and separate the non-negotiable core that must be preserved for it to still work from the surface features, materials, exact routines, specifics, that can and should flex to each new context. This requires genuinely understanding the mechanism of the practice, not just its appearance, which is why capturing the originator's tacit knowledge about why it works is so important to scaling it faithfully but flexibly.
    Why not just mandate the successful practice for everyone?
    Because mandating a practice without buy-in and support reliably produces surface compliance or failure, not genuine adoption, and then the practice gets blamed as not working when the real problem was the rollout. People adopt what they have had a hand in and understand the value of, so spread works far better through engagement than through a top-down requirement imposed on everyone at once. Mandating also ignores that adopters need real capacity, learning, time, coaching, resources, to do a new practice well, and a practice dropped on teachers without that support predictably fails. The more effective approach is to start with willing adopters, provide genuine support, let visible results build credibility, and let the practice spread as teachers see it work and want it, which produces real adoption rather than the resentful, hollow compliance that a mandate typically generates.

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