This is the second installment of Improving Improvement, our quarterly series focused on leveraging the power of research-practice partnerships (RPPs) to build schools’, districts’ and states’ capacity to improve. As we’re sure many of you have experienced in your work, the Covid-19 school shutdowns drastically changed our plans for supporting our partners’ efforts to design, plan, pilot, and test evaluations in fall 2020. Our annual convening, the event during which our nearly 60 partner districts and charter management organizations (CMOs) come together to make collective decisions and put in the bulk of the planning needed to achieve their goals, was scheduled for March 18. States began closing schools the week before. In less than a week we needed not only to redesign how we planned to support partners with the content intended for the convening, but to communicate changes clearly and reassuringly to an audience experiencing chaos and uncertainty. Despite the disruption and our partners’ (understandably) changed priorities, our network remains on track to meet its goals. It has not been perfect or easy, but we have been inspired by our partners’ work and commitment and have learned to adapt alongside them. Here, we share some lessons from this experience. We hope that these lessons will be helpful as you continue to rethink your partnerships and research plans in light of the unprecedented disruption that Covid-19 has brought and will continue to bring to schools.

Acknowledge and learn more about how Covid-19 is impacting your partners.

The first direct contact we had with districts after the Covid-19 shutdowns were not about our work but rather to connect with districts and listen. We had calls with every district to learn more about their response to the abrupt school shutdowns. While interviewers followed a semi-structured protocol developed specifically for these calls, the conversations themselves were informal, and interviewers took care to lead with curiosity about the district community as a whole and district team members as individuals.

From these calls, we learned about how our districts immediately sprang into action to devise creative solutions to provide students with meals, electronic devices, and internet access, and what teaching and learning looked like in the first few weeks following the shutdowns.

These conversations helped us build trust with districts, which was critical. In taking a pause from our scheduled programming and tasks that were already behind our original schedule, we demonstrated that we were not just focused on learning how Covid-19 would impact our particular project with districts but that we cared about the larger context of the district.

Don’t be afraid to reach out, but be flexible and understanding.

Shortly after our decision to cancel our in-person convening and switch to an on-demand virtual one, we had to consider how to engage districts—how often was appropriate and with what tone? Nervous that our communications would seem tone deaf or get lost amidst the flood of new obligations, we started with less frequent communications that each contained more information. Following some valuable feedback, we dramatically shortened our communications while settling on weekly reminders of next steps. In practice, we are nudging districts fairly often, but always with an accommodating tone that recognizes their fluid availability.

Provide deadlines to maintain urgency but offer extensions when requested.

In addition to considering how often to engage districts and with what tone, we had to consider whether to push them to meet deadlines. Knowing they might be overwhelmed with new and challenging circumstances, we defaulted to providing near complete flexibility. We removed deadlines from our materials and all communications framed tasks as optional. While districts appreciated that we weren’t piling on, some asked for clear deadlines to keep them moving. As one district told us, while the work was important to them, without deadlines, urgent items would always push the important ones further down the priority list. So, we added deadlines back in while communicating that districts should let us know if/when they couldn’t meet a deadline. We either extended the deadline or developed a workaround to accommodate them. The feedback, and the results, were positive.

Admit when you don’t have all the answers.

While they continued to work with us, districts retained a justifiable concern about the relevance of the work and how we would measure progress given the uncertainty around what school will look like in the fall. We’ve been working with states and others to offer some certainty, but we don’t yet know the answers to some of these questions. Rather than delay or claim certainty, we leaned into our uncertainty. We acknowledged that we did not yet know exactly how the year would look or how we would measure impact. As nice as it would have been to project omniscience, our candor built credibility and some solidarity (“this is as new for us as it is for you”). We were careful to match the uncertainty with a plan for how we would address it and a promise to keep pushing for answers on their behalf, letting our partners know we have their backs.

Have and express confidence in your ability to adapt.

Again and again, we have come up against questions to which we do not know the answer. Our approach has been to encourage districts to make a plan for our shared work based on the information they have about the fall and set the expectation that we will need to revisit the plan once we know more about what school reopenings look like. We have assured partners that we will be ready and available to support them when we have the information we need to move forward. While it may seem like a bold promise to be ready to quickly change plans, it’s helpful to remember that as researchers working in the field, we often have to adjust plans and have successfully done so.

Embrace virtual tools to provide more flexible and cost-effective support to partners.

Though we switched to virtual tools out of necessity, using virtual tools may be allowing us to be more supportive of and accessible to our districts than we would have been in our in-person event. Because it allows us to engage districts asynchronously over an extended period of time and without travel, we can provide one-to-one support to all nearly 60 partners. Our original plan was for a roughly 3-partner per support staff ratio. At the same time, we spared our partners the time and expense of traveling. All it took was liberal use of some readily available tools and the modification of our content for use by districts at home:

1. A content management system (e.g. Canvas) to lay out all of our guiding materials
2. Zoom for virtual meetings and to record presentations
3. Google Docs to collaborate in documents in real time
4. Slack to enable districts to engage directly with us and each other without endless email chains
5. Asana, a project management software, to document and assign action steps

We also learned that it was important to walk our partners through how to use the tools, so they would feel comfortable with the key features needed rather than overwhelmed. We provided technical support through user guides and live demos via Zoom and noticed an uptick in use after providing these resources.

Looking Ahead

By the time of our next installment of Improving Improvement, school will have started (likely in many different forms) and our partners will have launched or be ready to launch another round of interventions. Stay tuned for more lessons learned from the experience of helping them get there.

We are also always open to additional suggestions for topics for future editions of Improving Improvement. Reach out to us with any questions you have about our networks, continuous improvement process, or ideas you’d like to see us tackle.

David Hersh (david_hersh@gse.harvard.edu) is Director of Proving Ground and Jennifer Ash (jennifer_ash@gse.harvard.edu) is Director of the National Center for Rural Education Research Networks (NCRERN).

Suggested citation: Hersh, D., & Ash, J.. (2020). Improving Improvement: Lessons Learned from Working with Partners during Covid-19 Crisis. NNERPP Extra, 2(2), 19-21.