Implement. Change in Education

My 9-year-old ran his first cross-country race of the season in 90-degree heat.After the finish, he had three things to report: - "I couldn't breathe; I was running so fast." - "I placed 9th." - "I made new friends." Then came the line I haven't stopped thinking about: "When I'm in the flow running, it feels so good; I can feel nature." Nobody could fix the weather that day. But the course was built for kids his age. It's hard enough to be real, still within reach. So he found flow in conditions that should have taken it away. Here's what Csikszentmihalyi's research tells us: flow lives in a narrow band where the challenge is real and your skill is just enough to meet it. Too hard brings anxiety. Too easy brings boredom. Add clear goals and immediate feedback, and you've set the conditions.And here's what surprised me most: flow is contagious. His brother Aiden wasn't racing. He still moved faster than I've ever seen him move, just to cheer Owen on.
Researchers have seen this in classrooms too. Teachers in flow influence the students around them. Students in flow influence each other. We can't hand anyone flow. Not our kids, not our students, not the adults we lead. But we can set the course. Try this with one lesson, PLC, or meeting this week: 1. Does everyone know what "done" looks like? 2. Will they know how it's going before the end? 3. Is it a stretch they can reach?Fix the weakest of the three. That's it.Show Notes:
¹ Arnold B. Bakker, “Flow among music teachers and their students: The crossover of peak experiences,” Journal of Vocational Behavior 66(1), 2005, 26–44.
² Culbertson et al., “Contagious Flow: Antecedents and Consequences of Optimal Experience in the Classroom,” Journal of Management Education 39(3), 2015, 319–349.
³ Delaware Department of Education, Delaware Early Literacy Playbook, November 2025, “Critical Moves: Early Literacy Practices in Delaware Schools,” p. 12.
⁴ Same Playbook, foundational skills instruction attributes (explicit instruction, aligned practice “in and out of context,” frequent formal and informal assessment), p. 9.

This summer, I led a learning lab, "How to Implement (Just About) Anything," for about 250 Alabama CTE directors and career coaches at their CTE Summer PD Conference in Mobile.
Their state superintendent opened the morning with three words I keep coming back to: strategy, focus, and resources. And when I asked that room to turn and talk, the whole place came alive. Their implementation health quiz scores were some of the strongest I've ever seen.
Which raises the harder question this episode is about: what do you do when you're already on top?
In this episode, I share clips from that session and the moves I'd consider next, including the one tool I'd hand any leader on Monday morning: a plan on a page.
Thank you, TEAMTRI, for having me.
Want to know where your own implementation stands? Take the same quiz those directors took. The link is in the episode notes below.
Show notes:- EdScale Implementation Health Quiz

In August, every strategic plan still looks possible.
The plan is on the wall. The team is in the room. Every person in it means it.
Then it’s October. The plan hasn’t failed; it just hasn’t come up in a while. Nobody decided to remove it. It quietly stopped showing up.
Plans rarely die from being wrong. They die from having nowhere to live.
So here’s the test: look at your recurring agendas, standing decisions, and the data you actually review. If your priority isn’t showing up there, it isn’t protected yet.
The fix is simple: put the whole year on the calendar now. Progress-monitoring meetings, data reviews, coaching cycles, straight through June.
The dates will move. That’s fine. A meeting that exists can be moved. A meeting that was never scheduled just never happens.
Right now there’s room on the calendar. By October, there isn’t.
To the district, state, and school teams doing the unglamorous work right now: thank you. It matters more than the launch did.
Listen to the latest episode for more. I put the five questions we use for a first 30-day check-in into a one-page agenda. Free, no form. Link below.
Show notes links: - Use this agenda for your first 30-day check-in

"A principal looked at who wasn't showing up, found out why, and fixed that."
That is the sentence I keep coming back to from my conversation with Dr. Cheryl Dyson and Dr. Sarah Sirgo of Frederick County Public Schools.
Frederick cut chronic absenteeism from about 26% to 16.7% in three years. In its community schools, chronic absenteeism dropped 18 percentage points.
But the episode is not really about attendance as a metric. It is about what happens when a district narrows the work, protects the schoolhouse, and gives principals enough room to solve the actual problem in front of them.
Dr. Dyson talks about one school where students were not coming because they did not have clean clothes until a nonprofit brought in a truck full of washers and dryers. Dr. Sirgo talks about moving the conversation away from blame and toward support: "What support do we need to provide to get kids to come to school?"
In this episode of 𝑰𝒎𝒑𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒆𝒏𝒕 𝑪𝒉𝒂𝒏𝒈𝒆 𝒊𝒏 𝑬𝒅𝒖𝒄𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏, we unpack:
How Frederick moved from 26 KPIs to 17
Why strategic staffing matters for both teachers and principals
How science of reading training, DIBELS, and intervention routines are showing up in early literacy
Why math may require a different implementation playbook than literacy

A basketball coach once spent two hours explaining a decision that took him four seconds. A timeout. A play drawn up. The star waved off. The ball placed in a teammate’s hands. On tape, it looked like instinct. In reality, the decision had been made weeks earlier in hallway conversations, locker-room moments, and small exchanges that built enough trust for the hard call to feel clear when the pressure arrived. That story captures an essential lesson for education leaders: the best decisions often look effortless because of the preparation, relationships, and routines built long before the crisis. In our latest blog post and podcast episode, we explore five lessons education leaders can learn from elite coaches, including: - Why the real decision happens in the “before” - How to identify the vital few signals amid a flood of data - Why emotion regulation is a learnable leadership skill - What makes a postmortem strengthen-or destroy-candor - How successful organizations fall into the “success trap” Strategy rarely fails on the whiteboard. It fails in the follow-through. Where in your work are you using the calm moments to build the trust and clarity you’ll need when the hard calls arrive?

In 2022, Anne Arundel County Public Schools had one National Merit semifinalist. They have nine now.
A record 15 schools earned five-star ratings, and 95% of schools earned three stars or better. Graduation rate up two straight years to 80.9%. Grades 3 to 8 ELA and math both above the state average and climbing four years running.
 
In this episode of 𝑰𝒎𝒑𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒆𝒏𝒕 𝑪𝒉𝒂𝒏𝒈𝒆 𝒊𝒏 𝑬𝒅𝒖𝒄𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏, Superintendent Dr. Mark Bedell, Dr. Shannon Pugh, and CFO Matt Stanski walk through the governance work behind those numbers.
 
Three things I keep coming back to:
 
1. One plan, not six. Bedell's opening question to Pugh was "tell me how I'm going to use the Blueprint to meet our goals." The strategic plan, Blueprint, and the ESSA consolidated grant now sit inside a single story instead of six offices assembling separate ones.
 
2. The career ladder as a staffing strategy. Pugh believes Anne Arundel is the only Maryland district that opted into the state's full optional list of identified schools. About two dozen nationally board-certified teachers have since moved into them, drawn by an additional $7,000. She does not call them low-performing schools. She calls them Blueprint schools.
 
3. Money attributed where it is actually earned. Stanski's team pushed fixed charges (health insurance, pension, Social Security) down to every school and department and hit their 75% target this year. The same third-grade classroom can cost roughly $63,000 or well north of $120,000, depending on who is standing in it. You cannot have an honest equity conversation without that math.
 
The moment that stayed with me was smaller. A community schools program manager called for permission to buy a student a second inhaler, because the family's insurance covered one and the child had to stay home without one to keep at school. He was back in class the next day. Multiply that by 48 community schools.
 
"We're not here to play school. We're here to have school." - Superintendent Dr. Mark Bedell

It's 7:12 on a Tuesday morning, and I'm not saying a word. My son works down the list taped to the fridge: teeth, bed, lunch, folder, shoes, then turns to his brother: "Owen, you didn't check off your folder." Two boys, one laminated card, and I've been written out of the scene I used to run.
 
Here's the counterintuitive part: a checklist looks like a constraint and acts like a release.
 
It's the same reason a 1935 Boeing crash gave us the pilot's checklist, and why Atul Gawande's one-page list cut deadly infections in ICUs. Structure doesn't box people in; the right structure frees them up for the decisions that actually need a human.
 
That's what fidelity of implementation really takes in schools: not exhorting people to try harder, but building coherent supports all the way down to small, clear, impossible-to-miss next actions that fit the local context.
 
Where in your work is a simple one-page list waiting to create more clarity, ownership, and momentum?

“DCPS 23, no more.” Dorchester County Public Schools (MD), a rural district of ~4,500 students, posted Maryland’s biggest 3rd-grade ELA jump: +22 points (27% → 49%) and climbed to 19th statewide in ELA in a single year. In this episode of Implement Change in Education, Superintendent Dr. Jymil Thompson and Assistant Superintendent Dr. Jodi Colman share what actually changed inside the system. Key takeaways:- You can’t “intervene” your way out of a Tier 1 problem → they put instruction at the center - Coaching > evaluation: "You can't evaluate people into better performance. You have to coach them." - Remove barriers to instructional leadership (e.g., restructuring so admins can get back into classrooms) Listen now (and feel free to share with a leader trying to move outcomes districtwide).

A pathologist’s autopsy report can tell you exactly how a patient died. But it tells you absolutely nothing about how to live a long, vibrant life. For twenty years, K-12 education has been running an autopsy model. We call it "school turnaround." Between 2010 and 2016, the federal School Improvement Grants program poured roughly $7 billion into turning around struggling schools. The result? Null impacts on math, reading, and graduation rates. As Marcus Buckingham puts it: “Failure doesn't teach you anything about success.” Instead of spending all our energy auditing the bottom 5% and studying what broke, what if we systematically studied our "positive deviants"? What if we found the classrooms, schools, and districts that are already producing 5-star experiences with the exact same resources and engineered the conditions for those bright spots to spread? In our latest blog post and podcast episode, we break down why the turnaround industry keeps missing the mark, and share 3 moves district and state leaders can make right now to shift their strategy from deficit remediation to scaling what works.

What does it really look like to lead a school district when your own children are learning inside that same system?In this episode of "𝑰𝒎𝒑𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒆𝒏𝒕 𝑪𝒉𝒂𝒏𝒈𝒆 𝒊𝒏 𝑬𝒅𝒖𝒄𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏", I’m joined by two extraordinary Maryland leaders: Dr. Maria Navarro, Superintendent of Charles County Public Schools, and Dr. Sonja Brookins-Santelises, CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools. Together, we explore a side of educational leadership that rarely gets discussed: what it means to serve as both a superintendent and a parent within the same system.A few moments that stood out:- The “fishbowl” effect of leading in public while your children experience the system up close.- The honest, real-time insight children can offer about what is working and what needs attention.- The balance between being a district leader, being a parent, and knowing when to step in.- The reminder that educators, counselors, coaches, and school communities show up for children with deep care every day.At its heart, this conversation is about leadership, family, and the people who make public education work. Whether you are a parent, educator, school system leader, or someone who simply cares about the schools where children learn and grow, this episode offers a thoughtful look at what it takes to lead complex systems with purpose, humility, and care.And if you’d like to take a deeper dive into their previous podcast appearances, where we explore their work and accomplishments in greater detail, listen to episode #19 with Dr. Navarro and episode #6 with Dr. Brookins-Santelises. Listen here: https://buff.ly/bKWk70p