Find the Bright Spot

In the book Switch by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, the authors talk a lot about change. One of the techniques to changing behavior they mention is to look at problems from a different angle.  Rather than focusing solely on fixing a problem they suggest finding what is working - mining a nugget of success and then seeking replication.

For example if a student is struggling in school with academics and behavior, we tend to delve into an analysis of the causes and try to fix the problem.  Conversely to find the bright spot - we should ask when does the student find success?  It may be in only one class - but why not try the things from the successful class in other classes?
I think the key is to ask some basic questions:

• Where do we have success?
• What is different about these situations - what are people doing differently?
• How can we use what works in other situations?

I think the same thing applies to the improvement of instruction.  Rather than continually trying to fix the struggling teachers, we could look for the bright spots. For example we ask the question "in what classes are students really engaged in learning?"  We then look to see what happens differently in those classes; it could be a simple set of practices that could be used by the staff at large.   Granted there are a lot of factors that will come into play through implementation - but we are leveraging success rather than trying to fix failure.

As a leader think about this quote from the book: "'What is the ratio of the time I spend solving problems to the time I spend scaling successes?"   I think I'll try to spend more time scaling successes.

Toby