What, So What, Now What?

TLA has a new contract consultant. His name is Tom Benton. Tom was a school principal for a very long time. His ability to combine craft knowledge with a sincere desire to help school leaders improve their performance made him just the right guy at just the right time.

As you might imagine, TLA has a huge principal customer base with more than 300 schools in its service region, yet I now find myself the only full-time employee with principal experience. Even though we ascribe to leadership as a practice, not a position, and despite the excellent work of training consultants like Dawnelle Hyland, there is a kernel of truth to the old saw that "generals only talk to generals."

Tom retired from Wake County Public Schools at about the same time I was signing on as director of Wake Leadership Academy. Whereas I had been a bit of a rolling stone and a public school administrator for only eight years, Tom had been leading schools in the same district for many years.The older I get, the more I question the wisdom of forever avoiding the moss of the stone that keeps rolling.

In any event, Tom currently facilitates a high school-only School Leader Network and, more to the point of this blog, helps me facilitate a new TLA four-day training program piloted in Wake County for assistant principals. I expect that we will expand it before long to other districts and other audiences.

I mention Tom tonight because, for better or worse, he tends to share my mind. In fact, Tom recently reminded me of a framework for evaluation that I learned long ago and, except for his reminding me of it, I may not have thought to use in the Using Data to Focus Improvement course we co-facilitate.

The framework of which he reminded me and that serves so many purposes so well is this: what, so what, now what? I want to invite you to think along with me about exactly what this means and how you, as a leader, may use it. Let's practice what critical theorists call "deconstruction." First, the "what."

"What" is that which is to be studied, learned, explored, or tried. Here the attention is on implementing the innovation or treatment exactly as it was designed to be implemented. Fidelity is key. Only when the "what" is delivered to specification can the rest of the evaluation make sense. For example, the "what" could be a new reading program. Only to the extent that the program is implemented as it was designed to be implemented can its impact be measured. That leads us to the "so what."

So what if the new reading program was implemented? What difference does it make? Are scores on appropriate student learning measures higher? Why should we allocate additional dollars to buy more of it? Answering questions such as this is the "so what" stage. Even if the response to these questions is a resounding "yes,"  the circle remains incomplete. The next question is "now what?"

For argument's sake, let's say that the new reading program improved student comprehension in understanding and responding to non-fiction text 40% better than baseline. Now what? Can we purchase the program for all students? Alternately, might we drink from the same well as the program designers and thus create our own version of the program by identifying and implementing salient practices cited in research?

I will leave to your imagination how to apply the what, so what, now what framework in your leadership context, business or education. For that matter, use it to plan your next family vacation. As a graduate school professor of mine was fond of reminding his students, there's nothing more practical than a good theory. Tom and I would love to hear what you learn from your experience.