THE 4 B'S

Headnote

HOW TO ADAPT OTHER PEOPLE'S PRACTICES AND MAKE THEM STICK

When we learn about an educational intervention that is inspiring, innovative, or appears effective, we often think our next step is obvious: Take it back to our schools or systems and replicate it. We may be so enchanted by the content of what we've encountered that we just charge ahead, forgetting all the other things we know about the necessary conditions for change, especially when we adopt an idea from elsewhere. That's when many problems begin.

A practice that is seemingly perfect in someone else's class or school can become a shadow of itself if you try to adopt it exactly as is, without considering your context. Professional learning communities, instructional rounds, learning walks, data teams, peer review, lesson study, and improvement science - you name it, and we'll show you examples of how educators have misapplied them because they did not understand the conditions that enable success.

Although sometimes this is the result of a desire for a quick fix, more often it is the result of educators' enthusiasm for learning and making a difference. When their efforts fall flat, they can feel crestfallen.

This situation is avoidable, however. Asking probing questions and digging beneath the surface are essential for understanding what makes a particular model of teacher collaboration (or other innovation) successful. To help educators engage in this kind of thinking, we have developed a model we call the four B's.

THE FOUR B'S

The four B's framework grew out of our global study of collaborative professionalism (Hargreaves & O'Connor, 2017, 2018). We define collaborative professionalism as ways educators work together with depth, trust, and precision to achieve impact. We set out to study how it manifests in different cultures and countries.

As we looked across these settings, we found that particular designs for collaborating, like lesson study or teacher-led learning communities, seemed to work brilliantly in one culture or context but had features that might not work as well or in the same way in other contexts.

What would it take, we wondered, for these strategies to be just as effective elsewhere? What would we need to understand to take a collaborative practice from the Canadian wilderness, the forests of Colombia,...