Turning Small Wins into Positive Change With the Power of the Small Wins Dashboard

The Challenge

In the dynamic world of education, institutions are confronted with a pressing challenge—the ability to capture and use real-time qualitative evidence to advance their goals. While education leaders have a wealth of traditional metrics at their disposal, these often fall short. The reason? They don't enable educators to learn what's working as they go. Many of the goals that schools and organizations set are both adaptive and complex in nature, requiring innovative approaches without a set blueprint and necessitating continual learning. Traditional metrics tend to overlook the nuance, specificity, and immediacy educators need to understand what's working in real-time and to act on it right away. Not only does this hamper a team’s ability to progress toward its goals, but also team coherence, creativity, growth mindset, and belief that achieving its bold goals is possible.

The gap in capturing qualitative data doesn't just cloud our full understanding of student progress, it also makes sharing those key insights with the whole team a real challenge.

Maria Tukeva, Principal at CHEC, elaborates on this challenge, stating, "Most action plans you're required to do in education are outcome-based. Those are metrics that you track after the thing has already happened, but it doesn't let you know what processes might've been helpful or not helpful. Using something that's more qualitative—like Small Wins Dashboard—you're looking at tracking processes or tracking behaviors. And so that allows you to understand what actions may or may not be resulting in certain outcomes."

On the same note, Darry Strickland, Chief of Learning Design for Design for Emergence, points out another layer of complexity: the siloed nature of learning in educational institutions. "Learning oftentimes in schools is siloed," he explains, emphasizing the urgent need for tools and approaches that bridge these divides and offer a more holistic view of the learning journey.

The Solution

The Small Wins Dashboard offers a transformative solution, designed to bridge the evidence gap with real-time, beyond-the-numbers evidence so that school teams can continually learn together and ultimately reach their big goals. This tool is reshaping how education leaders monitor progress and approach staff learning, fostering a more collaborative and energized professional environment.

Design for Emergence integrated the Small Wins Dashboard into its liberatory design-based engagement with the CHEC leadership team. To advance CHEC’s vision of becoming a true design-thinking school, Design for Emergence facilitated leadership team experiences & provided ongoing leadership coaching. Mr. Strickland and his D4E colleagues embedded the SWD into their coaching structure by making small win reflection and storytelling part of each coaching session. This deepened the learning on the part of coachees and enabled the D4E Coaches to more effectively see and support their growth. As a geographically dispersed organization, D4E Coaches were also able to stay closely connected to one another, and continually exchange ideas & insights about their coaching practice.

CHEC leaders shared additional small win experiences & insights outside of coaching sessions. The CHEC leadership team periodically discussed the Small Wins data during leadership team meetings, to synthesize together what they were learning about their practice, their students, and themselves.

Strickland emphasizes the importance of this approach, stating, "Documentation storytelling is critical, particularly in adaptive change where the change is happening to you or you're trying to affect influence and change in others."

Transitioning from this perspective, Maria Tukeva recognized the need for a more nuanced approach to documenting everyday progress and staff learning, finding immense value in the Small Wins Dashboard’s ability to chronicle both successes and lessons learned. This not only addresses the challenge of capturing real-time qualitative information about what’s working (and isn’t) for students and staff, but also ensures that these insights are disseminated to the whole team for reflection and action.

Darry Strickland sees the dashboard as more than just a tool. By "tracking behavior and mindset shifts in others and in yourself," the Small Wins Dashboard provides a depth of understanding that traditional metrics miss. It illuminates people’s lived experience in schools, acting as a leading indicator of equitable student success and broadening educators’ knowledge of their students and of themselves. In the words of Dugan and Safir, it’s “street data”.

In the context of design thinking and coaching, Mr. Strickland believes the dashboard will revolutionize the way educators approach organizational learning:

"The Small Wins Dashboard is a great way to capture what facilitators are doing effectively, making conversations with peers and students more fruitful," he shared.

Where the Small Wins Dashboard shines is in its ability to break down silos and elevate collective learning & knowledge. Strickland emphasized its pivotal role in storytelling and knowledge sharing. "The Small Wins Dashboard is a way of being able to tell stories in real-time," he said. This not only accelerates change by sharing stories across networks but also directly addresses the challenge of siloed learning.

As Strickland puts it, "To get out of the siloing of information and learning, the Small Wins Dashboard is a real way of accelerating change by sharing storytelling across networks and across people."

The Results

The Small Wins Dashboard's impact is evident. Ms. Tukeva spoke of its transformative effect on her team's mindset and motivation.

"It has helped us stay motivated when you can see little steps you're making that are positive, instead of waiting for some data that shows a major accomplishment. It makes you more observant and reflective of your practice. And it makes it okay to say when something didn't work out, because you see it as a learning experience instead of as a failure," she shared.

Reflecting on its implementation, Mr. Strickland added, "The Small Wins Dashboard really helped move the needle with a lot of people." He further elaborated on the transformative nature of the dashboard, stating, "Celebrating small wins and giving yourself grace for lessons learned is vital, particularly when you're dealing with complex adaptive problems."

The Small Wins Dashboard stands out as more than just a tool. It's a catalyst for change. In a world where success is often defined by the destination, this dashboard serves as a reminder of the importance of the journey. How a team pursues its big, bold goals matters just as much as what it wants to achieve. By celebrating small wins and leveraging shared learning, institutions can pave the way for lasting, positive change.