From Adoption to Essential Use: Getting Implementation Right

Unlock the secrets to making your solution part of an educator’s essential classroom practice with strategic materials and professional learning. 

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how innovative your solution might be or whether it has strong evidence of efficacy—successful implementation ultimately depends on whether the classroom educator has the knowledge, confidence, skill, and support necessary to make it part of their essential practice. 

The challenge lies in equipping educators with all this after the sale. This means having the right mix of content, resources, examples, just-in-time tutorials, and instructional supports so that they can easily accommodate your solution into their instructional routine. Offering this helps ensure your solution becomes a valuable resource for educators and students. 

The Importance of Professional Learning to Product Adoption

Educators need ongoing support to effectively integrate products into their daily practice. Professional development—the mix of formal workshops and training offered in various formats—helps educators get started at making a solution part of their routine. But this one-size-fits-all approach has its limits.

Professional learning is an alternative approach to achieving product adoption. Professional learning emphasizes offering a broad mix of informal and self-guided tutorials, resources, and communities of practice where educators can drive their own learning, instead of attending a canned workshop.

At a minimum, an initial onboarding series of professional development to any product is necessary for a successful implementation. The challenge lies in what happens after that. That is when professional learning takes over.

The Unsung Heroes of Product Adoption in Schools

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Often, the responsibility for implementation falls to district-level champions. These aren’t the decision-makers the sales team has been working with but are often folks on their staff. It might be teachers on special assignment (TOSAs), instructional coaches, or curriculum specialists.

These are the folks tasked with the responsibility of rolling out the product to every school and educator. They have to figure out everything from basic communication about how to access the product to technical support and ongoing advocacy about using the solution. Relying solely on districts to develop all the professional learning materials and resources necessary for a successful implementation can lead to inconsistent product engagement. 

To support these internal champions effectively, you need to provide a wide range of professional learning materials that they can adapt and apply in a variety of contexts. Don’t make the mistake we see all the time by leaving it to chance or the whim of an internal champion. You can’t assume they’ll have time to create the right kind of professional learning experiences and materials that lead to widespread adoption and use because most of these folks are juggling up to a dozen products to be implemented across their district. There are only so many miracles they can perform!

Best Practices for Effective Professional Learning

Over the years, we’ve employed a variety of strategies that ensure educators are supported throughout the implementation process:

• Make it content-specific: Educators need to see clear curricular and pedagogical connections that they can immediately apply in their classrooms. Ensure professional learning is content-focused, aligned to standards, and has specific learning goals grounded in solid instructional practice and embedded technology use. 
• Offer time for real application: Provide onboarding that demonstrates effective teaching strategies to help educators visualize how to implement them in their classrooms. This includes modeling the effective use of your product in the classroom and providing opportunities for educators to reflect on and exchange ideas with others about the implications of using a product in their instructional practices.
• Promote collaboration: Offer structured ways for educators to use each other's expertise to solve problems and create new understandings. This helps foster new ideas on how to use your product effectively with their specific school demographics and classroom settings.
• Provide sustained support and accountability: Offer ideas and suggestions for how your customer’s implementation champions can provide support, build collegial relationships, and encourage professional discourse (during and after the learning experience).
• Utilize various formats: To support product adoption, make learning available in multiple formats—print, digital, face-to-face, and online. This variety provides flexibility for implementation, ensuring the content can be adapted for self-paced modules, brief presentations, or extended workshops to meet diverse needs.
• Consider toolkits for scaling implementation: Include toolkits—a curated set of sequenced tasks and actions with supporting resources and content—designed for large-scale implementation rollouts. These toolkits should provide all necessary materials for your customers’ internal champions to “train the trainers” and support the school leader’s implementation. 

We understand the unique challenges you face in guiding a school or district from initial interest to full product adoption. Our Engagement Booster Packs are designed to bridge the gap after the sale and provide your customer’s internal champions with the raw materials they can adapt and remix to best support professional learning about your product in their organization. Contact us to learn how you can leverage our expertise to help you drive product adoption.