How to Get Buy-in When Starting a New School Initiative

If you’ve been working in the education field for a while, you’re familiar with new school initiatives and their not-so-stellar success rate. Whether it’s improving digital literacy, or lowering disciplinary referrals in each grade, the last thing you want is to waste valuable time and resources on a program that won’t be successful due to lack of teacher buy-in or poor communication.

That’s why, as a school administrator, it’s crucial to involve your teachers early on in the initiative planning process so that you can design a school initiative with clear, measurable, and attainable goals.

We’ll be breaking down not only why setting great goals and involving teachers are crucial when starting a new strategic initiative, but also how you can go about implementing these tips into your own planning process to lead to better outcomes.

Create a committee of teachers to increase buy-in

Any new project or initiative is doomed to fail if teachers don’t buy into it. If they think it’s not worth their time or don’t understand the reasons why they’re being asked to change their curriculum, they aren’t likely to be invested in making the project work.

In fact, a study found that teachers were much more likely to buy into a new strategic initiative of innovation if a level of self-determination was present. The simple fact is that teachers and staff will feel more ownership over a new project if they are involved in the strategic planning and implementation early. That’s why it’s crucial to set up a committee of teachers who will be in charge of enacting the new strategic initiative early in the planning process.

Teachers involved in the planning process will help you see where there might be gaps in the initiative, or where you might have been too ambitious or not ambitious enough. Teachers have a better understanding of what is realistically achievable and what might be too much. Not only will their input be invaluable to the final initiative, but they will also become champions for the project to other teachers who might be on the fence about the changes.

Set clear, measurable, and attainable goals to increase the likelihood of success

If you want a new school initiative to succeed, you need clear, measurable, attainable goals from the get-go. Any strategic initiative that doesn’t have this criteria in mind is doomed to fail because, no matter how clear the end result is to you, if you aren’t able to communicate what’s expected of the people implementing the project, you have no way to measure success or progress.

Not only will you not be able to measure success, but your teachers won’t have a clear understanding of why they’re being asked to implement the initiative in the first place. If they know why you’re asking them to change their curriculum or how they approach teaching, they need to have confidence in the reasoning behind it. And the only way you can ensure they have that needed confidence is to show them that the project is working.

Without having an idea of what measurable progress you want to accomplish, you and your teachers won’t have any way of knowing if your strategic initiative is on the right track toward success.