Why Do We Focus On The Small Wins?
February 27, 2024
By Kippy Smith and Erica Crane
Welcome to the Small Wins Dashboard (SWD) blog! We'll regularly be sharing wisdom about how schools and education organizations can reach big goals by tracking small wins with their teams. We'll share practical advice, insights from research, and findings from our Small Wins data.
The Small Wins Dashboard comes from the idea that reaching big goals is a learning journey that requires the collective wisdom and sustained energy of your whole team. This means you can’t wait until you’ve finished the journey to learn from your progress or reflect on where you’ve been. Additionally, sharing stories of progress along the journey can act as a guide to emphasize wins and target supports. The Small Wins Dashboard helps you navigate your way toward a bold vision, one small (but important!) win at a time.
In the Harvard Business Review, Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer explain the power of recognizing small wins and how,
“Of all the things that can boost inner work life, the most important is making progress in meaningful work.”
Based on the significant role seeing and feeling progress can make on individuals and an entire team, the SWD developed ways to share success and lessons learned along the way, with visually compelling data displays in tandem with stories from co-workers in their own words.
Specifically in schools, a positive culture can be fostered when teachers are respected and long-term visions for future change can be broken down into achievable goals that highlight short-term successes. This can create more motivation, not less, when teachers are encouraged to consider “incremental positive progress” as Sarah Gosner explains in Edutopia. Bryan Goodwin and Susan Shebby share in ASCD’s Educational Leadership how teacher efficacy, or their belief in their own abilities, can be bolstered by championing the small wins. This New Leaders blog describes how,
“Most of the time, we celebrate when we’re at the end of an initiative or long process—not at the points along the way. But it’s keeping track of our wins throughout the work that reaps the benefits.”
This is why the Small Wins Dashboard exists. At the core of the work to create a tool to track the small stuff is the belief that learning from the everyday experiences, observations, and insights of teachers is essential to accelerating equitable innovation for good.
To get started recognizing small wins, here are some small, but mighty tips:
Define what success looks like, sounds like, and feels like with your team when considering an innovation. What will students be saying? What behaviors will teachers be doing? What will a classroom look like if this is working? You could even create an innovation configuration map (which is kind of like a rubric for your innovation)! Noticing behaviors can help you understand if your innovation is working, and also helps people become reflective practitioners.
Create a public and shared practice of celebrating progress. Progress means both successes, as well as lessons learned (e.g., learning IS progress, even if it comes from a mistake or failure). This can mean small gestures that create habits around appreciation for progress in weekly communications, during meetings, morning announcements, on post its, through a shout out jar, or in whatever other place your community gathers and shares information.
As you celebrate success, stay away from inauthentic or toxic positivity. Be honest about how change is hard, learning is hard, and we’re not ONLY celebrating to ignore the challenges we’ll be facing within implementing an innovation and creating a more equitable impact across our community. It’s ok to talk about what’s working as long as there are also opportunities for teammates to collaboratively keep learning together.
Share learning with your students. It can help build a culture of learning when successes (and lessons learned along the way!) are shared with students too. Explaining where you have small progress and still need to practice can inspire students to believe that learning is valued and everyone is trying new things and working to grow.
Get the Small Wins Dashboard for your team! This is a tool that will help track small wins, share stories from teachers to teachers directly, and create beautiful and clear visual displays to help analyze the qualitative data. Reach out to kippy@smallwinsdashboard.com to learn more or start a trial! Mention this blog post for more rapid inclusion in the trial process.