Implementation Science in K-12 Education with Amanda Borosh

Last week my Human Performance Technology (HPT) class had a guest speaker session with Amanda Borosh, who is working to close the research-to-practice gap in K-12 education. In other words, her goal is to reduce the discrepancy between the desired status (education professionals following evidence-based practices) and the actual status (education professionals relying on non-evidence-based practices). Her work overlaps with HPT because it involves using analytical methods to determine interventions that will improve human performance. 

Borosh's background is in special education. She began as an assistant teacher in inclusive preschool classrooms. Since then, she has consulted parents of young children with developmental delays and disabilities and spent several years as a special education teacher. In addition, she was a district-wide behavior analyst for three years for Chicago public schools. Most recently, she has helped teachers of students with disabilities who engaged in severe problem behaviors in their inclusive classrooms. Through her professional experience, she became interested in researching systems-wide changes that encourage optimal performance in the K-12 workplace. So, she is pursuing her Ph.D. at Purdue University and is now entering her third year of the program.

In our session, Borosh discussed the many dimensions of evidence-based practices (EBPs) for educators working with students, specifically academic, behavioral, and social-emotional. She also emphasized that teachers following non-evidence-based practices can cause students physical and psychological harm. For example, teachers generally overuse restraint and seclusion to manage problem behaviors, but research indicates that those tactics can have detrimental effects.

Her approach to addressing these problems has many similarities to HPT techniques I have been studying in class. According to my textbook, "Probably the contribution you can make that will have the most impact is to identify the key factors affecting a gap between desired and current performance. If you do this accurately, the appropriate course of action to achieve performance success emerges naturally" (Stolovitch et al., 2004, p. 55).

So, why does the K-12 research-to-practice gap exist? Collaborating with Borosh, my classmates, many of whom are currently K-12 educators, offered some possibilities, including environmental barriers to teachers (e.g., culture, resources, etc.) and a lack of effective training dissemination strategies. To close the gap, it's essential to address these obstacles. According to Borosh, we can do so using implementation science. Here is the active implementation formula:

Effective implementation, the second variable in the formula, has four stages:

We must also consider implementation drivers, which Borosh said are "all of the components that need to exist for a strategy to actually be implemented to fidelity in an organization."

The following video demonstrates these factors at work within the context of a K-12 example:

As part of her experience applying implementation science to K-12 contexts, Borosh has helped an elementary school adopt Class-wide Function-related Intervention Teams (CW-FIT). She said the goal of this EBP is to improve general education teachers' "ability to manage challenging behavior in the classroom and hopefully improve inclusion of students in the future."

I found it particularly striking that though she saw little improvement after her initial school-wide professional development session, she saw a dramatic increase in teachers' effective implementation of CW-FIT after providing one-on-one follow-up coaching. This anecdote corroborates the HPT idea that "it takes a lot more than any one single intervention to produce workplace performance success" (Stolovitch et al., 2004, p. 90). 

I've worked as a third-grade teacher, so I have first-hand experience with some of the challenges currently facing students, teachers, and administrators. Consequently, my K-12 teaching experience has underscored my appreciation for education as vital to society and the quality of the lives of the people within it. So, I'm grateful for people like Borosh who are focused on applying scientific knowledge to address the problems in our current system. Borosh's emphasis on a slow, systemic, and systematic approach rather than a quick-fix solution that lacks follow-up support seems well-founded. And, despite its different name (implementation science vs. HPT), her application process and its underlying philosophy seem to share considerable similarities with HPT strategies. 

For comparison, here is Stolovitch et al.'s (2004) Engineering Effective Performance Model (p.48):

Perhaps the HPT field, particularly step 9 of the above model, could benefit from including resources from implementation science. 

In any case, I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to view HPT through Borosh's lens. I hope she continues to yield successful results from her diligent efforts. 

References

Borosh, A. (2022, July 7). Using implementation science and organizational behavior management to support the adoption, implementation, and sustainability of evidence-based practices in k-12 education. Pear Deck. https://app.peardeck.com/student/tgctovpmm

Stolovitch, H. D., & Keeps, E. J. (2004). Training ain't performance. ASTD Press.