Our first guest speaker was Amanda Borosh, M. Ed., BCBA, LBS-1. Amanda Borosh has a background in behavior analysis (ABA) within public school environments and is currently completing a Ph.D. in Special Education. Her expertise and interests focus on bringing research-based practices into performance issues within the K-12 educational environment. She is currently conducting research using implementation science at a public school to address the school's performance goals. The bulk of her presentation was an interesting discussion of the field of implementation, and its four main stages.
Implementation Science
Amanda Borosh's work focuses on implementation science, a specific field of science that takes a systematic approach to implement research-based practices. Implementation of evidence-based practices has four main stages including exploration, installation, partial implementation, and full implementation (Borosh, 2022). Using these four stages brings a systematic approach to implementing evidence-based practices into workplace performance settings. It also allows for implementation to be based on quality analysis and time to gather resources and plan for quality implementation. Amanda Borosh provided a practical case example of this field with her current work at a local elementary school within her area. For two years she has worked with her team to address the performance-specific issue of special education programming at the school. They are working in a specific area of implementation science called performance management.
Presentation Takeaways
The presentation had a lot to offer. The field of implementation science and its branch of performance management were new areas for me. I am mainly interested in understanding how workplace performance can be analyzed and improved in industry. This presentation was the first time I saw how performance improvement could look within K-12. While this is not a field I will be going into, the topic was still interesting and had many applications for industry. I will highlight two of my key takeaways.
First, the speaker started the presentation by pointing out the research to practice gap. Essentially there is a gap between what research says and practices being implemented on the job. Whatever field you are in, I think this issue is applicable. Many companies and fields tend to have practices that run behind research, or best practices struggle to actually be implemented. Her solution was to use a slow systematic approach to implementing new performance practices. This was a fascinating takeaway for me. The speaker purported a slower implementation process that has clear and purposeful stages as having better long-term payoff than "quick" solutions. This is a thought that I have been mulling over for the past week. Industry often wants quick fixes and fast implementation. I have personally witnessed many performance-based issues at work that could not be fixed because the solution was rushed and ended up causing more issues. Given my own experiences, I am inclined to agree with the presenter on this topic. However, where I struggle is understanding how to pitch a slow and systematic approach given that industry often feels you are inept at your job if you cannot get something done immediately. That is definitely something I will continue to think about as I move forward in this course.
My second large takeaway was the speaker's answer to my posed question. I asked her how she was able to come into the school as an outside consultant and have her recommendations received in a positive light. Her response was that for the first year, her team listened and built trust and relationships at the school. They were very aware that if they made quick recommendations that were unhelpful, the whole project would be over. In taking the time to listen and gather quality data from the school, they were able to build trust and make useful recommendations as consultants. This response stood out to me. As I have seen from our course discussion on HPT jobs, many HPT roles require consulting tasks. It can be difficult to come in as a consultant and tell organizations, companies, managers, departments, etc. how to fix their performance problems. Her answer resonated with me. Again, my largest response to that is, do performance-based consultant positions often get a year to build relationships? I would think not. I am not sure how to translate that time into industry, but I do think it highlights the point that the analysis phase should be given a lot of time and support as it may be the most important stage in the performance improvement process.
Personal Reflections
While I will not be working in a role of performance management in K-12 education, I found that the presentation was helpful in considering broader performance needs. HPT is a different field than performance management/implementation science; however, both fields focus on understanding and improving performance. It was helpful to see best practices and research-based approaches from performance management that may be useful to HPT. Several areas were applicable to industry. A large one is that improving performance needs a clear systematic approach. Simply guessing at performance issues leads to a complete waste of resources. Understanding the organization and the root of the issues is key. I also saw an overlap between the implementation stages of Implementation Science and the HPT Engineering Effective Performance (EEP) Model that I have been studying. The EEP Model focuses more on human performance in industry and has more steps, but it overlaps with implementation stages in a focus on identifying current performance and performance needs or gaps and implementation with continued monitoring or improvement (Stolovitch and Keeps, 2004). While there are differences between the two and the businesses they are used in, the overlaps highlight that to address performance issues gaps and needs must be clearly identified, multiple solution options should be generated, and then implemented with frequent support and resources. Seeing these overlaps helps me to better understand the HPT process by seeing the best practice approaches in various models and methods. Overall, this presentation gave me a better grasp of how performance issues may look and be addressed in a field and gave me a better understanding of the work a performance consultant may do. It was a great first step in practically understanding the HPT field!
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 [Peardeck slides].
Stolovitch, H. & Keeps, E. (2004). Training ain't performance. ATD Press.
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