Don’t Blame the Scripts

0:05 Hello everyone. Welcome back to the DI podcast. I’m here with Naveen Risvi and we are going to be talking about uh her

0:12 career including this amazing award that you see here, one of two recipients,

0:21 two recipients of major awards here this year. This one’s the Siegfried Engelmann Excellence in Education Award. Naveen,

0:29 talk to our audience a little bit. What was your journey to this point that allowed you to be like celebrated in

0:37 front of all the OGs and all the folks that came out to the conference this year?

0:40 Um, I have to still caveat the fact that like I feel like this award is definitely shared with many many many many people. Um, I think one of the

0:48 reasons why the award really means so much to me is that it’s purely about helping children being successful and having really like high fidelity

0:57 limitations in the UK. So like that is first and foremost what I ultimately care about. I think it’s been a 10-year journey by the way like I started teaching Connecting Math Concepts (CMC) at Michaela Community

1:06 School which you are very well aware of and that gave CMC a huge um level of attention in the UK because lots of

1:13 people came to visit the school. So for example like Ark Greenwich is an amazing um free schools fantastic school my colleague Taran work was the principal

1:20 there they run the program um lots of schools in Dixons different trusts ARC they chose CMC and then from there when

1:28 I um left I then had a couple of jobs in between but then I joined Australia Academy trust and I thought we have a huge number of children who are not

1:36 proficient in mathematics they’re coming in with a numerousy age of seven and they’re 11 years old so we need to give them a really high instruction high fidelity diet of maths. We had

1:45 corrective maths in place with no NIFDI support and it was it was a train wreck and it was train wreck in the sense of

1:52 they were going through one lesson per three sessions. So that was a bit of a concern because they were never going to make that amount of progress in a year

2:00 and the thing is as you know in the UK as you know in the US in intervention program is very limited for a certain period of time before they transition

2:06 back into mainstream. So I was I asked my my boss if we could work with NIFDI.

2:12 So I approached NIFDI, met the team, heard about the implementation. I didn’t even realize they had contracts with chains of schools. That is how far the

2:20 UK was at the time. Um so then we um pulled in NIFDI, had a contract with them. Tamara Brley was our

2:27 implementation manager who was just like phenomenal and she just helped us with the structural arrangements, placement testing, um assigning kids, pre-ervice

2:37 of teachers. She just gave us all the guidance we needed to set up the fidelity of the curric of the invitation really well. So from midappril we

2:45 restructured the whole thing across four different sites which is quite a big accomplishment given the fact that it was just little old me and then I hired

2:53 John Owen, I hired Kevin Surrey. Um so that meant it worked quite well. There were definitely challenges there and I think the reality of the ground is when

3:01 you’re working in schools if someone leaves something does fall apart. So when I moved on and a new line manager came in, you people changed things and

3:10 like that limitation quickly folded. Um every man for one more year. Then I went to the learning trust and I really wanted to have CMC not as remedial

3:18 program. I wanted to be like how can we give children who enter school in year four the best math curriculum going forward. And that was Dar and CMC. Again

3:28 pulled in NIFDI. they were um Tamara was our IM and yeah the results uh came through and I think every single year

3:36 the SATs results in year six when the kids are about 11 will be better and better because the children have had CMC

3:44 for longer and think about the reception kids when they finish in about four years time they will have only known Connecting Math Concepts isn’t that phenomenal but

3:52 there are kids right now who’ve had some form of a mass diet that isn’t well written or necessarily delivered

3:58 fidelity and then having CMC and the staff loved it, the kids love it. Um, it did have its challenges but you know we’re in the better side of stuff now.

4:08 Now where we are the city of London Academyy’s trust and we’re implementing corrective maps sorry corrective reading CMC and expressive writing in eight

4:17 schools across city of London which is huge because it’s in the heart when I say city of London I mean there’s London which is the M25 then there’s a city of

4:25 London which is it own little kind of government state um and we’re we piloted with two schools again working with NIFDI John Owen as our implementation

4:33 manager but I just have to say as someone who’s done three implementations and done some support in Australia as well at mastery schools. I would highly

4:40 advise to always go with NIFDI purely because they just tell you all the information up front and it’s so much

4:48 better because what happens is in a school environment is that when something goes wrong or you don’t have good pre-ervice or you don’t have NIFDI,

4:55 the program is blamed. It’s not the leaders, it’s not the lack of training, it’s not the lack of placement testing,

5:03 it’s always the books. Like how can you blame like an object for a poor implementation? So I was always say

5:12 there’s a lot of people out there who will say they’re NIFDI trainers or that they’ve been trained by NIFDI or that they work for other organizations, but

5:21 I’ve had it without NIFDI. They’ve had it with NIFDI. And since NIFDI, I’ve never gone back. And I tell every single school or trust always go with go with

5:30 NIFDI because the kid the people that suffer from poor impmentation are the kids and that’s like and when you see it

5:38 for yourself you just you feel the injustice in you. Um I see kids all the time and work in schools all the time.

5:44 So I’m quite closely wedded. I would say to a school leader who has a DI program or who has um NIFDI support that you

5:51 need to be in the school and seeing what it’s like on the ground to see that the high fidelity is really there.

5:56 And you I keep hearing this word fidelity, right? And it’s it’s sort of a it’s a weasel word. It’s a word that that can be used in many different ways.

6:05 And I hear that fidelity for some folks is actually not desired because you want to respond. So the argument goes to the

6:13 kids that you have in front of you that teachers can bring in their own expertise I suppose to like to to to to

6:22 freelance off of the program or maybe there’s aspects of the program that you just don’t follow because you don’t think those parts are as important as

6:28 others. Tell me about in the context of implementing DI why fidelity is so important.

6:34 Yeah. So with the programs there are so many variables that are controlled primarily instruction and the kind of one thing that the teachers have to do

6:43 live which is unscripted is essentially the seven steps. They follow the seven steps in terms of the sentence starters but they have to like enact the seven steps to any error the children make.

6:53 Now with any program um some things are controlled some things are not controlled but the things that are controlled teachers need to have the knowledge of what those variables are

7:01 and why they are controlled. So I think when I say high fidelity, I’m thinking there are lots of factors that mean a

7:09 scripted presentation can be delivered well. For example, if kids are not tested for the program and they’re

7:17 having the program, some kids need it, some kids don’t need it, some kids definitely need it, or some kids could get by without it. So if you have the

7:25 wrong set of kids in front of you, you’re targeting the wrong children.

7:29 Another thing, if you have a program which is taught by more than one teacher, like one of the bottom set nine classes that one of my previous trusts

7:37 had four different teachers a week, they had no chance. No matter how good the instruction was going to be structurally, if you’re being taught by a different person four days of the week, again, that’s not going to work.

7:47 So with high fidelity, that kind of means committing to conditions that allow the best learning conditions to flourish. So having one teacher, having

7:55 teacher who’s trained to deliver the program, having somebody who timetables it where the kids have enough hours in a daily session. For example, CMC requires

8:04 70 minutes. At city of London, we given 10 hours in the week to accommodate the 70 minutes on a daily basis. So high

8:11 agility means creating the best learning conditions for the students to thrive in. I have seen so many implementations

8:18 where people just cut the corners on like oh we’ll actually give them 40 minutes and we’ll do three sessions per week. You’re paying so much money for a

8:25 program. I mean like the materials are really expensive and you’re going to give the kids the least ideal conditions. So fidelity is like how much

8:34 can you commit to conditions where the kids are going to have the most successful chance in closing their gaps and catching up to their peers? Because the reality is when children are behind

8:44 nothing’s going to help them catch up besides having more time and better instruction. You give them better instruction, but if you don’t give them more time, they’re not going to catch

8:52 up. So, I would say that NIFDI are very clear in their leadership institute, in their coaching institute, what are the

9:00 different conditions to put in place to allow it to work. Now, as someone who works an administrator, as a curriculum

9:07 designer, like schools are very messy places. They’re logistically very messy.

9:12 There’s so many operations that have to work. Teachers leave, teachers come and go, kids, you know, are absent. You have to plan for all those accommodations.

9:22 But to summarize my point, the more high fidelity, the better learning condition for the kids and the higher probability of

9:31 success. The minute you cut corners on the implementation, you start creating new problems for yourself and those problems are harder

9:40 to diagnose and then the program gets blamed rather than the conditions that were set for it to thrive in. But like I said, like I

9:49 learned everything from the leadership institute and coach institute to know how to put a implementation in place and it’s it’s possible. I think the reality

9:56 is schools have money and schools have leaders. It’s up to the leaders to make those decisions to allow those kids to

10:05 thrive. It’s possible. You can always move money around. You can always change conditions. At Athena, we had so many limitations because the schools had 50

10:14 kids. We had 50 kids in the school. We had four classrooms and three teachers.

10:19 We still made it work. It just depends on how much you want to commit. And you know and and maybe that speaks too to the importance of NIFDI in this that

10:27 like when there’s questions that they have seen over and over again with many different schools instead of like making

10:34 like an executive decision that might actually harm the the learning. NIFDI can help you navigate like okay should we do both addition and subtraction

10:43 corrective math at the same time maybe for these sets of learners but there’s some downsides for these sets of learners. All of those sort of logistical things I think. Um yeah. So

10:52 check out NIFDI.org. Naveen, I wanted to just congratulate you one more time uh on, you know, all your service and

10:59 commitment to like the DI community. Um and it’s just so great to meet you in person.

11:04 If you want to meet people like Naveen and um all the the rest of the OGs of DI, you you you come to Eugene every

11:12 year. Uh this is the 52nd NIFDI Conference in Eugene, Oregon, and next year is going to be the 53rd. So come on out and listeners take care.

11:22 Thank you so much for your time. Thanks Zach.