PDSAE: The Case for Small Steps toward Change

I’ve often seen schools expect dramatic changes soon after they implement something new: a new initiative, a whole-school overhaul, a visible shift that everyone can point to. While that expectation is understandable, sustainable change is rarely immediate and obvious, and expectations of dramatic shifts can often work against it.

The evidence on school improvement points towards sustainable change happening in small, deliberate steps, tested and understood before the next step is taken. It is not achieved in a single sweeping move (Bryk et al., 2015).

Where PDSA comes from, and why it fits

The Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle is often used to frame organisational improvement processes. As set out by Langley et al. (2009), the cycle works through a process of planning a small, specific change, implementing it on a limited scale, studying what happened, and acting on what was learned before deciding on the next step. It is deliberately incremental by design. Each cycle is bounded, testable, and small enough that a school can adjust quickly if the context-based evidence doesn't support continuing.

The structure focuses on incremental, informed change. It doesn't rely on getting everything right all at once. It relies on being willing to look honestly at a small attempt and decide, based on the evidence, what to do next. This is where I think the Evaluate step is an important addition to the model.

Why I've added an E

Part of the rationale sits in a distinction Osworth and Cunningham (2021) raise: whether improvement is treated as an outcome or as a process. As an outcome, improvement is an end result: a score that has moved, a target that was met (or not). As a process, it's a way of working, the discipline of cycling through Plan, Do, Study, and Act again and again, embedded in organisational culture rather than declared at a single point in time. Unfortunately, much of the language schools and systems use defaults to the outcome view, and that shapes where attention goes: whether the statistics have changed, rather than what's been learned and how reliably it can inform the next cycle.

In practice, the loop back to the next Plan stage can happen too quickly, often because the outcome view has already declared success or failure and moved on. Part of this comes down to what the Act stage actually tells you: what you did, not the extent to which it worked, or why. Without the crucial Evaluate stage, schools can end up in a kind of organisational whiplash, racing from one intervention to the next without the evidence to know whether the last initiative is worth building on.

This is where a more critical approach to educational practice is important, and where Bryk et al.'s (2015) point about measurement becomes directly relevant: "we cannot improve at scale what we cannot measure" (p. 87). This isn’t about finding fault, but it is about interrogating evidence rigorously rather than moving straight from action to the next idea. This is why I've added a fifth stage after Act: Evaluate. Plan, Do, Study, Act, and then Evaluate the outcome of that action specifically against evidence, before the next Plan cycle begins.

An invitation to reflect

How often does a change move straight from the Act phase into the next idea, without a real check on how well it actually worked or if it needed more time? What would change if evaluation had its own dedicated step before the next cycle begins?

I'd welcome hearing from you, and whether it changes anything in how you'd run your next small cycle of change.

References

Bryk, A. S., Gomez, L. M., Grunow, A., & LeMahieu, P. G. (2015). Learning to improve: How America's schools can get better at getting better. Harvard Education Press.

Langley, G. J., Moen, R. D., Nolan, K. M., Nolan, T. W., Norman, C. L., & Provost, L. P. (2009). The improvement guide: A practical approach to enhancing organizational performance (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass.

Osworth, D., & Cunningham, K. (2021). Improvement science and the Every Student Succeeds Act: An analysis of state guidance documents. Planning and Changing, 51(1/2), 3–19.