You’re right that most school change can be improved by thoughtful “divide and conquer” approaches. We’ve used two in our work:

The first approach involves our own survey of a staff through a participant-observer model. We break the large group into four categories in more or less the same way that marketers divide up markets into groups of “early adopters” and so on. We have four groups: Leaders, Followers, Waiters, and Non-Pariticpants. And we have a set of “strategies” we apply to each group to keep things moving and as harmonious as possible. Pairing Followers with Leaders usually works well as does leaving Waiters and Non-Participants alone for a period of time while we build momentum.

Our second approach, which we can use concurrently, is to push a small amount of content-neutral curriculum through all classrooms. We have a cross-curricular teaching strategy guide that has been used in one way or another by teachers in all grade levels and subject areas. Nobody has to use all the strategies to be “part of the group” and everyone can find ways to change their teaching at least a little even without formal in-service training.

I really like the way you’re always thinking about simple ways to make the job of improving schools easier and more efficient. Lord knows, this is the kind of thinking we need in order to get better results and to take more good ideas to scale.