CBAM brings order to the tornado of change

By Donald L. Horsley and Susan Loucks-Horsley

Journal of Staff Development, Fall 1998 (Vol. 19, No. 4)

The Concerns-Based Adoption Model (CBAM) is a framework and set of tools for understanding and managing change in people. Created through a decade of research and development (Hall & Hord, 1987), CBAM has been in use for more than 25 years now.

We believe CBAM has proven itself an indispensable tool for developing and continually evaluating reform efforts, one that ought to be in every professional developer’s toolkit.

Mind you, our biases here are strong. One of us (Susan Loucks-Horsley) was a co-developer of CBAM, and both of us do a great deal of training and consulting with the model. But our faith is rooted in solid research and nurtured by confirming experiences. Both of us are reminded of CBAM’s key messages on a daily basis.

When most people think of "change," they have in mind a new program or practice: cooperative learning, standards-based science and math, or restructuring schools, for example. No doubt about it, these represent significant examples of change. But to be more precise, these are examples of the content of change. CBAM is about the parallel process of change, the natural and developmental process that each of us goes through whenever we engage in something new or different.

CBAM examines this process in three distinct ways:

1. Stages of Concern.
2. Levels of Use.
3. Innovation Components.

These describe the affective dimension of change: how people feel about doing something new or different, and their concerns as they engage with a new program or practice. This is the part of CBAM that many people think is the most helpful for professional development purposes. There are four general categories of concern — Awareness, Self, Task, and Impact — which encompass seven distinct stages.

Awareness (Stage 0) describes a person who either isn’t aware of the change being proposed or doesn’t want to learn about it.

Self concerns refers to the questions we ask when we hear about something new (Stage 1, Informational), and how it might affect us (Stage 2, Personal).

Task concerns emerge as we engage with new skills, time demands, materials, etc. (Stage 3, Management).

Impact concerns describe our thoughts on how we can make a program work better for learners (typically students) (Stage 4, Consequence), how to make it work better by actively working on it with colleagues (Stage 5, Collaboration), and, ultimately, being successful with the program and seeking out a new and better change to implement (Stage 6, Refocusing).

These describe the behavioral dimension of change — what teachers, for example, actually do in the classroom when making the transition from teaching one way to teaching differently.

There are three Levels of Use that define nonusers of a program:

Level 0, Nonuse — A person is taking no action with regard to the program or practice;

Level I, Orientation — A person seeks information about the program or practice;

Level II, Preparation — A decision has been made to adopt the new practice, and the person is actively preparing to implement it.

Before the CBAM research, the literature on change implied that once people had decided to use a new practice and were trained in its use, they established a suitable routine fairly quickly. However, the CBAM research revealed that there are significantly different levels of mastery. They identified five distinct Levels of Use among users:

Level III, Mechanical — This reflects early attempts to use new strategies, techniques and materials. It’s the point in our use of something new at which we often feel inadequate and awkward. At best, we feel as though we’re preparing a new recipe for the first time, constantly referring to the cookbook for guidance and reassurance.

Level IVa, Routine — We’ve established a satisfactory pattern of behaviors.

Level IVb, Refinement — People go beyond the routine by assessing the impact of their efforts and making changes to increase that impact.

Level V, Integration — People are actively coordinating with others to use the innovation.

Level VI, Renewal — People seek more effective alternatives to the established use of the innovation. (This is essentially the beginning of a new cycle of Stages of Concern and Levels of Use.)

The CBAM dimension we label Innovation Components (also called Configurations) recognizes the importance of identifying the specific parts of a change, and providing staff developers with hands-on tools for making those identifications. We call these tools Practice Profiles.

The Practice Profile calls on leaders of an innovation to formally define how it should look when it’s used in the classroom or building. The profile first includes a precise description of the resources and conditions necessary to implement the program. Then perhaps six to eight critical components of a program are identified, along with sets of descriptive examples of what each component looks like when used appropriately. Examples of a classroom practice can include definitions and descriptions of teacher and student behavior, often arrayed in terms of "Ideal," "Acceptable," and "Unacceptable" behaviors. (See the Practice Profile at right. Also see related article on page 21 for an example of how this process helps staff developers bring new programs into different schools.)

CBAM developers have created manuals that include detailed examples of instruments for assessing the major components of the model. Available tools include several instruments for assessing Stages of Concern, such as guides for analyzing written responses to open-ended statements, and questionnaires that can yield a profile of participants’ concerns. There is also an interview protocol for assessing Levels of Use, and procedures for developing a Practice Profile tailored to any given change.

These assessment instruments can provide baseline and follow-up data for monitoring implementation and determining content of follow-up support. There are means for aggregating data from individual practitioners so implementation of a new practice can be monitored in a variety of ways — by grade level, subject, building, and district, for example. CBAM data also can help key decision makers stay informed of progress in the crucial phases of early implementation, before impact on student achievement can be shown.

CBAM data also can — and should — be shared with change participants themselves. This can help them understand that what they’re experiencing is a natural outcome of having to do something new, and that they’re by no means alone in their frustration over once again being rookies in their profession. CBAM’s framework can provide a common language for discussions among the implementers of a reform (such as teachers) and the facilitators of the reform (such as administrators and staff developers). This can make it easier for these different groups to work together at evaluating staff development efforts and deciding how to make them more effective.

One of the greatest strengths of the Concerns-Based Adoption Model is that it gives credence to, and supplies a precise language for, the feelings each of us has when we are expected to embark on yet another new program or practice. It’s comforting to know that there are discernable patterns in the many different and powerful emotions we feel when adapting to new circumstances. CBAM helps us make sense of this change process, and provides those in the midst of that process with concrete tools for moving that process along and continually evaluating their progress.

Before CBAM, most research on change took a structural approach,

identifying markers along the path to implementation: the announcement of a change effort, then the decision to adopt, and then preparation and training. The assumption was that once a new practice was introduced to the workplace through initial publicity and training, its implementation was a fait accompli.

The CBAM research (complemented by other research of the same time period) changed our understanding of change in significant ways. Some of the more significant learnings:

Change is a process, not an event. This simply can’t be emphasized enough. Subsequent research on school change has confirmed that changes in classroom practice can take anywhere from three to five years to be fully implemented. More comprehensive, systemic change initiatives only begin to take hold in that period of time, because the phenomenon of change goes far beyond the individual.

Change is a highly personal experience, involving developmental growth in feelings (the Stages of Concern) and skills (the Levels of Use). More to the point, people need sustained help along the way if they’re going to fully implement a new idea, and they’ll require different kinds of help as their needs change.

An example: Several years ago, we watched two of our friends run in the Boston Marathon. One friend, John, was using the race to qualify for the U.S. Olympic trials. When he passed us, he was maintaining a world-class pace. We held out orange slices for him but it was clear there was little real help we could offer. We couldn’t possibly have offered the kind of elite-level advice or coaching that a runner of his caliber might have found useful at that point — if, in fact, he needed any help at all.

About 90 minutes later, our late friend (and a friend and heroine to all staff developers) Judy-Arin Krupp came by. Delighted to see friendly faces on a miserably cold and wet day, she urged us to walk along with her for several hundred yards. We passed along warm hugs and a dry sweatshirt before she set off to finish the course.

Clearly these two, while running the same race, had different paces, different reasons for being there, and vastly different needs for support and encouragement along the way.

Personal concerns are legitimate. Too often, personal concerns are dismissed as irrelevant or, at worst, the response of the dreaded Resister. But the fact is that resistance to change — whether demonstrated by asking hard questions, dragging of heels, or outright belligerence — is a natural phenomenon. It’s normal to want to know how something new will affect you, and to feel a threat to your competence, comfort, control, and confidence.

How long someone’s personal concerns remain, however, is another matter. A staff developer can help diminish resistance by applying knowledge of Stages of Concern. The critical point here is that decision makers who are convinced that something is good have already gone through the four general phases of concerns, from Awareness to Impact. They often need to be reminded that others must be afforded the same process, because:

"Every attempt to preempt conflict, argument, protest by rational planning can only be abortive...When those who have the power to manipulate changes...shrug off opposition as ignorance and prejudice, they express a profound contempt for the meaning of lives other than their own....(They) have already assimilated these changes to their purposes, and worked out a reformulation which makes sense to them.... If they deny others the chance to do the same, they treat them as puppets dangling by the threads of their own conceptions." (Marris, 1975, p. 166).

Hall, G.E. & Hord, S.M., (1987). Change in schools: Facilitating the process. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Marris, P. (1975). Loss and change. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday

Donald L. Horsley is an independent consultant and a senior associate with Keystone International, Inc., specializing in understanding and managing change in individuals, groups, organizations and systems. He works in education, municipal government, non-profit organizations, and the corporate sector. He can be reached at 5763 N. Placita Bacanora, Tucson, AZ 85718, (520) 577-2869, e-mail: Dhorsley@aol.com.

Susan Loucks-Horsley is director of professional development for the National Institute for Science Education, and director of professional development and outreach for the National Research Council’s Center for Science, Mathematics and Engineering Education. She can be reached at WestEd, 4732 N. Oracle Road, Suite 217, Tucson, AZ 85705-1674, (520) 888-2838, e-mail: sloucks@wested.org.

These definitions are an example of a system of evaluation to determine if a classroom is equitable toward races, cultures, and genders. Using tools such as these, classroom behaviors and values can be plotted and charted to show progress toward change.