Concerns-Based Adoption Model (CBAM)
Video: Stages of Concern

Text Transcript of the Video

Gene Hall: "At the center are the three diagnostic dimensions: The Stages of Concern, the Levels of Use, and Innovation Configurations, and obviously, the one that drives an awful lot is the Stages of Concern. That's where the model's first name comes from: Concerns-Based Adoption Model."

Narrator: Stages of Concern, or SoC, is based on the idea that in order to implement an innovation successfully, you have to address the users' concerns. These concerns are captured through a questionnaire.

Shirley Hord: "Stages of Concern is a way of accessing information about people's attitudes, or reactions, or feelings about a new program or a new practice. In other words, it's the affective domain -- what they're thinking about it or feeling about it."

Narrator: There are seven Stages of Concern numbered from 0 to 6. Stage 0 is where the individual is unconcerned. The individual indicates little concern or involvement with the innovation. Stage 1 is where the user has informational concerns. The user would like to know more about the innovation. Stage 2 is where the user has personal concerns. The user is concerned about how using the innovation will affect him or her. Stage 3 is where the user has management concerns. The user is concerned primarily with managing processes, tasks, and resources. Stage 4 is where the user has consequence concerns. The user is concerned about how the innovation is impacting the students. Stage 5 is where the user has collaboration concerns. The user is interested in how colleagues are using the innovation. Stage 6 is where the user has refocusing concerns. The user is concerned with making the innovation work even better.

Archie George: "Stage 0 being, "I don't even know what this is." Stage 1 is, "I've heard about this, and I need more information." Stage 2, personal concerns, "How is it going to affect me, and what's in it for me. I'm not sure I can do this." And so forth, on up to Stage 6, which is, "I have some ideas how we might do things better." Those concerns show up as a profile, and as the individual becomes more informed, less personally concerned, more proficient with the use, the profile will shift, and you get a different picture of what the concerns of the teacher or the group are in a visual sense."

Narrator: Stages of Concern are measured by having the user complete a paper and pencil questionnaire. When the questionnaire is scored, the user will have a separate score for each of the seven Stages of Concern.

Archie George: "The respondent, the teacher typically, or prospective teacher, simply indicates for each item whether it's something they would see themselves saying. "Is this true of me now?" So there are 35 of those statements, and they simply go down and indicate on a scale of 0 to 7 whether this is a statement that represents what they are concerned about at the time. On the Stages of Concern instrument, the 35 items are divided into seven scales, and instead of getting a single classification of the Stage of Concern for an individual, you get a profile showing their intensity of concerns on each of the seven stages."

Narrator: The Stages of Concern manual provides detailed instructions for scoring the questionnaire and interpreting the results.

Archie George: "Each stage has five items, and so you add up the responses to those five items and get a raw score, and since each scale runs from 0 to 7, you could have a total score of 35 at the highest. For each of these scales, through fairly careful structure of a normative group, we found what is typical, so there is a percentile table, and you convert each scale individually against the percentile table for that scale, and that's where you come up with the profiles."

Narrator: The information gathered through the SoC questionnaire can be used to identify and address teacher concerns associated with the implementation of an innovation or standards-based reform.

Archie George: "Ideally, a change facilitator would pay attention to the Stages of Concern of the teachers in order to most appropriately address those concerns that are being expressed, and if the faculty, the teachers, the respondents basically, have high information or high management concerns, they would do different things than if they were lower in those areas. So it might be inappropriate to stress the value of the innovation for student learning outcomes when the teachers have very high personal concerns. You need to address those to find out what those are exactly and alleviate those concerns so that the faculty can get on with the innovation."

Narrator: The Stages of Concern dimension is a key component of the Concerns-Based Adoption Model, because it addresses the human side of change. It is also a very powerful tool, because it can be used to support an individual teacher or to evaluate concerns across larger groups.

Archie George: "And the Stages of Concern, in an ideal situation, would show a profile, a wave curve if you will, that would reflect whether or not the concerns of the teachers are being addressed. And it's good, whether you're working with individuals or working with groups."