Lumen Impact Group
Lumen Impact Group

From Inspiration to Implementation: A Framework for Impactful Dissemination in Education

Published: June 30, 2025

Imagine you’ve built a sturdy, beautiful bridge across a deep river. It’s changed everything for your community, connecting people, opening up opportunities, and making daily life easier. Naturally, others want a bridge just like it. But handing them a photo or a list of materials won’t be enough. To replicate it, they’ll need your blueprints, your learnings from trial and error, and maybe even your help getting the first beams in place.

That’s the challenge (and opportunity) facing education leaders across the country. We’re not short on success stories. What we need are better ways to help others build their own versions.

Putting Best Practices into Practice

Across the country, innovative educators and systems leaders are working hard to develop and test best practices, strategies and models that are making a real difference in student learning, teacher growth, and school transformation. Whether it’s a school-wide instructional model, a high-impact data protocol, or a targeted engagement strategy, there are many examples of what is really working.

But there’s a catch: while we’ve made progress in sharing these best practices, far fewer of them are actually adopted and implemented to fidelity in new settings. Why? Because true transformation takes more than inspiration and information—it takes structure, support, and sustained commitment. That’s where a stronger dissemination strategy comes in.

At Lumen Impact Group, we’ve worked alongside education organizations to not only capture their success stories but to scale them in ways that lead to lasting change. And what we’ve learned is this: impactful dissemination is not just a document or a session, it’s a process, and we think of that process as a pyramid.

The Pyramid of Impactful Dissemination

Think of dissemination as a five-level pyramid. At each level, you’re helping others move closer to meaningful implementation, not by pushing more information at them, but by designing supports that meet them where they are and help them take the next step forward

Level 1: Inspire

This is your widest tier, the base of the pyramid. The goal here is to generate curiosity, energy, and excitement around a promising practice. At this level, dissemination tools include short videos, conference panels, quick overviews, or social media stories that reach broad audiences and offer a taste of what’s possible.

You’re not teaching the “how” here; you’re simply casting the vision and planting the seed.

Level 2: Engage

Once you’ve inspired interest, the next level helps people go deeper. This might look like a webinar, a downloadable white paper, or a longer conference workshop. At this stage, your goal is to engage participants in deeper understanding, how this practice works, what it takes to start, and what impact it has.

You’re not yet giving the blueprint, but you’re offering more context, credibility, and examples that make the idea feel both aspirational and achievable.

Level 3: Foundational Implementation

This is where the real transition begins: from idea to action. At this level, you provide concrete resources and supports that help adopters explore implementation in a meaningful but manageable way. That could include:

  • A toolkit with templates and guidance
  • Case studies and lessons learned
  • Community of practice sessions
  • Site visits with pre- and post-reflection
  • Facilitated planning tools or mini-pilots

You’re helping the early adopters get their footing, without expecting them to go all-in just yet.

Level 4: Full Implementation

At this stage, adopters are actively implementing the model or strategy, and this is where they’ll need the most support. This phase requires real-time coaching, expert consultation, and strong attention to change management.

Disseminators at this level might offer:

  • Implementation coaching
  • A residency or shadowing experience
  • Small-group problem-solving sessions
  • Change management resources tailored to local context
  • Monitoring tools to track fidelity and outcomes

This is also where you begin to identify common challenges and respond with targeted resources and responsive learning opportunities.

Level 5: Grow the Experts

The top of the pyramid is where transformation becomes exponential. Here, successful implementers become advocates and mentors. They can present at conferences, lead webinars, host site visits, and support peers at earlier levels of the pyramid.

This not only deepens their own expertise, it builds a distributed network of implementers who can sustain and expand the impact far beyond the originating organization.

Why This Matters

Dissemination isn’t just about telling others what worked for you, it’s about building a clear, supportive pathway for others to learn, try, reflect, adapt, and succeed. It’s a long game. But when done well, it leads to a powerful ripple effect: more schools equipped with tools that work, more educators who feel empowered, and more students who benefit from transformational practices.

So, the next time you’re preparing to “share out” a best practice, ask yourself: Are we stopping at inspiration? Or are we building a bridge to real implementation?

We’d love to hear how you’re scaling success in your community—and support you in making your impact even stronger.

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Cresthaven Academy
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Alabama School Readiness Alliance
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National Alliance of Public Charter Schools
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New Schools for Alabama
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