What is our real influence?

There’s a lot of talk right now, especially on LinkedIn, about how educators should use their influence to challenge systems, change curriculum or teaching methods, and advocate for change. I’m glad people are having these conversations. School psychs should be in these discussions, and we have genuine insight to contribute to decisions about students, instruction, intervention, and how a building operates.

I think it's great to challenge reading instruction and non-evidence-informed methods. But what can I actually change in my current role? I don't always have a seat at the table when selecting assessments, choosing interventions, or deciding how data are used in my district (data is? data are? I landed on are). That's not a complaint; that's the scope of my role.

It got me thinking: what can a school psychologist actually change without any formal authority to change it?

I’m not asking that to argue against advocacy, or to tell anyone to stay in their lane. If anything, I think we underestimate the influence we already have.

A director I worked for would often say, “Positional authority is a myth.” I continue to think about that statement. I'm not sure positional authority is completely a myth. I think there is just more here to discuss.

Principals and superintendents can do things I can’t. Staffing, master schedules, district policy, budget allocations. That’s real positional authority, and it controls the structural conditions of a school.

My take instead is that authority and influence govern two different things: authority controls resources and mandates, while influence can shape execution and daily behavior. I've seen this a few times during my career. I've mainly been a school psych, but I have gone through roles where I have varying degrees of system impact.

I started as a practitioner following a rigid district model. There was almost no ambiguity in the job: learn the model, run the model. It was an interesting time when I was the only psych at a mid-size elementary school (1:500). However, I was the psych, social worker, and counselor. Do it all, but do it as a trained psych and figure out the rest along the way.

My next role took me back to more of a traditional role as a psych, but we were administratively titled, so much more autonomy in how to do the job. I had to decide how to frame a case, what data mattered, what recommendations to write, and how to navigate the room with teachers and families. I was the district rep on evaluations and IEP's. That meant more freedom, and honestly, more exposure when I got something wrong. I also had more latitude to work with my schools and navigate how I wanted my role to look. It was the early days of MTSS, and I wanted to move from test-place to intervene-monitor-then test. Plus, I wanted to intervene myself but monitor the outcomes.

Later, I spent five years as an MTSS coordinator. That’s when I really started thinking past the individual child. I was looking at professional learning, district-wide processes, and the environmental conditions under which staff operated. I probably learned the most of my career in this stretch of time.

I tried to stop trying to tell people what good practice looked like and focus on what made good practice easier to execute. I started to look at the work of Sutton and Rao on organizational friction (Scaling Up Excellence, 2014; more recently, The Friction Project, 2024). Their argument was straightforward: if you want more of a behavior, reduce the friction around it. If you want less of it, add friction. You’re not trying to eliminate friction everywhere in a system. You’re trying to make the right thing the easiest thing to do.

We were trying to increase reliance on data-based decision-making. However, there were several places where teams had to go to find all the data. Need screening? Go to the first website. Need monitoring? Try here. Want to create a plan? Go here. None of the systems synced. I found that if there was one place for it all, teams were much more likely to look at and use the data. Information had to be accessible in 3-clicks or less, or it wasn't going to happen. One place, less than three clicks, and things started moving! Provide ongoing and just-in-time training; results compounded. Make data a singular thing or tool vs. THE thing, and conversations about student needs deepened, and outcomes increased. Increase transparency and trust increased.

Fix the organizational friction, and you’ll get a far better return than you would from another professional development session reminding people that data is important.

The concept works in reverse, too. If you want a counterproductive practice to stop, look at what makes it convenient right now. Tweak the form, adjust the meeting agenda, or change the default option. Small shifts in friction can accomplish more than directives ever will. Make the desired practice easier to implement, and maybe don't spend time sabotaging a less desired practice; focus on the right things first.

Several years ago, we relocated to Ohio. There weren't the cushy MTSS coordinator roles for me to ease into. Back to being a building-level school psych. On paper, moving back to a building role felt like stepping down. There’s no coordinator title and no system-level lever to pull. It was a tough transition at the time. Now, I don’t view it that way. The work is just different, and by the way, to those who I said "just make the change", sorry....

My scope changed, and I can still shape how an evaluation is structured, how data is presented, what goes into a written recommendation, how an intervention is planned, and what questions get asked in a problem-solving team. I can help a teacher view a student’s difficulty through an instructional lens rather than a deficit lens. I can ask whether an intervention was delivered with fidelity before anyone concludes it failed. I can push a team to use progress-monitoring data to make a real instructional adjustment instead of charting points and moving on. None of those actions require an administrative credential.

Implementation Isn’t an Org Chart, I'm a big NIRN fan

Implementation science backs this up. The National Implementation Research Network framework (Fixsen et al., 2005) identifies three core drivers of implementation: competency, organization, and leadership.

What stuck with me is that the framework doesn’t reduce leadership to a static box on an organizational chart. Leadership includes both technical and adaptive work, and different people can contribute leadership depending on what the moment requires. This applies well beyond school psychology.

Teachers, school counselors, intervention specialists, speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, and behavior specialists are all trying to advance practice with zero formal authority over the colleagues around them. They don’t set curriculum, determine staffing, or write board policy, yet they shape the daily reality of a building.

• A teacher might be able to influence how a grade-level PLC spends its 30-minute planning block.

• A counselor can shift how an attendance team approaches family outreach.

• An SLP can help an evaluation team distinguish between a language disorder and an instructional gap.

None of them need to be an administrator to do that work.

That’s the practical idea behind distributed leadership. It isn’t about handing out leadership titles. It’s about recognizing that assessment, instructional, and relational expertise already live in places the org chart doesn’t account for.

Technical Problems vs. Adaptive Messes

Some problems in a school are technical. They require a clearer protocol, better decision rules, focused training, or a cleaner tool. We can design and pilot those solutions without mandating a single thing.

Other problems are adaptive. People hold competing values, a practice collides with an unspoken belief, or staff understand what they’re supposed to do but can’t see how it fits alongside six competing mandates. You can’t solve an adaptive challenge with a new Google Form. However, I have created some very pretty forms.

A school psych rarely has the positional authority to solve either type of problem by decree. But we can name the issue, ask a sharper diagnostic question, and build consensus around a more effective way of working. Problem analysis and intervention selection could be our niche rather than giving a WISC.

That’s the aspect of “systems change” I find far more actionable than broad advocacy rhetoric. Pointing out a systemic flaw is fine, and we should do our share of it. But diagnosing a systemic problem and changing it are two distinct jobs.

The internal question I use to anchor my work is simple:

What part of this can I actually move?

• If an intervention is flatlining: Can I help the team determine whether the breakdown is the core program, implementation fidelity, intervention dosage, or the initial diagnostic match?

• If teachers find progress-monitoring platforms cumbersome: Can I help find ways to reduce the operational friction enough to make the data usable?

• If my evaluation recommendations risk landing as generic or worse, impractical. Can I make them explicit, actionable, and tied directly to Tier 1 and Tier 2 strategies?

• If a building problem-solving process is struggling: Can I draft a streamlined alternative and offer to pilot it with one team? Personally, this one is the hardest for me now. Keep up with evals and building-level processes.

None of that feels like major moves, but it’s real implementation work.

Acknowledging the Boundaries

Influence isn’t a replacement for authority. Master scheduling, staffing allocations, district curriculum adoptions, budget lines, and state compliance rules require someone with formal authority to move them. Honestly, those are not my strengths either.

I prefer to be behind the scenes to gather solid data, define the problem precisely, build the rationale, and put it in front of the person who has the decision-making power. Call it managing up or influence; that's the work I want to focus on now.

Title never made much difference in my roles over time.

• School Psych (psych/counselor/social worker): I had control over how accurately I executed the framework. And how I built relationships with students in classes or on the playground (I had recess duty in January in Milwaukee-do NOT miss).

• School Psychologist (admin'ish): I had autonomy over my case conceptualization, evaluation design, and consultation approach. Worked with building and district admin to scale effective processes.

• Coordinator: I had room to refine processes, establish decision rules, and remove friction from systemic practices.

• Present: The scope is more localized, but the leverage remains real.

The central question is rarely, “Do I have enough authority to fix this top-to-bottom?”

It’s usually, “What does this specific situation need right now, and what leverage do I have to offer?”

Sometimes that looks like direct advocacy. Sometimes it means challenging a rushed team decision. Sometimes it means bringing clean data to an administrator and letting them make the call. Sometimes it’s the quieter adaptive work of shifting how a team talks about student performance.

Often, it's making a high-leverage practice a little easier, a low-leverage practice a little harder, or framing a conversation thoughtfully before it repeats itself tomorrow. Think about what can be done to smooth out the process you want.

I’m still trying to figure out what a school psychologist can influence. I’m increasingly convinced those boundaries are rarely defined by an organizational chart.

We don’t always get to make the final decision. We can still have a massive hand in what happens next.

References

• Fixsen, D. L., Naoom, S. F., Blase, K. A., Friedman, R. M., & Wallace, F. (2005). Implementation Research: A Synthesis of the Literature (FMHI Publication No. 231). University of South Florida, Louis de la Parte Florida Mental Health Institute, The National Implementation Research Network.

• Sutton, R. I., & Rao, H. (2014). Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less. Crown Business.

• Sutton, R. I., & Rao, H. (2024). The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder. St. Martin’s Press.