Four State Education Agencies (SEAs) are working together to address a common challenge – improving district use of data for strategic planning and continuous improvement. The partnership has developed a model process and product for working with districts and schools to help them improve use of readily available data for one program – Handle With Care (HWC).

Victoria Schaefer, Principle Education Researcher, REL Appalachia and SRI

Data and innovative technology are enabling teacher preparation programs to improve teaching and learning, help achieve social equity, and unlock brighter futures for all students. Engage in a hands-on demonstration of Teacher Preparation Dashboards rooted in a model for continuous improvement of teacher preparation programs.

Cali Stringer, Senior Consultant, UPD Consulting
Calvin Stocker, Senior Director of Operations and Strategic Initiatives, US PREP National Center

A network of charter schools is using improvement science and the model for improvement to uncover drivers of parent satisfaction with their experience at their child’s school. Descriptive analysis of parent survey data showed that overall satisfaction was high, but negative sentiment was also high. A sentiment-based driver analysis revealed that negative sentiment was especially high among parents who reported being “somewhat” satisfied. With this insight, the school team identified an improvement aim to reduce the percentage of “somewhat” satisfied parents and built a driver diagram to identify possible change ideas. They prioritized a set of changes that the team hypothesized would improve parent experience, reduce negative sentiment and ultimately result in a larger percentage of “extremely” satisfied parents.

Samantha Murray, XM Scientist and Head of R&D, Qualtrics

Personalized learning (PL) is an approach to education that focuses on building students’ identities as lifelong learners, so they develop a full-fledged sense of learner agency and ownership of their academic progress. This study shows Denver Public Schools’ improvement science research over the past three years, examining the equitable impact of implementing PL on both teachers and learners by studying the planning, implementation, and roll out of PL. Data explores changing teacher practice and learner outcomes with a focus on understanding the impact of PL on students of color in order to address the pervasive opportunity gap within the district.

Elisa Bowers, Personalized Learning Program Manager, Denver Public Schools

Marcus Foster Education Institute (MFEI) uses systems change strategies and Carnegie’s continuous improvement methodology to train all of its partners, including high school and college students, K-12 and postsecondary institutions, and nonprofit and industry partners. This poster will capture how data is used before, during, and after MFEI’s RESET event, a day-long hackathon where students are trained in continuous improvement tools and design thinking. Youth Design Teams are grouped with professionals from their career field of interest and peers that share similar college and career interests to tackle broader social issues that are meaningful to them in their own local community.

Janasha Higgins, Research, Evaluation, and Data Manager, Marcus Foster Education Institute

The Literacy Design Collaborative will share its experience in developing an analytic infrastructure and using real-time data to capture teacher engagement and respond to variations in its blended professional development model in over 100 New York City and Los Angeles schools, resulting in over 5 months of additional student growth in LDC classrooms.

Megan Jensen, i3 Grant Director, Literacy Design Collaborative
Chad Vignola, Executive Director, Literacy Design Collaborative
Suzanne Simons, Chief Academic Officer, Literacy Design Collaborative

As facilitators of improvement science, we lead big change initiatives. Sustaining change requires leadership from our community partners. Through a teacher’s voice, we will share the transformational and lasting change of one classroom teacher in the iTeachELLs grant project seeking to improve how educators teach linguistically diverse learners.

Melanie Baca, Business Analyst, Arizona State University
Malissa Chavez-Thibault, Instructional Coach, Arizona State University
Wendy Farr, Director, iTeachELLs, Arizona State University

Leading requires getting comfortable with change, challenge and failure. Successful leaders are proficient in strategic thinking, creating connections, and execution. Successful leaders consciously address the cultural forces at work in and around their setting, capture their work and are aware of how the cycle of change impacts their work environment.

PJ Foehr, School Lead/Team Chair, Hawaii State Public Charter School Commission

A framework for sustaining the collaborative engagement of educators can serve as a supportive structure while increasing effective teaching practices that have positive impacts on student success. Establishing community norms, employing educational protocols for data analysis, and utilizing a cyclical design to guide a process of inquiry are key to realization.

Cathleen Benedict, Assistant Professor, Director of Graduate Programs in Special Education, Centenary University

In 2018, the California Teacher Education Research and Improvement Network (CTERIN) launched a Networked Improvement Community across the University of California. This NIC aims to improve the preparation of teachers around a specific instructional practice: building on multilingual students’ strengths. Our poster presents this network’s work to date.

Carlos Sandoval, Ph.D. Candidate, University of California, Irvine

To be a great leader, certainly skills are essential, but what is often missing is experience. Simulations enable scalable experience to improve the use of good judgment in even the most complex situations and to build resilience to handle the associated blowback that often follows decisions.

Ken Spero, CEO, Ed Leadership SIMS

Texas Instructional Leadership (TIL) focuses on the coaching of principal supervisors in order to increase leader efficacy and, ultimately, student performance. This poster describes the impact that job-embedded professional development for principals and principal supervisors has had on student achievement in diverse school districts in Houston, Texas.

Ingrid Lee, Director of Accountability and Leadership Solutions, Region 4 Education Service Center
Alyson Schafer, Coordinator of Instructional Leadership, Region 4 Education Service Center

DIG Deeper is a research-practice partnership (RPP) that focuses on spread and sustainability of high-quality teaching practices that support elementary students’ engagement in critical thinking. DIG Deeper is working to promote teachers’ Readiness For Change (RFC) because large-scale, lasting change is ultimately driven by individual teachers’ motivation to change their teaching practices. Baseline data indicate discrepancies between teachers’ reports of their own RFC and principals’ views of their teachers’ RFC. Principals far underestimate their teachers’ RFC, which may result in them providing no, or inadequate, support to teachers striving to change their teaching practices.

Kaitlyn Ferris, Lead Research & Evaluation Associate, Outlier Research & Evaluation at UChicago STEM Education at the University of Chicago
Jeanne Century, Director, Outlier Research & Evaluation, UChicago STEM Education at the University of Chicago

Now in year three of a rigorous and iterative pilot to scale foundational literacy initiative to ensure that 97% of all students are proficient readers by third grade, practitioners at Pajaro Valley Unified School District will share their improvement science efforts to positively impact site and classroom level instructional capacity.

Michelle Rodriguez, Superintendent of Schools, Pajaro Valley Unified School District
Kasey Klappenback, Assistant Superintendent, Elementary Education, Pajaro Valley Unified School District
Lynda Pate, Coordinator of Early Literacy, Pajaro Valley Unified School District
Andrea Willy, District Grant Writer, Pajaro Valley Unified School District

Arkansas Early Learning is a federally-funded, non-profit organization that offers early childhood education services to children six weeks to five years. AEL’s mission is to provide a comprehensive learning program for children and families to develop the skills essential to their social competency. Children’s readiness for school and beyond is fostered through individualized learning experiences. Children progress in social skills and emotional well-being, along with language and literacy learning, and concept development. AEL uses Practice Based Coaching to customize professional development strategies to continually improve teachers’ use of effective teaching practices, in turn leading to positive outcomes for children.

Laura House, Coach, Arkansas Early Learning
Lisa Owens, Regional Program Director, Arkansas Early Learning

Colonial is growing an improvement network. Data defines our challenges, identifies positive deviants and promising practices, and drives our implementation plans. This poster showcases how intentional support and purposefully crafted learning opportunities support the development of this network. Learn how collaborative problem-solving is moving the needle on student improvement in Delaware.

Peter Leida, Assistant Superintendent, Colonial School District
Stephanie Callaway, Lead Teacher for STEP (Supporting Teacher Effectiveness Project), Colonial School District

The diversity in our classrooms is changing. Students identified as English Language Learners continue to fall behind their peers in all content areas. An improvement network of 400 educators shares their experiences applying Problem-Based Enhanced Language Learning, one method that aims to prepare all teachers to work with diverse learners.

Silvia Aparicio, Instructional Coach, Arizona State University
Brad Bostick, Instructional Coach, Arizona State University
Wendy Farr, Director, iTeachELLs, Arizona State University

The Niswonger Foundation was established in 2001 to make a positive and sustainable difference in education in northeast Tennessee. As a recipient of an EIR grant to fund the Rural Literacy Initiative Focused on Effectiveness project (or Rural LIFE), the Foundation provides targeted support for improvement in literacy at the middle school level utilizing personalized learning approaches. Rural LIFE is uniquely positioned to both validate the use and implementation of key literacy and personalized learning strategies in the rural school setting as well as develop and codify a suite of resources other schools can use as they seek to employ these strategies in their contexts.

Bethany Fillers, Director of Professional Learning, Rural LIFE; Niswonger Foundation

Orenda works alongside school/district teams to build a new foundation of systems and practices – grounded in equity, driven by data, and sustained through collaborative learning. A critical step is the Equity Discovery Study which elucidates local conditions and current systems that pose specific barriers to student success.

Robin Avelar La Salle, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder, Orenda Education
Genny Cadena, Director, Education Partnerships, Orenda Education
Danelle Almarez, Chief Academic Officer, Orenda Education

This poster describes how the first core improvement principle—make the work problem-specific and user-centered—is applied to the Partnership for Pre-K Improvement Washington Research Practice Partnership. Information shared include success and challenges in implementing a systematic, collaborative process focused on selecting research questions, the user-centered process undertaken to further refine sub-questions.

Maria Cristina Limlingan, Research Scientist, University of Washington
Jess Robertson, ECEAP Innovation and Capacity Specialist, Washington State Department of Children, Youth and Families

Three community foundations share tools and strategies used to build a culture of improvement in their regions. With an initial goal of increasing the college completion rates of underrepresented students, these leaders organized partners to engage in data-informed inquiry, sharing, and learning to collectively address challenges and ignite systemic change.

Laurel Sipes, Research Associate, John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities, Stanford University
Kelly King, Senior Program Officer, Education & Los Angeles Scholars Investment Fund, California Community Foundation
Kristen Beall Watson, President and CEO, Kern Community Foundation
Liz Newman, Senior Community Engagement Associate, John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities, Stanford University

This poster will introduce our NIC’s equity map, a tool that puts equity ambitions into concrete practice, and examples from two teachers on how they incorporated equity into their PDSAs and teaching. Our Student-Centered Assessment Network (SCAN) of Rhode Island-based secondary teachers incorporated concrete activities and routines throughout network activities.

Alicia Espinoza, Senior Technical Assistance Consultant, American Institutes for Research
Matthew Welch, Senior Researcher, American Institutes for Research

In this poster session, we will introduce the Center on Great Teachers and Leaders’ new READI framework. The framework guides practitioners on closing gaps and avoiding unintended consequences, by designing programs to improve schools, address shortage and develop teachers in a way that accommodates the characteristics of the highest-need schools.

Lisa Lachlan, Principal Researcher, American Institutes for Research
Etai Mizrav, Senior Technical Assistance Consultant, American Institutes for Research

At GO we work with families, educators, and community allies to win advocacy campaigns that promote equitable education systems and transformational schools. These campaigns are built by community leadership, aligned networks of community members who support the campaigns, and public communications that improve understanding, engage new leaders, and direct public discourse.

Maribel Lopez, Director of Community Leadership, GO Public Schools West Contra Costa

Major General Óscar Bonilla High School is a public secondary vocational school attended by 900 students, of which 70.3% are classified as vulnerable. The school had systematically obtained lower results than expected in standardized tests (92% students at the insufficient level). By working with the leadership team using improvement science, the average percentage of students at the insufficient level was reduced by 14 percentage points after a year (Language and Mathematics). The number of chronically absent students (students missing more than 20% of class days annually) was reduced by 35%. The number of monthly practice sessions was doubled, with no significant changes in sessions attendance (74% average), and pedagogical reflection of the data (98% average).

Francis Durán, Improvement Science Coordinator, Fundación Luksic
Valeria Acevedo, Improvement Science Coordinator, Fundación Luksic
José Gutiérrez, Project Director, Fundación Luksic

The Center for Talent Development at Greenlee has partnered with the central office of the Denver Public Schools to develop and improve a Talent Development Model using an improvement methodology that amalgamates improvement science and equity-centered design thinking. The poster describes the model, methodology, and the impact of both.

Yee Lam Li, Innovation and Improvement Specialist, Denver Public Schools

For the past two years, Renton (WA) School District has been working with community-based partners, extended learning organizations, and early learning providers in local improvement networks (LINs) to improve early mathematics and social-emotional learning outcomes for students of color and students from low-income families. This poster will describe the evolution of this work since the team’s presentation at Summit 2019 when the Renton LIN was in the early stages of formation, including how the principle of “keeping students at the center” paved the way for cross-sector continuous improvement to achieve racial equity. This poster session will also include lessons learned and early outcomes from their efforts.

Amber Banks, Senior Program Officer, Pacific Northwest, US Programs, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Jennifer Hogg, Education Associate, Social Policy Research Associates
Stacy Lappin, Director of Program, Sound Discipline
Ebony Pattenaude, Director of Renton Innovation Zone Partnerships and Early Learning, Renton School District

We seek to design an integrative model of Multi-Tiered Systems of Support and Restorative Justice using our change design team and process. By engaging a state-wide coalition of educators, we test solutions and develop a guidebook to support dissemination of best practices.

Nicodemus Ford, Senior Program Manager, Pivot Learning
Allison Carter, Vice President, Pivot Learning
Monica Ng, Vice President, Pivot Learning
Rhonda Beasley, Coordinator, Santa Clara County Office of Education

In Chicago, schools that fail to improve are very likely schools with high levels of student mobility, chronic truancy, and/or homelessness. Leaders of these schools face multiple challenges. However, because the churn of the student population is not generally recognized as a key variable in poor school performance, these challenges are not well understood. This poster will describe the processes and products of a network of school and system leaders supported by an IHE hub to address the complex problem of leading high-churn schools to improved student learning outcomes with a focus on PK-3rd grade literacy.

Lisa Walker, Senior Researcher, Center for Urban Education Leadership, University of Illinois Chicago

It is not enough to provide a “safe” space for girls of color to learn computer science. Broadening participation in STEM-CS must be systematic, ongoing work within the school community. The benefit of a researcher-practitioner partnership (RPP) is building practitioner trust through singularly focusing on their educational improvement goals. Our RPP engages school staff to work with researchers on structural, instructional, and curricular improvements that promote girls’ interest and experience in STEM-CS. We will describe the partnership work by showcasing the school context (via quantitative and qualitative student data), our logic model, and outcomes we are monitoring for continuous improvement.

Ryoko Yamaguchi, Research Scientist, University of North Carolina Greensboro
Veronica Madrigal, Senior Analyst, Education First Consulting

Partnering with districts for 23 years, Orenda Education ensures all students receive an education that prepares them for success in college. We work alongside district and school teams to build a new foundation of systems and practices that are grounded in equity, driven by data, and sustained through collaborative learning.

Bambi Smith, Achievement Specialist, Orenda Education
Carlye Marousek, Achievement Specialist, Orenda Education
Danelle Almarez, Chief Academic Officer, Orenda Education

Project I4 is a U.S. Department of Education research and practice grant that supports nested NICs in improving academic discourse in K-12 math classrooms. Learning experiences are focused on relational trust, academic discourse, and evidence-based observations to facilitate meaningful conversations with teachers and address issues of equity in their schools.

Lawrence Hodgkins, Teaching Assistant Professor, East Carolina University
Carrie Morris, Project I4 Coordinator, East Carolina University

This poster presents the findings from a two-year effort in one university redesign of its doctoral program in educational leadership around inquiry and continuous improvement. The university, in collaboration with its four district partners (through iLEAD), adopted improvement science and social justice as twin design pillars and CPED guidelines on how to redesign the educational doctorate to bridge theory and practice for advanced leadership development. The program redesign emerged from a modified grounded-theory approach, working through iterative cycles of inquiry, design and feedback around the course offerings, applied projects and the dissertation of practice, now being tested with multiple cohorts.

Margaret Terry Orr, Associate Professor, Fordham University
Andrea Coddett, Deputy Superintendent, Yonkers Public Schools

Today’s higher education landscape is in crisis, and colleges are closing at an alarming rate. The Community Solution in Higher Education™ illustrates how—when colleges collaborate instead of compete—communities win. This poster shows the challenge, solution, and impact of a networked approach—where partners share resources and expertise to achieve economies of scale.

Michael Horowitz, President, TCS Education System

We detail an effort in the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at California State University, Monterey Bay to address the accountability metrics of CSU’s Graduation Initiative 2025. Following two years of work with faculty and staff to co-create college-specific student success goals, we report on the establishment and use of improvement communities to 1) identify and implement change ideas, 2) gain and strengthen faculty buy-in, and 3) ensure continuous quality improvement for this work. This poster will be of interest to those working to incorporate improvement science into student success implementation efforts within higher education’s shared governance model.

Andrew Drummond, Associate Dean, College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, California State University, Monterey Bay
Kevin Grobman, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, California State University, Monterey Bay

A deep commitment to continuous data-driven learning and iterative testing is essential for strong performance in educational outcomes. However, making sense of all of the resources available and effectively measuring improvement in the education space is particularly challenging. The Continuous Improvement Roadmap draws from both external and internal resources to simplify and make accessible continuous improvement practices to build staff capacity to engage in a disciplined way. Our poster shares detail of the eight-stage framework from defining the problem to codifying insights.

Jessica Rosner, Managing Director, Internal Learning & Innovation, Teach for America

Why do some schools undergo reform over reform but improve little, while others manage to reverse a poor or downward performance trajectory? How do some schools do this in the face of challenging policies and dramatic changes in their respective student bodies, workforces, and surrounding communities? This research introduces three odds-beating schools (those with better than predicted student outcomes) to highlight catalysts for improvement that are attributable to their diverse student graduation outcome improvement trajectories. These catalysts include different discourses, alignment and coherence mechanisms, routine changes, and new opportunities for collective sense-making.

Kristen Wilcox, Associate Professor, Florida International University
Kathryn Schiller, Associate Professor, University at Albany

Learn key improvement tools and processes that led to sustaining change at secondary schools that participated in E3 Alliance’s network focused on tackling chronic absenteeism. This poster will focus on the adaptive and technical challenges encountered by school improvement teams that ultimately led to increases in attendance and academic outcomes.

Lauren Thomas, Manager of Continuous Improvement, E3 Alliance
Laura Koenig, Senior Director of Community Solutions, E3 Alliance

“Un Buen Comienzo” is a professional development program for early childhood teachers and leaders. The schools and districts that complete this program become part of a Continuous Quality Improvement Network in order to sustain practices and foster collaboration and innovation. This poster describes the process and results of this experience.

Pablo Muñoz, Continuous Improvement and Evaluation Director, Fundación Educacional Oportunidad
Alejandra Cortázar, Vice President, Fundación Educacional Oportunidad

The Networked Improvement Learning and Support (NILS) platform is an online improvement tool designed to accelerate the initiation and development of Networked Improvement Communities (NICs). It facilitates rigorous testing while disseminating NIC learning via curation and synthesis in order to help the network achieve its collective aim.

Jojo Manai, Managing Director of Collaborative Technology, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
Susan Haynes, Partner Success Manager, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

The UMBC Math Project supports math teams in six Baltimore City schools in implementing continuous improvement processes leading to improved learning outcomes for students. Teachers analyze student data and design instructional improvements using PDSA cycles throughout the year. This poster focuses on the process and experience of building improvement capacity at each of the six partner schools and the outcomes yielded over the past four years of continuous improvement efforts. Specifically, teacher agency and capacity have increased through sustained, iterative, and customized continuous improvement supports.

Joshua Michael, Project Director, UMBC Math Project, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Justin Holbrook, Assistant Principal, Lakeland Elementary/Middle School, Baltimore City Public Schools
Sara Krauss, Assistant Principal & Math Lead, Liberty Elementary School
Denita Plain, Assistant Principal, James McHenry Elementary/Middle School

The Mapping Personalized Practices survey provides insights into the practices being used in classrooms. It maps teacher practices across four domains, giving leaders insights into how PL is being implemented. Leaders can use survey data to plan professional learning, and to connect practices with outcome data to improve instruction.

Gerald Dryer, Director of Research, Personalization in Practice, UW-Madison

In 2015, the National Conference of State Legislators (NCSL) reported that 32 states had implemented some form of performance funding (PF) in public higher education, while 18 states continued to use the traditional method of funding based on enrollment (NCSL, 2015). Today, PF percentages vary across states, ranging from less than 1% to 100%, as do the measures used to assess performance (NCSL, 2015). Healthcare has decades of experience producing standard measures used by interdisciplinary groups to identify the need for change, make change, track improvement, and apply to reimbursement. What can public higher education learn from this experience?

Kathleen Curtin, Assistant Professor, D’Youville College

Teaching Matters partners with schools across New York City to improve instruction and assessment in ELA and Mathematics, with the aim of decreasing disparities for Black, Latino and low-income students. This poster will illustrate the ways in which we are strategically planning for improvement by building capacity to see the system from an equity-driven perspective. Specifically, we will focus on the improvement science methods and tools that we are using to engage teachers, school leaders, and our internal staff to perform root-cause analysis, develop driver diagrams incorporating culturally responsive teaching, and engage in PDSA cycles using culturally responsive practical measures.

Jennie Brotman, Director of Service Design, Teaching Matters
Jen Gleason, Senior Educational Consultant, Teaching Matters
Jacobē Bell, Senior Educational Consultant, Teaching Matters

The problem-solving framework builds educators’ capabilities to identify problems, test solutions, and evaluate. The University of Minnesota’s CEHD and CAREI collaborated to train administrators. The Region-10 Wisconsin-Minnesota Comprehensive Center provides technical assistance to SEAs, REAs and LEAs across two states. This poster describes these approaches.

Delia Kundin, Associate Director, Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement (CAREI), University of Minnesota
Kate LaVelle, Research Associate, Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement (CAREI), University of Minnesota
Jane Fields, Research Associate, Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement (CAREI), University of Minnesota

A foundational piece of new school-based collective improvement efforts is a commitment to iteration. Yet, initial studies of these methods in education find significant challenges to iterate on practices and structures. This poster highlights insights from educational settings where iteration is occurring and the conditions that facilitate it.

James Jack, Doctoral Student, Harvard University

Catalyst @ Penn GSE has engaged three networks of schools in inquiry communities dedicated to helping educators build capacity to use continuous improvement practices to face challenges. Our poster presents the insights from the first two years of working with these three networks, which were organized around themes identified as needs by participating schools: student sense of belonging, effective use of data, and teacher questioning in mathematics. We also present common themes that emerged across the three networks, as well as our learnings about building inquiry communities and supporting schools with adopting improvement science practices from the university perspective.

Sarah Gudenkauf, Research Assistant, Catalyst @ Penn GSE

Alameda Unified School District integrated the improvement process into a structure that was already in place – the School Plan for Student Achievement (SPSA) – with the goal of improving the capacity of school leaders in the improvement process. Using the SPSA as a structure familiar to schools, the District adjusted the process to include a deep dive into data to discover root causes, crafting theories of improvement, and continuously driving improvement through taking action and analyzing the results of those actions. Learn how you can utilize an existing structure in your district such as the SPSA to drive improvement in your district.

Lindsey Jenkins-Stark, Data Coordinator, Alameda Unified School District

As a community of practice, the Read Charlotte Data Collaborative partners with eight child-centered community organizations focused on continuously improving literacy outcomes of students in Charlotte-Mecklenburg county. Direct practitioners in the Data Collaborative adopt four behaviors: use common literacy assessments, use evidence-based literacy practices, sustain evidence-based practices with implementation drivers from the Active Implementation Framework, and constantly evolve practices with improvement science. By delivering a suite of supports: training, coaching, tools, and technical assistance, our team supports shifting four adult behaviors aimed at affecting student literacy outcomes across our community.

Deepti Panjabi, Data Manager, Read Charlotte
Angela Preston, Literacy Coach, Read Charlotte
Tyler Barnett, Data Lead, Read Charlotte
Matt Lynch, Sustainability Lead, Read Charlotte

The Writing Framework provides a powerful approach to improving literacy outcomes by supporting teachers in developing authentic writing performance tasks, collaboratively analyzing writing data, and implementing a targeted instructional response. The Framework promotes three vectors of change: the restoration of balance between reading and writing in the classroom; the advancement of equity in student outcomes through agency and voice; and the long-overdue addition of valid and actionable student writing data to educator dashboards. This poster will showcase our research and rationale, methodologies, and preliminary data sets demonstrating student gains in our pilot districts.

Susan Levenson, School and District Improvement Facilitator, Engagement Services Lead, Comprehensive School Assistance Program, WestEd
Robert Rosenfeld, Senior Engagement Manager, Comprehensive School Assistance Program, WestEd

This poster describes recent, enterprise-wide professional learning initiatives at Ohio State University. Collectively, the programs create sustained opportunities for new and continuing faculty to implement evidence-based teaching practices with the expressed goal of positively impacting student outcomes. Information presented includes interpretive analysis and assessment of the programs and their impacts.

Kay Halasek, Director, University Institute for Teaching and Learning, Ohio State University

The qualitative study discusses evidence of transformational learning, analyzing cognitive and social-emotional issues related to school leadership in economically challenged K-12 public schools. Sixty-eight purposefully sampled participants experienced the Reflective Processes in Action (RPI) and the Achievement-Centered Leadership (ACL) Processes. Researchers used inductive data analysis applied through established theoretical frameworks. Areas explored included how participants’ mental models shift as they critically reflect on their current practice. Findings include critical thinking and paradigm shifts in both the affective and cognitive domains. Through established frameworks, the transformational process is segmented to find particular strengths and weaknesses in the efficacy of the process.

Lorie Wolfe, Co-Director Emeritus, Western Michigan University

The Student-Centered Assessment Network’s (SCAN’s) first two years intentionally featured a relatively large number of loosely coordinated change-ideas. This decision sparked engagement but also challenges for shared measurement and collective learning. We now present tools and routines used during SCAN’s third year to reign in variation in the NIC’s featured change-ideas.

George Atupem, Research Assistant, American Institute for Research
Stephen Plank, Managing Researcher, American Institute for Research