The instructional loss as a result of COVID-19 has had a tremendous impact on student learning and has disproportionally affected those students and communities already grappling with the achievement gap. In response to this crisis, BellXcel and its affiliate SCRI used improvement science and agile methods to rapidly design and implement a holistic remote learning solution for summer 2020. Leveraging data collected and lessons learned from summer programming, hybrid learning options were then developed for the school-year. The poster describes the design process, program components, outcomes and findings, as well as recommendations for remote and hybrid learning experiences.

Jess Banks, Managing Director, Consulting Services, Sperling Center for Research and Innovation (SCRI) at BellXcel

The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an international evaluation that assesses 15-year-old students’ ability to apply their knowledge and problem-solving skills in reading, math and science. A related assessment, the OECD Test for Schools (OTS) is a PISA-base, school-focused assessment that allows schools to benchmark their results with student performance around the world.

Thousands of schools in the United States and 13 other countries have taken the OTS. This poster is about the schools’, principals’, and teachers’ commitment to continuous improvement, their long-term engagement with this international benchmarking tool, and how they have not only improved local performance, but are inspiring education leadership changes globally.

Chi Sum Tse, Analyst, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)

Schools That Lead (STL) has grown a Networked Improvement Community (NIC) of over fifty K-12 public schools across North Carolina working on a shared aim: Reducing the number of students with early warning indicators that are barriers to on-time graduation.

The STL senate bill included a mandate to contract with an external evaluator to assess the ultimate impact of the NIC on student outcomes. The poster will describe a) the process of partnering with an external evaluator to develop policy-relevant short-term metrics; and b) how an evaluation partnership can be used to support the success of a NIC.

Julie Marks, Director of Program Evaluation, Education Policy Initiative at Carolina
Sofi Frankowski, Chief Learning Officer, Schools That Lead
Dana Diesel, President and CEO, Schools That Lead

As a university-based induction program, the North Carolina New Teacher Support Program (NC NTSP) partners with educator preparation programs (EPPs) to prepare and support early career teachers. The onset of COVID-19 had major effects on the beginning teacher support provided by the NC NTSP program. One of the most challenging impacts dealt with supporting early career teachers’ transition from face-to-face instruction to wholly virtual instruction situated within issues of access and equity. Therefore, this presentation aims to address best practices on how the NC NTSP program developed new approaches to respond to the current needs of our pK-12 and EPP partners.

Elizabeth Hodge, Professor and Assistant Dean, East Carolina University
Beth Edwards, NC NTSP Director of Curriculum and Instruction, NC New Teacher Support Program
Marquis Mason, UNCC Lead Instructional Coach NC NTSP, University of NC at Charlotte (UNCC)

After nearly three school years, the Rhode Island-based Student-Centered Assessment Network (SCAN) began 2020 preparing to complete the hub’s work with teachers at three participating high schools. Unfortunately, COVID-19 arrived in the region, disrupting SCAN’s activities when the school buildings closed. However, as this poster presentation will show, the relationships, structures, and supports developed through SCAN allowed participating teachers to transition to virtual teaching with the benefits of network resources, routines, and colleagues. The poster presentations will share the experiences of navigating virtual teaching and networking, including successes, lessons learned, and plans for long-term sustainability.

Mary Bridget Burns, Researcher, American Institutes for Research
Erica DeVoe, Teacher, Westerly Public Schools, Westerly RI
Stephen Plank, Managing Researcher, American Institutes for Research
Matt Welch, Senior Researcher, American Institutes for Research

What does the improvement journey look like at the start? That’s what the leaders of Estacada wanted to understand and so in 2019 they began their journey. This session tells the story of that early journey that led them to achieve results and make improvements. These results solidified their commitment to improvement and to the ongoing development of their leaders and employees. This session focuses on anyone who wants to know what it was like in the beginning. It follows a team of improvers across year one, where they not only made impactful improvements and achieved results, it made them agile when Covid challenged them for the fight of their life. Their agility and ability to respond to change turned these early improvers into effective decision makers and were recognized statewide for their ability to turn barriers into opportunities.

Ryan Carpenter, Superintendent, Estacada School District, Oregon
Kathleen Oropallo, Director, Leader Coach, Studer Education

Principal and Teacher Led Conferences enhance school-wide implementation of continuous improvement by providing opportunities for teachers and leadership to present critical reflections, evidence of progress, examples of data tracking, and empowering stories. The poster describes how a program utilizes this structure across the school to build accountable teams and collective efficacy on staff to support equity with all learners.

Erica Crane, Superintendent & Principal, Sierra Academy of Expeditionary Learning

We share progress from the initial years of developing a statewide network in West Virginia focus on support and leveraging teacher leadership toward improvements in grades 6-12 mathematics. Central to this work is the identification and support of practicing teachers participating as “fellows” in a funded statewide secondary mathematics teacher leadership development program. We will highlight updates and lessons learned from the network’s chartering and initial improvement efforts. We will also look forward to the continued growth of the network—with additional fellows as well as teachers and administrators participating in local improvement teams led by fellows.

Matthew Campbell, Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education West Virginia University
Joanna Burt-Kinderman, Mathematics Instructional Coach, Pocahontas County Schools

STEP (Supporting Teacher Effectiveness Project) provides Delaware educators an opportunity to lead and learn. Teams leverage the strengths of our own positive deviants making both educator and student gains. SEEK, DISCOVER, CONFIRM, and SHARE are phases teams journey through, while using asset-based thinking, improvement science principles, and PDSA cycles to identify best practices that accelerate measurable growth.  The instructional core is the center of conversations – and promising practices are from our own Colonial classrooms.  This poster describes how network participants use data to define, analyze, goal set, and build both teacher efficacy and effectiveness.

Stephanie Callaway, Lead Teacher for STEP, Colonial School District
Peter Leida, Deputy Superintendent, Colonial School District

New York City’s transition to remote learning revealed many issues of equity, especially in the area of technology and access to the virtual learning space. One Bronx school used improvement science to take on the impact of access on student participation and completed assignments. The school identified and addressed the need for daily online instruction that was interactive and engaging, appropriate for students reading below grade level, and easy for parents and students to use. Intrinsic to this approach was a “bank of key symbols” that allowed students to independently navigate daily online instruction.

Marcia Feliz, Academic Response Team Specialist, Bronx Borough Office, New York City Department of Education
Rachel Nugent, Academic Response Team Specialist, Bronx Borough Office, New York City Department of Education
Lizette Aguilar, Academic Response Team Specialist, Bronx Borough Office, New York City Department of Education
Kris DeFilippis, Academic Response Team Director, Bronx Borough Office, New York City Department of Education

True systemic achievement and equity can be accelerated when the correct ingredients are present. In this poster presentation, we reveal two critical ingredients, adult expectations and proven reading outcomes through the A2i Professional Support System, that can be used to achieve educational innovation and expand impact across districts, networks, and communities.

Sarah Siegal, Vice President, Learning Ovations, Inc.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, schools nationwide had been rapidly implementing digital technology. Digital technologies promise to more effectively target instruction, engage students, provide rapid and accurate assessments, and organize and analyze data in powerful new ways.  Many educational leaders argue that these efficiencies can solve persistent problems and deliver more equitable education. However, if technology only improves the identification of student needs, the differentiation of instruction, and the rigor of accountability, it will simply reproduce the core aspects of the current system. This poster presentation addresses that, to deliver an equitable education, technology must be implemented using an equity framework.

Gerald Dryer, Director of Research, Personalization in Practice, University of Wisconsin–Madison

The researcher autoethnography studied her lived experiences as a Black woman in three school districts in Oregon. The findings showed that racial and organizational trauma, systematic oppression, and healing were the themes of her lived experiences. The researcher found racial healing by adapting the Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) to reflect her racial experiences, participation in Conscious Freedom Life Coaching, and Culturally Specific Interpersonal Neurobiology learning. A combination of these tools produced a healing network from racialized trauma: Breaking Cycles of Racial Harm, Breaking Cycles of Racial Trauma Harm- Building Healing Resilience, a framework for understanding and healing from racial trauma and a Black Indigenous People of Color Coaching Model (BIPOC).

Lisa Collins, Consultant, Education Through Engagement, LLC

The Network for College Success (NCS) supports a community of high school educators in Chicago who are shifting their practice to center and empower Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students and students of color.. Its efforts include applying continuous improvement methods to collect student voice as critical data in seeing the system producing the results in the schools they support. The team is taking the lessons learned from the data to center the values prioritized by students of color. The team has a mission to support identity growth and developmentally appropriate practices that attend to adolescent needs.

Andrea Cortes, Postsecondary Coach, Network for College Success, The University of Chicago
Carlos Samaniego, Postsecondary Coach, Network for College Success, The University of Chicago

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented disruption to the traditional school model.  The core practices of personalized learning: Learner Profiles, Flexible Learning Pathways, Competency Based Progressions and Flexible Learning Environments are all key to successfully re-imagining school in this new context.  By leveraging these powerful practices, schools can move beyond survival and towards being thriving learning communities.

Gerald Dryer, Graduate Student, UW Madison
Rich Halverson, Dean of Innovation, School of Education UW Madison

As COVID-19 highlights disparities in student access to technology, teacher practices, and instructional resources, leaders of equity-focused improvement efforts are working to continue making progress. In response to the impact on schools by the pandemic, our research-practice partnership examined what teachers considered to be the essential components of virtual instruction and how those components facilitate equitable deeper learning opportunities for their students. Results of this investigation highlighted teachers’ awareness of the economic, social, and emotional inequities students encountered during e-learning. These findings will inform future equity-focused improvement efforts in virtual environments, which is likely to be a long-term concern of the public education system.

Kaitlyn A. Ferris, Ph.D., Senior Research & Evaluation Scientist, Outlier Research & Evaluation, UChicago STEM Education, University of Chicago
Maxwell Kanter, Student, Outlier Research & Evaluation, UChicago STEM Education, University of Chicago
Huifang Zuo, Ph.D., Research & Evaluation Associate, Outlier Research & Evaluation, UChicago
STEM Education, University of Chicago

The world is changing and education needs to stop keeping up and start getting ahead. With disruption occurring on a global scale, the system of higher education needs to better prepare both students and instructors for agility amidst uncertainty. Can the way we think about a ‘course’ serve as a lynchpin for sustainable systems reform? This project began in 2015 with a comprehensive needs analysis, followed by design thinking sessions to create a viable proof of concept, and lastly the creation of a series of course-level prototypes run from 2018-2020. These prototypes have yielded incredible insights on how higher education can move forward with sustainable and effective digital transformation strategies.

Michelle Sengara, Team Lead, Strategic Innovations, York University

How do we talk about engagement? This poster presentation looks at a comparative case study that examined the language of community engagement contained in artifacts and documents of colleges and universities with and without a 2015 Carnegie Certificate of Community Engagement through the lens of leadership-as-practice. The purpose of this study was to compare schools considering the Campus Compact Community Engagement Initiative as each articulates policies, vision, and strategies of engagement from within classifications and regions. Vertical and horizontal comparison of the nature of language for community engagement initiatives and mission reflect a positive impact from the presence of the certificate.

Julia Dunst, Adjunct Professor, Healthcare Science, Alvernia University

This poster will highlight a three years partnership between the South Jersey Data Leaders Partnership (SJDLP) and the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education innovation center, Catalyst @ Penn GSE to create and sustain a Networked Improvement Community focused on learning and applying the principles of continuous improvement to address teachers’ and administrators’ variable capacity to use data to guide decision-making. The session will describe how the NIC has evolved as the NIC participants’ focus problems have shifted over time and how NIC leaders have adapted their approach to facilitating learning about improvement practices.

Sarah Gudenkauf, Research Assistant Catalyst @ Penn GSE, University of Pennsylvania
Megan MacDonald, Research Assistant, Catalyst @ Penn GSE, University of Pennsylvania
Marc Mancinelli, Director of Curriculum and Instruction, Lindenwold Public Schools

Our improvement community is made up of site and district teams wishing to continuously improve their systems by building on strengths, as well as investigating opportunities for growth. Enter our interactive classroom space to see how co-learning, reflective inquiry, and systematic collaboration are at the heart of this work.

Jennifer Biagio, Administrator of Differentiated Assistance, Tulare County Office of Education
Lisa Lemus, Staff Development and Curriculum Specialist of ELA/ELD, Tulare County Office of Education

Leaders skilled in continuous Improvement (CI) should be able to guide their staff in creating change around key areas. This poster presentation details how the Education Development Center uses a gradual release of responsibility model to build leader capacity. This approach involves modeling the process of facilitating staff through the examination of school and district data to identify key focus areas, conducting a root cause analysis, developing driver diagrams and PDSA plans, supporting teams in data collection and compilation, facilitating collaborative PDSA data study and development of iterative PDSA cycles, and documenting cycle learnings.

Anne Wang, Senior Research Associate, Education Development Center

The Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Appalachia and education leaders in West Virginia developed a data-driven approach to improve school-based supports for students experiencing trauma. Presenters will share co-developed tools and protocols that build capacity to use data to monitor implementation of a specific intervention—Handle with Care (HWC), a freely available program any school can adopt.

Victoria Schaefer, Principal Education Researcher, SRI International
Hannah Kelly, Research Associate, SRI International
Sarah Dec, Research Associate, SRI International

Design thinking and improvement science are compatible partners that, when married, accelerate improvement in NICs. Drawing on lessons from two Georgia NICs – one rural and one urban – this poster will offer marriage counseling” tips for NIC conveners. This poster is for you if you’ve been in a NIC but: felt alone; been frustrated by poor inter-NIC communication; given up on the more powerful possibilities of the NIC for you and are just going through the motions for the kids. You’ll find links to protocols that helped build powerful connection and vulnerability among districts, community partners, and intermediary organizations in NICs.

Stephen Plank, Managing Researcher, American Institutes for Research
Matt Welch, Senior Researcher, American Institutes for Research

Utah has perennially low Free Application for Federal Student Aid completion rates, but we know that high school seniors who complete the FAFSA are 63% more likely to enroll in college, with the number going up to 127% for students from low-income students households. And that rate jumps by 4% for each additional $1,000 in Pell grant funding received. This poster tells the story of the United Way of Salt Lake’s cross-sector partnership with six Utah schools that raised FAFSA completion rates 8% collectively—and 14% in one of the schools—by aligning partner efforts and engaging the schools in a networked continuous quality improvement learning community.

Alexis Bucknam, Regional Network Director, United Way of Salt Lake
Jake Housel, School Network Director, United Way of Salt Lake

Transformative change is hard work. Efforts stall for many reasons. Counterintuitively, moving too quickly without creating the conditions that will allow changes to stick, or creating a system where change happens ‘to’ people instead of ‘with’ people can actually slow or derail improvement. This poster shares lessons learned launching an improvement effort in the COVID context and makes a case for prioritizing the time and space to lay the foundation for improvement efforts through building relationships and trust and making the ‘user experience’ of those that we work with a top-line goal to drive the personalization of our support.

Kyle Moyer, Director of Continuous Improvement, Marshall Street
Giovanna Santimauro, Improvement Advisor, Marshall Street
Marco Castaneda, Improvement Advisor, Marshall Street
Tim Burke, Improvement Advisor, Marshall Street

The Tea Area School District is a rapidly growing school district. This poster session will describe the utilization of continuous school improvement tools and tactics to support and cultivate the culture as the school district doubles in size approximately every 10 years or less. The tools utilize including Employee Engagement Surveys paired with 30, 60, 90-day action plans; development of Standards of Practice; and integration of a strategic plan. Supporting the tools is a laser focus on students-first, commitment to engaging the people closest to the work with leader rounding, and an accountability structure grounded in collegial presentation and feedback sessions every 30, 60, and 90-days.

Jennifer Lowery, Superintendent, Tea Area School District
Tonia Warzecha, Director of Curriculum and Instruction, Tea Area School District
Chris Esping, Business Manager, Tea Area School District
Gayle Juneau-Butler, Leader Coach, Studer Education

In this poster you will learn from educators, funders, and researchers who worked together through the California Wildfires and the COVID-19 crisis to adapt improvement-cycle plans to respond to the needs of students, parents/guardians, and educators. We will share our insights from over 15,000 student, family, and school staff members about key themes including: obstacles to students learning, emotional and mental health, equity, and relationships. We will discuss the challenges to data-rich interventions during an emergency. Participants will leave with tools and resources to keep student and stakeholder feedback central to recovery and community resilience efforts.

Jennifer de Forest, Manager of Partnerships, Center for Effective Philanthropy, Youth Truth National Survey
Jessica Progulske, College & Career Readiness Coordinator for Student Agency, Sonoma County Office of Education
Amber Figueroa, Vice President Operations & Programs, Career Technical Education (CTE) Foundation

Blue Engine optimizes how educators work together to create engaging, individualized learning experiences for students marginalized by racism and bias. Over the last 5 years, we have codified an annual learning cycle for rigorously studying our Core Program Model, learning which practices drive impact for all our students, and consistently improving and replicating our most promising classroom practices. Our virtual poster depicts our annual improvement cycle, focusing on the codification and spread of our “bright spot” data practices. We guide the viewer to consider how to implement similar improvement processes in their own programs.

Emily Walsh, Director of Knowledge Management & Product Design, Blue Engine

In the midst of implementing a pilot-to-scale program with fidelity, the Pajaro Valley Unified School District (PVUSD) is evaluating their multi-tiered system of support (MTSS) for early literacy professional development in 3 classrooms using improvement science tools such as process mapping.  These process maps provide school sites with multiple entry points to understand, improve, and impact their system at various process steps. Additionally, these maps also bring together multiple perspectives to support the development of an improvement science mindset in the district. The poster presentation looks at this work of PVUSD and its aims of improving the process by which students enter and exit Tier 2 of MTSS  and advancing the development of a learning stance to improve its early literacy system.

Emily Supple, Post Baccalaureate Fellow, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
Kasey Klappenback, Assistant Superintendent of Elementary Education, Pajaro Valley Unified School District
Catherine Miller Young, Cognitive Development, School of Education, University of California Berkeley
Nicole Marsh, Coordinator of Early Literacy, Pajaro Valley Unified School District

Since all educators have a common passionate goal, everything just lines up for us when we are conducting improvement projects, right?  Not necessarily!  We often encounter dichotomies, clashing priorities, competing values, change resistance, and intractable problems.  Improvement leaders need to have a problem-solving tool in our toolkit as we face challenges in our PDSA cycles.  John Dewey observed, “a problem well-defined is a problem half solved.”  This technique works to define any problem by breaking it into its component assumptions and legitimate interests.   Learn how to use the Evaporating Conflict Cloud tool to solve the unsolvable and get to YES!

Alfredo Mycue, Co-Founder and Director of Strategy, ReEngine Consulting, LLC.

Plan, do, study, act (PDSA) cycles represent one common approach to continuous improvement. The Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Appalachia and its school and district partners in eastern Kentucky propose the addition of an important new phase that precedes the PDSA cycle – setting the foundation. The poster highlights this new phase, which includes ways to incorporate student voice to inform the problem of practice, theory of change, and selection of evidence-based practices before moving into the PDSA cycle.

Stephanie Suarez, Research Associate, SRI International
Ryoko Yamaguchi, Technical Assistance Provider, REL Appalachia, Plus Alpha Research and Consulting
Victoria Schaefer, Principal Education Researcher, REL Appalachia, SRI International

In response to the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, many schools have opted to prioritize social and emotional learning (SEL) over grades and testing. Drawing on interviews with K-12 teachers, this poster discusses what education can look like when teachers are allowed to value mental health over test scores.

Amara Cohen, Student, University of Chicago

School-Wide Improvement in Mathematics (SWIM) is a research-practice partnership aimed at improving students’ mathematics learning at elementary schools in a diverse school district. This poster shares the process of transforming a district into a learning organization through a partnership that involves a district administrator, a school principal, teachers, a mathematics coordinator from the County Department of Education, and two researchers. The first phase is centered on a Title I elementary school serving students of color from low-income households. The poster presents their process of building trust and supporting the school/districts’ goals through the development of a shared vision of mathematics teaching and learning, the creation of stable settings for collaboration, and the ongoing negotiation of tensions and challenges.

Rossella Santagata, Professor, School of Education, University of California Irvine
Jiwon Lee, Graduate Student Researcher and Ph.D. Candidate, University of California Irvine

Improvement Science methods have demonstrated particular success when used to address legible problems, for which precise, frequent, and meaningful indicators of performance are available. But many important educational aims (e.g., moving towards a more ambitious vision of teaching, disrupting systemic inequalities) may appear less legible to educators, especially at first. Drawing on a multi-year study of teachers’ and leaders’ experience with four CI methods across seven school systems, this poster explores how educators can creatively draw on improvement science principles to address these illegible problems.

Maxwell Yurkofsky, Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Jal Mehta, Professor of Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Un Buen Comienzo’s improvement network is comprised of 98 public schools from 9 school districts located in the 6th Region of Chile. This poster presents how district leaders created positive dynamics that had a strengthening effect on the network’s functioning. These dynamics allowed for the network to respond collaboratively to the needs of remote teaching in early education due to the Covid-19 pandemic through virtual network instances.

Pablo Muñoz, Chief of Evaluation and Continuous Improvement, Fundación Educacional Oportunidad
Marcela Marzolo, Executive Director, Fundación Educacional Oportunidad

The Bronx Academic Response Team was in the middle of collaboratively developing a driver diagram with a Bronx school’s instructional leadership team (ILT) when they had to transition to remote learning due to COVID -19. Upon relocating to the virtual environment, the response team identified the change idea of using Flipgrid—a simple and free video discussion tool for educators, learners, and families—to provide students with opportunities for choice, collaboration, and ownership of their learning. The ILT differentiated the Flipgrid activity through teacher modeling, choice over prompt, and format of response. Furthermore, by engaging in a virtual PDSA cycle, the collaboration gained a deeper understanding of the change idea and how to use improvement science to support challenges of remote learning.

Kaitlyn Reilley, Academic Response Team Specialist, New York City Department of Education
Kris DeFilippis, Academic Response Team Director, New York City Department of Education

This poster details an application of improvement science by a novice team at the Institute for School Partnership to support educators during their shift to distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. We describe how we onboarded our team with limited prior experience using improvement science, focused our work around a co-developed driver diagram, used an effort vs. impact matrix to select which change ideas to implement, and documented improvement with Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles. Presenters will highlight the complexities of initiating improvement work for their first time and in the midst of a pandemic which required a prompt but intentional, user-centered response.

Rachel Ruggirello, Associate Director, Institute for School Partnership
Abbey Loehr, Research Director, Institute for School Partnership
Maia Elkana, Evaluation Director, Institute for School Partnership
Heather Milo, Lead Instructional Specialist, Institute for School Partnership
Alison Brockhouse, Research and Evaluation Associate, Institute for School Partnership

This poster presentation showcases how an institutional focus on equity empowered faculty, administrators, and staff to explore gaps affecting students in the San Diego State University Commuter Life Learning Community. Using pre-and post-assessment data of intrapersonal competencies, reflective journals, and instructor and student descriptions of experience that were used to inform design improvements of a seminar course and instructor professional development, this poster will illustrate which equity gaps were closed and for whom, and what else was discovered from this collaborative project.

Marilee Bresciani Ludvik, Professor and Faculty Fellow, San Diego State University
Stephen Schellenberg, Assistant Vice President for Educational Effectiveness, San Diego State University
Randy Timm, Assistant Vice President for Student Life and Dean of Students, San Diego State University
Nina Potter, Director of Assessment, College of Education, San Diego State University
Sandra Kahn, Director of College of Education Research Analytics, San Diego State University