Planning, Implementing, and Supporting Improvement

• District/ University Collaboration Continuous Improvement

  I am project lead and lead research on for the Design Improvement (DI) program, which integrates Design Thinking with Improvement Science as a means to collaboratively design and accelerate school improvement efforts that will lead to increased leadership capacity and equitable outcomes for students. The goal is to create and sustain productive system-level change that ensured equitable and excellent educational practices by addressing school-specific problems of practice.

  The DI process consists of five phases: (1) Discovery, (2) Interpretation, (3) Ideation, (4) Experimentation, and (5) Evolution. These phases are described in detail in Tables 1 and 2. The design process begins with understanding the problem in order to determine a specified and measurable aim and create a theory of improvement (driver diagram). Then improvement teams conduct Plan/ Do/ Study/ Act (PDSA) cycles to prototype and test change ideas linked to specific drivers or key leverage points in the system that are directly related to the complex problem of practice central to the improvement theory. The DI process should result in regularly collected and assessed data, closely linked to the aim of the theory of improvement. The theory of action for the professional learning program is:

   If we build capacity within a school to use a Design Improvement process to deeply examine problems of practice, ideate potential solutions, and implement actions that are monitored through an improvement science framework (PDSA) then schools will develop patterns of behavior, strategies and tools that will be sustainable over time and adaptable to new problems, leading to increased student learning.

  The University of Denver (DU) Educational Leadership and Policy Studies (ELPS) department offers DI as a School Turnaround Leadership Development (STLD) provider for the Colorado Department of Education (CDE).

  See more about the program here:
• School Improvement and SIGs

  I am currently analyzing and interpreting the data from a five year, longitudinal study of a school undergoing an improvement effort supported by 4 years of SIG funding. 
• District Role in School Improvement 

  Based on what we do know about which features of district context matter most for improving the struggling schools, we contend that the district characteristics related to school staffing, funding allocation, and resource availability are the fundamental components in relation to school performance. Our research questions are: a. In what ways, if any, do the district characteristics of staffing, funding allocation, and resource availability vary between schools in the urban, rural, and in between settings? b. What is the relationship between the district characteristics of staffing, funding allocation, and resource availability levels and school level effectiveness? We are using  publically- available secondary data for all schools and school districts in a Colorado from Institute of Educational Sciences (IES), the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Common Core of Data (CCD), and the State Department of Education. By exploring these predictors using ANOVA and multiple-regression, we hope to better elucidate how to improve struggling schools in in-between districts.

  Most of the existing knowledge of district context comes from major urban districts (e.g. Torre, et al., 2013; Villavacencio & Grayman, 2012); we intend to utilize the findings of our study to draw attention of policymakers and district leaders to recast improvement plans to consider the unique experience of struggling schools in in-between districts.

   Alexander Ansah, Sajjid Budwhani and I will be working on this study to present in November 2017 at the UCEA Convention.  They will also present it at the UCEA Graduate Student Summit.