Extending Evaluation Capacity Building Theory to Improvement Science Networks

Evaluation practices are continuing to evolve, particularly in those areas related to formative, participatory, and improvement approaches. Improvement science is one of the evaluative practices. Its strength is that it seeks to embrace stakeholders’ and frontline workers’ knowledge and experience, who are often tasked with leading improvement activities in their organizations. However, very little guidance exists on how to develop crucial improvement capacity. Evaluation capacity building literature has the potential to fill this gap. This multiple methods case study follows a networked improvement community’s first year in a public education setting as network leaders sought to build capacity by incorporating Preskill and Boyle’s multidisciplinary model as its guiding framework. The purpose of this study was to better understand how to build improvement science capacity, along with what facilitates implementation and beneficial learnings. This article ends by reconceptualizing and extending Preskill and Boyle’s model to improvement science networks.

A Rural School’s Adaptations, Improvements, and Innovations During the COVID-19 Pandemic

COVID-19 prompted unprecedented disruptions to schools with challenges particularly severe for high-poverty remote rural schools. This case study recounts the story of a rural school that had participated in a research–practice partnership (RPP) multi-year improvement effort prior to the pandemic and documents the ways the RPP and the school-based improvement team worked to navigate pandemic-related disruptions. This case study provides educational leaders with insights into ways to surmount challenges and innovate especially during times of significant disruption and provides prompts to consider with regard to the use of RPP support and improvement science-based processes and tools.

School Development in South Carolina - Building Leadership Capacity for Evidence-Based School Development in South Carolina Schools

This study presents two U.S. school development projects aimed at building leadership capacity for continuous school development that attempts to use “evidence-based” ideas from the standpoint of education values and understandings with a renewed sensitivity to culturally diverse students in South Carolina schools. The Lowcountry Educator Initiative (LEI) uses a professional development program designed for educators from various schools. School Improvement through Improvement Science (SITIS), stems from a larger university-school partnership initiative that includes other institutions around the United States. The two projects serve as compelling examples that push on the limited scope that federal and local policy requirements place on educational institutions to provide evidence of improvements that lead to educational success. This work offers qualitative evidence that honors, recognizes, and leverages the strengths of the participants’ contexts to facilitate improvement in practice. The projects implemented offer evidence for (1) providing leadership support for school improvement efforts, (2) the use of local context in improving practice, and (3) the valuing of various data to engage in locally-relevant and appropriate work. We recommend centering the local context and improvement science approaches in research design, research funding, and educator preparation.

Accelerating Character Education Learning Through a Networked Approach: Insights From the Kern Partners for Character and Educational Leadership

This article explores the utility of networked improvement communities (NICs) as an organizing structure for scaling character education across educational leadership programs through a case study of one network committed to integrating character education across varied institutions and contexts. In examining the improvement science process that guided NIC members’ development and implementation of character education approaches and their perceptions of and participation in NIC activities, this case study offers insights on the promise of structured collaboration across diverse institutions. Furthermore, it identifies the need for NICs to differentiate improvement science activities based on participants’ institutional readiness for character education.

Examining the Practices of Generating an Aim Statement in a Teacher Preparation Networked Improvement Community

Background and Context Continuous improvement and networked improvement science have emerged as prominent approaches to improving schools. Although continuous improvement approaches have generated promising results in education, how these efforts come to be enacted remains a crucial question that can generate insight into how these approaches can be improved. Purpose and Objective Our study is focused on understanding how improvement is performed by focusing on the process of generating a shared aim statement in a teacher-preparation improvement network. We seek to understand how practitioners within a network a) engage a central tension (between language acquisition and multilingualism), b) negotiate this tension, and c) reach a settlement that results in a shared aim. Setting This study takes place in a teacher-preparation improvement network as part of the California Teacher Education Research and Improvement Network (CTERIN). The focus of the network centered on improving the preparation of candidates to build on multilingual students’ strengths. Participants The improvement network that is the focus of our research consists of 49 teacher educators across eight teacher preparation programs as well as three facilitators who were part of CTERIN, including the two authors of this study. Research Design Our analysis examines the interactions among teacher educators and improvement facilitators to unveil the practices that they engaged in to produce a shared aim. Data for this study include audio and video recordings of three 90-minute videoconference meetings, audio–video of a two-day in-person convening, and improvement artifacts such as fishbone and driver diagrams. Findings Our study highlights the range of practices that practitioners engaged in and how those evolved as they negotiated and settled a tension between language acquisition and multilingualism. As the process of generating an aim unfolded, teacher educators engaged in the practices of aspirationalizing, dualizing, recentering, rerouting, clarifying, tuning, and converting. Conclusions and Recommendations We argue that these practices make visible that the process of generating an aim statement is a complex and complicated process that requires negotiation and a recognition that some perspectives are foregrounded and others are backgrounded. Understanding this process has implications for how improvement facilitators engage practitioners in the process of doing improvement and generates theory of improvement implementation by highlighting how disparate teams, individuals, and organizations reaching sharedness requires negotiating, foregrounding, and backgrounding.

Getting Better at Getting Better: Improvement Dispositions in Education

Background/Context Continuous improvement methods are becoming increasingly popular in education. Existing research has emphasized the technical aspects of improvement practice and has rarely focused on important social phenomena that underlie improvement work, such as the mindsets and identities of successful practitioners. To address this gap, we conducted an exploratory study of educators involved with networked improvement communities (NICs). Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study Two questions guide our study: (1) How do participants in networked improvement communities describe the key dispositions of educational “improvers”? and (2) What do participants report as the types of activities, social processes, and tools that enable the development of these dispositions? Research Design We used purposive and snowball sampling to recruit participants from diverse roles and who had received training in improvement science and/or had been involved in a NIC. We asked respondents to refer us to colleagues who were incorporating improvement science principles and tools into their professional work. In total, we interviewed 22 participants. Data Collection and Analysis We conducted semistructured, virtual interviews using Zoom. We audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim each interview for analysis. Through a collaborative and progressive process using NVivo 12 software, we applied open and axial coding methods to the data to identify emergent themes and patterns. Findings/Results Respondents report that educational improvers engage in disciplined inquiry, adopt a learning stance, take a systems perspective, possess an orientation toward action, seek the perspective of others, and persist beyond initial improvement attempts. Results also suggest that having opportunities to practice improvement with guidance from a coach, having access to a learning community of trusted colleagues, working in an environment where there are resources to support improvement work, and having leaders who model an improvement mindset support educators’ ability to engage in new practices that shift how they see themselves and relate to their work. Conclusions/Recommendations This study helps identify important dispositions associated with continuous improvement work in education. It also highlights the potential for NICs to bring about substantive changes in how participants connect to their professional practice, as well as with their colleagues, and how they pursue solutions to complex problems. Our research also suggests the need to provide educators with authentic opportunities to engage in fundamentally novel types of activities to cultivate new ways of approaching work that help all students learn and succeed.