(Originally titled “Linking Continuous Improvement and Adaptive Leadership”)
In this Educational Leadership article, Jal Mehta (Harvard University), Max Yurkofsky (Radford University), and Kim Frumin (Deeper Learning Dozen) say the continuous improvement process, widely implemented in business, health care, and education, usually calls for (a) defining a problem, (b) developing a strategy, (c) trying it out, (d) assessing how it’s working, (e) making adjustments, and (f) repeating the process.
But in a study of continuous improvement in four school districts in the U.S. and Canada, Mehta, Yurkofsky, and Frumin found that it’s not “the linear process that it is often understood to be; instead, there is a lot more leadership skill, relationship building, political savvy, judgment, and personal touch involved.” Here’s what was happening in the most successful schools:
• Forging a collective purpose – Leaders developed “a shared desire to move toward a common destination,” say the authors. This is challenging in K-12 schools because of the lack of agreement on goals and measures, a norm of privacy in classrooms, and disagreement on what good teaching looks like. “But when people do come together to work in a disciplined way on an identified problem,” they say, “remarkable things can happen.”
An example: in the late 1990s, the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research found that when ninth graders were “off track” on several key indicators, they were much more likely to drop out. By focusing on getting freshmen on track, Chicago boosted its graduation rate from 60 percent in 2007 to 82 percent in 2020. The key to success was that principals and teachers deeply believed that their work would produce an important result – important for their kids, their colleagues, and their communities.
• Implementing with integrity versus fidelity – The authors critique the rigid implementation of a program in one school, resulting in delayed problem identification, lost momentum, and disappointing results. In another school, teachers looked for new strategies to address problems they’d previously identified. “Many of the teachers were inspired by their colleagues’ different approaches to instruction,” say the authors, “and made significant changes to their own practice as a result.” The leaders in this school listened, “trying to understand clearly where their team members were (in mood, energy, and commitment) – and then adapting based on what they were learning.”
• Developing dispositions – The most successful schools kept their eye on key processes versus step-by-step implementation of continuous improvement. “Perhaps the most important disposition,” say the authors, “is a commitment to disciplined, reflective inquiry, drawing on multiple sources of data and evidence. After a long focus on accountability, during which many teachers have felt controlled by data, in these cases, the teachers begin to feel the data are working for them.” The authors suggest using a variety of data – the voices of students and community members as well as test scores – and “holding data lightly” as problems are analyzed and solved.
• Building a culture of trust – In the most successful schools, this is what made the difference, motivating teachers’ sustained effort and energy for the mission. Trust also made it possible to have difficult conversations. “As people became more invested in one another,” say the authors, “they felt freer to share what was happening in their classrooms and share what was really on their minds.”
• Finding the right frequency for meetings – Given the demands on teachers’ time and the tendency for districts to load teachers with one new initiative after another, the authors found it was crucial to find the Goldilocks zone for collaboration. One district had success with every-other-week “huddle-calls” in which teacher teams gathered online for a half hour after school to recount struggles and share suggestions. Teachers liked this structure, say Mehta, Yurkofsky, and Frumin, because it was “small and personal, focused directly on what they were teaching, and gave them new ideas of things they could try” – without overmanaging them or requiring identical strategies. This approach “can lead to incremental improvement without radically revamping how schools normally work.”
• Buffering teachers from incoherence – A final role for leaders, say the authors, is making sure teachers aren’t discombobulated by conflicting demands on their time and attention. In one district they studied, an innovative constructivist biology initiative could have been jeopardized by rigid implementation of the teacher-evaluation process. A savvy university partner showed school administrators how teachers’ new pedagogy dovetailed with the district’s evaluation rubric.
“Linking Continuous Improvement and Adaptive Leadership” by Jal Mehta, Max Yurkofsky, and Kim Frumin in Educational Leadership, March 2022 (Vol. 79, #6, pp. 36-41); the authors can be reached at jal_mehta@gse.harvard.edu, myurkofsky@radford.edu, and kim_frumin@gse.harvard.edu.
Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #926 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.
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