GSE Theses and Dissertations

School districts across the United States are increasingly adopting Portrait of a Graduate frameworks to articulate the competencies students should develop before graduating. However, many districts struggle to translate these aspirational visions into daily classroom instruction. These frameworks are often paired with instructional approaches, assuming that adoption alone will lead to shifts in classroom practice. This capstone examines how a district can move from defining graduate competencies to intentionally operationalizing them through coherent instructional and systems design.

The strategic project was conducted in the Uniondale Union Free School District, a suburban district on Long Island, New York, serving approximately 6,000 students, 100% of whom are students of color and approximately 60% economically disadvantaged. Although, the district had established a Portrait of a Graduate framework, instructional practices were not yet consistently aligned with those goals. To address this gap, the project, From Portrait to Practice, piloted Project-Based Learning as an instructional approach for cultivating Portrait of a Graduate competencies. A teacher Design Team at Uniondale High School engaged in a collaborative process to redesign curriculum units using a research-based PBL framework, supported by structured professional learning, collaboration, and coaching.

Evidence—including teacher surveys, instructional artifacts, and documentation of design sessions—suggests that the Design Team model increased teacher familiarity with PBL, strengthened confidence, and supported the development of authentic, inquiry-based units aligned to the Portrait of a Graduate, with increased instructional ownership among participants.

Analysis indicates that enabling conditions—particularly protected collaboration time, shared instructional tools, and job-embedded professional learning—were critical to teacher engagement and instructional redesign. However, uneven leadership engagement and limited participation beyond the Design Team constrained broader system traction.

The findings highlight important implications for districts working to translate competencies into classroom practice. District leaders must establish clear instructional models, engage in strategic implementation planning, institutionalize enabling conditions that foster professional learning and collaboration, and ensure leadership alignment to enable implementation at scale. More broadly, competency-based visions must be underpinned by deliberate system design to effectively and equitably transform teaching and learning.

Ultimately, a Portrait of a Graduate becomes meaningful only when it is intentionally designed into the systems, structures, and practices that shape daily classroom experiences.

This Capstone explores the tension that high-performing large, urban districts experience between sustaining initial success with an efficiency lens and the imperative to learn and evolve. The author offers a clear path forward through on-going professional learning aimed at vertical development and strategic leadership. This intervention focused on the Executive Directors within the Division of Academics and Schools, a strategically selected set of leaders tasked with improving the conditions and outcomes for teaching and learning. The design of this learning series focused on both content and process that fostered the space for the kind of learning that would help the organization manage the tension between efficiency and learning. Evidence and analysis from this project revealed shifts in leaders' thinking, increased ability to see interconnections, and early signals for application.

The work of this Capstone is situated in the author’s Residency site, Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS). A major urban district with consistent performance gains, MNPS has achieved the highest growth status designated by the Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE) for four consecutive years. The author describes the on-going performance pressure experienced throughout the system — a pressure to continue using the established strategies that have led to sustained success. At the same time, Superintendent Adrienne Battle seeks for MNPS to become a learning organization, premised upon the need to identify new strategies to sustain an upward trajectory and to evolve to meet new demands and challenges.

The Capstone concludes with recommendations on how other districts, researchers and practitioners can use this work to consider broader implications for addressing this tension in service of students in the United States Kindergarten through 12th Grade system and their academic growth and achievement, both today and in the future.

This capstone examines how a global education consultancy can strengthen its capacity for continuous improvement by building the conditions and routines that convert individual expertise into collective judgment. Conducted during a ten-month residency at One World Network of Schools, the project addresses a persistent challenge: while consultants generate deep insight through partnership work, that learning often remains localized within individuals and projects rather than shaping practice across the organization.

Drawing on research in continuous improvement, adaptive leadership, and professional service firms, the project reframes improvement as a function of how organizations organize for learning, not simply the adoption of technical routines. Guided by Jal Mehta’s Continuous Improvement framework of mindsets, routines, practices, and relational conditions, the work tested a particular theory of action: if these elements are strengthened and embedded within existing ways of working, then reflection can reliably translate into action and individual expertise can become shared, strengthening consultative practice and the development of system leaders. In turn, this work aims to support more coherent systems that improve student outcomes across diverse global contexts.

The project drew on both internal and external evidence to inform its design. Internally, I conducted interviews with all team members and administered an organization-wide diagnostic survey, which revealed strong learning mindsets and relational trust alongside the need to strengthen routines and practices that translate insight into action. Externally, interviews with consultants from leading professional service firms surfaced consistent design patterns for organizing learning in judgment-driven contexts.

In response, I designed and facilitated a process of collective diagnosis and sensemaking that translated evidence into shared priorities and moved the organization from reflection into coordinated action. Building on this work, I aligned the organization around a focused set of continuous improvement priorities and designed pilot routines embedded within existing structures such as huddles, retreats, and project cycles. These included teaming structures for case launch, mid-point reflection, and case wrap-up, adapted from professional service firms to help One World organize learning across engagements. The pilots emphasized practice-based learning, shared reflection, and the codification of consultative moves that could travel across contexts. Early findings suggest that progress was bolstered by the work feeling collectively authored and grounded in real practice, with learning built into existing routines so that reflection consistently translated into action.

This capstone makes three contributions. First, it argues that the education sector must learn more deliberately from adjacent fields, particularly business and management consulting, where organizations have developed strong, time-tested approaches to building, scaling, and sustaining learning. Second, it advances a strategic planning methodology that builds collective design and investment while landing on clear priorities and actionable next steps. Third, it demonstrates how to launch and build continuous improvement within an organization, moving from early awareness and shared understanding to initial routines that generate early wins and begin to embed learning into everyday work.

This capstone examined how narrative power was harnessed and deployed within a national network and broader justice movement to influence systems change aimed at improving outcomes for opportunity youth, defined as young people between the ages of 16 and 24 who are out of school and work. The strategic project was designed and implemented at the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions (AFCS), which is the home of the Opportunity Youth Forum (OYF), a network of 45 place-based urban, rural, and Indigenous community collaboratives working across education, workforce, justice, and social service systems. While the network had achieved measurable progress in reducing youth disconnection, this work began with the notion that power operates through meaning-making and that durable change requires transforming the narratives that shape whose lives, knowledge, and futures are valued.

Guided by this premise—and grounded in Black feminist and womanist thought—the project tested how healing practices, coupled with narrative change strategies, could be operationalized through leadership practice, capacity building, network alignment, and youth leadership. It unfolded in three phases: (1) strengthening embodied leadership and a culture of care, (2) building narrative strategy capacity across the network, and (3) supporting coordinated narrative efforts and youth-led storytelling. Core activities included organizational care processes, narrative strategy trainings, cross-network convenings, and small grants to young adult partners.

The findings indicated that narrative change is not primarily driven by communications efforts but by the interaction of leadership practice, relational trust, distributed capacity, and coordinated action. Leadership practices rooted in care enabled collaboration, investments in narrative fluency strengthened leaders’ ability to challenge dominant frames, and network structures supported the spread and reinforcement of aligned narratives. Consistent with Black feminist theory on epistemic power, youth leadership proved critical in shifting whose knowledge was recognized as credible and authoritative.

This capstone argues that narrative power functions as core infrastructure for systems change. For AFCS and OYF, embedding healing and narrative strategy into leadership development, network learning, and youth governance strengthened long-term impact. For the broader social sector, the findings suggest that durable narrative change requires distributed leadership, coordinated networks, and the centering of those most impacted as authors and authorities of new narratives.

While instructional leadership has been studied by education scholars for decades, this body of work has traditionally been focused solely on the role of the principal. In recent years, a growing contingent of researchers have begun to study the potential impact that assistant principals can make on instructional leadership. This capstone presents a case study of what happens when intentional group development sessions and individually tailored coaching are offered to a group of assistant principals in a small, suburban district.

As the Director of Leadership Development for Reading Public Schools (MA), my primary role was to support principals, assistant principals, instructional coaches and curriculum coordinators in strategically moving the needle on instruction for the district. The district hired assistant principals for each elementary school for the first time in 2023. Senior leadership wanted to respond directly to requests for support from this group of leaders – the majority of whom were first-time assistant principals. This capstone documents the design and execution of a plan for intervention to improve the instructional leadership capacity of the district’s five elementary assistant principals. The basis for the intervention, in the form of professional development for assistant principals, is anchored in previous scholarship and frameworks from Elizabeth City, Linda Darling-Hammond, Philip Hallinger, Kenneth Leithwood, as well as many others. I also draw heavily on the Wallace Foundation’s seminal series on assistant principals.

This work argues that assistant principals can and should be a crucial part of any school’s instructional leadership team. They must not be left to deal exclusively with student behaviors or administrative tasks, as has historically been the case. With some intentional shifting of school and district priorities, a focus on efficient time management (to ensure the aforementioned other duties are completed nonetheless), and the opportunity to receive targeted training and development, assistant principals should be able to effectively contribute to a school/district’s vision of improving instruction for all students. In turn, districts that undertake this important work will also create an organic internal pipeline of future principals who are ready to lead.

The contribution of this capstone to the field of educational leadership is twofold. First, this capstone adds assistant principal voices to the literature in the form of pre- and post-intervention surveys and interviews. Secondly, it offers a low-lift, simple, and efficient roadmap for senior administrators to improve assistant principals’ leadership capacity in both small district and suburban district settings.

We face an epidemic of loneliness and a crisis in youth wellness. Reflective of challenges across the education sector, youth in Reading, Massachusetts face unprecedented levels of anxiety and depression, the impact of the Covid pandemic, and disconnection. Schools and communities are a crucial part of the solution. The heart of the strategic project I carried out as a doctoral resident in Reading Public Schools is to mitigate challenges through a multi-faceted focus on connectivity: strengthening connections among young people, with families, staff, and community partners.

This capstone illustrates the power of place-based collaborative action to cultivate school and community connectedness. Through strategic alliances with Reading Public Schools, the Reading Children’s Cabinet, the Reading Office of Equity and Social Justice, and the Reading Coalition for Prevention and Support, I developed and implemented a comprehensive initiative to cultivate connectedness and resilience through four major strategies:

● Elevate youth voice and agency to build a community of belonging through youth listening sessions at Reading Memorial High School to discuss students’ sense of belonging as members of Reading Public Schools and in the greater Reading community. ● Strengthen family and community engagement through a year-long event series with Phyllis Fagell, author of Middle School Superpowers, with concrete strategies and tactics to empower middle school students to thrive. ● Build capacity among staff for healthy, respectful relationships in the workplace – at school and in the broader community. ● Leverage an array of community partners to prioritize and coordinate youth mental health services as a community-wide strategy.

The capstone and strategic project it describes shed light on the powerful potential of public education in cultivating healthy interconnectedness. In a complex and evolving context, the school district serves as a vibrant hub of community engagement, illustrating the unique convening power of schools to build healthy relationships, connections, and find common ground – for young people and their communities to thrive.

This capstone examines a strategic effort to strengthen school leader collaboration and professional learning in Revere Public Schools (RPS), a diverse urban district committed to advancing equitable outcomes through deeper learning. During my 10-month residency with the RPS superintendent, two pressing needs among principals and assistant principals were identified: more opportunities to collaborate and share practices, and greater support in developing the capacity to lead for deeper learning. While RPS has strong, progressive structures for developing instruction and supporting teacher growth, a need remains to develop supports specific to the demands of the school leader role.

The school leader role has grown increasingly complex in recent decades, with mounting responsibilities, high stress, and increasing rates of turnover (Levin, Leung, Edgerton, and Scott, 2020). Recent literature underscores that peer collaboration and networks of professional learning are effective in supporting school leaders—yet such systems are often underdeveloped and underutilized in many school systems (Grissom, Egalite, and Lindsay, 2021). In response, I designed and implemented a Community of Practice (CoP) for RPS school leaders, focused on leadership for deeper learning. By grounding the effort in research literature on professional learning, social learning theory, and change leadership, the CoP provided a collaborative, job-embedded, and participant-driven model for growth. Through the CoP, participating school leaders formed practice groups, co-designed leadership activities aligned to deeper learning traits, and engaged in cycles of implementation and reflection. This model prioritized agency, collaboration, and alignment to district vision—important attributes of both deeper learning and effective professional development.

This capstone’s resulting implications explore how professional learning models like CoPs can be adapted to meet the distinct needs of the school leader role, and how leadership for deeper learning can be more intentionally developed across the education sector. This work demonstrates the power of embedding adult learning in structures that mirror the pedagogy we expect in classrooms—collaborative, creative, and student (or leader)-centered. It contributes a scalable model for leadership development and offers practical insights for designing professional learning that is participant-centered, aligned with district strategy, and sustains school leader growth.

Enrichment programs have been increasingly adopted in K-12 schools nationwide due to their impact on student engagement, academic achievement, and social-emotional development. The School District of Philadelphia (SDP) in partnership with the mayor of Philadelphia sought to mitigate the opportunity gap for Philadelphia’s children by providing Extend Day/Extended Year programming in 20-pilot schools in the district. This high-priority initiative was based on the needs of working parents and expanding access to enrichment programs. The district’s Superintendent, along with the mayoral appointed School Board, leveraged the expertise of members of various SDP departments and created a cross functional team to liaise with the mayor’s education team on this initiative. Extended day/Full Day and Extended Year/Full Year is defined as a comprehensive initiative to offer additional programmatic opportunities for SDP students and their families that include services before and after school, winter break, spring break, and during the summer months. I had the responsibility of supporting the roll out of this initiative and collecting data throughout the process to assess the overall effectiveness of the program. This capstone specifically explores the inaugural Winter Break Camp in SDP. By partnering with new and existing stakeholders, developing a comprehensive directory to aid in internal planning, and communicating pertinent information with families, the goal was that SDP and the City of Philadelphia would host a safe, welcoming, and fun Winter Break Camp for the families in Philadelphia. This capstone explores the collaborative process between the school district and the mayor’s office, while simultaneously exploring my leadership learning throughout the strategic project.

The City Schools of Decatur (CSD), located six miles northeast of Atlanta, Georgia, is a high-performing school district. At first glance, high student achievement results are evidence of outstanding teaching and learning for all students within the school district. However, when achievement data is disaggregated, a different narrative unfolds.

The achievement data for CSD students who identify as Black is far lower than that of their White counterparts. Some student groups have historically been underserved because educators have not provided them with the tools they need to learn and grow. This has been a matter of fact in CSD for decades. Upon the arrival of a new superintendent in the Spring of 2023, it was time for CSD to find the courage for growth and change.

Research shows that school principals have the wherewithal to facilitate change in favor of improved student outcomes. CSD school leaders have the potential to serve all students with support structures in place. As such, tracking and facilitating support could lead to a new CSD narrative. The district and school leadership could become the mobilizers of educational equity, ensuring all students are served according to their learning needs.

Surfacing the courage to lead in CSD required a three-pronged strategic approach that served as the basis for this capstone project. All three prongs leveraged school principals as the agent of change in schools. The first prong focused on facilitating canvas walkthroughs for principals to receive instructional feedback from district leadership. The second prong involved the creation of a school leader playbook that clarified the expectations and district supports that sought to ignite courage in CSD school leaders–courage so they may be true vanguards of data-driven instruction and educational equity. The third prong leveraged school support visits and the strategy that comes with an instructional cabinet support tracker. When the district leadership acts in the spirit of true collaboration, support to principals is stronger and more effective. The canvas walkthroughs, school leader playbook, and instructional cabinet support tracker led to changes in adult behavior that impacted teaching and learning in the classroom and to positive achievement results.

One common challenge that organizations engaged in collective impact (Kania & Kramer, 2011) face is a growing need to reach broader audiences and inspire new leaders to advance this work. This capstone explores strategies to expand student engagement with organizations practicing collective impact, through the lens of The EdRedesign Lab (EdRedesign) at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I leveraged the organization’s senior fellowship program, which supports best-in-class leaders, to introduce students to EdRedesign and the collective impact field.

A pivotal moment came when survey data revealed that this emergent field’s vocabulary may create a barrier to entry for students and other professionals. Findings showed widespread unfamiliarity with key terms such as collective impact, cross-sector work, backbone organization, among others. To address this communication barrier, I launched an informal awareness campaign using storytelling to explain collective impact work, demystifying the vocabulary and increasing accessibility. To generate student engagement, I leveraged my connections at Harvard through my roles as a doctoral student, first-year experience residential proctor, and fellow. These efforts contributed to the creation and launch of a new pilot program, the Cradle-to-Career Summer Fellowship, aimed at providing undergraduate students with summer experiential learning at a collective impact organization. The fellowship may serve as a model for organizations across the country to adopt in their efforts to engage undergraduate students.

I make concrete recommendations to address both technical and adaptive challenges (Heifetz, 1994) that organizations may encounter when implementing similar practices. I also identify implications for my leadership and the sector at large. Through this engagement project, I experienced managing from the middle, aligning my workstyle with the organization’s culture, and deepening my understanding of the collective impact ecosystem. My experience as a resident allowed me to learn from a strategic-minded team, reflect on my leadership style, and practice my immunity-to-change goals (Kegan & Lahey, 2009). On a broader level, this work reinforced the importance of intentionally developing a culture of mentorship to scale leadership and ultimately increase impact.