GSE Theses and Dissertations

Despite efforts over the past twenty-five years at the federal, state and local level to create formal teacher leadership roles, the responsibilities of teachers in the public school system have remained stubbornly persistent. With few aberrations, the role of a teacher on his/her first day is likely to be very similar to her/his last (Donaldson et al., 2008). Recently, there are signs that this stability may be disrupted; new and diverse teacher leadership roles and career opportunities may be emerging in the sector. One prominent example of teachers taking significant leadership roles is Teach Plus’ Teacher Turnaround Team Initiative (T3). This program recruits, trains, and supports a cohort of effective and experienced teachers to play formal leadership roles within a turnaround school. T3 has a track record of results and is rapidly expanding to cities across the country. Designed as a three-year program, the initial cohort of schools in the first partner district is now ending the formal initiative and Teach Plus is faced with the important question of what type of support, if any, the organization should provide these schools post T3. My strategic project focused on creating a menu of options, in a fee for service model, in which the principals of schools exiting T3 could purchase is they desired to continue a level of partnership after the three year formal initiative ended. This Capstone Paper reviews the knowledge base surrounding teacher leadership with a particular focus on second stage teachers (70% of T3 Teacher Leaders have between 3-10 years experience). I then explain the strategic project in detail and offer an analysis with special attention to three different dimensions: 1) The impact on the specific project to the organization and the reasons for it’s success or failure. 2) The challenge of sustainability to the overall initiative. 3) The technical and adaptive challenges of expanding teacher leadership at scale in the education sector. Reviewing the lessons learned in research and through the project, I suggest that three main components would help shift T3 from a successful entrepreneurial start up to a sustainable approach to reform: 1) Identifying a permanent source of funding. 2) Incorporating principal leadership development into the program design. 3) Developing capacity at the district level to build an on-going system of support. I will also suggest that the T3 initiative has implications on the education sector at large. I argue that the T3 Initiative proves that with the proper support, teacher leadership has the potential to build the collective capacity for school turnarounds; that principal leadership matters and must be intentionally developed; and that scaling T3 requires districts to integrate innovative approaches to developing teacher leadership into the overall strategic human capital management of the district. Finally, I reflect on personal lessons learned and explain how the T3 Initiative reaffirmed my belief that ambitious reform initiatives require comprehensive support, collective ownership, and a plan for sustainability.

For my residency, I served as the Director of the Pathways to Prosperity Network (PtoP Network), a multistate initiative co-led by Jobs for the Future (JFF) and the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) that focuses on “ensuring that many more young people complete high school, attain a postsecondary credential with currency in the labor market, and launch into a career while leaving open the prospect of further education” (HGSE, 2012). JFF, my residency partner organization, is a national nonprofit that works with states, districts, and other partners to “design and drive the adoption of education and career pathways leading from college readiness to career advancement for those struggling to succeed in today’s economy” (JFF, 2013). The primary guiding questions for my residency were: “How does a state take a good idea and put it into practice with measurable outcomes on the ground?” and “What is the role of nonprofits in supporting and sustaining education improvements at the state and local levels?” The PtoP Network provided me with ample opportunity to exercise leadership by exploring and implementing responses to both of these questions. In 2011, HGSE released the report Pathways to Prosperity: Meeting the Challenge of Preparing Young Americans for the 21st Century, which challenged our nation’s “excessive focus on the four-year college pathway, arguing that we need to create additional pathways that combine rigorous academics with strong technical education to equip…young people with the skills and credentials to succeed in our increasingly challenging labor market” (HGSE, 2012). Launched in the summer of 2012, the PtoP Network was created in response to states’ expressed interest in doing something about the data and implications of the Pathways report. The PtoP Network is comprised of six states in the first cohort (summer 2012: Illinois, Maine, Masschusetts, Missouri, North Carolina, and Tennessee), and four states in the second cohort (winter 2013: California, Georgia, New York, and Ohio), with several other states requesting to join that are currently under consideration. Each state selected one to three regions in which to launch the PtoP initiative, with the goal of developing frameworks and guiding principles for building comprehensive career pathways that will be scaled statewide. JFF/HGSE organizes and guides the PtoP Network, provides technical assistance and resources for systems-level designs of grades 9 through 14 career pathways, and builds the capacity of states and regions to create, lead, and sustain the initiative. Through this strategic project, I am both helping to guide nine states through the change process of translating an idea for educational improvement into policy and practice, and investigating the role of nonprofit organizations in sparking, promoting, and sustaining change within states and state agencies. I describe in my capstone how I apply research about state education agencies, college and career readiness, implementation strategies, and adaptive leadership into practice through my role with the PtoP Network. While the Network itself is still in planning, development, and early implementation stages, it provides a helpful and hopeful model for substantively changing and improving the education sector.

How can a community of practice comprised of diverse teacher preparation leaders from across the country collaborate to disrupt the teacher preparation field? The single most important school-based factor in a child’s education is the quality of his or her teachers--so important, in fact, that a series of good teachers can overcome the effects of poverty. Yet our schools of education are struggling to prepare teachers for today’s classrooms, even as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has called for a “sea change” in the way we train new teachers. This capstone focuses on how the NewSchools Venture Fund (NewSchools), a nonprofit venture philanthropy firm focused on transforming the preparation of beginning teachers in America, uses convening as a tool for fostering innovation and enabling disruption in the teacher preparation market. The scope of the capstone project involved planning and executing on two convenings of diverse leaders from institutes of higher education, teacher preparation programs, school operators, and critical support providers. My paper subsequently analyzes the effectiveness of NewSchools’ efforts to design teaming opportunities, referred to as “Design Teams,” for leaders to work together in piloting new solutions for ongoing problems of practice that impact the teacher preparation field. Finally, I consider what the potential impact of the Design Teams could be, beyond NewSchools, as a means of accelerating new research and generating novel ideas across the education sector as a whole. These considerations raise implications for how NewSchools’ new model for collaboration could lend insight to the field as to how to bring people together from different perspectives to work on issues of strategic importance such as teacher preparation.

All students must have opportunities to explore their strengths and interests. Every student is entitled to and ought to receive strong, personalized supports to bolster his/her academic, behavioral, and social emotional learning and success. It is the responsibility of school systems to prepare and coach their staff to provide this rich and constructive learning environment to all students. Simultaneously, school systems must develop deep partnerships and relationships with families and communities so that our students and communities thrive. This capstone explores how one district, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS), Maryland, has prioritized interventions as a key focus area and subsequently planned to implement an integrated system of supports, such that every student will thrive. As MCPS has focused on issues of equity and excellence for decades, this prioritization of interventions and support for struggling learners provides focus to the system for completely eradicating the achievement gap. With an understanding that high expectations, excellent instruction, and committed staff are essential for all learners, MCPS is beginning its implementation of this integrated system of supports focusing on schools and students that are most underperforming. The design of this integrated system culminates from research on Response to Interventions--both literature and state and district implementation, convening a staff workgroup, and engaging with various stakeholders across MCPS to build on the struggles and the successes in the district’s history. Within this capstone, literature is examined related to interventions, and the project work that occurred between July 2012 and April 2013 is described and analyzed. The analysis emphasizes the need to consider change management theory and to create space for both technical and adaptive work, namely creating strong structures and processes that are deeply connected to culture and practice. This capstone concludes with reflections on potential implications for the author, MCPS, and the education sector.

Disconnected youth are under-networked, offering them few of the professional and educational opportunities available to their more privileged peers. There are currently many organizations and services that strive to connect youth to these types of opportunities, but they lack coordination, consistency and scale. The Internet is well positioned to be a revolutionary force in connecting these young people to opportunities they would otherwise not receive, and do so with unprecedented reach and depth. Camellia Network, working specifically with youth aging out of the foster system, is an online platform dedicated to connecting former foster youth with each other, with supporters, and with opportunities. While my work focuses specifically on this population of former foster youth, it is reasonable to extrapolate my findings and analysis to other disconnected youth populations. My Strategic Project was to create an “Opportunity Partnership” department for the organization that would develop and support a system of connecting former foster youth to professional and educational opportunities through the Internet. A new arm of the organization, the project was poised to test my theory that educational and professional opportunities can be made accessible and will be seized with the aid of the Internet. My Strategic Project is a potential proof point for the education sector, acting as an experiment for what can happen when we use the Internet to provide access to opportunity –jobs, trainings, professional development, perks- to disconnected youth. We, as educators, are always looking for the method, platform or program that will achieve transformation at scale. The Internet is an obvious choice for large-scale change. However, my project’s outcomes imply that it takes more than simply making something more accessible in order to affect real transformation. It suggests that achieving this kind of scale is not about making something that works well small, bigger. Instead, scale is about fitting the small, quality pieces together so something new can happen, across a wider range. Scale is about the network. The Internet can help us do that, if we use it correctly: to create a new and empowered community of opportunity.

High-quality teachers are critical to transforming the performance of the U.S. K-12 education system. Historically, however, the United States has not taken a systematic and coherent approach to recruiting, training, supporting, and retaining teachers. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards is one of the country’s premier efforts to realize such a transformation in the teaching profession. While substantial, the progress the National Board has made to date has fallen short of the ambitious expectations that surrounded its birth. The National Board in 2012, led by its new President Ron Thorpe, finds itself--and the education sector--at a crossroads. In this capstone, I share my experience leading the development of the National Board’s five-year strategy with the hope that it proves useful to other practitioners, particularly those concerned with the professionalization of teaching in America. The strategy development work drew on diverse sources of knowledge including: the National Board’s founding and evolution; other countries’ approaches to building the teaching profession; the development of other professions in America, especially medicine; the role of teachers unions and teacher voice in teacher professionalization; the demographics and perspectives of the teacher workforce as it relates to professionalization; and the theory of adaptive leadership and how it applies to the professionalization of teaching. The resulting strategic direction describes the National Board’s new focus on anchoring the teacher career continuum with the National Board’s standards and assessments and on mobilizing National Board Certified Teachers as accomplished practitioners. An analysis of this strategic project reveals three key findings: (1) the context of an ambitious vision and an openness to external critique enabled strategy development; (2) the need for adaptive change at the National Board required the use of adaptive leadership skills; and (3) to make progress in today’s American K-12 education sector, advocates of professionalization must explicitly build political will and adapt to the cultural context. These findings yield implications that will inform my future leadership in education, the National Board and its efforts to undertake the strategy it has developed, and the advance towards professionalization in the education sector as a whole.

The STEM Champions project was a focused and strategic approach to coordinating community resources in Cambridge Massachusetts to better serve the learning needs of students in the Cambridge Public School District. The central research questions included “How can we change from a school district that has ad hoc community partnerships to a district that has focused and strategic partnerships?” “How can theories about how organizations work within themselves and across sectors help build a flexible and sustainable group of various organizations that contribute to the learning needs of Cambridge children?” and “What is the best system to organize the assets of various organizations, the developmental needs of children, and the curricular opportunities for learning at each grade?” A large part of the evidence I provide is through the actual work I produced during the course of this project (which was conducted during an embedded 10-month residency in the district). The data set revealed 58 STEM resources in Cambridge that were already involved with individual schools and classrooms. Of those, a comprehensive asset map was created for a subset of 14, and a protocol developed for asset mapping the remaining 58. The subset of data revealed that there is a very high probability for the district to coordinate with STEM resource organizations in Cambridge to meet its goals: to provide real-world learning experiences through partnership with top-notch local resources for every student in every grade each year. This means that a student who graduates from Cambridge Public Schools should be able to engage in some of the world’s best STEM learning each year of their school career. Interviews revealed the importance of relationship-building, communication, and district-level point of contact were important parts of what external resources needed to build a sustainable relationship with the district. Thus, another outcome of the project was the establishment of a Community Resource protocol that can be shared out across the district and sector that focuses on building relational trust, understanding what motivates organizations to change and collaborate, and communicating clearly about how organizations outside a school district can best “match” the needs of student learning within the district.

Each role in education, whatever its placement in a school system’s hierarchy, requires a different set of knowledge and skills. This Capstone will focus on the "school-to-central" leadership transition by challenging the assumption that what makes leaders effective as school principals also makes them effective as central office leaders. The Review of Knowledge for Action cites evidence from New York City Department of Education (DOE) focus groups as well as out-of-sector research on organizational advancement to confirm the hypothesis generated by this Capstone: the "school-to-central" leadership transition requires an intentional shift on the managing others to managing self continuum, as well as the hard skills to soft skills continuum--essentially, the higher one advances, the more relevant soft skills and the ability to manage self become. This exploration studies the design and implementation of the Advanced Leadership Institute in the New York City Department of Education--a leadership development experience for high-potential leaders interested in exploring advanced roles, the majority of whom are current principals. Of the four quadrants identified by this Capstone as critical for the "school-to-central" transition--I) adaptive leadership, II) systems thinking, III) relationship building, and IV) project management--only quadrant II) systems thinking was incorporated explicitly into the program design. This Capstone will analyze the implications of the Advanced Leadership Institute as it relates to the findings as well as explore the potential impact of creating supports for the "school-to-central" transition in the New York City Department of Education and the education sector writ large.

Over the next thirty years, seismic demographic shifts will render the U.S. a “majority-minority” nation where people of color (now 37 percent) will comprise 57 percent of the population by 2043. This shift brings us to a crossroads. Will we as a nation act now by making savvy investments into social innovations and improvements that can result in increased educational attainment and overall quality of life for all citizens? Will we act and invest now to diminish the persistent disparities in factors such as high school graduation, college attendance, incarceration, and life-long earning potential that are strongly correlated at present with race and socioeconomic status? Though governments spend more than $500 billion annually on educational services in America, these public sector funds are highly restricted in their use. Instead, grants from private philanthropy have traditionally been the only sources of capital to launch, test or scale innovative new technologies, programs, products and services for the U.S. education sector. But grants as the lone capital source for educational innovation are insufficient to fuel the level of improvement our education system must achieve.The emergence of impact investing and crowdfunding over the last five years provides an exciting and potentially game-changing solution to this capital problem that may help us to meet the mandates of the future. This capstone examines my work between June 2012 and October 2013 as a doctoral resident at Tides Foundation on the design and launch of an online platform to facilitate impact investments from large numbers of people into entrepreneurial social enterprises whose products and services might improve outcomes in education, social equity, the environment and economic opportunity. The capstone recounts the process by which I attempted to advance this work based on four goals and fifteen corresponding objectives; explores the challenges and opportunities presented by an unexpected change in the organization’s leadership; and provides a glimpse into the most valuable lessons I gained during this process about management, pedagogy and policy. This capstone concludes with reflections, recommendations and possible implications of this work for my own leadership practice (particularly as a leader working to improve the schools and youth development initiatives “from the outside in”); for Tides Networks work in impact investing amongst public foundations; and for entrepreneurs and investors in the education sector at-large.

This Capstone paper explores the instructional and relational factors that shape success for principals amid the initial years of practice as school building leaders. The paper also defines talent and identifies investment factors, such as skill development and support systems for new principals, in a mid-sized urban school district in the United States. District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) identifies leadership development as a substantive leverage point to reform its school system and improve the level of student achievement across the district. The aim of the Capstone paper is to explore my strategic project designed to implement, improve, and strengthen induction practices for new principals. DCPS has chosen to provide professional trainings in an attempt to move school leaders from a status of novice manager to expert leader focused on a number of Leadership Framework standards designed by the organization. New Principal Supports is one of the arms of work within the strategic project that strive to build leadership capacity for new leaders. Throughout the residency experience, instruction and DCPS leadership standards are explored as vehicles to impact leadership skills, inform principal effectiveness, and promote academic success for all students. DCPS is clear on the need to develop its own commitment of funds and professional resources to all principals, regardless of the stages in their leadership careers. One consistent area explored throughout the Capstone is the impact that quality professional development opportunities and other support systems have on cultivating successful principals and sustaining a culture of exemplary leadership for the larger school community. The design, facilitation, and results of the Capstone project have been documented and analyzed to provide recommendations to DCPS on how to increase its investment in new principals, to further develop existing principal supports, and inform principal success as a key strategy to a larger education reform effort in K-12 public schools.

“For too many American students, high school is a time of disengagement that fails to put them on a path to college and career success...Preparing young adults for success requires a different educational experience than it did even a generation ago” (US Department of Education, 2013). Responding to abysmal levels of college and career readiness, high dropout rates, and persistent racial and socioeconomic outcomes gaps, President Obama calls for seismic changes in our nation’s approach to high school. Simultaneously, as we near the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education our nation’s schools are regressing: students of color across the nation attend hyper-segregated schools where poor conditions and lagging outcomes are magnified. This Capstone explores my leadership challenge as a Resident in Denver Public Schools: to design and lead community-district school design process and make progress towards an innovative and inclusive new high school, Denver’s first new comprehensive high school since the 1980s. I frame this work around three adaptive challenges: changing beliefs about learning and school design, shifting institutional roles to promote collaboration and distribute leadership, and addressing historically significant issues of integration across neighborhood and racial boundaries. My research and analysis focuses on creating the enabling conditions in which community and district partners could address these challenges. I conclude that carefully constructed learning roles, environments, and experiences can achieve progress toward the long-term outcome of innovative and inclusive high schools. I also grapple with the difficulties and ambiguities of challenging institutional authority, fostering trust, safety, and learning, and sustaining capacity for collective action.

The education research and practice communities are in agreement; principals matter, they are of central importance in our nation’s effort to improve schools for all students. Yet, the principalship is misunderstood. There are mixed views on what makes a principal effective, competing demands, and inordinate expectations placed on the role. Over the past fifty years as its education policy has grown in influence, and especially since the passing of NCLB, the federal government has made the situation for principals even more complicated and tenuous as it has neglected to get to know these important practitioners. Aware that something needed to be done but not sure how to proceed, the United States Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, and his leadership team, in the Spring of 2012, sought to create a principal and instructional leader strategy. I was hired a year later to spearhead this work. Before such a strategy could be created, though, it was important to build a relationship between principals and federal policymakers. Using a design thinking framework, this capstone represents my effort to better understand the role of principals, the role of federal education policy in our nation’s schools, and the convergence of the two. In it I describe the development of a feedback loop between principals and policymakers that can serve as a model for future policy development. Through an analysis of data gathered from a review of literature, roundtable discussions, and a survey, the feedback loop process uncovers and calls into question an underlying assumption by the Department about principal leadership and its association to instructional leadership. In the end, implications for both the Department and Education and the sector as a whole are considered.

Despite earnest efforts, most urban school districts have struggled to sustain district-wide racial equity in achievement outcomes. In response to such a plight in the Pittsburgh Public Schools, this capstone details the piloting of an initiative that uses a unique set of approaches at multiple levels and sees learning-focused partnerships between principals and their central office supervisors as a focal lever for district-wide improvement. At the principal level, the initiative involved installing a program of personal mastery and instructional leadership development, as well as assisting in the establishment of a community of practice among school leaders. Simultaneously, this project used informal authority strategically at the district level to challenge a compliance-based culture in the central office, with the goal of turning mindsets there toward becoming more of an adaptive learning organization focused on reflective continuous improvement. Assuming the roles of a principal supervisor, a member of the superintendent’s executive cabinet, and a practice-based researcher, I explored the day-to-day opportunities and challenges of being a boundary-spanner, working across hierarchical levels of district and school leadership. Findings detail ways in which urban central offices can shift their approaches in supporting principals—from top-down, compliance-based models to more of a focus on the adaptive leadership skills needed for principals to learn and lead with greater discretion and empowerment. Simultaneously, principal supervisors can play a critical role in elevating key lessons and ideas from leaders in the field in ways that reciprocally influence policy and organizational structure at the district level. Findings also suggest, however, that to do so sustainably requires shifting the central office culture so that principal supervisors can also operate more freely and instinctively. In this regard, a more formally authoritative positioning is needed to address the stubborn and prohibitive elements of central office culture.

Big Picture Learning (BPL) has developed a uniquely innovative and effective approach to education. While the United States public school system overall has struggled to innovate in response to the rapid changes in technological, cultural, demographic and socioeconomic realities of the 21st century, BPL has proven its ability to provide students with an excellent education, and prepare them to be successful adults. Over the past 18 years, BPL has focused on developing its approach to learning and teaching, and expanding its network of schools. Currently, the network is large and diverse enough to prove that the approach is viable in a variety of contexts. The network is also vibrant, stable, and sustainable enough to be used as a platform for developing and testing new ideas. In short, BPL is ready to do more. This capstone describes work on three key challenges that will shape the future of the organization. 1) A leadership succession plan; 2) Development of a future-focused strategy to guide BPL in advancing and adapting its mission to a highly dynamic environment and ecosystem of the education sector; and 3) Organizational capacity building. The co-founders of BPL, Dennis Littky and Elliot Washor, have been the co-directors since its inception in 1995. This capstone describes the planning for a phased leadership succession process that will culminate during the 20th anniversary celebration in 2015, when I, and Carlos Moreno (a close friend and long-time colleague) will be transitioning into co-leadership of the organization. In addition, this capstone describes the development and initial implementation of strategy for the more widespread dissemination of BPL’s approach to educators, leaders, and policymakers beyond the already established BPL network, while ensuring that the already established schools continue to improve and deliver an excellent education. Finally, this capstone discusses the need to bolster organizational capacity through targeted investment aimed at retaining key core capabilities while also allowing the organization to emerge from the leadership succession process poised to advance with a new orientation, modified business model, and strategy for sustained public value creation.

Transforming American K-12 education in order to advance student learning and meet the challenges of a complex world will require a reconceptualization of how schools are organized and a simultaneous focus on the learning of adults and children (Wagner et al, 2006). BPE is creating such organizations: Teaching Academies, designed to be sites of deep teaching, learning, and improvement for both students and adults, characterized by collaborative, common practices, shared responsibilities for student outcomes, and continuous systems of improvement. During 2013-14, BPE began a significant organizational transition to create Teaching Academies and to develop the “home office” that will support them, while also attending to its existing commitments: running the Boston Teacher Residency and its first charter school in the Dudley neighborhood of Boston. The work of my residency was to support the leadership team during this transition, contributing to the design of the Teaching Academy model and the creation of the conditions for staff engagement. This capstone suggests that for BPE to implement and support the teaching academy model successfully, its central support function will need to operate as a learning organization, as “in any effort to foster schools that learn, changes will make a difference only if they take place at all levels” (Senge, 2000, p. 11). An analysis of my strategic project reveals the ways in which BPE’s organizational transition was made more complex by the ambitious goal of transforming to a learning organization in support of this new model of schooling, and examines the external and internal conditions that hindered and helped the movement toward its desired organizational form.

Since the enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, states and public school districts have been held to increasingly higher accountability standards. This has led to more high-stakes assessments for students, and more focused attention on the achievement results data from those assessments. While the pressure to produce successful student outcomes continues to rise, two other factors have affected school districts’ ability to deliver. On the financial front, the past few years have seen greater budget constraints for public schools caused by the struggling American economy. Meanwhile, the rapidly increasing racial and ethnic diversification of the United States is outpacing school districts’ ability to adapt. Chesterfield County Public Schools, a large, suburban district in central Virginia, is experiencing each of these dynamics: increased accountability, a changing student population, and financial challenges. Although Chesterfield has traditionally been a high-performing school district, its overall student performance has declined in recent years. In an effort to sustain excellence, Chesterfield has increased its curriculum offerings and supports while maximizing its operational efficiency. However, those efforts have not turned the tide of declining test scores, particularly for its growing population of children of color. Education research has indicated that student achievement rises when teachers collaborate and use student data to plan and inform their instructional practice. The central question of this capstone is, how can student achievement data be used more effectively by teachers and administrators to drive instructional decision making in Chesterfield County’s schools? Chesterfield adopted the professional learning communities (PLC) model several years before the start of this project in 2013. However, the level of implementation of PLCs has been sporadic throughout the district. This capstone reviews the research on data use in education and the effectiveness of PLCs. It presents findings from the current state of data use in several schools based on interviews, focus groups, and observations, followed by an analysis of how Chesterfield can improve its data use for driving instruction. The capstone concludes with the study’s implications for myself, for Chesterfield, and for the education sector.

Mission-driven organizations that want to remain innovative and continue to grow their share in the education sector need to embrace change, seize opportunities for improvement, and commit themselves to consistent and continual learning and growth. Such a commitment to improvement and to consistent and continual learning relies on the development of coherent, unified systems to collect, analyze, use, and respond to data coming from multiple facets of the organization. This capstone explores how one organization, Expeditionary Learning (EL), desiring to become a more data-driven organization, sought to strengthen its data collection and analysis mechanisms, specifically focusing on feedback and satisfaction data from its clients. Expeditionary Learning is experiencing a period of tremendous growth and change marked by new opportunities to pursue and refine mission-aligned business. With this growth, comes a need to systematize and organize many aspects of the organization, including structures and processes for collecting, analyzing, and responding to data regarding client experiences and client satisfaction. As the majority of EL’s work is client facing, gathering data from these clients with regards to their experiences with EL is crucial to ensuring needs of clients are met and ultimate outcomes of impacting teacher practice and student achievement are reached. This capstone begins with a historical and contextual background of Expeditionary Learning and places this particular strategic project within that context. Next, literature is examined related to improvement processes, customer satisfaction, and implementing organizational change, providing a rich research base from which the project and its implementation was conceptualized. The project work that occurred between July 2013 and April 2104 is described and analyzed. The analysis emphasizes the need to consider the technical and adaptive aspects of implementing organizational change. Finally, the capstone concludes with reflections on the research and the implementation of the project. These reflections also provide potential implications for the author, for Expeditionary Learning, and for the education sector.

Our current U.S. K-12 education system is constructed on an outdated nineteenth-century model that is no longer equipped to prepare students for success in the twenty-first-century knowledge-based world (Mehta, Schwartz & Hess, 2012). As such, the field needs innovation that improves the quality of and access to learning. This capstone explores how to foster innovation in a school district, and the enabling conditions and barriers to success. I came to Denver Public Schools (DPS) charged with designing and launching DPS’s Innovation Lab. The goal for the lab is to stimulate conditions for innovation across DPS by developing a systematic process through which stakeholders--students, educators, families, community, and central office staff--foster solutions to critical challenges, with the most promising ideas nurtured from concept to scale. A long-term aspiration for the lab is to catalyze a shift in the existing institutional power structures to spur bottom-up innovation. Key findings surfaced through an analysis of my project results. First, the external education landscape, especially accountability pressures, significantly influences innovation within DPS. Second, DPS can improve conditions that better support innovation, but the district faces institutional resistance. This second finding is supported by four contributing discoveries: (a) demand exists for the lab’s goals, but there is a lag between demand and changed behavior; (b) capacity for creativity and innovative problem solving can be built through the design thinking process, but persistence is required; (c) it is possible to prototype elements of the lab model, but competing priorities present obstacles to translating prototypes into a coherent model; and (d) distributing decision-making to empower members across the community requires a shared vision and trust across the system. Finally, laying a foundation for adaptive change is slow going, uncertain, and requires persistent adaptive leadership. These findings suggest implications for DPS and the broader sector: (1) develop a strategy to promote conditions that foster innovation, (2) recruit and build the innovative capacity of adults in the system, and (3) structure the Innovation Lab model to promote sustaining innovation and space for external disruptors.

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy, in aspiring to narrow the achievement gap, has had the unintended effect of driving educators, schools, and districts to focus on academic achievement based on standardized tests, largely neglecting the social emotional needs of children. Given this polarization, NCLB would need to be restructured to enable educators to re-integrate these two domains. As a doctoral resident serving as Interim Director of Strategic Initiatives at Sand City Unified School District (SCUSD), I assumed responsibility to manage its NCLB Waiver, recognizing the opportunity of a lifetime to create more holistic district systems and structures to support the whole child. In this capstone, I will share my experience and lessons-learned in seeking to guide district leadership to implement the NCLB Waiver, a transformational initiative requiring organization learning and a shift in mindset. I focused this capstone to answer the following main and sub-guiding questions: What does it take for an organization to implement a transformational initiative that requires collective learning and mindset shifts? What can a change agent do to lead and foster learning? How does a distressed organization respond to change? I will share my experience practicing advanced leadership strategies to convince, guide, and support district leadership to learn about, collaborate around, and execute new developments as part of the federal requirements to implement the NCLB Waiver--and the organization’s response to my prompts to operate differently. In order to understand early indicators of district learning, my data is based on the fidelity of implementation of five different Waiver work streams across the district that required significant district investment of time and energy. These results are analyzed based on the concepts and frameworks of “positive deviance” (Cameron, 2013) and “adaptive leadership” (Heifetz, 1994) to identify key findings for my main guiding question. My analysis reveals five key findings: (1) an organization’s context--historical and social-emotional--impacts its members’ capacity to learn; (2) trust and a positive “holding environment” conducive for learning need to be developed to create the space for learning; (3) role models need to be available to model a new norm; (4) meaningful elements and outcomes of organizational work need to be made explicit as motivation for individuals to learn; and (5) persistence and skill in regulating the level of organizational distress within a productive range is required to create room for learning.

School districts, as public agencies, are responsible for producing a public value that is shared with their stakeholders. Often times, however, stakeholders – defined, as students, parents, staff, and community members – are not meaningfully engaged in co-creating a district’s strategy. One reason may be that district leaders take a primarily technical approach to soliciting, garnering, and using stakeholder feedback to inform their decision-making and future actions. Engagement tends to be seen as a product (e.g. community meeting), rather than as a consistent relationship-building process, causing districts to fall short in receiving the robust stakeholder feedback and investment they seek. The Knox County Schools (KCS), in recent years, has experienced low and inconsistent levels of stakeholder engagement. Despite this, the district’s leaders seek to incorporate stakeholder input into the development of KCS’s future strategy and next five-year strategy plan. The district, which has achieved strong student achievement gains in the past half-decade, aims to build upon this momentum by devising an improvement strategy that will further accelerate and broaden student learning for all of its 56,000 students. This Capstone provides a roadmap to other practitioners who seek a community-based approach to strategy development, which is the first and most critical component of an effective strategic planning process. It chronicles efforts at developing and implementing a stakeholder engagement process, rooted in network and organizational theory, in which over 7,500 individuals participated and provided feedback. Furthermore, it shows how the feedback was presented back to district leaders and incorporated into KCS’s strategy and strategic plan. This Capstone highlights the challenges that arise when an organization receives significant stakeholder feedback, a sizeable portion of which is critical. It reframes the strategy development process as first, a call for collective reflection, and then a call for collective action. The findings indicate that meaningful stakeholder engagement can catalyze powerful organizational learning, as leaders are asked to revisit their progress, reassess their beliefs, revise and recommit to their theory of action, and even reset portions of their strategy. Additionally, this Capstone may yield insights that inform the way Knox County Schools, similar districts, and the larger K-12 public education sector balance their urgent reform agendas with their responsibility to strategically build organizational capacity.