GSE Theses and Dissertations

Life Science Cares (LSC) is a federated nonprofit network that mobilizes the financial and human capital of the life sciences industry to disrupt poverty. As the organization expanded across five affiliate sites and a newly formed National Team, its fast pace of execution often outstripped its capacity for learning. Although staff expressed a desire for stronger cross-site connection, shared resources, and opportunities to learn from one another’s work, LSC had not yet developed the structures and routines needed to support reflection, shared sensemaking, and knowledge transfer across sites. As a result, knowledge often remained local rather than becoming an organizational resource.

This capstone examines the strategic project I led during my residency to create the early conditions for workplace learning at LSC. Rather than beginning with technical solutions such as templates or standard operating procedures, I designed and facilitated the Learning from Practice Group, a structured cross-site intervention in which staff examined dilemmas of practice, surfaced implicit knowledge, and reflected with colleagues across the network. The project was informed by diagnostic work, including a listening tour, survey data, retreat observations, and pilot feedback.

The design of the Learning from Practice Group embedded adaptive and strategic leadership routines without presenting the experience as formal training. Across a four-session arc, participants encountered recurring learning practices meant to help them slow down, examine real-time challenges, surface tacit knowledge, and engage in structured inquiry. Participants were later invited to “try on” selected routines in other work settings, making diffusion in this project the spread of learning practices and habits of inquiry beyond the group itself.

Findings from pre- and post-assessments indicated that the Learning from Practice Group strengthened trust, psychological safety, and participants’ willingness to reflect, ask questions, and learn with peers across the network. At the same time, evidence of diffusion beyond the pilot remained limited. Although some routines became visible in all-staff, affiliate, and functional meetings, uptake was uneven. My analysis suggests that broader diffusion remained limited in part because the intervention was still in an early developmental stage: participants were beginning to learn, adapt, and enact the routines, but had not yet had sufficient opportunity to model them consistently, receive feedback, and support wider uptake across the organization.

This capstone argues that in federated nonprofits, organizational learning must be intentionally designed through shared routines, protected spaces for reflection, and structures that support diffusion. For LSC, this means pairing relational learning spaces with organizational mechanisms that help new practices travel. For the nonprofit sector, the findings suggest that the capacity to learn from practice is essential to sustaining mission-driven work over time.

Ahead of a major milestone recognizing the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, there is an effort by the Trump administration to supervise the kinds of history that can be told. This intentional endeavor to normalize revisionist historical narratives hampers the prospects of an inclusive, democratic future, anchored by a Lincolnian government by and for the people. This capstone is an account of my attempts, as a Doctoral Resident at the Netter Center for Community Partnerships, to develop a movement that energizes young people to exercise their agency to produce a future for the United States they are proud of. The Netter Center positions itself as the University of Pennsylvania’s instrument for advancing civic and community engagement. It brings university and community resources together to address issues of poverty, health disparities, and environmental sustainability. The Center fosters democratic, place-based partnerships between Penn and local communities that strengthen research, teaching, learning, and service. The first part of my strategic project uses the Netter Center’s framework of university-assisted community schools to model ways for cultural organizations to collaborate with schools, starting with the Paul Robeson House and Museum. The aim is to turn students into community leaders who use narrative history to build power with their peers and in their communities. Relying on the insights learned from these young people, I planned, financed, and began producing The People’s 250, a cultural event centered around the 250th Anniversary of the United States that promotes themes of democracy, accurate historical narrative, and artistic expression toward a collaborative future.

Public education systems are operating in a period strained by fiscal volatility, enrollment decline, leadership turnover, and expanding expectations for impact. Organizations that support districts and states are simultaneously being asked to pursue broader outcomes — such as economic mobility and whole-child development — while navigating tighter funding environments and increased accountability pressure. These external shifts intensify internal demands for coordination, clarity, and sustained execution. Within this context, TNTP, a national education nonprofit, entered a new strategic phase that expanded its scope while both decreasing internal capacity and not restructuring to meet their bold vision for impacting youth across the country.

The problem of practice addressed in this capstone is not rooted in a lack of strategic clarity, talent, or ambition. Rather, the challenge identified was a structural leadership constraint that centralized decision-making authority, coordination responsibility, and escalation pathways in a small subset of organizational leaders — constraining the organization's capacity to lead at scale. With my residency in the Strategy, Growth, and Finance (SGF) Division, I focused my efforts on how this structural reality created bottlenecks, slowed execution, and limited the organization's ability to distribute leadership in service of its strategic priorities. Addressing this challenge required more than procedural adjustment; it demanded a deliberate reconstruction of the systems, processes, and leadership behaviors that shape how authority is held, how decisions are made, and how leaders show up in relation to one another. In doing so, this work moved from diagnosing structural constraints to actively shifting the organizational culture and mindset that sustained them.

The strategic project focused on strengthening SGF’s internal leadership infrastructure. Instead of launching new initiatives, the project redesigned how work moved across the team by clarifying decision rights, establishing shared routines, and codifying meeting and communication norms. Two goals guided the effort: (1) diagnosing systemic causes of capacity strain and designing targeted structures to enable clearer ownership and coordination without increasing headcount, and (2) piloting distributed leadership routines and gathering formative feedback on early shifts in clarity, ownership, and reliance on executive escalation.

Leadership bottlenecks reflected structural design realities; not a lack of individual skill or will. Where ambiguity around authority and sequencing was reduced, distributed leadership behaviors increased and reliance on senior-level escalation decreased. Where ambiguity persisted, centralization remained the default. For TNTP, the implications include prioritizing decision clarity, routinized coordination, and intentional leadership design as enabling conditions for sustainable execution. For the broader PK–12 sector, the findings underscore that transformational ambition requires aligned internal infrastructure and authorization. Bold strategy alone is insufficient. Sustainable impact depends on organizations intentionally designed to carry leadership, coordination, and learning at scale.

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.

Many school board members receive training on procedures, legal responsibilities, and policy development after taking office. Yet the dimensions of governance that practitioners in this inquiry described as the most demanding—the relational, adaptive, and collective demands of the role—remain far less systematically supported. This capstone examines how post-election governance support can be structured to strengthen the capacities required for leading in complex, high-stakes environments. For the broader field, this inquiry raises two questions: How does the sector define and measure governance effectiveness at the school board level, and what forms of collective governance support can function within the structural constraints of elected service?

During a ten-month residency at Leadership for Educational Equity (LEE), a national, nonpartisan civic leadership development organization, the author led the design of a governance support hub for school board members. The hub is organized around three core components: six governance competencies that name what the role demands beyond procedural training, a 24-question scenario-based self-assessment tool, and five high-stakes governance moments that anticipate the challenges board members predictably face. These components were developed through governance and adult learning scholarship, a two-phase inquiry with practitioners across nine states, and iterative engagement with LEE coaches and staff.

Three factors shaped the project's evolution from a competency framework into a full support hub, each pointing to a deeper reason the governance support gap persists. First, the conditions of the role, including individually structured training, public accountability, and limited opportunities for collective practice, are structurally misaligned with how governance capacity develops. Second, in the accounts gathered here, naming governance challenges with precision appeared to reduce practitioners' isolation and create conditions for engagement. Third, the resources to support board members often already exist but may lack the shared structure needed for board members to reach them.

For LEE, the hub offers a model for self-directed member engagement that complements existing coaching and support structures. This capstone contributes practitioner voices, a design framework, and a set of questions to a growing conversation about how the field invests in school board members once they take their seats and govern on behalf of their communities.

Urban public school districts serving high-need communities face a persistent structural challenge: administrators routinely work in silos without the shared accountability needed to collectively improve student learning outcomes. This capstone documents a 10-month residency inside a large urban school district in South Texas serving approximately 50,000 students—the majority Hispanic and economically disadvantaged—where 20% of schools have received consecutive failing ratings from the Texas Education Agency. The problem of practice was how the district could develop a cross-functional team within its Office of Teaching, Learning, and Leadership to move from siloed, role-bound work to collaborative, continuous improvement with shared accountability for instructional quality, leadership effectiveness, and student learning outcomes across priority schools. In response to this problem, the residency introduced the Leading Wisely Institute, a structured professional learning series grounded in the Data Wise Framework and System Wise Approach. Over the year, the team established collaborative norms, conducted calibrated classroom walkthroughs, and completed three phases of the Data Wise Framework.

Three conditions constrained the project’s full potential: insufficient co-construction from the team generated early resistance; the original scope reproduced the initiative overload it sought to prevent; and leading change without formal authority required relational strategies that existing frameworks only partially predicted. These findings carry implications at two levels. For the district, structural adoption of collaborative protocols must deepen into lasting cultural transformation. For the sector, this capstone contributes to a nascent body of evidence on building collective efficacy across district leadership teams under external accountability pressure.

Large urban school systems have long struggled to translate strategic priorities into coherent, system-wide improvement. While districts often adopt ambitious plans to address persistent opportunity and achievement gaps, these efforts frequently falter due to fragmentation across departments, inconsistent implementation, and limited coordination among adults. This capstone examines how coherence can be intentionally cultivated within a complex public school system and what leadership conditions are required to sustain equity-centered change over time.

Situated within Boston Public Schools, this study focuses on the design and facilitation of cross-functional collaboration to align high-quality programming and school facilities as mutually reinforcing components of a coherent system. Through the leadership of cross-collaboration teams, the project involved developing logic models, identifying shared metrics, and creating a transparent, multi-year implementation roadmap. The work also centered the cultivation of psychological safety, the elevation of student and community voice, and the application of an equity planning framework to guide decision-making.

Drawing on qualitative and quantitative evidence—including participant interviews, artifacts from cross-functional teams, and community engagement data—this study finds that coherence is not primarily a technical achievement, but a relational and structural one. Trust emerged as a critical enabling condition: where trust was present, collaboration accelerated and coordination improved; where it was uneven, progress slowed despite strong technical design. Additionally, the findings highlight that cross-functional collaboration must be deliberately designed with clear roles, authority, and accountability to move beyond episodic coordination toward sustained system alignment.

This capstone contributes to the field by offering a model for operationalizing coherence in large districts through structured cross-functional collaboration, while underscoring the central role of trust as the connective tissue between strategy and implementation. The implications suggest that districts seeking to advance equity must move beyond isolated initiatives and instead invest in the relational and organizational conditions that enable adults to work together effectively on behalf of students.

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 practitioner inquiry examines how internal organizational alignment within the William Julius Wilson Institute (WJWI) at Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) shapes its capacity to deliver consistent, high-quality partnerships to places building cradle-to-career ecosystems to reduce poverty and expand economic mobility. Drawing on empathy interviews with staff members, an internal alignment pre-survey, participatory tool development as inquiry, and iterative analysis of organizational operations and artifacts, I examine the operational conditions shaping WJWI’s internal coherence during a period of rapid growth. The analysis draws on the water of systems change framework, organizational learning theory, and improvement science as complementary lenses.

This work challenges the broader cradle-to-career field to invest in internal organizational coherence as an ongoing development strategy to meet the diverse needs of places across the country. I advocate for a set of standards and measurement tools that establish high-quality expectations while allowing place-based variation, and a multidimensional poverty measurement that captures the lived volatility families experience beyond income thresholds, as a starting point for dissecting the impediments to economic mobility across contexts. Most critically, continuous improvement is highlighted, underscoring that conceptual alignment around what cradle-to-career means is not the same as operational coherence in how cradle-to-career systems are supported and scaled. For families in historically redlined American cities, the gap between the two is not theoretical; it is a lived reality. Internal coherence is the precondition for systems change.

This capstone presents a case study in how a mid-sized urban district approached strategic planning through the use of cross-functional teams. Boston Public Schools (BPS) is the oldest school district in the nation and, in the 2025-2026 school year, it served over 44,000 students across 105 schools. Boston, like many urban districts, faces the persistent challenge of how to improve academic outcomes, particularly in literacy, for students across racial, linguistic, and socio-economic groups.

In summer 2025, as I began my doctoral residency in BPS, the district launched a strategic planning process that used cross-functional teams to set priorities and chart a course for the next five years. As part of this effort, I co-facilitated a cross-functional team of central office leaders responsible for developing goals, action steps, and an implementation plan related to the district’s academic focus on equitable literacy.

Throughout the capstone, I examine how district leaders approached equitable literacy as a known, prescribed solution to be scaled across the system. The work of the cross-functional team, however, illuminated a different reality. Participants surfaced inconsistencies in how equitable literacy was defined and enacted. Their work also revealed how a lack of clarity about their level of authority constrained the team’s capacity to translate ideas into concrete action aimed at improving outcomes for historically underserved student groups.

The capstone also offers a perspective on diagnosing and leading within a complex context. Drawing on the BART (Boundary, Authority, Role, Task) and Cynefin frameworks, I argue that widespread instructional improvement requires innovative approaches that emerge through experimentation and collaboration, rather than the implementation of technical approaches only. These findings have implications for districts and organizations navigating similar challenges. In a context of constrained resources, including declining enrollment and the expiration of ESSER funds, district leaders will continue to face challenges that are complex in nature and require emergent thinking.