Scaling Instructional Improvement: Designing a Strategy to Develop the Leaders of Leaders

Abstract

With close to 50 million children attending 98,000 public schools in the United States, the public school classroom continues to be an essential locus of change that, if improved at scale, could increase educational and life outcomes of many young people. Improved student learning requires an improved instructional core and school leaders are essential drivers of this improvement across a complex system of classrooms. The systematic study and codification of the behaviors, practices, and habits of “positively deviant” leaders–i.e. leaders who have consistently developed strategies to improve student learning despite facing similar challenges as others in similar circumstances–can help school and system leaders observe, create, and implement scalable effective practice. In this capstone, I describe a strategy to integrate design thinking and positive deviance to develop a desirable, viable, and feasible strategy to enable effective system-level instructional leadership practices to scale across a diverse educational system. Through my analysis of a strategic project I led at Relay Graduate School of Education, I explore the implications of these findings for my site, the sector, and for myself as a leader.