Between now and November 2022, we will publish a series of blog posts presenting selected thematically-organized resources for education practitioners from the 2021 Summit on Improvement in Education (and elsewhere). Resources will focus on leadership, equity, data, and coaching. In this post, we introduce the series.

Since 2014, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has hosted the annual Summit on Improvement in Education. It is a key moment where individual practitioners and teams from schools, districts and charter school organizations, institutions of higher education, and intermediaries come together to learn and connect with fellow improvers in the field. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the improvement community gathered for Summit 2021, which Carnegie hosted as a virtual conference. In doing so, presenters from more than 240 sessions created a vast treasure trove of improvement resources to share with Summit attendees. Following the Summit, these resources were available to conference attendees as part of a digital library.

Now, the Foundation would like to make a curated selection of these resources available to all improvers.  With a generous grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation will be releasing practical, immediately applicable resources on the role of improvement science in education—its efficacy, best practices, use to advance equity, and key enabling conditions to inform scale and sustainability efforts.

In order to build awareness and catalyze use of equity-centered continuous improvement tools and processes, we will release a curated selection of improvement resources and examples pulled from 2021 Summit sessions in our Living Improvement: Resources from the 2021 Carnegie Summit five-part series. Over the next four months, resources will be released in four topic areas: leadership, equity, data, and coaching. It is our hope that this series will enable wide access to continuous improvement tools and resources created by a variety of Summit presenters.  If you are new to improvement, we hope you will find in each release something that will give you a practical place to start or an example to spur your thinking. If you are a seasoned improver, we hope you will find something in each release that will give you deeper insight into the work. 

We hope that these releases will show the depth and breadth of the improvement work underway in the field. These resources represent the work of thoughtful, dynamic, and passionate improvers who are making a real difference in the lives of students and educators across the country and around the world. We are so grateful to have them in our community, and that they join us in our mission to address long-standing educational inequities and improve educational outcomes for Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian and Pacific Islander, and first-generation students, as well as those from low-income backgrounds.  

Carnegie Foundation’s 2023 Summit on Improvement in Education is scheduled for April 23–25, 2023 in San Diego, CA and online.