Sponsored by Fundación Educacional Oportunidad, Santiago, Chile

In 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic affected the education of thousands of students. Fundación Oportunidad and UBC Network designed a new perspective on school attendance, focusing on students’ participation in activities both in virtual and in-person modalities in order to keep them connected with schools and prevent exclusion. The poster describes how the network managed to increase participation.

Pablo Muñoz, Continuous Quality Improvement Director, Fundación Educacional Oportunidad

*Only available on the Summit Web Platform

A common challenge educators face is a lack of awareness of what schools and teachers are doing outside of their school system that is making a positive impact. For this reason, it is imperative for educators to expand their network and access to other peer resources to accelerate professional growth.

Brian Hoffner, Director of Science/STEM Resources, Office of the Maricopa County Schools Superintendent

Adrian De Alba, Director of Instructional Leadership Development, Office of the Maricopa County Schools Superintendent

Darcy Moody, Director of Advocacy and Program Development, Office of the Maricopa County Schools Superintendent

Developing ways to measure improvement often takes a lot of time and effort. Find out how EmpowerK12 helps schools implement a strong measurement plan using a low-lift, three-step toolkit and quickly learn the solid metrics you can use for your own improvement initiative.

Kenli Okada, Managing Director, EmpowerK12

Kristen Wolfe, Senior Data Architect, EmpowerK12

Hemet Unified School District and WestEd continued their partnership to build an equity-driven continuous improvement school district. They used a data protocol to spark critical curiosity for how the district’s systems were designed (to produce the student outcomes). The partnership evolved district vision: a laser focus on students furthest from opportunity. Simultaneously, the partnership informed WestEd’s vision of an integrated theory of equity-driven continuous improvement.

Kevin Macpherson, Improvement Specialist, WestEd

Jenn Martin, Assistant Superintendent, Student Services, Hemet Unified School District

Successive cycle coding from the 2012 research of Johnny Saldaña supports the translation of qualitative empathy interview data into quantitative data that is useful for systemic change. By focusing on the story of our process in working with a local educational agency, we demonstrate a real-life example of how qualitative data analysis can create an opportunity to engage in multiple discussions centered around potential application of the demonstrated process.

Tacey Rodgers, Director, Assessment, Research, and Evaluation, Solano County Office of Education

Amy Robinson, Program Manager, English Language Development Curriculum and Instruction, Solano County Office of Education

In this poster, attendees will learn about three school organizations that have successfully implemented Tripod surveys of students, families, and faculty/staff as a part of a strategic plan for system improvements. In each school or district, leadership teams integrated their review of the Tripod survey data to build improvement capacity, demonstrate how the use of measurement and data drives improvement, and build a culture of continuous improvement. The school organizations implemented a variety of surveys—family pulse surveys; diversity, equity, and inclusion surveys of families, faculty/staff, and students; and faculty professional learning environment surveys.

Cait Deneen, Senior Design Principal, Education Elements

Kristen Howell, Partner, Education Elements

This poster details how three organizations (Raise Your Hand Texas, TeachingWorks, and WestEd) engaged in the co-development of practical measures for use in teacher education. In particular, the presenters detail the development of multi-dimensional measures designed to support teacher educators’ implementation of practice-based pedagogies to teach justice-focused, high-leverage practices.

Erica Boas, Improvement Specialist, WestEd

Jahneille Cunningham, Improvement Specialist, WestEd

Thea Ulrich-Lewis, Program Director, Raise Your Hand Texas

Jason Brasel, Research and Design Specialist, TeachingWorks

This poster details how six schools in Berkeley County, WV, collaborate to implement the Handle With Care program. HWC helps educators to implement classroom and schoolwide trauma-sensitive strategies, and supports schools in a continuous improvement approach to data review and program adaptation.

Douglas Gagnon, Senior Education Researcher, SRI International

Victoria Schaefer, Principal Education Researcher, SRI International

Coaching in teacher preparation can address equity issues with rising teachers. This poster represents the work of six universities that used improvement science to explore affordances and challenges of virtual contexts in coaching for equity over the two years of the pandemic. We used PDSA cycles to explore peer coaching in university coursework; the traditional pre-conference, observation, post-conference (POP) cycle; and the virtual simulation program Mursion. This poster will address equity and justice in schools and virtual coaching as coaching practices that must be reset to prioritize asset-based approaches and virtuality in teacher education.

Samuel Brower, Clinical Associate Professor, University of Houston

Heather Dunham, Doctoral Candidate, The University of Texas at Austin

Alycia Maurer, Associate Professor, Our Lady of the Lake University

Patsy Sosa-Sanchez, Assistant Dean, EC-6 Programs Coordinator, Assistant Professor of Bilingual/ESL, University of North Texas-Dallas

Melissa Mosley Wetzel, Professor, The University of Texas at Austin

Learn about the impact of one Kentucky district’s journey to live their values and create a great place to work. Presenters will share the shift in thinking that led to improved district and community change in teaching and learning, increased communication, leadership capacity, and building greater unity.

Deanna Ashby, Leader Coach, Studer Education

BARR (Building Assets, Reducing Risks) will discuss staff-to-staff relationships and how empowering teachers results in increased student SEL and equitable academic outcomes. This poster will describe the processes by which BARR fosters collective and individual efficacy among teachers.

Megan Reder-Schopp, Associate Director of Research, BARR Center

The California Curriculum Collaborative, also known as CalCurriculum, has worked with California districts, charter networks, and county offices to design curriculum adoption processes for their local context. This poster highlights successes and challenges and provides a model process that can be replicated in schools to give leaders clear, actionable steps to build improvement capacity in their districts.

Maryia Krivoruchko, Program Manager, Pivot Learning

Shannah Estep, Senior Specialist, Outreach, EdReports

Gavin Reagins, Program Associate, Pivot Learning

The Arkansas Department of Education, with the Region 14 Comprehensive Center as Westat, is employing a human-centered design approach to reimagine a talent management system rooted in data-driven decision-making. This poster shows how to effectively engage stakeholders through authentic communication that reflects the local systems.

Andy Sullivan, Director of Educator Licensure, Arkansas Department of Education

Sandra Hurst, Director of Educator Effectiveness, Arkansas Department of Education

Sharlee Crowson, Public School Program Coordinator, Arkansas Department of Education

Jenna Scott, Educator Effectiveness Portfolio Manager, Region 14 Comprehensive Center at Westat

Darcy Pietryka, Educator Effectiveness Project Lead, Region 14 Comprehensive Center at Westat

This poster outlines the power of networking a gradual release model by which school instructional leadership teams assume the work of continuous instructional improvement during the second year of an improvement network. The goal of this work is to build a systems approach to instruction, school-level processes for structured PDSA cycles, and an accompanying data infrastructure to measure progress.

Chad Vignola, Executive Director, Literacy Design Collaborative

During SY 2020–21, Baltimore City Public School’s Secondary Literacy Improvement Network (BSLIC) developed an improvement advisor role to support network leaders in providing weekly improvement coaching support to teachers. Network leaders built this role in order to deepen school-based staffs’ understanding of and expertise with the improvement science methodology.

Amiee Winchester, Continuous Improvement Program Director, Baltimore City Public Schools

Koren Lawson, Lead Teacher, Baltimore City Public Schools

Melanie Everheart, Teacher, Baltimore City Public Schools

Through support from the Literacy Design Collaborative, teams of teachers instruct students in English Language Arts, Social Studies and Science using LDC Real Works Modules (10–14 hours of reading and responding to texts according to sequences of study) while participating in semester-long, LDC-led Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles that result in the analysis of the student products as an indicator of teacher growth.

Dwight Nolt, Director, District Leadership, Literacy Design Collaborative

Sponsored by Pivot Learning

Presenters will discuss their work with a design team to focus on building an MTSS model with integrated restorative practices.

Nicodemus Ford, Senior Program Manager, Pivot Learning

Monica Ng, Vice President, Pivot Learning

Melissa Rubio, Director, Upland School District

Felicia Singleton, Director, San Diego County Office of Education

How can university faculty re-center their curriculum and pedagogy to meet diversity, equity, and inclusion aims? Focusing on the core problem of how educators can frame inclusivity and anti-racism in their courses, this poster shows how to design and implement a decolonization effort and effect its spread.

Kristen Wilcox, Associate Professor, University at Albany

School districts and educational institutions are complex systems. The day-to-day experiences within bureaucratic structures such as school districts produce experiences for people of color in which they are made invisible by the exact nature of the bureaucratic rules, mandates, and policies that structure the organization. How can school districts interrupt the culture and practices that perpetuate negative experiences for students, families, and staff from marginalized communities? Learn how equity coaching rooted in organizational learning healed racialized experiences and how culturally responsive leadership created inroads of success for a school district in Salem, OR.

Lisa Collins, Assistant Professor, Lewis and Clark College

Muhammad Khalifa, Professor of Educational Administration, The Ohio State University

Olga Cobb, Assistant Superintendent, Salem-Keizer Public Schools

The four-year early literacy initiative of Pajaro Valley Unified School District resulted in systemic changes and educational equity for all students. This pilot to scale model, monitored through cycles of improvement, includes job-embedded coaching for K–3 general and special education teachers, instructional staff, and administrators to support systems-thinking mindsets and strong Tier 1 pedagogy.

Michelle Rodriguez, Superintendent of Schools, Pajaro Valley Unified School District

Kasey Klappenback, Assistant Superintendent of Elementary, Pajaro Valley Unified School District

Nicole Marsh, Coordinator Early Literacy, Pajaro Valley Unified School District

Claudia Monjaras, K–12 Curriculum Director, LA & HSS, TK–12, Pajaro Valley Unified School District

Andrea Willy, District Grant Writer, Pajaro Valley Unified School District

Students should be at the center of school systems. Portage (MI) Public Schools has undertaken a cultural transformation as a school system to achieve this aim, starting with focusing on student voice. Hear the story, see the data, and learn how student guidance informed a process to build a system of belonging.

KK Owen, Leader Coach, Huron Studer Education

Mark Bielang, Superintendent, Portage Public Schools

Need in Deed, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit, has a vision for equitable public education in which students’ lived experiences drive them to be advocates for positive change. The poster describes the teacher network and how it supports teaching practices that center students’ lives and concerns in curriculum and instructional approaches.

Pam Prell, Program Director, Need in Deed

Kyra Atterbury, Program Director, Need in Deed

Wendy-Anne Roberts-Johnson, Executive Director, Need in Deed

This poster shares the emerging story of the Texas A&M International University improvement network and its work in fostering equity, inclusion, and belonging for teacher candidates from Laredo. Promising network practices include expanding learner pathways, amplifying network initiatives, and fostering a shared narrative to create a “permaculture” of improvement.

Paul Rogers, Associate Professor, UC Santa Barbara

James O’Meara, Dean, Texas A&M International University College of Education

Seth Sampson, Assistant Professor, Texas A&M International University College of Education

Leveraging community assets helps prioritize equity and sustainability in community-engaged research. We share experiences from a networked improvement community (NIC) that has identified a shared problem of practice for supporting housing insecure and foster youth within an urban Southern California community. Through stakeholder interviews, presenters found that partners leverage their community cultural assets in varying capacities to support the mental, emotional, physical, and financial well-being of students. Organizational constraints and roles create variance in the assets partners bring to a NIC. This poster will present how practitioners leverage their assets as they collaboratively co-developed change ideas in their NIC.

Verenisse Ponce Soria, Graduate Student Researcher, Orange County Educational Advancement Network (OCEAN), UCI School of Education

Lora Cawelti, Graduate Student Researcher, OCEAN, UCI School of Education

Erica Van Steenis, Postdoctoral Researcher, OCEAN UCI School of Education

Richard Arum, Dean UCI School of Education, OCEAN, UCI School of Education

June Ahn, Associate Professor and OCEAN Faculty Director, OCEAN, UCI School of Education

This poster will highlight the approach of three practitioner-researchers who facilitate professional development and lead ongoing improvement projects that intentionally incorporate racial literacy into learning about continuous improvement practices. It will detail an evolving theory of improvement for facilitating learning on racial literacy and improvement mindsets in different contexts.

Megan MacDonald, Research Assistant/ Doctoral Student, Catalyst @ Penn Graduate School of Education

Sarah Gudenkauf, Research Assistant/ Doctoral Candidate, Catalyst @ Penn Graduate School of Education

Katie Pak, Director, Special Projects, School District of Philadelphia, Office of Leadership Development

Adina Goldstein, Research Assistant, Catalyst @ Penn Graduate School of Education

Active learning has been touted as a way of promoting deeper learning among students. But are teachers adhering to the tenets of active learning? Research suggests faculty in higher education are not. A 2020 study was conducted to explore quantitative measurement of the use of active learning strategies.

Victoria Greenwood, Associate Professor, Nursing, Russell Sage College

ImpactTulsa launched a pilot program to support partner capacity-building through a 12-month embedded continuous improvement coaching model. This work focused on supporting an organization to create and utilize a sustainable internal continuous improvement team. This poster shares the approach used, lessons learned, and tools developed.

Julian Himes, Senior Analyst, ImpactTulsa

The Region 14 Comprehensive Center and a state education agency spent a year examining how districts can ensure equitable access to effective teachers. Thought companions in this process included regional equity leads tasked with supporting districts with identified equity gaps. The journey included exploring the data fields used to identify districts and examine the quality of the district equity plans. Along the way, presenters developed a shared language and understanding around cultural competency, relevancy, and responsiveness, as well as for tools, resources, and virtual trainings to prepare the equity leads for potentially difficult conversations with their districts.

Karen Gray-Adams, Educator Effectiveness Project Lead, Region 14 Comprehensive Center@Westat

This poster presents the findings of a five-year study to develop school-focused networked learning collaboratives intended to build participant teams’ school improvement capacity through cross-team collaboration, improvement science training, and implementation coaching. This program has been designed to address two primary challenges facing the statewide authorization of charter schools in Colorado. First, a wide variety of school models are represented, including alternative education campuses, dual-language immersion, Montessori, early colleges, and classical school models. Second, the autonomy afforded to charter schools requires that participation in any authorizer-led school improvement programming be voluntary on the part of school leadership.

Jessica Welch, Improvement and Implementation Specialist, Colorado Charter School Institute

Ryan Marks, Director of Evaluation, Accountability, and School Improvement, Colorado Charter School Institute

Using improvement science, the presenters are beginning to close the achievement gap by addressing two of the largest barriers for marginalized students: discipline and uniform instructional interventions. Through restorative practice and individualized learning plans, these two educators are using improvement science as their guide to. move their districts away from the conventional norms that fail to meet the needs of the most vulnerable students and creating educational environments that instead address the needs of all students.

Robert Fitzpatrick, English Teacher/Vice President of the Union, Wilmington University

Capt. Sean Hoggs (Ret.), Teacher Leader, Wilmington University

Leaders often emerge from within organizations as they work their way up to leadership. But sometimes there is a need for a different type of leadership. Boldly hiring outside the safety zone requires strength and a belief in the power of putting the right leaders in the right places to benefit students.

KK Owen, Leader Coach, Huron Studer Education

The goal of the Advanced Placement for All program is to ensure access to advanced coursework for all students in the school, address systemic inequities in access, and increase the number of historically underrepresented students who experience success in an AP course. The poster will present a case study of an AP for All program adopted in 2017, Including the approach used to develop multiple driver diagrams for a program several years into implementation that represented the collective theory of improvement for the different stakeholder groups of AP teachers, school leaders, and district leaders. The poster will describe the methods used to (1) collect individual theories of improvement, (2) leverage driver diagrams in visualizing collective theories, and (3) engage stakeholders in evaluating the similarities and differences in their theories.

Sarah Gudenkauf, Doctoral Candidate and Consultant, University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education

The 4-Step Reading Tool provides students a structure for gathering information and forming conclusions about what they’ve read. The poster describes how our High School STEP Team coaches students around internalizing the tool and empowering them to leverage it when they are engaging with text.

Stephanie Callaway, Lead Teacher for STEP, Colonial School District

Peter Leida, Deputy Superintendent, Colonial School District

Michael Doody, Secondary Science Teacher, Colonial School District

Christina Horstmann, Secondary Social Studies Teacher, Colonial School District

This poster expands the vision of adolescent literacy By highlighting how the presenters used readership to bring awareness of culturally diverse books with grades 6–12 and evidence-based strategies to authentically foster a love of reading with the goal of increasing literacy achievement for English Learners. Share in the discussion of our continuous improvement journey.

Jenean Bray, Co-Lead, ELA/ELD Curriculum Specialist, Tulare County Office of Education

Tammy Milligan, Co-Lead, ELA/ELD Curriculum Specialist, Tulare County Office of Education

Timothy Budz, ELA/ELD Staff Development and Curriculum Specialist, Tulare County Office of Education

Improvement practices are instrumental in how we innovate to address the literacy deficits that elementary students are experiencing. This poster describes how educators can use these principles with the Action Research Model to enhance instruction and fill learning gaps in small-group reading intervention settings.

Brittany White, Teacher, Houston Independent School District

Network challenges and opportunities regarding planning. and implementation transitions are examined for the West Dallas STEM School (WDSS) Project:, which brings together Southern Methodist University, Dallas Independent School District, the Toyota Foundation, and the West Dallas community. Specifically, this poster looks at (1) envisioning and designing a model STEM school; (2) continuous improvement and teacher professional learning; (3) a shared instructional and learner profile; and (4) designing classroom and school learning environments.

Stephanie Knight, Dean, Simmons School of Education and Human Development, Simmons School of Education and Human Development; Southern Methodist University

Richard Duschl, Executive Director, Caruth Institute for Engineering Education, Lyle School of Engineering, Southern Methodist University

Anthony Petrosino, Associate Dean, Simmons School of Education and Human Development, Southern Methodist University

Karen Pierce, Project Director, West Dallas STEM School, Southern Methodist University

In this work, presenters demonstrated the use of data and measurement to track progress against a well-specified aim or a specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound (SMART) goal.- The purpose of this study was to identify challenges and ineffective practices in coaching, with the goal of addressing challenges in order continue the growth and spread of the program. This poster addresses this effort’s design and outcome. Specifically, the presenters used the New Teacher Center Kiano platform to gather several different data points, and then they used this data to inform development of change ideas and new drivers. In addition, this poster will surface the complexities of initiating or sustaining improvement efforts, including learning from failures or instances when things did not go as planned.

James Thurman, Blueprint Literacy Coordinator for Literacy Coaching, Baltimore City Public Schools

Zachary Jaffe, Blueprint Literacy Coordinator for Continuous Improvement, Baltimore City Public Schools

Joy Guthrie, Blueprint Literacy Coach, Baltimore City Public Schools

Networked Improvement work is fundamentally different from much of what teachers typically engage in to improve schools. It can run counter to those who are accustomed to being asked to roll out or implement schoolwide improvement initiatives. This session will address the ways that one hub, Schools That Lead, has gone about recruitment, practitioner support and development, growth of new mindsets, and meaningful connections across more than 50 schools so that improvement becomes part of the school culture instead of another mandate.

Sofi Frankowski, Chief Learning Officer, Schools That Lead, Inc.

In this session, two principals in a North Carolina networked improvement community will describe how teachers develop change ideas, test those ideas in their local context for early promise, and share those ideas across their statewide NIC. From this work, a “menu of change ideas” is developed by the NIC hub to support the spread and scale of change ideas and advance teacher efficacy.

Carmen Graf, Principal, East Garner Elementary School

Rebecca Beaulieu, Principal, Neuse River Middle School

The Value Stream Mapping tool helped the Louisiana Department of Education bring down the contract approval time and save over 10,420 days in a year. This poster will demonstrate how to analyze the current state and design a future state for a series of events within a process.

Kristin Nafziger, Program Director, Region 14 Comprehensive Center at Westat

Kristen Pugh, Technical Assistance Lead, Region 14 Comprehensive Center at Westat

The Cajon Valley Union School District, a K–12 public school district with 17,000 students, partnered with the San Diego Workforce Partnership and the San Diego workforce board to design and deploy a career-center model integrating vocational psychology and labor market information that can serve every child and their parents at the Cajon Valley Middle School. The career center is now being replicated across the other middle schools and elementary schools in the district.

Sarah Burns, Director of Learning, San Diego Workforce Partnership

Ed Hidalgo, Chief Innovation and Engagement Officer, Cajon Valley Union School District

David Miyashiro, Superintendent, Cajon Valley Union School District

Sponsored by Center for Public Research and Leadership

This spring, the Center for Public Research and Leadership will launch the Leading Through Learning playbook, a web-based resource designed to help both new and mature leaders develop a leadership strategy that inspires transformative, equity-driven change in school systems. Attendees will get a first look at the website and have the opportunity to join the Leading Through Learning community.

Meghan Snyder, Director of Research Strategy and Policy, Center for Public Research and Leadership

Andrea Clay, Director of Legal Strategy and Policy, Center for Public Research and Leadership

Ayeola Kinlaw, Consultant, Center for Public Research and Leadership

Liz Chu, Executive Director, Center for Public Research and Leadership

Amayo Bassey, Graduate Consultant, Center for Public Research and Leadership