Continuous Improvement / Organizational Development Projects

Our continuous improvement/organizational development work is designed to help various kinds of educational organizations (both K-12 and higher education) learn how to strengthen their continuous improvement processes.  In this work we help organizations learn how to use/lead cycles of inquiry to find and solve root cause problems within their organizations. This work begins with the development of an “impact logic” that helps organizations: a) clarify the proximal and distal impacts that they seek from their work, and b) design and utilize the kinds of data systems for tracking proximal and distal outcomes. We have been selected by The Wallace Foundation to support and provide mentor support for the continuous improvement work of both school districts and university-based leadership preparation programs as part of the foundation’s UPPI project (2016 to 2021) and ECPI project (2021 to 2026). In our higher education work, we also focus attention on developing organizations to diagnose and strengthen their cultures and infrastructure (structures, tools, routines) in ways that support continuous improvement work. In our Pk-12 work, we further expand our attention to developing organizations to diagnose and strengthen a school’s distributed leadership capacity and teacher learning organization as two key resources that support continuous improvement.