Using Evolutionary Learning to Develop, Implement, and Improve Strategic Initiatives
For more than a decade, we have implemented and refined our Evolutionary Learning methodology, a disciplined approach to creating and sustaining more equitable educational systems through careful observations of people's experiences. Evolutionary Learning is especially concerned with the diverse experiences of people closest to the problems we hope to solve in public education and who are well positioned to design and enact solutions.
Individuals, teams, and organizations can use Evolutionary Learning effectively for activities as simple as maximizing the impact of small changes in procedures and as complex as reorganizing an existing system’s overall plan of operations. In all such cases, people in the system broadly agree on a set of goals to pursue and propose a strategy for meeting them.
After extensive research on how leaders in schools, school systems, state agencies, and other ed sector organizations use Evolutionary Learning, and the impact it has had on their systems, we developed Leading Through Learning, a playbook for rewiring how systems work to get ever better. This unique framework includes tools to help leaders put this work in action, and stories of what this work looks like in practice in school systems, support organizations, and other entities across the education sector.
Support for Leading Through Learning was provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The recommendations presented in this guide are those of CPRL alone and do not necessarily reflect our funder’s opinions or positions. Leading Through Learning is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share-Alike license and is subject to the copyright rules under that license.