Leading through learning to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow

We’re closing this initial series with a post exploring what’s ahead in public education. We’re joining in a chorus with other organizations, leaders, and pundits who are trying to discern what’s just over the horizon and relaying what they see through their newsletters, podcasts, articles, and books.  

We’ve all read the headlines and seen the data on today’s challenges in education: Students are experiencing disparities in access to challenging and joyful learning experiences and great teachers. Schools face teacher shortages, particularly in low-income communities. And public school systems are in crisis as families increasingly pull their children from public schools to homeschool or send them to private schools.

At the Center for Public Research and Leadership (CPRL) at Columbia University, we envision a future in which leaders across the education sector have the skills and conviction to be what we call Learning Leaders – to learn with and from people across their system how to design policies, practices, and solutions that meet today’s needs, and to be able to regularly adapt and improve. 

Our 12 years of studying, guiding, and supporting systems transformation has revealed a series of leadership moves that have elicited real, sustainable change. This approach, called “Leading Through Learning,” is a method of applying and modifying what works in theory with what works on the ground in a school or district or state department of education. This framework is based on four core leadership practices. Learning Leaders: 

1. Establish an equity-centered vision and structure daily operations as continuous learning to actualize that vision
2. Foster and expand community participation in design, implementation, and improvement
3. Use observation and information to turn doing into learning
4. Enable everyone to generate, spread, and apply knowledge

When leaders enact these principles, they achieve promising results as well as build the strength to take on whatever lies ahead.

Learning leaders in action

Seaford Public Schools, Delaware

Take Seaford, a district in Delaware that we studied for its significant gains in student learning as a result of improvements to core instruction. 

Seaford’s successes start with a common equity-focused vision and values. The district’s Director of Curriculum and Instruction Kelly Carvajal Hageman describes herself as “relentless” about her focus on student learning. “We were driven by the North Star of giving all students access to grade-level content, and we knew they could meet high expectations if they had the proper support.”  

Given significant shifts in the community – students learning English grew to one-quarter of the student body – and lagging reading proficiency, district leaders set out to build a shared understanding of what good research-based reading instruction looks like for all learners. They collaborated at every level of the district, creating teaming structures to leverage the expertise of multiple stakeholders, develop a stronger understanding of their system, and diagnose and respond to emergent needs. 

Through this participatory process, the staff determined that rather than continue to pull students learning English out of class for instruction, students and teachers would benefit from a co-teaching model that allowed for differentiated grade-level instruction within each classroom. Intervention now happens exclusively in real time in classrooms. “We have nearly abolished remediation in Seaford,” she said.

In Seaford, learning is thoroughly embedded in daily routines. Every educator, from paraprofessionals to teachers to school leaders, actively participates in ongoing job-embedded professional learning. Classroom walkthroughs and observations, feedback exchanges, student work analyses, and collaborative planning are built into each school day. “Learning Lab” teachers at Blades Elementary co-teach alongside an expert from University of Delaware’s Professional Development Center for Educators who provides teachers with real-time coaching. Lab teachers adjust instruction based on live feedback. Seaford educators also regularly provide feedback to those who design and revise instructional materials and professional learning so that materials and approaches improve. 

The results are indisputable: In 2015, Seaford was the lowest performing district in Delaware, dangerously close to a state takeover. Eight years later, Seaford’s students do better in ELA and math than students in almost any other district in Delaware.

Tulsa Public Schools, Oklahoma

We also see the principles in Leading through Learning in action in Tulsa Public Schools. In 2016, Tulsa schools faced massive cuts in state funding. As part of her strategic planning process as Tulsa’s then-new superintendent, Deborah Gist created the Office of Data Strategy and Analytics to make the district’s visionary strategic plan clear and measurable, and to make their work efficient by providing easy to use data tools and reports that would save educators valuable time and effort. 

A major component of Destination Excellence, the strategic plan, involved the district office adopting a mindset of being “all in” to support the work of teachers, continually assessing and improving their service to schools. “We wanted to use data to learn about people’s experiences,” said Sean Berkstresser, Executive Director of Information and Analytics at Tulsa Public Schools.

With support from CPRL, the data team built knowledge, skills, and processes related to continuous improvement, with a focus on engaging diverse groups of stakeholders. They developed a data dashboard to make it faster and easier for teachers and principals to analyze and apply the data with support from the district’s team of data analysts and developers. Now, the district's priorities align with the measures and performance expectations that principals set for their schools. Frequent input from a cross-section of stakeholders, Berkstresser said, has allowed for alignment, accountability, and buy-in that give the goals “more teeth.” 

Leaning on the framework’s key equity principle that knowledge is democratic, Berkstresser’s team decentralized knowledge ownership, giving staff, students, parents, and community members the ability to understand student growth and track progress toward goals. This provided everyone the opportunity to not only give input but also meaningfully contribute to decisions about which ideas are worth capturing and scaling. 

“Our team has to constantly think about what we are doing to improve lives and work for teachers and students. Are we seeing results? That has to drive everything,” said Berkstresser. 

The district did see early results: In the 2018-19 school year, the percentage of schools that improved their proficiency rates more than doubled from the year before, nearly 2/3 of schools improved reading growth, and the graduation rate rose to 75% from 67% in 2015. 

Added Director of Data Strategy Jonathan McIlroy, “Our charge is to help people push past admiring the problem and create systems and structures that create a conversation and a call to action.” 

Having these structures in place is also helpingTulsa bounce back from the Covid-19 pandemic. Data review is now embedded in day-to-day processes. School leaders meet biweekly with district support staff to review school-level strategy metrics and discuss potential action steps. District staff meet weekly to discuss school-level challenges and bright spots and how the team can support school leaders, and to review system level strategy metrics.  While, like most districts, Tulsa saw student learning gains slide backward during the pandemic, schools across the district have begun to see growth again. 

An approach for today and the future

If history is any indication, school system leaders are likely to respond to the pressure on our public schools by imposing more control and uniform approaches coupled with  expectations of universal improvement. 

Our years of research and partnership with education sector leaders has us advocating for  a different path for future success, one that relies on system leaders’ ability to attend to the unique needs within classrooms, schools, communities, districts, and states, and to design solutions  fitted to the dynamics of multiple, distinct challenges that arise at the same time. 

The learning leaders’ approach in places like Seaford and Tulsa gives us confidence that we can adapt and evolve to address whatever the future holds for public education while holding fast to high expectations for what a great education can be for each and every child. 

Become a learning leader. Join us.