Educational Community Study Circles: How Superintendents Can Enhance School Improvement through Community Dialogue (original) (raw)
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PSN: Education (Topic), 2017
This paper describes a plan for evaluating the Community Education Circles (CECs) program that is being implemented in the Lawrence Public Schools as part of an effort to enhance family-school engagement and improve outcomes for both students and parents. The CECs program supports the larger Lawrence Working Families Initiative, which in 2013 was awarded a multiyear grant through the Boston Fed?s Working Cities Challenge. This paper accomplishes several objectives: (1) describe the goals and methods of the CECs program as well as the larger goals of the Lawrence Working Families Initiative; (2) describe the methods that will be used to evaluate the success of the CECs program; (3) describe important features of the survey data and the school administrative data that have been collected so far for the families that are participating in our study. Concerning the last objective, we describe aspects of a family?s structure and employment situation, primary language, demographic informat...
was developed by the Study Circles Resource Center. SCRC is a project of the Topsfield Foundation, Inc., a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan foundation that is dedicated to advancing deliberative democracy and improving the quality of public life in the United States. SCRC carries out this mission by helping communities to organize study circles -small-group, democratic, highly participatory discussions that give everyday people opportunities to make a difference in their communities. We provide advice, networking, and how-to materials (including study circle guides on a variety of issues).
The Study Circle: A Case Study for Community Success
2005
Communities across the nation are adopting Study Circles as a way for groups of people to discuss, share, and resolve problems affecting them at any societal level. A small community in northern Indiana decided to use a Study Circle on the topic of how to improve student achievement. This paper uses this particular Study Circle as a vehicle to describe the Study Circle method and compare it to the Case Method. We posit that the characteristics of the Study Circle match that of the Case Method
American Educational Research Journal, 2016
In this article, we explore how organizational routines involving instructional rounds—collective, structured observations and reflections on classroom practice—might contribute to the development of social networks among administrators and support a common, district-wide focus on instruction. Building on work on communities of practice, we consider some of the mechanisms through which rounds might contribute to the development of the relationships, common language, and shared understanding integral to building social capital. Our analysis focuses on the evolution of social networks among administrators in three districts. While this initial analysis does not find a consistent association between engagement in rounds and the development of social networks that have the characteristics of communities of practice, it points to several key factors that need to be taken into account in order to use rounds strategically to support the development of connections among administrators who m...
The Power of Community School Councils in Urban Schools
Peabody Journal of Education, 2020
Demand for school reform, particularly urban schools labeled as "failing," requires a community engagement strategy centered on intermingled social problems: poverty, racial isolation and discrimination, cultural clashes, socioeconomic inequalities, and funding disparities. While school administrators are challenged to turn schools around with limited time and resources quickly, their efforts are not a silver bullet. Engaging community requires committed partnerships that support schools to advance quality learning. Community school councils, an organizing strategy, focus on addressing potential threats and enhancing strengths for student success. This case study describes the participatory action structure of community school councils in an urban public high school, a middle school, and three elementary schools. The theoretical framework of the study is based on Bryk's five essential elements of school improvement and their interplay that predicts school improvement or stagnation in the long term (Bryk et al., 2010) and more recent findings that community schools demonstrate an evidence-based strategy for equitable school improvement. This study is relevant to school communities with comparable demographics interested in a comprehensive strategy that expands the traditional educational mission to address social/emotional and health needs of children and families by engaging the broader community to support student learning, strengthening families and school communities.
Teachers College Record, 2008
Background/Context: This study builds upon research on teacher professional communities and high school restructuring reforms. It employs a conceptual framework that draws upon theories of "community of practice" and "community of learners." Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This study analyzes how teachers' professional inquiry communities at the high school level constitute a resource for school reform and instructional improvement. Setting: This research focused on a reforming, comprehensive urban public high school with site-based management. Population/Participants/ Subjects: This study investigates the practices of six school-based oral inquiry groups known as Critical Friends Groups (CFGs), which were selected as cases of mature professional communities. Twenty-five teachers and administrators participated as informants. Research Design: This research involved a video-based, qualitative case study. Data Collection and Analysis: Data included observations of CFG meetings, interviews with teachers and administrators, and document collection. Analysis entailed coding with qualitative software, development of analytic cross-CFG meta-matrices, discourse analytic techniques, and joint viewing of video records with informants. Findings/Results: The author explores four particular design features of CFGs-their diverse menu of activities, their decentralized structure, their interdisciplinary membership,
Leadership for Learning Improvement in Urban Schools
2009
state's) accountability system, instructional guidance, and expectations for databased practice, and they had wedded those to an internal set of expectations and responsibilities that represent the school's internal accountability system. Related to this response, the schools were building and expanding their own systems for collecting and using data in daily practice, drawing on what the district or state provided, but often including other forms or representations of data concerning their students. The stance most of the school leaders took to the larger environment was to ■ ■ treat it as a source of opportunities, resources, and potentially helpful ideas, rather than a site of roadblocks, unhelpful advice, and unreachable requirements. The leaders' response to the larger environment had identifiable consequences for instructional practice. Leaders' efforts were helping to focus and align instruction and, to some extent, ■ ■ narrow it. Leaders appeared to be developing a new language for talking about students ■ ■ that emphasizes "gaps," "gains," and "moving" students. The language underscores a view of student learning that emphasizes measurable progress, often with regular testing as the metric. Picking up a theme pushed by the districts and enabled by more regular use of ■ ■ data in instructional planning, instructional leadership in these schools was emphasizing the differentiation of instruction, to serve students' differing needs, approaches to learning, and prior schooling histories. vii Leadership for Learning Improvement in Urban Schools In parallel with supervisory leaders' use of data, teacher leaders found data ■ ■ about student achievement or other evidence of student learning offered a convenient and often productive entry point for building and sustaining a working relationship between teacher leaders and classroom teachers. Several conditions affected the ability of the teacher leaders to find a secure footing in the school, among them, role clarity, cultural norms, and the support of principals as well as peers engaged in teacher leadership work. The accessibility of peer-alike colleagues, in particular, seemed to help learning-focused teacher leaders mitigate the tensions they experienced in their emergent roles. Learning-focused teacher leaders occupied a middle ground in their respective schools, positioned between classrooms and individuals or entities at the school or district level with authority over multiple classrooms. The territory they occupied generated ambiguities concerning their work, the potential for conflict, and opportunities for furthering the learning improvement goals of school and district. The direct and regular interaction with the principal placed teacher leaders in a ■ ■ position to both shape and absorb the schoolwide agenda for learning improvement and then to transmit improvement messages to school staff. As part of their work, learning-focused teacher leaders could-and often ■ ■ did-act as a bridge or conduit between the classroom and district or state expectations for classroom practice. Whether in relation to the district's or school's learning improvement agenda, ■ ■ or both, learning-focused teacher leaders offered a direct and continual link between district or school reform intentions and daily practice. These bridging activities and roles necessitated a continuing process of negotiation, as the teacher leaders carried forward their instructional support work. Learning to Lead for Learning Improvement These findings have clear implications for what supervisory and nonsupervisory leaders need to learn to do if they are to pursue ambitious learning improvement agendas in contemporary urban settings. Principals and other supervisory leaders need to rethink and expand their conception of supervision so that it becomes one of regular, often informal conversation with teachers about instructional issues. They also need to create working partnerships with other staff around the building Pathways for School Leaders' Learning School districts, state agencies, external organizations trying to support educational reform, and others can create various pathways for supporting these kinds of new learning. Some of the need can be met by better initial preparation programs. These districts created their own leadership development programs of several kinds, aimed primarily at preparing new principals. But as important or more, especially for teacher leaders, are three other sources of learning and support: Central office support systems. ■ ■ Especially where the central office had taken proactive steps to become more responsive and engaged with schools, school leaders gained much from a variety of officials and staff from the district. A companion report, Central Office Transformation for District-wide Teaching and Learning Improvement (Honig, Copland, Lorton, Rainey, & Newton, forthcoming), elaborates on what this can mean in the relationship of central office and schools. Peer and professional networks. ■ ■ School leaders relied on-and were sometimes helped to develop-connections with colleagues in similar roles and other proix Leadership for Learning Improvement in Urban Schools fessionals who could offer ideas, advice, comfort, and modeling of potentially useful practices. Relationships with external organizations (e.g., nonprofit groups, universi-■ ■ ties). Either by being prompted or through their own evolving relations, school leaders developed long-term relationships with various external organizations that offered instructionally specific expertise and occasions for school leaders to deepen their understanding of their work. These sources in combination began to provide a web of support for the instructional leadership cadres at work in these kinds of schools. As the work of learning improvement moves forward in urban schools, policy makers, leaders, and others who care about the reform of public education can find ways to focus these support systems on the new learning that the instructional leadership cadre is doing. Research Strategy and Sample We pursued a multiple-case investigation of schools within four school districts:
2019
California's shift towards continuous improvement in education makes understanding how districts and schools can learn to improve a more pressing question than ever. The CORE Improvement Community (CIC), a network of California school districts engaged in learning about improvement together, is an important testing ground to learn about what this work entails. This report continues drawing lessons from the CIC's second year as its districts work together towards a common aim: to improve the mathematics achievement of African American and Latinx students in Grades 4-8. The CIC applies a specific continuous improvement approach, called improvement science, to support teams in reaching the aim. Improvement science, unlike many approaches to reform, is not a specific "program" designed to fix educators' performance in a particular aspect of their work (e.g., mathematics instruction). Instead, it is an approach and tools through which educators can better understand the causes of lagging performance, select ideas that they believe will lead to improvement, test them, and collect and analyze data from those tests to systematically see if their ideas indeed yield better outcomes. In 2016-17, the work of the CIC consisted of building district teams that conducted systems analysis to understand the achievement gap in their respective contexts. In 2017-18, the CIC launched local improvement teams (LITs) at schools, which used tools and protocols of improvement science to identify strategies that could impact the problem of practice, test those ideas, and gather data about the impacts of those change ideas. The first section of the report briefly explains the policy context in California and the history of the CORE districts' collaboration. The second part of the report details four major lessons learned from the CIC this year: 1. The simultaneous goals of improving math achievement while building capacity for continuous improvement o er both benefits and challenges for the CORE Districts. 2. Districts have a pivotal role to play in supporting and sustaining continuous improvement e orts focused on classroom instruction. 3. Context matters. Preexisting structures and processes, time for educator collaboration, and supportive leadership all influence continuous improvement e orts. 4. District and school leaders are excited about the potential of continuous improvement to spur deep and lasting improvement. The lessons learned from CORE's second year of implementing the CIC have broad implications throughout the state and the nation as educational organizations seek to bring continuous improvement to bear on problems that have been intractable to date.