For nearly 15 years, my career has been dedicated to teaching, coaching, and mentoring educational leaders to use rigorous inquiry methods to enact more equitable and just educational systems. This has primarily focused on developing leaders’ capacity to use the tools and methods of improvement science, an approach to educational change rooted in iterative inquiry, driven by practical theories of improvement, and informed by evidence in the form of data for improvement. I have taught, coached, and advised leaders in higher education, K-12 schools and districts, and non-profits. In my teaching and coaching, I work with leaders to support them in envisioning the kinds of learning environments they hope to enact and support, going beyond a narrow focus on dominant outcome metrics such as standardized test scores.
However, systems leaders are not at the liberty to ignore such metrics given the weight of accountability systems bearing down on daily work. Thus, I help these leaders: a) develop clarity on the kinds of learning environments they aspire to create as educators; b) position dominant metrics as one kind of indicator that may or may not be trustworthy indicators of learning, and c) attend to and, if needed, design new indicators connected tightly to their visions for ideal learning environments.
I have engaged in this type of leadership development work as an improvement coach in my previous professional experiences. More centrally and recently, I engage in this work through my teaching and advising in the Educational Systems Improvement Science Ed.D. program at Clemson University, where I teach research methods and educational reform classes.