Improvement R&D: A School-University Collaboration to Support Professional Learning

• In Event: Partnering With Practitioners: How Researcher-Practitioner Collaborations Can Benefit Research and Practice

Abstract

Objectives
The present paper examines the results of a multi-year collaborative design effort to build instructional routines to support literacy improvement in a K-12 school. We present an analysis of one school’s efforts to use Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles as a tool to document the implementation and iterative design of instructional routines, and its effects to improve student achievement (Bryk, Gomez, & Grunow, 2011; Bryk et al., 2015; Langley et al., 2009). The following questions guided our collaborative effort: How does engaging in PDSA cycles influence practice? What types of changes in teaching practice of individuals and groups do PDSA cycles support? In what ways can PDSA cycles contribute to collaborative practice schoolwide?

Theoretical Framework
Organizational and reading-to-learn perspectives highlighting the importance of routinization of work suggest instructional routines are beneficial to organize the work of teaching and learning (Johnson, 2004; Sherer & Spillane, 2011; Grossman, 1992). Instructional routines support students’ development of the academic literacies required to access and learn from domain-specific text (Gomez & Gomez, 2007; Zywica & Gomez, 2008). Through routines, students learn expectations with respect to, among other things, behavior, classwork performance and completion, and grading. Teachers, too, require routinized methods for tracking implementation of instructional routines and alignment to student learning. When used effectively, PDSA cycles support teachers’ ability to measure student learning and to quickly adapt practice to implement effective strategies that can be used to scale improvement.

Methods
Over the 2013-2014 academic year, researchers and practitioners began a multi-year collaboration to engage PDSA cycles schoolwide to address problems of practice. The current analysis draws on this work and focuses on the design efforts of researcher-practitioner groups. Each group was comprised of teachers and an improvement advisor (researcher or out-of-classroom personnel). All groups had the goal of improving literacy as it related to their specific discipline or grade level. The groups set specific aims and engaged in the PDSA process throughout the year.

Teachers collaboratively designed instructional routines and refined them using iterative PDSA cycles. Data draws on documentation collected over the 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 academic years, including meeting field notes, document analysis, lesson artifacts, and student work. To study the use of PDSAs as a tool to iteratively refine instructional routines on student learning, data analysis focused on the collection of data around the ways teachers adapted instructional routines to improve student learning, and end-of-year common assessment data.

Results
Preliminary findings suggest that use of PDSA cycles supports teachers to establish common routines to approach teaching and share their learning around an aim, helping them to improve students’ learning. While there are indications that groups improved alignment of instructional practice and student learning as measured by common assessments, the implementation of PDSAs was not without challenges.

Scholarly Significance
Our work responds to the need for tools, strategies, knowledge, and resources to advance thoughtful improvement. Given the recent application of improvement science approaches to education, this project seeks to add to the burgeoning research in this area (Bryk et al., 2015; Lewis, 2015).

Authors

• Maritza Lozano, University of California - Los Angeles

• Karen Hunter Quartz, University of California - Los Angeles

• Louis M. Gomez, University of California - Los Angeles

• Pedro De Leon, UCLA Community School

• Rebekah Kang, Los Angeles Unified School District