The Drivers of a University-District Co-Design Partnership

• In Event: Hilton Roundtable Session 16
  In Roundtable Session: Continuous Improvement in University, District, and School Contexts: Promises and Challenges, Iteration After Iteration

Abstract

Continuous improvement (CI) comes in various forms, differing according to scope of problems addressed, complexity and duration of the change process, locus of solution generation, and decision-making dynamic. Practitioners may learn through rapid cycles of inquiry, such as PDSA cycles, that iterate around a fairly narrow practical focus. Or they may develop more complex designs for learning or changing practice that address problems of a broader scope, being supported by researchers. Solutions may be generated predominantly in an internal process of sharing ideas (Authors, 2016b) or in a process of external design development and internal reinvention (Fishman, et al, 2013). Decision making in the co-design process could be more top-down or bottom-up.

CI, regardless of its specific form, requires a mindset and organizational routines that have a high degree of rationality. Clearly defined problems of practice need to be thought through with articulated theories of action and connected with precise goals and metrics that guide iterative improvements. The ambiguous nature of goal setting, the ill-structured nature of problems, and the frequent incoherence of organizational change in many public school districts (Honig and Hatch, 2004) make CI a challenging undertaking (Authors, 2016c).

The paper traces the development of an on-going district-university partnership now in its fourth year that was formed in response to the new demands of the Common Core standards. Its goal has been to increase student academic engagement with subject matter content. On-going longitudinal data collection from meetings and reflective interviews are analyzed.

Phase I of the partnership began with a bottom up co-design effort at four schools. A multi-functional co-design team with instructional coaches, principals, district supervisors, and university partners developed video-based inquiry tasks to enhance the work of teacher work teams. This approach failed for a number of reasons:

• Ownership: the university partners were the main external developers of design ideas. Instructional coaches did not want to be relegated to mere re-inventers.

• Stretch: the district-internal actors were committed to an established routine of inquiry which tended to reproduce the status-quo.

• Incoherence and overload: central office administrators inundated schools with a constant flow of new initiatives and directives, depleting the design experiments of energy.

In Phase II, the partnership moved to the central office. The goal was to create problem awareness about prevalent instructional patterns and to focus district instructional leadership on fostering student academic engagement in lessons. Kernel routines (Resnick et al., 2010), namely learning walks and school improvement planning, were repurposed for district supervisors and principals to practice observing instruction and establishing a coherent focus in school improvement efforts. The protocols were co-designed, and university partners gave regular feedback on specific learning goals that the kernel routines were to advance. This phase was successful in creating problem awareness, but the conversations on focus and coherence still lack depth.

In Phase III, the partnership will return to the school level where design experiments will now be enabled and supported by central office and school level administrators.

Author

• Rick Mintrop, University of California - Berkeley