Developing Learning-focused Leaders Through Design-based School Improvement: Lessons Learned Across Germany and the United States

• In Event: Advancing The Teaching and Learning of Collaborative Continuous Improvement in Education

Abstract

Objectives: Our proposed poster focuses on how educational leaders develop the capacity to guide collaborative, continuous improvement (CCIE) using Design-Based School Improvement (DBSI) (Mintrop, 2016), a model rooted in intrinsic motivation and collective problem-solving. We compare two research-practice partnerships (RPPs)—one in California, USA, and another in Berlin, Germany—focused on building the capacity of district leaders and school development coaches, respectively, to enact and teach DBSI to teachers and principals. This poster examines the processes and challenges of cultivating learning-focused leadership for DBSI, comparing our lessons learned across two educational systems to infer key pedagogical principles and facilitation strategies for building capacity for CCIE.

Theoretical framework: DBSI depends upon learning-focused leaders (Knapp et al., 2014)—teacher leaders, coaches, or administrators—who understand their work to center around supporting professional learning. Both the California and Berlin cases focused on understanding how to support leaders to learn and enact DBSI within the constraints of their distinct systems. We drew on a set of shared theoretical assumptions across both contexts. First, our RPPs served as a collaborative infrastructure for co-designing leadership learning between leaders and university partners (Coburn et al., 2013). Second, following socio-cultural learning theory, we assumed that expertise is developed through meaning-making in authentic, practice-embedded settings (Knapp, 2008). Third, following Schön’s (1984) concept of reflective practice, we grounded leadership development in a pedagogy of conceptual learning, iterative application, and reflection-on-action. These shared commitments guided context-specific learning processes and supported our cross-case comparison.

Method: As one initiative within a multi-year partnership, the California project involved district leaders engaging in DBSI through a nine-month learning series facilitated by university partners, with data from 20 hours of audio recordings, 180 pages of field notes, and artifacts. The Berlin project, focused on school development coaches facilitating DBSI in disadvantaged schools over three years, draws on over 100 hours of audio data, coaching sessions, and case conferences. Both projects analyzed their qualitative data by identifying episodes that involved ease with learning, difficulty with learning, and emerging new understandings and coded for particular challenges and affordances of the professional learning series (Mintrop et al., 2024).

Substantiated conclusions: Our findings revealed two critical challenges in cultivating learning-focused leadership: (1) navigating tensions between internally felt needs and externally imposed mandates, and (2) reshaping professional roles. In both contexts, leaders struggled with reconciling authentic motivation with performance-driven demands, and with shifting from an implementation or compliance orientation to a learning-focused leadership role. Sustained co-design partnerships, skillful facilitation, and reflective data practices enabled leaders to reframe resistance as learning, surface assumptions, and foster agency among educators.

Significance: This research contributes insights into leadership development for CCIE in diverse educational systems. It shows that fostering learning-focused leaders necessitates long-term, contextually embedded professional learning supported by skilled facilitation and relational trust. The findings highlight the potential of DBSI to bridge policy-practice divides, empower district leaders, and build sustainable school improvement capacity.

Authors

• Corinne Aramburo, University of New Mexico

• Elizabeth Zumpe, University of Oklahoma

• Nils Reubke, Friedrich Alexander Universität Erlangen Nürnberg