Learning Improvement Science to Lead: Conditions That Bridge Professional Development to Professional Action

• In Event: Centering Equity and Practice Considerations in Improvement Scholarship

Abstract

Though improvement science (IS) has become increasingly common in educational spaces, little research explores how leaders learn and come to use IS. To begin to fill this gap, this qualitative study explores the conditions that influence the development of educational leaders’ improvement science fluency, a concept that captures practitioner capacity across three domains of improvement science activity: tools, principles, and dispositions. Additionally, we explore how, given contextual constraints, leaders adapt IS. We conjecture the extent practitioners align their practices with the ethos and actions of IS depends on the interaction of a set of conditions, including opportunities for practitioners to apply what they learn on role-relevant problems of practice, role authority, and the availability of a set of organizational supports.

Authors

• Mary-Louise Leger, University of California - Los Angeles

• Olivia Elvira Obeso, University of California - Los Angeles