National Summit on Improvement in Education 2025

In the pursuit of educational improvement, understanding variation is key to making informed decisions that drive real change. This interactive session will explore the power of Shewhart Charts to distinguish common from special cause variation. Using case examples, we will demonstrate how organizations, teams and networks can use these methods to accelerate their improvement efforts. 

We cannot improve what we can’t measure: Share your feedback on this session.

Improvement networks seek to solve complex problems in education, but little is known about how hub leaders build and manage these temporary learning organizations. In this workshop, hub leaders will use The Network Health Study’s Hub Leadership Framework to reflect on their own leadership practice, engage in collaborative problem solving around hub team design and common challenges leaders face, and engage in a reflective routine to strengthen hub leadership practice. We explicate the complexities of hub leadership practice while supporting leaders’ professional learning, providing tools, routines, and collaborative space to learn from each other.

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How do you know which changes will lead to real improvement? In this interactive session, participants will apply planned experimentation—a structured approach to testing changes that increases both the efficiency and effectiveness of PDSA cycles. Through a hands-on activity, attendees will design, run, and analyze PDSA cycles, uncovering insights to drive better decision-making. Whether tackling student outcomes, operational processes, or instructional strategies, this session will introduce you to practical tools to test multiple changes and learn about their individual and combined effects.

Improvers 💜 data: Complete the Session Survey.

In this methods session, we describe what practical measures are and how they might be used to empower educators and students to use data to solve meaningful problems. Practical measures that are easy to use and prioritize learning from actionable data can help educators improve the quality of instruction. To emphasize this, we will share  an example of a set of practical measures designed to support teacher learning and capability to enact culturally responsive teaching. Participants will learn about the measurement development process, test this new measure in practice, and explore opportunities to integrate practical measures in their own educational system. Participants will also consider ways to center equity and justice in other kinds of practical measurement work in their own systems.

We cannot improve what we can’t measure: Share your feedback on this session.

Not all problems are created equal—some have a far greater impact than others. In this hands-on session, participants will learn how to apply Pareto analysis, a simple yet powerful tool for identifying the most frequently occurring causes of the problems we seek to address and focusing efforts where they matter most. Using real-world education data, attendees will practice creating Pareto charts, uncovering root causes, and making data-driven decisions that maximize improvement. Walk away with practical skills to streamline your efforts, reduce inefficiencies, and drive meaningful change in your school or district.

Improvers 💜 data: Complete the Session Survey.

How do you build a shared set of measures that truly supports learning and improvement across a network? In this interactive session, participants will explore key principles for selecting meaningful measures and apply them to a real-world challenge from a math improvement network. Through discussion and insights from improvement advisors, attendees will leave with practical strategies to design a measurement system that drives continuous learning and impact.

We cannot improve what we can’t measure: Share your feedback on this session.

Organizations using improvement science to guide change efforts often look to improvement coaches to support their work. Coaching can be essential to build individual and team capabilities and support progress towards an improvement goal, but there are few resources that describe this nuanced work. In this session, four categories of common improvement coaching dilemmas will be introduced, as well as ways to explore them and identify potential actions to take. Participants will engage in a scenario-based simulation to practice responding to challenges that routinely arise during coaching and also reflect on a challenge from their own practice.

We cannot improve what we can’t measure: Share your feedback on this session.

Join us for stories of bright spots and hurdles gathered over four years with Oregon’s NWRESD Student Network. In partnership with adults in the NWRESD 9th Grade Success Network, Student Interns investigate their own systems, design and implement plan-do-study-act cycles, and advocate for more caring, connected, and inclusive school cultures. Interns receive stipends for participating in convenings, workshops, and coaching to develop the skills and mindsets to become agents of change. Session participants will develop their own pilot proposal for partnering with students using key lessons learned from the NWRESD Student Network and resources from Student-Powered Improvement.

Improvers 💜 data: Complete the Session Survey.

Educators are regularly given data that highlight problematic outcomes without providing clues for how to improve. Seeking a different approach, CORE’s 9th grade on-track network has learned to display grade and attendance data in new ways that support improvers to act. We will share emergent insights from our work with urban districts across California and improvement-focused data displays we’ve used with schools, including control charts and pareto charts. Session activities will surface participants’ collective wisdom about how to display familiar data in novel ways that catalyze action. Attendees will leave with insights to apply to data in their own context.

Improvers 💜 data: Complete the Session Survey.

The Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle is the engine for learning in networked improvement work, and improvement coaches play an important role in ensuring that the learning from these inquiry cycles benefits the network. In this session, participants will learn about models and approaches to improvement coaching, with a focus on how coaches can help teams build efficient and effective inquiry routines. Participants will examine and reflect upon common dilemmas in coaching PDSAs and practice identifying specific coaching moves to support the team moving forward. 

Celebrate and push on the work: Give feedback on this session.

Increase your improvement team’s capacity to meaningfully plan for and use empathy interviews in this hands-on session. Participants will learn how to identify a clear and specific purpose for empathy interviews and backwards plan towards that purpose. We’ll discuss the common missteps of empathy interviews and how to avoid them. Participants will practice analysis and application of interview findings. Strategies from this session can be modified and applied to other qualitative data teams collect such as listening sessions. Previous experience with empathy interviews is not required.

Improvers 💜 data: Complete the Session Survey.