National Summit on Improvement in Education 2025

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.

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.

Bank Street Education Center (Bank Street) will highlight how to embed sustainability practices into CI work. Bank Street will share examples from their 5 + year partnership with Yonkers Public Schools (YPS). This session will share examples of how Bank Street  navigated the local context and leadership transitions, cultivated a coalition of the willing among a network of schools, and supported district leaders in embedding CI practices into district-wide structures including their five-year strategic plan, math vision, PLCs, job descriptions, and data collection systems. Participants will hear examples from the field including course corrections in implementation, lessons learned, and sustainability wins.  

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.

In this interactive session, participants will learn about our story of impact, including the improvement challenges we faced and the practices we refined to drive shifts in student outcomes. Central to our success were the internal processes of democratizing decision-making and, at the school level, the use of collaborative tools like our new classroom-level measurement tracker. Participants will engage with real data and our tools through simulations and case studies. Then reflect on how to customize tools for their own contexts, and explore actionable steps to implement.

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

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.

Join us to explore how the GRAD Partnership leverages intermediaries—ranging from district offices to higher education regional networks—to address unique educational and community contexts to support implementation of student success systems. This session will focus on building the network and leadership of improvers specifically in rural schools. Participants will: (1) Gain insight into intermediary role and its impact; (2) Engage in an interactive activity to identify their connection to intermediary supports; and (3) Hear real-world success stories from two rural intermediary partners (North State Together in Northern California and district level attendance team leadership in New Mexico).

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

Building a meaningful experience for network members is a pressing challenge for leaders who support networked improvement. Whether or not educators are told to participate in an improvement network, they voluntarily engage at variable levels. This session provides an overview of lessons learned from the Network Health Study about strategies leaders used to design participation structures that support member engagement. Leaders will grapple with how to balance structure and agency in their work and learn about a tool to measure how individuals value network participation.

Improvers 💜 data: Complete the Session Survey.

In this session, participants will hear the story of the College Ready on Track (CRoT) hub team’s effort to set up and run a networked improvement community dedicated to providing Long Term Multilingual Learner students in Denver Public Schools high schools with the conditions to be successfully prepared for college, career, and life. Presenters will share learnings about the power of data in helping the CRoT team go from identifying an equity problem to improve, fostering collaboration across central office teams to successfully launching a network in two month’s time. 

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

Education leaders often find themselves firefighting — addressing immediate issues only to see them resurface. Real-Time Problem Solving (RTPS) offers a method that tackles problems at their root, focusing on individual incidents, rather than problem generalizations,  to uncover and address their underlying causes, then sharing these solutions across the system. Guided by the principles “systems, not people” and “solve, don’t fix,” RTPS fosters sustainable solutions that reduce inequitable outcomes. In this session, participants will engage in hands-on RTPS activities, developing practical skills and mindsets to implement meaningful, lasting improvements in their own work.

Improvers 💜 data: Complete the Session Survey.