Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford:
They leave some real clear lessons for improvers who really want to do work with people and not to people or for people.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton and that was the voice of Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford. Brandi is an associate professor of educational leadership at Clemson University and the author of Improvement Science in Education: A Primer, as well as lots more. Brandi sat down with Stacey Caillier, the director of the soon-to-be-launched National Coalition for Improvement in Education, and Curtis Taylor, director of the also soon-to-be-launched National Attendance and Engagement Meta Network. The three of them got together to talk about what continuous improvement can learn from the Civil Rights movement. I love this conversation so much. Enjoy.

Stacey Caillier:
Brandi, we are so excited to have you back for part two and I’m extra excited that we are joined today by Dr. Curtis Taylor who is one of my colleagues at High Tech High Grad School who I deeply admire and who has thought a lot about the intersections of improvement work and equity work, and I would say that together we are two of your biggest fans. So we’re really excited to talk with you today. Two years ago, several of us attended a session that you led at the Carnegie Summit where you were challenging folks to think about what we as an improvement community could learn from civil rights organizers, and people literally charged out of that room. It was like a spark was lit. I had probably 10 different people run up and be like, “Oh my gosh, I just went to the best session.”

And then this year you published a fantastic chapter that you wrote with Erika Lytle Lett and Shamella Cromartie on ImproveCrit Using Critical Race Theory to Guide Continuous Improvement. Curtis and I both read that chapter, marked it all up, loved all sorts of things about it, and we are really excited to dig into both of those pieces with you and just have a conversation about the intersections of improvement, organizing, and the pursuit of justice. Sound good?

Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford:
Yes, let’s do it.

Curtis Taylor:
Sounds good.

Stacey Caillier:
All right. So we’re going to start with the session that you led at the Carnegie Summit, and then in that session you talked about the incongruence that can happen when we take improvement science, which was developed in industry, and we apply it to education, a system that was designed to be inequitable. You posed this really powerful question in that session of where else may we look for histories of continuous improvement and shared how you find a lot of energy and solace in looking at civil rights activism as something to think about for our histories. So I just want to open up with who are some of your north stars in that movement and what do you think improvers can learn from organizers?

Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford:
So the presentation I did a couple years ago at Carnegie was really a passion project. It just allowed me to talk about my favorite people. Going back to this history of improvement in industry, one of the things that is problematic is when you read improvement work, they’re often talking about restoring the system to its optimal performance, but in education the system has never been optimal for all children, and so that’s why we need to look for histories elsewhere. And so when I think about organizing, some of my north stars are Septima Clark, Ella Baker, and Bayard Rustin, and I think these gifted organizers have a lot of insights for improvers about how we can do this work, particularly in conjunction and in solidarity with the people the work is designed to serve.

When I think about Ella Baker first, I think of how much she honored the genius of everyday folks, and I am going to talk about her quotes and Septima’s quotes, and they’re not in front of me so I’m not going to get it right, so I don’t want the historians to come after me. But Ella Baker says something like, I don’t want the students she was working with to see their pastors or their community leaders, but I wanted them to see themselves as the primary catalyst for change. That is one of the things I think about in improvement work, and I’ve talked about this before, but improvers have to have humility, to really let the people lead. One of her famous quotes is strong people don’t need strong leaders, and it’s really about being a facilitator and getting out of the way because the people know what’s best for them.

In a similar vein, Septima Clark does the same thing. In a conversation where she was talking about Martin Luther King, she said that the two of them kind of saw things differently and that King felt like he needed to be places to speak, whereas Septima said, “I would’ve never accomplished anything if I thought I had to go everywhere and do the talking. I train people to do their own talking.” And so there was this real emphasis on building capacity, and that’s why there was this proliferation of citizenship schools which she started by getting regular folks to teach other folks what to do to pass the literacy test and things of that nature so people could vote.

But Septima also has a piece called Literacy and Liberation, I can’t think of what year it was, somewhere in the sixties, it might be ’64, where she talks about people being action research minded and that we have to take a look at where we are and where we want to be. Now she does not use the terminology improvement science, but I’ve always said action research and improvement science are cousins. And so it’s that same type of mindset, figuring out where we are and where we need to go.

And then Bayard is also organizer extraordinaire. He’s most known for organizing the March on Washington, but he had such a resume before he got there, and that’s what people often don’t realize. His hands were involved in so many things, from labor stuff to race stuff. But the gift of Bayard is recognizing that all of these different struggles, while they are different, were connected and then liberation is connected across the board. Sometimes we get so siloed, like I’m working on discipline, well, I’m working on attendance, that we can’t see that we need both discipline and attendance for these children to reach their full potential. And so Bayard says, “It’s all connected, and while I might be working on this piece of the puzzle and you’re working on that piece of the puzzle, I can support you and you can support me.” And so I think they leave some real clear lessons for improvers who really want to do work with people and not to people or for people.

Curtis Taylor:
I love that so much, Brandi, just having those examples of how they were leading and empowering individuals to do the work and catalyzing it throughout. It makes me think of a comment that was made to me about leading from the back compared to leading to the front and how I think both are necessary and then in the work that we’re doing. So I appreciated you sharing the story of Ella, Septima, and Bayard Rustin in those efforts and how they’re doing that particular piece. In that same session, you talked about the journey to reconciliation as a beautiful example of improvement thinking and strategy. For listeners who may not know, can you share what the journey of reconciliation was and what you think those of us who are committed to improving and service of justice can learn from it?

Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford:
As we’re sitting here talking about this, I think I’m going to start assigning Rustin’s reflections on the Journey to Reconciliation in my improvement courses so people can read it and see it as an example. But folks often refer to the Journey of Reconciliation as the first Freedom Ride. It was literally the same thing, but it took place in 1947. It was in response to the Irene Morgan versus Virginia decision which was decided in 1946, but basically it said that you don’t have to enforce segregation on commercial interstate buses. So buses crossing state lines, it’s against the constitution to enforce that.

Basically with the journey of Reconciliation, which Rustin was an organizer, they were doing like PDSA cycles. They were literally testing out what would happen when Black folks and white folks got on these interstate buses and rode south and didn’t follow the customs of the state they were in, and they collected data. They collect the outcome data, they collect their process data, and it’s interesting because in his notes Rustin writes there were three reasons for doing this Journey to Reconciliation, and the first reason was to gather data in a “scientific fashion,” and I put air quotes around scientific fashion because those are his words, not Brandi’s words, in a “scientific fashion” on what would happen when Black folks and white folks rode south together and did not heed to the Jim Crow expectations.

And then the second purpose was to develop techniques for dealing creatively with the conflicts that would arise. And then the third purpose was to share what they learned with other people. I think that’s what improvement is all about. The data piece is what really got me because they collected quantitative data on things like how many people were arrested, how much they had to pay for bond, how many days they had to be in jail, that type of stuff. But they also collected really intricate qualitative data like the reactions to the people on the buses, so much so that they were able to give advice like if you’re in a situation like this, if you’re facing this thing, try to appeal to the women on the buses because the women show more pity and empathy than men. They had so many detailed things that they learned and shared out. And then of course the Journey to Reconciliation definitely became a model for the Freedom Rides you would see later in the ’60s.

But Rustin was testing things under different circumstances, trying to figure out what works for whom. So sometimes the Black folks would not adhere to the rules. Sometimes the white folks would not adhere to the rules. They did it on both Greyhound and Trailways. So they were doing all the things. But we typically look to Toyota and to healthcare when thinking about where are examples of improvement, and I think it’s important that we don’t just look to industry or to even healthcare for insights of improvement because improvement is not new and no group or industry or sector has a monopoly on strategy.

Curtis Taylor:
Hmm. Mm-hmm.

Stacey Caillier:
I love that. I feel like that perfectly covered all the testing, learning, adapting things to new contexts, all because we’re trying to reach this goal and we’re trying to pilot some things and learn from them so that the next version goes better, and it’s beautiful. So this next question is going to seem like a little bit of a pivot, but it’s not. I want to talk about science fiction because in the chapter that you wrote with Erika and Shamella, you all say, and I’m quoting you, “That justice work is science fiction and that improvement in service of justice is science fiction because,” to quote you all, “when educators seek equitable opportunities and outcomes for students, they’re seeking that which has never been,” much like Ella, Septima, Bayard, and other civil rights activists were seeking.

So just to your earlier point, this work is not about remembering what was or trying to get back to some perfect version of something that didn’t actually work for everybody, but about dreaming something new and moving toward it with a lot of determination and discipline as your last example shared. It made me think about when we started our kind of journey with continuous improvement, we actually didn’t start with the problem. We started by asking people to dream together. We went into schools and we asked people, “What are your dreams for young people in your care and what would you like school to be for them?” And that was our starting point which is really different from starting from unpacking the problem or fixing what is. And so I’d love just to hear from you, why do you think the dreaming or the science fiction part of it is so often left out of improvement, and what can we do to kind of bring it back in or reclaim it a bit?

Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford:
That is a good question, and I don’t know why it’s left out. I think, well, I think a lot of things, to be honest.

Stacey Caillier:
Share them all, Brandi, all of them.

Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford:
Oh, goodness. We don’t have that much time.

Stacey Caillier:
This podcast just got to be four hours, friends.

Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford:
I think sometimes in improvement work we are so focused on protocols and tools and methods and the process that we miss where we’re going. I think a lot about how we can bring the dreaming back in and kind of what hinders us. I think one of the first things we can do, particularly in education, to bring the dreaming back in is to listen to the children, and not saying that we more seasoned humans are jaded, but children have not been jaded and distracted with the socialization that makes us think constantly that we have to have goals that are specific and measurable and achievable, underline achievable, relevant, and timeout. When you look at children, even in this moment when it seems like kids are highly distracted by electronics and whatnot, even in this moment they yearn for imaginative things.

And so the dreaming aspect is so critically important. So many prolific educational scholars talk about the importance of dreaming. And so I think about Robin DG Kelley, and I think about Bettina Love, they tell us we have to dream and the improvers have to do so as well. We can’t get so bogged down in the technical and the rational that we forget it is our dreams and our visions, and that’s the future that we’re trying to achieve. The methods are just a means to an end, but the end is what we actually dream about. And so it’s important to start with the dream. It might be science fiction. It might be something that’s not been seen before.

Curtis Taylor:
I love that so much, Brandi, because it makes me think about we do a lot of future dreaming ourselves. Even as adults, we think about what we want to be, and like you said, our goals and things that we want to accomplish, but some of those things are far long and out of our reach and so we have to dream about it. It even makes me think about teaching too, of how we plant the seeds with students, and we probably won’t see that growth until they’re like years away from us, and then they’ll come back in some way or some how and then share the impact that we have made on them at some point in their educational career. So that just makes me, it gives a lot of hope to a lot of the work that we do, yeah.

Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford:
I don’t want to sound negative, but I think some of those students we do get to know and learn what comes of what was planted, and some of them we don’t, but we have to plan anyway even if we don’t get to see what comes from that.

Curtis Taylor:
Exactly, exactly.

Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford:
The justice and science fiction is very much a nod to Adrienne Maree Brown who writes that all organizing is science fiction. In Octavia’s Brood, which is like, I don’t know what comes after the colon, but it’s a science fiction book about imagining socially just futures, and as a non-sci-fi person, I could appreciate it.

Curtis Taylor:
Ooh, that sounds good for me too.

Stacey Caillier:
As an Octavia Butler fan, I also appreciate that.

Curtis Taylor:
Mm-hmm. So, Brandi, you also write that critical improvement, improvement for justice requires pre-work. That pre-work may be that we need to deconstruct and challenge inequitable systems and the beliefs and ways that uphold them, not just modify distant systems. So in our work we’ve talked about what we need, that we need to set aims that are so ambitious that they disallow this status quo. So we have to find a new more equitable ways of working to achieve them and the need to support educators and all of us to recognize the biases and beliefs that impact our practice. How can we better discern when deconstruction is necessary?

Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford:
In the ImproveCrit chapter, which initially we wanted it to be ImprovCrit, but the reviewers shot us down, but improvement is all about improvisation. I was trying to make the case about wanted it to be ImprovCrit, and they were like, “No.” So we [inaudible 00:19:13]. We listed these, I guess what would be tenets, and the final tenet is sometimes you can’t improve, you need to deconstruct. I would say sometimes it’s difficult to recognize what needs to be deconstructed, in part because a lot of us working, particularly in the education system, we’re working in a system that has worked for us. We’ve made it, okay? We’re professors, we’re at the top, we’re school leaders. Clearly something about this school thing works. And so it is difficult for us to see how a system we’ve made it through could be oppressive to other people.

And so I think one of the key things when determining whether or not something needs to be deconstructed is looking at its history and its purpose and what’s the purpose of whatever the thing is. Was the purpose designed to privilege some groups or to hold others in place? When that was the basis for the genesis of that thing, it might be something that needs to be reconstructed or deconstructed, and after it’s deconstructed, you can reconstruct something new and better. But I think that’s probably where you need to start.

Stacey Caillier:
And, Brandi, in that chapter, you talked about gifted education or gifted programs as an example of a stratified system that by design requires deconstruction, not just improvement. Can you unpack that example for us a little bit?

Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford:
I can, and this is also a shout-out to the reviewers on this particular chapter because when we said that some things need to be deconstructed, we just put a period, and the reviewer was like, “Give us an example.” So we were like, “Okay, here’s one.” Honestly, I was like, “Yo, people are going to be mad. Nobody’s going to want to hear this about gifted. Everybody want their child to be labeled gifted and talented or academically and intellectually gifted.” I had one of those labels as a kid and I thought it made me special. What I missed was how much other folks didn’t get because they had the label or didn’t have the label.

And so when we look at gifted education and when we look at what it has turned into and how what starts as, oh, these children deserve enrichment, then it morphs into, oh, these children need to be on a different track. Oh, these children need to experience deeper learning opportunities. What about the other children? The other children don’t deserve enrichment? The other children don’t need to have opportunities to engage in project-based learning? And so we began to talk about, oh, let’s diversify AP classes. Well, that stratification began in second grade when you started calling certain kids gifted.

And so it’s not saying that I’m anti-differentiation because I believe children need different things, but I don’t believe that we need to come up with a whole class of special things that say it’s just for children who score this score on the Wechsler intelligent test or they hit this threshold on the Naglieri because I’m not even certain that I believe these tests can measure intelligence. So who are we to say you deserve X, Y, and Z, but you over here you don’t? And I honor folks like Donna Ford who have spent their career talking about how do we get more kids of color in gifted. This is not an attack on people who have done that good work. I’m just raising do we need gifted at all or do we look for the gifts in all the children.

Stacey Caillier:
I loved that example, and I love the question you pose in that chapter too. You write, “Can equity be achieved by improving access to gifted education?” And this example was especially close to my heart because it was one of the things that drew me to High Tech High because when I came to High Tech High I saw it as a deconstruction and reconstruction project. It was designed purposefully with no tracking, no gifted programs, no AP classes. The whole idea was to take all those things that we had learned from those places the best and give it to all the kids and design a learning environment where all kids experience the things from those programs that were being pulled out for being special. And so I love that you unpack that example. I’m glad your editors asked for it. I mean, when I was thinking about one of the biggest hindrances to deconstruction and reimagining, I think a lot of times it can be the stories that we as educators tell ourselves about our role, how much agency and sense of ownership we may feel over what’s happening in our schools.

When I look back at my own time coaching improvement teams, I actually feel most proud of a team who had the courage to ask, “Are we the problem?” This was a team in our college access network. We’d been doing this protocol, our favorite one around interrelationship digraphs where the whole goal is to do some root cause analysis, but discover what’s the rootiest root of why more of their Black and Brown students weren’t applying to four-year college, and this protocol guiding them through surfacing all these possible root causes and identifying which of these are actual roots and which are just symptoms. They realized that they weren’t providing enough support to the students who needed it most and that they were expecting students and families to come to them.

And after this kind of aha and this question of, oh my god, are we the problem, they totally shifted the supports they offered or failed to offer. They flipped a bunch of things and they recognized that, wait, we had agency to actually design a whole new program which they did to support their Black and Brown students, especially their first gen students. They created this whole new program for supporting students who were falling through the cracks before to apply to college. So the tool helped them arrive at a mindset shift, but this doesn’t always happen when using the tools of improvement as we’ve talked about. I’m curious if there’s been a light bulb moment for you where you’ve witnessed folks understanding, that their understanding of the problem or their role in it has shifted, and what do you think leads to these moments?

Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford:
I have witnessed moments like these, and the thing is they happen at different times. And so it’s not like we can put together a formula where we say, “Do this and this and this and then the mind shift, mindset shift, and then you can move forward with X, Y, and Z.” It doesn’t happen that way. I do believe improvement work has to be done alongside or in conjunction with just some general exploration and understanding of systems and particularly how systems of oppression operate. This is important because people need to both take responsibility but also not feel guilty and paralyzed, and so there’s multiple things that have to happen here.

So when I think about this shift that needs to occur, one of the things I often think about is this idea around common cause. I know listeners are like, “Uh-oh, here she goes getting all technical.” But in improvement, we talk about common causes and special causes all the time, and a common cause is something that affects all parts of the system. We have to recognize that in these United States, various systems of oppression are common causes in our educational system. So racism, sexism, classism, heteronormativity, ableism, nationalism, all of them common causes that are baked into the way we do business.

When we recognize that as a fact, we can begin to look for how they manifest within our systems, and it doesn’t let us off the hook because we’ve been complicit in helping the system function the way it does. But just as we’ve been complicit, we can also be a catalyst for changing the way the system does business. And so once you recognize it’s baked in the system and you can look for it and you can find your role in it and then change your role, it lets you understand that, hey, I haven’t contributed to this because I’m a bad person. I’ve just been part of the problem because this is the way I was taught this is how you do school. This is what teaching is supposed to look like. This is what I was taught in my educator prep program, but now I’ve got this new information where I learn, oh, I can do something different.

And so there is a tension in teaching both about how these oppressions play out within educational spaces and then also showing, okay, now let’s look at ourselves and how are we, as Mohammed Khalifa says, how are we disrupting it or allowing it to happen because people can’t take on the entire burden of the system being jacked up. No individual did it all. Little Johnny did not meet the benchmark is not all your fault, but let’s talk about what portion of it is your fault and how you can help little Johnny meet it next time. And so I think that is like what is going to be most important for helping people see their role in it, but also not being paralyzed by what they have done in the past. And so they can have those light bulb moments and can move and let that be a space they can move from, not that they become stuck in. Does that make sense?

Stacey Caillier:
Totally. I mean, I love the idea of when we’re using tools of improvement or we’re engaging in improvement within this lens of understanding the oppressive systems in which we’re all rooted and contributing in various ways. Ideally when we’re doing improvement in service of liberation, it’s kind of taking us out of that place of just acting out of impulse or unconsciousness and into more conscious action. Having those mindset shifts allows you to have more conscious action, like you’re saying, kind of challenge the way that I just assumed things happened or needed to happen. So I love that. I also think of where I’ve seen that happen is when there’s been that kind of loving accountability, like I’m going to love you real hard and also hold us all accountable for what we’re doing moving forward. So yeah, thank you for that.

Curtis Taylor:
Yeah, I love that too. It’s like the essence of the warm demander that I love. Mm-hmm.

Stacey Caillier:
That’s right.

Curtis Taylor:
Exactly.

Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford:
I mean, it’s true. I was just going to say, I think Decoteau Irby’s work around stuck improving really gives us some examples of… well, one, it critiques what he calls race neutral improvement, where people are coming up with all of these improvement initiatives and innovations without addressing the monkey in the room which is race and racism, but where he gives examples of here’s how you can teach folks about the oppressive system so then they can look for the oppression in their practice. And so I think his work is really important in this particular space as we think through these things.

Curtis Taylor:
That’s great. Thank you for that. So, Brandi, anyone who has listened to your first podcast, who has read your work knows that you care deeply about gauging students and families’ true partners in improvement work. So taking those questions of who’s impacted and who’s involved to heart throughout their improvement process, in the chapter you write, “User-centered too often means using the users.” What does this mean to you?

Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford:
People mean well, let me start there. People mean well with being user-centered, but sometimes they just want to take information from the user. So they’re like, “Okay, yeah, I’ma have this empathy interview with you,” or maybe a focus group with a group of students or with some parents or community members, “and we’re going to gather this information from you. And then we’re going to go off, us experts, and figure out what’s best for you and then bring it back to you.” So we were user-centered because we talked to you, we got some insights from you, but that’s where it stops.

I think often it stops when it’s time to make decisions, and anytime where power has to be shared, that is when the being user-centered kind of goes by the wayside. So we use what you said as we created our fishbowl and we listened to you as we put together our driver diagram, but now we’re getting ready to decide what we going to do, and so we going to tell you what we going to do, and that is typically how it happens. And so I guess that’s what it means to me when I say being user-centered is just using the user.

Stacey Caillier:
Yeah, yeah. I was just at, well, Curtis and I were both just in Cincinnati at a healthcare thing and there was a lot of pushback on the term user-centered for that exact reason, and just talk about how are we making sure that stakeholders have a seat at the table, but also have status and having their expertise recognized and feel like they can contribute and have power in decision-making. We talk a lot in our own networks about it’s not about just getting folks in the room, it’s about making sure they have status when they’re in the room, designing a process that allows their brilliance to shine and actually impact decision-making in a real way. I’m curious if you have any tips or if you’ve seen folks do this well, what would you recommend or what does it look like to you?

Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford:
First of all, never bring one person on. So if the user is parents, don’t get just one or two parents and don’t get the loudest parents, the president of the PTO. Y’all already know what the individual thinks because they’re already telling you. So let’s think about who else needs to be a full participant in the improvement work. And then let’s not use people. Labor is not free. And so if you have folks laboring for your organization, how are you compensating them? There are always laborers of love, I get that, but especially minoritized individuals, we can’t expect them to work out of the goodness of their hearts all the time because it’s just not right. So as you think about if they have to come to meetings, if they have to spend time, how are you compensating them for that? And I mean, you can get real creative. I’m not going to tell you how that needs to be done, but just that it does need to be done.

And then the other thing is being careful of what’s happening within the room and being vigilant. So if you notice you’ve got this diverse group of invested individuals but it’s two teachers dominating the conversation, how do you pull the other folks in? How are you sure that you minimize or mitigate any power imbalances that are within the group you have? It’s not just about getting folks in the room. They need to be comfortable enough to express what they think and to know that they are not there just for show, but that what they are sharing is given as much weight as what the next person shares. I do think there are places that do it well, and I think it’s on people like me and like you all who broadcast where good stuff that is happening to focus in on those spaces and to amplify those stories so we can say, “Look, here is where it’s happening.” I don’t want to call any names right now, but it’s happening.

Stacey Caillier:
We’ll find them. Future podcast. Stay tuned.

Curtis Taylor:
I love that. I love that accountability piece too for us to get it done. You also write about how there’s danger in using a focus on data as an excuse for not engaging with the people we serve, like we got the grass, see, we got the data here. Can you say a little bit more about this danger, where it comes from, and how we can avoid it?

Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford:
There’s I think a article that Mohammed Khalifa wrote where he talks about collecting data in districts and then using that as an excuse not to fully engage with families. I think, to be clear, data is important, but just because you can disaggregate data and see trends within different groups of students, that is not explanation of what their experience is. This is why I think QuantCrit is so important in telling us, one of their tenets is the data don’t speak for themselves, and so even though you might discover a theme, it doesn’t mean you know what’s happening there. And so when you find something in the data, you have to go talk to who does that data really truly belong to, who is it representing, and what can they tell you. Of course you’re going to have your own hypotheses about what’s happening, but you need to talk to the people whose data that is to really know what that data means.

We cannot say, “Hey, look, we look at our English language learners and we see that there’s a dip right here, and now we know what’s happening and what needs to be done,” because we don’t, and there’s an arrogance when we think because we have data we have more insight than we do. And so that’s the danger and that’s what we have to be careful of because having the data, I mean, it can make you feel powerful, you’ve got these insights. Okay, but they are limited. And so it is very important that you check what you think you know.

Stacey Caillier:
As someone who was trained in ethnography, I really appreciate that, and it also makes me think of how often in early days of my introduction to improvement it was kind of like look at the data, generate some change ideas. It was very much like this direct leap. Now after years of supporting this work and working with teams on it, I see the perils of like, no, no, no, no, we don’t just get to jump from looking at some graphs to generating change ideas without talking to the folks in the system to understand what their actual experience is underneath all that data in those graphs. So I really, really appreciate that.

Okay, we’re nearing the end, Brandi. We’re getting close to the final question, and we’re all having this conversation because we think continuous improvement or improvement science, whatever you call it, is a powerful way of shifting systems towards greater justice when it’s consciously and critically applied, and that’s a big one, when it’s consciously and critically applied. One thing we also have in common is that we believe improvement is for everybody. It’s not just for scholars or system leaders. It’s for coaches, teachers, support staff, students, families, communities, and in a call back to where we started today, it’s built on the magic of everyday people. So as we seek to expand our field and welcome more folks into it, what other kind of disciplines, histories, theories come up that you think can inform us? And I know Curtis has been doing a deep dive into diffusion of innovation, so we should definitely talk about that, but want to let you kick it off and then we’ll move over into that.

Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford:
Yeah. I think all of us involved pull from what we know. And so that’s why I was able to see connections with organizing because that’s in my background, and so I’m pulling from what I know. I think as I have continued to explore this work, I’ve been working a little bit with Amanda Meyer who has a more contemporary understanding of organizing, and again, it has shown me other ways that organizing can really inform the work we’re doing. But when I think about histories, oh, there’s so many, and I’m again limited in that I’m pulling from what I know, but Black educational history blows my mind. Every time I’m in archives looking at what educators did, Cree Brown, and what they were able to accomplish and how they used data, how they worked so intimately with communities, I feel like these are lessons for improvers.

But improvement is not something that we do alone. It is something we do in conjunction with, in solidarity with other people. So I think any discipline that has insights on coalition building has insights for improvement. When I think about what theories can inform us, I say all the things that go under kind of the umbrella of critical theory. I do think critical race theory and quant theory, QuantCrit, inform the way I see improvement, but I would also offer up critical feminist series or Black feminist series, queer series, critical disability studies and DisCrit. Especially as we begin to look at the different problems of practice that we’re facing, these theories help us to unpack what the problem really is and to see how the problem manifests in so many little ways in the ways our systems are created.

And so that’s why I think Michael Apple tells us, he writes this piece on scholar activism and he talks about how one of the tenets of scholar activism is not to throw out elite knowledge but to use it in service to the people. That’s where the theory piece comes in. We need these critical theories that are being banned and talked bad about to really dig into the problems that are pressing in education. It’s not just one particular viewpoint that’s going to save us, so to speak, but there are insights in all of these bodies of work, and so with theories I would say go far and wide. And then in terms of other disciplines, listen, I’ve been in education for a very long time. All my degrees got-

Stacey Caillier:
You’re not that old, come on.

Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford:
But I’ve not been really home in another discipline. My first degree is in English, and my second one is in communication, but primarily I have studied the field of education. But I don’t think there is a discipline that exists that we cannot learn from. We can learn design from engineering. We can learn how things work together and adapt and change from biology, which I know very little about hard sciences so that’s as far as I can go to speak to that. But I don’t think there’s anything that we can’t learn from. When I think about improvement still being kind of in its infancy in education, I say we need all of these folks with their backgrounds in math and science and social sciences and no matter where to tell us what they know and to literally be critical friends and tell us how we can be better based off what they know in their discipline.

Stacey Caillier:
I love that. Curtis, I’m going to awkwardly invite you in because I feel like one of the theories that we’ve been talking about quite a bit is diffusion of innovation and what can we learn from that to start thinking about how do we bring more folks into this field of improvement and spread more great ideas so that they’re happening in more places. I’m curious what’s coming up for you as you’re thinking about that through this lens of diffusion of innovation.

Curtis Taylor:
Yeah. And, Brandi, we’ve been in fellowship about the diffusion of innovation, so I’d love to get your thoughts around that particular theory and how that can be supportive in justice streaming and the equity work that we do with improvement. So my first question is how do we support the process of assuring that innovative ideas are simple and advantageous for school leaders, system leaders, teachers, coaches, families, and more for us to do this work. And I’ll let you answer that first question there.

Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford:
I think a couple of things. One, we have to not take ourselves super serious and think that I’ve got to make something convoluted for it to be seen as innovative and the next thing. There used to be this thing, which is terrible and I probably shouldn’t say it, but it used to say, keep it simple stupid. I feel like we muddy water that doesn’t have to be muddy sometimes.

As we ran fellowship and we talked about change packages and how we spread and share what we know, I really appreciated the example from the people who were doing the work on dialysis. There were these change packages related to dialysis. The change package had four major sections, A, B, C, and D. A was like here are the things you got to do if you’re doing this intervention. B was like here are the things you can kind of flex on and adapt to make your own. C was like here are some resources that you can use when doing this. And D was here’s some infrastructure things you might want to already have in place to do this thing.

Now between the bullets they had lots of words I could not read and tell you what they meant, but A, B, C, and D seem like, hey, this is a model for how to share things. Here are things you got to do. Here’s what you can flex on. Here’s some resources. Here’s some things you already need to have in place. Keep it simple, and you don’t have to talk about things in a way where it feels like someone needs to be a expert on improvement to engage in the conversation. You don’t.

I keep going back to what I think it was Lloyd Provost who was saying that with the control charts that we use and whatnot, these things were initially designed for uneducated people working in factories to keep track of what was happening in their system. So why have we made it so complicated that people with degrees are looking at it like, “I don’t know if I can do that”?

Curtis Taylor:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford:
Why are we trying to create some elite club of improvers? No, no, improvement is for everybody. It is not for the elite. It is for the magical everyday folks. And so we have to find a different way to package it because that’s what turns people off.

Curtis Taylor:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Stacey Caillier:
Yeah. Yeah. I love Becky Margiotta, one of the founders of The Billions Institute who’s whole gig is large scale change, how do we spread things. She’s constantly talking about how simple can it be because nothing’s going to spread if it’s too complicated, like the simpler… but you also want it to be like it has to have the essential pieces, but how do you figure out what those essential pieces and only the essential pieces are there so that it can get legs and travel because, yeah, not everybody’s going to pick it up.

Curtis Taylor:
Yeah. And that brings me to my next question then moves into how do we tap into the right social systems or structures for the ideas to move and spread in order for us to achieve greater justice.

Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford:
Ooh, that’s a big one.

Stacey Caillier:
Curtis [inaudible 00:51:14] that one. He likes big questions.

Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford:
To move, for ideas to move and spread, I think we have to have a double-angled approach. So maybe let’s spread using some of the traditional mechanisms, so be that prints and media and those types of things. So I do think it’s important for us to get a stronghold in colleges of education so that people are teaching improvement stuff. I think it’s important to show impacts of improvement in academic literature and kind of those traditional mechanisms, but I also think things like this, Unboxed. I think it’d be great one day when it’s some improver talking on NPR or… I’m not cool so I don’t know what the current talk shows are, but if we could get an improver to talk to somebody like Trevor Noah. I know he’s no longer on The Daily Show. I don’t know what the current shows are, but whatever the shows are that people are watching. If we can get people there, or maybe on The View or somewhere where it’s not just the education folk talking about it, but it becomes more in the culture, so to speak.

I think the way we brand improvement has got to shift. So it’s not like improvement for people with backgrounds and statistics, but improvement is for people who love children. And so while we may need to use some of those traditional methods, we also have to go beyond those to achieve greater justice because there’s still a lot of people whose gifts and knowledge could transform the way we do work who are not yet in conversation with us. And so that’s who we’re trying to get to the table.

Curtis Taylor:
Thank you, Brandi, for that.

Stacey Caillier:
Well, this is the moment that I felt like that was a beautiful final thought, and I want to give you an opportunity to have any space for a final thought, wondering, benediction. I feel like Curtis and I are now like, “How are we going to get Brandi on The Daily Show?”

Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford:
Not Brandi, an improver, first of all. I guess my final thought would be to remember, and I’m literally taking this from Louis Gomez, that improvement in education is in its infancy. And so when it comes to infants, I remember when my twins were dedicated my pastor did a sermon on the mystery of infancy, and that when you hold an infant you don’t know what or who they are going to be. There is so much mystery and all you can do is pour in. We are at the ground level of pouring in to this infant that is improvement in education. And so that means, yes, we have an incredible responsibility, but we get to dream about what this child will one day be and we can try to put the things in place to get that child there.

And so I think all of us engaged in improvement work, yes, we have lessons to learn from industry and healthcare as well as organizers and historians and people all over the place, and it’s okay because all of these things are going to help this child grow. And so I think for those of us in the baby’s life, so to speak, we just need to remain open and be willing to grow and not get closed off and think that we’ve got it. I tell people all the time, I’m constantly learning and revising my own thinking about improvement, and we all have to be willing to do that, and to continue to shoot that baby is going to lead us to science fiction. So that’s it. We have to cultivate this baby so they can do what we have not yet even imagined.

Curtis Taylor:
Wow. That was so beautiful, Brandi. I feel like I have been baptized again and [inaudible 00:56:16] to relearning again. Yeah, you have inspired me so much with just all the information that you have shared, the stories that you have shared, and just a lot of your brilliance in the work, and this once again inspires me so much and brings so much hope. So thank you again for sharing. Stacey, did you want to share any last thoughts?

Stacey Caillier:
Nope. Just want to say thank you and I think you both are dope.

Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford:
Oh, I think you both are dope too.

Curtis Taylor:
I know. #Dopeness.

Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford:
Dope Improvers, yes. Oh, that’s a T-shirt.

Curtis Taylor:
I love that, yes.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Ben Krueger is our audio engineer. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. Huge thanks to Brandi, Curtis, and Stacey for this conversation. Check out the show notes for this episode, they are packed with links to interesting stuff. Thanks for listening.