The System Improvement Leads Networked Improvement Community includes representatives from Special Education Local Plan Areas (SELPAs), County Offices of Education, and districts from across California.
These participants make up improvement teams of administrators, program specialists, and special ed teachers from Shasta, San Luis Obispo, West Contra Costa, Sonoma, Irvine, and Clovis.
As a totality, these teams are all part of a Networked Improvement Community (NIC) sponsored by the System Improvement Leads project (SIL), a collaborative grant project between the Riverside County SELPA, the El Dorado County SELPA, and the El Dorado County Office of Education.1 The SIL project is supported by the California Department of Education (CDE) and the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence (CCEE).
The SIL NIC holds the collective belief that IEP goals are the heart of the educational program for students with disabilities. They believe that it is possible to improve the system design so that 100% of IEP goals can be achieved, setting students up for a lifetime of access and success. The goal is to increase the percentage of IEP goals met from 38.5% to 100% by June 2026.
To begin, the improvement teams within SIL NIC created process maps to illuminate how teachers and administrators enacted the IEP process and conducted empathy interviews with teachers, parents, and students to gather qualitative data to document their thoughts and feelings about the IEP process and its effect on their students. Finally, they mined data from individual IEP reports to illuminate potential sources of variation in IEP goal documentation and quality.
Through an investigation of the system, teams developed both a clearer and more complicated view of the IEP process. This process also highlighted for leaders how little they actually knew about the intricacies of their systems, an eye-opening and humbling experience. For example, the IEP process at individual sites varied wildly, leaving teachers to navigate it for themselves. As a result, what was considered a high-quality IEP goal also varied. In addition, some teams were shocked to discover the number of IEPs without documented goals when reviewing individual IEP reports. But more problematic was the fact that they had to review a sample of reports one by one since they couldn’t easily access this data from the Special Education Information System (SEIS). More importantly, it underscored the value and importance of systems thinking in uncovering the contributing factors to the problem that were previously unseen.
In addition, during the investigation period of this project, the Shasta SELPA and County Office of Education discovered that only 73% of IEP goals were marked “met” or “not met”. Without this, there is no official record of student progress. The teams found the motivation to move the needle for students by investigating their current reality.
Approaching the work with curiosity and humility has not only provided teams with a better understanding of their systems but has also shifted leaders’ relationships with their colleagues. As one program specialist noted,
I’ve had a shift in my thinking around collaboration and working in a group, like active listening to [teachers] who have perspectives that I may not understand or may not have valued as much. I notice a difference in my professional relationships that has been really positive.
A SELPA administrator at another district also commented on how the nature of the work has shifted her interactions with teachers and program specialists:
We have had to build a relationship with them in a different way because we’re saying ‘Here’s what we’re working on, we really need your help. Here’s where we screwed up, here’s where we did well, we need your lens.’ It’s been a good partnership not just for growth but for those relationships in the district.
After investigating their local systems, teams began using the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle to try out potential “change ideas” to improve the IEP goal-setting and reporting process. These have included a rubric to evaluate the quality of IEP goals and a checklist tied to the IEP process. A PDSA is a mini-experiment used to test ideas out in practice. In the early stages of testing, teams often, but not always, try out ideas on a small scale; for example, one teacher with one student. Here, the goal is to learn about the feasibility of a change idea: Can it even be done in practice? If so, does it produce the desired outcome? What are potential challenges that might need to be addressed? Ideas that show promise are then tested on a larger scale to learn how to adapt them to different contexts and then finally how to implement them across the entire system.
Once Shasta had knowledge that only 73% of goals were marked met or not met, they quickly tested their change idea to improve this outcome. They developed a high-quality IEP checklist, including specifics for IEP goals, trained their case managers, and engaged in routine data collection. By November 2021, they found that 99% of goals were marked met or not met; a drastic improvement thanks to their PDSA cycles as well as resource sharing within the Network Improvement Community. Several teams were prototyping and testing IEP checklists and by combining resources, teams knew they were rolling out the best of the best for their students.
Meanwhile, the Clovis school district worked diligently to design a data collection system that would be feasible for staff and gather the relevant data needed to work towards improvement for students. Initially, they were collecting far too much data and it was taking team members an unreasonable amount of time to complete. Throughout several PDSA cycles, they honed their system, gathered only the necessary data for improvement, and remained firm on the fact that staff needed a reasonable task in order to make this work sustainable.
Conducting small-scale experiments using scientific reasoning and evidence represents a major shift in how network members have approached reform efforts in the past. At first, some leaders were impatient with the process, wanting to move to full-scale implementation as quickly as possible. However, they soon discovered how much learning happens with each PDSA and how much more confidence they have in spreading ideas that have been vetted through early testing.
One assistant of special education especially appreciated the time devoted to inquiry, though initially they had found it frustrating:
I’ve been in special education for 22-23 years. Everybody always has these great ideas and I’ve been part of many teams where those great ideas have been put in place without much inquiry. But many [of these] programs haven’t lasted. What’s exciting to me is all the nitty gritty work that we do [in the PDSAs]. At first, we wondered, ‘Why are we taking so long? Why are you making us do that [cycle] again?’ Every time we did a PDSA, we would [tell our coach], ‘We just did that but just a little bit different.’ But we totally get it now. Seeing those small improvements we make every week is super exciting.
PDSAs also challenge the push for full-scale implementation when they reveal that an idea doesn’t work. For example, when testing a specific change idea and reviewing the data, one team discovered that the idea wasn’t as helpful as they thought it would be. Abandoning the idea, however, wasn’t easy. In the words of one team member,
It was hard to accept that we thought was working wasn’t really helping that much. [We’re] so used to just continuing with something because that’s what we’ve done, and it’s a huge shift to be in a space where once we get information that something’s not working, it’s okay to just move on and abandon it.
For many teams, the use of data or evidence as part of the PDSAs distinguishes it from other forms of inquiry and reform efforts in general. A program specialist had this to say:
There are so many books and leaders on educational reform and change theory, [but] none of it is like this. There are tons of pieces, structures, and theories that this work incorporates, but this stands out as being very different. The differentiating point is those PDSAs. They’re a more structured approach to looking at data, which allows for more disciplined inquiry.
Most notably, the program specialist contrasted this process with how “data” is more commonly used. In the words of one,
We always talk about making data-based decisions but in reality, we typically don’t. We typically hear from maybe a few stakeholders and they bring some subjective information to the table and then we make decisions about support and professional development based on that.
As the SIL NIC continues this work, they are focused on adding additional teams to the network in service of scaling the promising change ideas and continuing to learn and innovate. So far, the network has increased the percentage of IEP goals met from 38.5% to 56%. Scaling this work will increase the number of students who are positively impacted. In September 2023, four additional teams from across the state joined the network.
As teams reach improvement on the initial driver of IEP Process, they are moving on to tackle Inclusive Practices and Chronic Absenteeism as we work towards ensuring students meet 100% of their IEP goals.
In most organizations, leaders are considered the experts. They come up with solutions to problems and ask their employees to implement them. However, this style of leadership no longer meets the complexity and fast-paced nature of today’s world. Instead, leaders must create learning environments that draw on the expertise of everyone in their organizations and value learning through experimentation and failure.
To do this, leaders must think and behave differently. In Transforming Educational Systems Toward Continuous Improvement: A Reflection Guide for K-12 Executive Leaders, Dixon, and Palmer identify key dispositions and core practices of such leaders, who they identify as improvement leaders. First, improvement leaders have a growth mindset and see every individual in their organization as valuable and contributing members with the capacity to learn and develop. Second, they are curious, humble, and vulnerable; they recognize they do not have all the answers, are open to feedback, and are willing to be wrong. In addition, these leaders are comfortable with uncertainty, recognizing that learning is a messy process where answers aren’t always readily available. They try out possible answers using scientific reasoning and rely on concrete evidence that something works before scaling it across the organization. Finally, improvement leaders are systems thinkers who see interconnections across different departments and lines of work.
In addition to these values and characteristics, the SIL NIC has the opportunity to build upon the work of social justice advocates, community organizers, and improvement theorists from our past and present. Brandi Hinnant Crawford perfectly voices this connection as she states “Everything about me is rooted in justice. I wouldn’t touch improvement science if I didn’t think it could lead to justice. Because I don’t have time for nothing else.” Septima Poinsette Clark’s work supports Black Americans’ access to literacy and forged the way for the Civil Rights movement to push for voting and basic civil rights. As Ella Baker says, “Give light and people will find the way.” These great improvers teach us that work focused on justice paves the way for lasting improvement. We are grateful to build upon these improvers and leverage what we know works. We continue to be optimistic about how engaging in this work influences how users engage in schools day to day.
For many network members in the SIL NIC, their approach to leadership and other change efforts in their organizations has shifted profoundly. They are looking at their systems with a more critical eye, seeking out the knowledge and expertise of others in their organizations, embracing failure as a valuable part of learning, and testing and vetting ideas with more discipline and rigor. In short, they are becoming the improvement leaders we need to transform our systems to serve all of our students.
1. The broad goal of the SIL is to increase the capacity of COEs, SELPAs and LEAs in continuous improvement, data best practices, and high leverage change ideas in order to improve outcomes for students with disabilities.
Tags:
