The Riverside School District Leadership Team in a one school K-8 district during the 2014-2015 school year participated in monthly workshops provided by LeadershipEnergies (LE) to prepare the team to use clinical practice to solve problems.

Industry: Education PK-12 Districts and Schools

Project Type: Professional Development and training for a team of teachers, supervisors, and administrators in an enlarged role of problem solving.

Challenge
Provide an inexperienced cross functional team, the District Leadership Team (DLT), with training and support for the implementation of clinical practice to improve school problem solving and raise student achievement.

Solution
Though the use of a textbook and resource manuals on clinical practice written by the workshop presenters and training workshop topics used by the presenters to expand team understanding of how to support faculty growth, LE provided instruction and structured experiences that prepared these leaders and the faculty for greater decision making responsibility to raise student achievement. Topics selected to improve DLT performance were: understanding of the school organization and team work on performance outcomes; use of data to drive decisions in the school’s Professional Learning Communities (PLCs); use of the clinical cycle to analyze performance data; use of diagnostic instruments to establish diagnoses, prescriptions, prognoses, and assessment of results; understanding and use of the 18 Interactive Performance Systems (IPS) to find the root causes of underperformance; use of vital signs to make diagnoses and report progress; and DLT application of this knowledge to identify systems needing improved performance health.

Results
The District Leadership Team (DLT) developed preliminary diagnoses to explain what was holding back progress in faculty learning and student achievement growth. At first, performance functions in seven systems were identified as needing improvement. These preliminary findings and intended corrective actions were refined by the DLT and the number of improvement activities was reduced to five systems. Later in school year workshops, the DLT narrowed proposed performance improvement action to three systems—Student Behavior and Performance Data; Team Work and Problem Solving; and Universal Acceptance of Expectations—a more manageable number to launch the improvement process in the following school year. A new organization chart and team design were drafted for use and certain school, adult, and student behaviors were identified as those most likely to produce improvements. The DLT prepared a presentation of the DLT’s work and prepared recommendations for the superintendent before reporting and discussing with the full faculty.

Customer Feedback
“We learned a lot about school performance and improvement processes that were new to us, but we gained the confidence to use this learning in our team meetings. We look forward to our presentations to the superintendent and the efforts to improve performance next year. Now, we see the advantage of selecting priorities for improvement earlier in the year and starting implementation strategies in the same year.”
—District Leadership Team assessment of the benefits of their experience in LE workshops