In December, Impact Florida partnered with FADSS and the Florida Department of Education to empower a small group of new superintendents to select a small team of principals and district leaders to engage together in a series of interactive workshops to build their collective capacity to use data in effective continuous improvement practices in our Data Impact Cadre.
The districts participating in the fourth Districts for Impact Learning Cadre include:
Building on the Florida Department of Education’s “Data Impact Project” and with the technical assistance of Proving Ground, an initiative of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, the Data Impact Cadre set out to support participants to achieve three goals:
- understand what effective continuous improvement and data literacy looks like
- understand the conditions necessary for effective continuous improvement
- apply their knowledge of effective continuous improvement to identify potential solutions to gaps in student performance on the Algebra I EOC exam.
One thing that makes this program so unique is that it was designed, partly out of necessity, to be a “sprint” learning experience offering four virtual learning sessions over the course of six weeks. The cadre members also shared their experience with their colleagues at the FADSS New Superintendent Training session in January 2021.
December: Superintendents engaged in initial reflection on their students’ performance in Algebra I.
January: District teams reflected on their current CI practices, reviewed school and district-specific Algebra I data, and shared strategies for identifying a specific problem statement. Two weeks later, the teams refined their problem statements, identify root causes relative to their identified problem statement, and identify critical roots that offer the greatest intervention opportunity.
February: Teams identified barriers to implementation and discussed how we can support each other moving forward.
In just a short time, thanks to the strong leadership of these superintendents and the hard work of their teams, each of these school districts have identified a clear, concise problem in Algebra I and the critical root causes underlying those problems. What’s more, these teams have a better understanding of how to create the conditions necessary for continuous improvement to occur at scale.