GSE Theses and Dissertations

Despite efforts over the past twenty-five years at the federal, state and local level to create formal teacher leadership roles, the responsibilities of teachers in the public school system have remained stubbornly persistent. With few aberrations, the role of a teacher on his/her first day is likely to be very similar to her/his last (Donaldson et al., 2008). Recently, there are signs that this stability may be disrupted; new and diverse teacher leadership roles and career opportunities may be emerging in the sector. One prominent example of teachers taking significant leadership roles is Teach Plus’ Teacher Turnaround Team Initiative (T3). This program recruits, trains, and supports a cohort of effective and experienced teachers to play formal leadership roles within a turnaround school. T3 has a track record of results and is rapidly expanding to cities across the country. Designed as a three-year program, the initial cohort of schools in the first partner district is now ending the formal initiative and Teach Plus is faced with the important question of what type of support, if any, the organization should provide these schools post T3. My strategic project focused on creating a menu of options, in a fee for service model, in which the principals of schools exiting T3 could purchase is they desired to continue a level of partnership after the three year formal initiative ended. This Capstone Paper reviews the knowledge base surrounding teacher leadership with a particular focus on second stage teachers (70% of T3 Teacher Leaders have between 3-10 years experience). I then explain the strategic project in detail and offer an analysis with special attention to three different dimensions: 1) The impact on the specific project to the organization and the reasons for it’s success or failure. 2) The challenge of sustainability to the overall initiative. 3) The technical and adaptive challenges of expanding teacher leadership at scale in the education sector. Reviewing the lessons learned in research and through the project, I suggest that three main components would help shift T3 from a successful entrepreneurial start up to a sustainable approach to reform: 1) Identifying a permanent source of funding. 2) Incorporating principal leadership development into the program design. 3) Developing capacity at the district level to build an on-going system of support. I will also suggest that the T3 initiative has implications on the education sector at large. I argue that the T3 Initiative proves that with the proper support, teacher leadership has the potential to build the collective capacity for school turnarounds; that principal leadership matters and must be intentionally developed; and that scaling T3 requires districts to integrate innovative approaches to developing teacher leadership into the overall strategic human capital management of the district. Finally, I reflect on personal lessons learned and explain how the T3 Initiative reaffirmed my belief that ambitious reform initiatives require comprehensive support, collective ownership, and a plan for sustainability.

For my residency, I served as the Director of the Pathways to Prosperity Network (PtoP Network), a multistate initiative co-led by Jobs for the Future (JFF) and the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) that focuses on “ensuring that many more young people complete high school, attain a postsecondary credential with currency in the labor market, and launch into a career while leaving open the prospect of further education” (HGSE, 2012). JFF, my residency partner organization, is a national nonprofit that works with states, districts, and other partners to “design and drive the adoption of education and career pathways leading from college readiness to career advancement for those struggling to succeed in today’s economy” (JFF, 2013). The primary guiding questions for my residency were: “How does a state take a good idea and put it into practice with measurable outcomes on the ground?” and “What is the role of nonprofits in supporting and sustaining education improvements at the state and local levels?” The PtoP Network provided me with ample opportunity to exercise leadership by exploring and implementing responses to both of these questions. In 2011, HGSE released the report Pathways to Prosperity: Meeting the Challenge of Preparing Young Americans for the 21st Century, which challenged our nation’s “excessive focus on the four-year college pathway, arguing that we need to create additional pathways that combine rigorous academics with strong technical education to equip…young people with the skills and credentials to succeed in our increasingly challenging labor market” (HGSE, 2012). Launched in the summer of 2012, the PtoP Network was created in response to states’ expressed interest in doing something about the data and implications of the Pathways report. The PtoP Network is comprised of six states in the first cohort (summer 2012: Illinois, Maine, Masschusetts, Missouri, North Carolina, and Tennessee), and four states in the second cohort (winter 2013: California, Georgia, New York, and Ohio), with several other states requesting to join that are currently under consideration. Each state selected one to three regions in which to launch the PtoP initiative, with the goal of developing frameworks and guiding principles for building comprehensive career pathways that will be scaled statewide. JFF/HGSE organizes and guides the PtoP Network, provides technical assistance and resources for systems-level designs of grades 9 through 14 career pathways, and builds the capacity of states and regions to create, lead, and sustain the initiative. Through this strategic project, I am both helping to guide nine states through the change process of translating an idea for educational improvement into policy and practice, and investigating the role of nonprofit organizations in sparking, promoting, and sustaining change within states and state agencies. I describe in my capstone how I apply research about state education agencies, college and career readiness, implementation strategies, and adaptive leadership into practice through my role with the PtoP Network. While the Network itself is still in planning, development, and early implementation stages, it provides a helpful and hopeful model for substantively changing and improving the education sector.

Khan Academy’s projects are designed to inspire and empower teachers and students to discover, create, and advance their learning. This paper begins by reviewing my entry project, co-leading the Discovery Lab, which is a hands-on learning summer program. Then it transitions to online project-based video content I created. I next explore effective project-based learning and Design Based Research (DBR) to set the stage for Spider and Spout, our hands-on robotics project pilot studies. Spout provided promising results, which were used for the implementation of Spider, a more advanced fully programmable robot that can be built using only online instruction. These projects suggest that DBR could be used to effectively implement our project-based curriculum. Our Spider pilot project also suggests that it is possible to train students to build projects assisted only by online videos. However, it remains unclear if the students will be able to move beyond the procedural knowledge acquired by following the step-by-step videos to effective project-based learning (more advanced critical thinking and creative problem solving). This report then reveals that more research is needed to draw conclusions about how effective our projects will be at scaling across the education sector or at disrupting or changing existing culture of the classroom. Next, I identify the Discovery Lab 2013 as a means for rapidly gaining research data to improve our projects prior to scaling. Finally, I explore the key components of my learning as a leader.

This capstone explores matters of accountability, coherence, and improvement in the context of implementing a performance review and evaluation system for senior leadership in a large urban school district. Central office leaders at the Los Angeles Unified School District (the District) identified educator quality as a crucial issue in supporting District-wide improvement in student achievement. District leadership is also encouraging a shift in culture: instead of focusing on teachers and principals as the only adults who impact student achievement, they have emphasized the value of all District employees as educators, who contribute to the health, safety, achievement, and learning of all students in the district. There is a clear message from senior leaders that all adults in the system must perform at high-levels to achieve the breadth and depth of change necessary to benefit students. The capstone includes the description, findings, and analysis of a pilot study wherein 22 District leaders tested a leadership framework and growth planning tools for evaluation and reflection. The purpose of the pilot was to design and assess a growth and development program for senior leaders in the central office that is coherent and aligned with the current strategic plan and evaluation work already underway for teachers and school leaders in the system. The pilot was intended to inform a strategy for scaling this work to all senior leaders in the district. For participants who volunteered, there were three objectives: 1) to model accountability at all levels of the organization; 2) to reflect on and improve job performance with a self-assessment and the creation of an Individual Growth Plan (a set of individualized goals for improvement); and 3) to provide feedback on ways to improve the framework, tools, and processes used in the pilot, and to support its coherence with other District performance initiatives. With 100% completion for self-assessments, and over 50% completion for individual growth plans, the researcher has been able to gather feedback on the pilot to inform the improvement and scale of the evaluation system for the District’s leaders. Major findings include: the need for dedicated time of a skilled practitioner to lead this work; the necessity of devoted time for leaders to self-reflect and discuss their job performance with both colleagues and supervisors; the importance of leadership to promote and herald such systems to embed them into the culture and create employee buy-in; and the desire by leaders to explore various measures of their performance to improve their work. The work of ensuring accountability and achieving coherence are closely tied. The accountability has to make sense in and of itself, as well as in relation to the larger system. Coherence cannot be measured without some accountability mechanism in place. Bridging these two areas of work in service of organizational improvement is both efficient and sensible. What better way to develop the minds, habits, and talents of students than to offer, as guides, adults who themselves are in a constant state of development?

The recent piloting and development of "blended-learning" educational approaches (which combine traditional in-person and online instruction within schools) are beginning to offer proof points for the ways in which formal education can be improved upon through the systematic use and integration of digital resources. However, much of the early work undertaken by innovators has focused mainly on redesigning the structures and activities undertaken within schools; there is little yet known about the teacher competencies and human capital systems that will be necessary for implementing these new teaching and learning models. Given the critical importance of these "people" systems to the change process, there is more work to be done to fully understand the changing role of teachers in blended-learning contexts. This capstone offers one potential starting point for the people-side of the blended learning equation. It describes the design and early implementation of a redesigned teacher talent strategy for an emerging charter management organization, Touchstone Education. Design and change management work is described and discussed in three strategic areas: (1) the development of a new competency model for teachers in Touchstone's blended learning schools; (2) the creation aligned structures, processes, and tools to support the start-up's capacity undertake the talent acquisition activities; and, (3) the identification and implementation of strategies to build the talent pipeline. In addition to analyzing key results as well as challenges, the Capstone identifies next steps for the organization as it grows as well as implications for other organizations seeking to undertake the development of new school models that seek to use technology in innovative ways to produce engaging, effective, and equitable results for students.

Traditional leadership development programs are based on an old paradigm of leadership focused on the technical learning of new skills and abilities required for successful job performance or promotion. In the context of education teacher leadership development has meant acquiring the pedagogical knowledge and management skills necessary for formal leadership roles such as grade-level teacher leaders, school deans, or instructional specialist. Missing from this traditional view of teacher leadership development is a focus on personal and adaptive learning. Instructional skills are unequivocally necessary for developing teacher leaders, but technical skills alone will not prepare teachers to meet the increasingly complex and challenging demands of teaching and leading in low-income public schools. The skills and capacities needed for teachers to meet these challenges are adaptive in nature and developmental in process. Redefining teacher leadership to include personal leadership development requires an intentional process for cultivating teachers’ developmental capacities for self-reflection, self-awareness, introspection and perspective taking of differing views and situations. The strategic project was an effort at redefining teacher leadership development, and more broadly leadership development, at Teach For America (TFA) in Los Angeles. The primary goal of the project was to design and implement an 8-month personal leadership development pilot program for second year teachers in Los Angeles. The leadership pilot, which is rooted in constructivist-developmental theory, focused on cultivating teachers’ personal leadership by fostering three habits of mind: Understanding Self, Understanding Others, and Understanding Self in the context of Others. The project’s secondary goal was to cultivate the personal leadership of TFA staff and build their capacity to facilitate it for others. Focusing on staff development was an effort to create the conditions at TFA that would ensure a sustained and an ongoing focus to developing personal leadership across the organization. Early results from the project indicated that Teach For America finds value in personal leadership development as a critical component to teacher and staff development. However, there was not a strategy to meaningfully and systemically integrate personal leadership into their existing teacher leadership development model. Additionally, TFA staff lacks the knowledge and skills necessary to develop personal leadership in others. Although the strategic project was focused on developing teacher leadership the analysis brings to light the challenges and opportunities for cultivating personal leadership development of adults in schools or in any organization. Implications for Teach For America and the education sector is a call for more holistic and systemic approach to leadership development that includes both a focus on personal and professional development.

How can a community of practice comprised of diverse teacher preparation leaders from across the country collaborate to disrupt the teacher preparation field? The single most important school-based factor in a child’s education is the quality of his or her teachers--so important, in fact, that a series of good teachers can overcome the effects of poverty. Yet our schools of education are struggling to prepare teachers for today’s classrooms, even as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has called for a “sea change” in the way we train new teachers. This capstone focuses on how the NewSchools Venture Fund (NewSchools), a nonprofit venture philanthropy firm focused on transforming the preparation of beginning teachers in America, uses convening as a tool for fostering innovation and enabling disruption in the teacher preparation market. The scope of the capstone project involved planning and executing on two convenings of diverse leaders from institutes of higher education, teacher preparation programs, school operators, and critical support providers. My paper subsequently analyzes the effectiveness of NewSchools’ efforts to design teaming opportunities, referred to as “Design Teams,” for leaders to work together in piloting new solutions for ongoing problems of practice that impact the teacher preparation field. Finally, I consider what the potential impact of the Design Teams could be, beyond NewSchools, as a means of accelerating new research and generating novel ideas across the education sector as a whole. These considerations raise implications for how NewSchools’ new model for collaboration could lend insight to the field as to how to bring people together from different perspectives to work on issues of strategic importance such as teacher preparation.

All students must have opportunities to explore their strengths and interests. Every student is entitled to and ought to receive strong, personalized supports to bolster his/her academic, behavioral, and social emotional learning and success. It is the responsibility of school systems to prepare and coach their staff to provide this rich and constructive learning environment to all students. Simultaneously, school systems must develop deep partnerships and relationships with families and communities so that our students and communities thrive. This capstone explores how one district, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS), Maryland, has prioritized interventions as a key focus area and subsequently planned to implement an integrated system of supports, such that every student will thrive. As MCPS has focused on issues of equity and excellence for decades, this prioritization of interventions and support for struggling learners provides focus to the system for completely eradicating the achievement gap. With an understanding that high expectations, excellent instruction, and committed staff are essential for all learners, MCPS is beginning its implementation of this integrated system of supports focusing on schools and students that are most underperforming. The design of this integrated system culminates from research on Response to Interventions--both literature and state and district implementation, convening a staff workgroup, and engaging with various stakeholders across MCPS to build on the struggles and the successes in the district’s history. Within this capstone, literature is examined related to interventions, and the project work that occurred between July 2012 and April 2013 is described and analyzed. The analysis emphasizes the need to consider change management theory and to create space for both technical and adaptive work, namely creating strong structures and processes that are deeply connected to culture and practice. This capstone concludes with reflections on potential implications for the author, MCPS, and the education sector.

Disconnected youth are under-networked, offering them few of the professional and educational opportunities available to their more privileged peers. There are currently many organizations and services that strive to connect youth to these types of opportunities, but they lack coordination, consistency and scale. The Internet is well positioned to be a revolutionary force in connecting these young people to opportunities they would otherwise not receive, and do so with unprecedented reach and depth. Camellia Network, working specifically with youth aging out of the foster system, is an online platform dedicated to connecting former foster youth with each other, with supporters, and with opportunities. While my work focuses specifically on this population of former foster youth, it is reasonable to extrapolate my findings and analysis to other disconnected youth populations. My Strategic Project was to create an “Opportunity Partnership” department for the organization that would develop and support a system of connecting former foster youth to professional and educational opportunities through the Internet. A new arm of the organization, the project was poised to test my theory that educational and professional opportunities can be made accessible and will be seized with the aid of the Internet. My Strategic Project is a potential proof point for the education sector, acting as an experiment for what can happen when we use the Internet to provide access to opportunity –jobs, trainings, professional development, perks- to disconnected youth. We, as educators, are always looking for the method, platform or program that will achieve transformation at scale. The Internet is an obvious choice for large-scale change. However, my project’s outcomes imply that it takes more than simply making something more accessible in order to affect real transformation. It suggests that achieving this kind of scale is not about making something that works well small, bigger. Instead, scale is about fitting the small, quality pieces together so something new can happen, across a wider range. Scale is about the network. The Internet can help us do that, if we use it correctly: to create a new and empowered community of opportunity.

High-quality teachers are critical to transforming the performance of the U.S. K-12 education system. Historically, however, the United States has not taken a systematic and coherent approach to recruiting, training, supporting, and retaining teachers. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards is one of the country’s premier efforts to realize such a transformation in the teaching profession. While substantial, the progress the National Board has made to date has fallen short of the ambitious expectations that surrounded its birth. The National Board in 2012, led by its new President Ron Thorpe, finds itself--and the education sector--at a crossroads. In this capstone, I share my experience leading the development of the National Board’s five-year strategy with the hope that it proves useful to other practitioners, particularly those concerned with the professionalization of teaching in America. The strategy development work drew on diverse sources of knowledge including: the National Board’s founding and evolution; other countries’ approaches to building the teaching profession; the development of other professions in America, especially medicine; the role of teachers unions and teacher voice in teacher professionalization; the demographics and perspectives of the teacher workforce as it relates to professionalization; and the theory of adaptive leadership and how it applies to the professionalization of teaching. The resulting strategic direction describes the National Board’s new focus on anchoring the teacher career continuum with the National Board’s standards and assessments and on mobilizing National Board Certified Teachers as accomplished practitioners. An analysis of this strategic project reveals three key findings: (1) the context of an ambitious vision and an openness to external critique enabled strategy development; (2) the need for adaptive change at the National Board required the use of adaptive leadership skills; and (3) to make progress in today’s American K-12 education sector, advocates of professionalization must explicitly build political will and adapt to the cultural context. These findings yield implications that will inform my future leadership in education, the National Board and its efforts to undertake the strategy it has developed, and the advance towards professionalization in the education sector as a whole.

The STEM Champions project was a focused and strategic approach to coordinating community resources in Cambridge Massachusetts to better serve the learning needs of students in the Cambridge Public School District. The central research questions included “How can we change from a school district that has ad hoc community partnerships to a district that has focused and strategic partnerships?” “How can theories about how organizations work within themselves and across sectors help build a flexible and sustainable group of various organizations that contribute to the learning needs of Cambridge children?” and “What is the best system to organize the assets of various organizations, the developmental needs of children, and the curricular opportunities for learning at each grade?” A large part of the evidence I provide is through the actual work I produced during the course of this project (which was conducted during an embedded 10-month residency in the district). The data set revealed 58 STEM resources in Cambridge that were already involved with individual schools and classrooms. Of those, a comprehensive asset map was created for a subset of 14, and a protocol developed for asset mapping the remaining 58. The subset of data revealed that there is a very high probability for the district to coordinate with STEM resource organizations in Cambridge to meet its goals: to provide real-world learning experiences through partnership with top-notch local resources for every student in every grade each year. This means that a student who graduates from Cambridge Public Schools should be able to engage in some of the world’s best STEM learning each year of their school career. Interviews revealed the importance of relationship-building, communication, and district-level point of contact were important parts of what external resources needed to build a sustainable relationship with the district. Thus, another outcome of the project was the establishment of a Community Resource protocol that can be shared out across the district and sector that focuses on building relational trust, understanding what motivates organizations to change and collaborate, and communicating clearly about how organizations outside a school district can best “match” the needs of student learning within the district.

Each role in education, whatever its placement in a school system’s hierarchy, requires a different set of knowledge and skills. This Capstone will focus on the "school-to-central" leadership transition by challenging the assumption that what makes leaders effective as school principals also makes them effective as central office leaders. The Review of Knowledge for Action cites evidence from New York City Department of Education (DOE) focus groups as well as out-of-sector research on organizational advancement to confirm the hypothesis generated by this Capstone: the "school-to-central" leadership transition requires an intentional shift on the managing others to managing self continuum, as well as the hard skills to soft skills continuum--essentially, the higher one advances, the more relevant soft skills and the ability to manage self become. This exploration studies the design and implementation of the Advanced Leadership Institute in the New York City Department of Education--a leadership development experience for high-potential leaders interested in exploring advanced roles, the majority of whom are current principals. Of the four quadrants identified by this Capstone as critical for the "school-to-central" transition--I) adaptive leadership, II) systems thinking, III) relationship building, and IV) project management--only quadrant II) systems thinking was incorporated explicitly into the program design. This Capstone will analyze the implications of the Advanced Leadership Institute as it relates to the findings as well as explore the potential impact of creating supports for the "school-to-central" transition in the New York City Department of Education and the education sector writ large.

A series of reform efforts over the past two decades have found the Boston Public Schools (BPS) making progress, despite the districts’ struggles over time to improve its lowest performing schools. Due to a total restructuring of the central office and a strategy focused on increasing student outcomes in a set of highly impacted schools across the city, BPS is keenly poised to address persistent achievement gaps and provide the Boston community with high quality schools in every neighborhood. My project was to lead the planning and facilitate the initial stages of the implementation of an effort to turn around 21 schools whose performance was below the city’s average on Massachusetts state assessments for two consecutive years. The strategy called for a focus on the individual schools and a new model of collaboration between the district central office and the schools. Cross-functional teams composed of district administrators, school leaders, teachers, and support staff worked jointly to customize interventions for the schools. The project succeeded in that it provided an opportunity to test a new central office structure designed to support principals to lead quality instruction in their schools. It also succeeded because central office administrators collaborated with school communities in unprecedented ways, used data publicly to target interventions toward the students with the greatest needs, allocated coaching support toward the schools, used budget flexibility to enhance school-based strategies, and rolled out a new evaluation system and staffing supports for this set of schools--all while maintaining requisite services for all schools. In addition to these successes, we encountered several key challenges including lack of initial funding, difficulties customizing professional development to the schools, creating a learning community among the school leaders, and sustaining a focus on this initiative while other initiatives vied for the same resources. Competing initiatives unveiled larger political challenges and created shifts in organizational priorities. We achieved success by focusing all of our attention on delivering services to the schools during the planning stages. At times, we failed to communicate well with school leaders and grappled to maintain consistent focus on supporting principals to lead instruction in their schools throughout the implementation. Boston Public Schools can be successful in transforming schools to improve quality (1) by continuing to restructure the central office to create the conditions for schools to be successful, (2) by creating direct lines of accountability for each central office employee to student learning in classrooms across the district, and (3) by beginning to address some significant inequities built into the system. Regardless of what new initiative arises, central offices must construct and organize systems that focus on partnerships with school leaders to ensure quality teaching and learning in every school, resulting in exceptional learning outcomes for every student. Hopefully, the content herein can be very helpful to BPS and others seeking to engage in similar manners of reform.

The paper explores two strategic projects that attempt to build leadership capacity through the vehicles of coaching and communities of practice in a large urban school district. The paper explores the conditions that enable or hinder change initiatives to move from idea to design to implementation and on-going learning for the organization. The experience at LAUSD helped to highlight the need for a balanced approach to organizational change that emphasizes developing the human resources within the system as a key lever in a successful change initiative. In order to create a learning organization with an emphasis on collaboration and reflective practices, the organization must value these practices and create the culture to support them.

The District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) has engaged in ambitious urban school reform since Michelle Rhee began exercising leadership as the district’s chancellor six years ago. Rhee launched efforts to terminate ineffective teachers, build a comprehensive performance management system, and hire principals who promised to deliver radically improved student outcomes. Although Rhee’s tenure was short-lived, her successor has engaged in equally transformative reform efforts, while exercising a more collaborative leadership style. With attention having been focused on building teachers’ instructional capacity, a shift is taking place in DCPS--one that increasingly recognizes the role of school leader as a key lever to whole school improvement. Amidst the slew of principals released by Rhee, DCPS looked externally to select principals with proven track records to take over its failing schools. However, in the last two years a central office Principal Effectiveness (PE) team was created to grow principals from within. This small team was charged to build an internal leadership development program to prepare DCPS employees for the principalship. As a former high school principal and Harvard Graduate School of Education student agreeing to complete her residency with DCPS, I was tasked to bring this vision to life. While the work of stakeholder engagement, recruitment and selection, program and lesson design, and launch and implementation, was plentiful, time-consuming, and often stressful--it was mostly technical in nature. What became increasingly clear is that the more difficult, adaptive work of shifting organizational culture was direly needed. In this capstone, I assert that DCPS’s organizational culture is not yet organized to facilitate adult learning and capacity building. While our small team successfully reached a critical milestone in launching DCPS’s aspiring principals program (called the Mary Jane Patterson Fellowship), we recognized a critical need to work more strategically and methodically to address a looming adaptive challenge: If we help the system’s aspiring principals evolve into highly effective school leaders who will transform teaching and learning in DCPS schools, we must also help the system evolve in its capacity to believe in and concretely support its leaders as adult learners. As a way of exploring this adaptive challenge, I will describe a gap between the organization’s espoused belief system and the behaviors of its senior leaders, and how this gap has critical implications for the learner orientation of the district as a system. Across the sector, there are individuals and small programs that are positioned as key levers to shift the organizational culture of their surrounding systems. In the case of DCPS, the Patterson Fellowship is an ideal lever for system change. What this requires is a creative strategy to build a synergistic relationship between key players of the Patterson Fellowship team and district leaders who can envision new possibilities for organizational learning. Simply put, DCPS must increase its orientation toward adult learning and development in order to engage in whole system transformation. With student learning at stake, the learning of adults is of critical importance. Becoming a learning organization for key adults in the system is DCPS’s greatest current challenge.

Building a social movement that produces teaching and leadership talent for school systems and leaders who can take on the systemic dimensions of the problem of educational inequity is a complex challenge. To help address this challenge successfully, entrepreneurial educational leaders must develop their capacity for leadership and management, improve their adaptive leadership skills and be able to communicate a narrative that can help them build broad coalitions of support. In this paper, I introduce a problem many entrepreneurial educational leaders in the Teach For All network face in acquiring the public and private sector support needed to advance their organization’s mission. I focus on how Teach For All has created a global organization to help solve this problem. Teach For All is an international non-profit working to help entrepreneurs around the world build social movements in their countries to end educational inequity. To inform my practice, I apply a knowledge base developed by John Kotter, Ron Heifetz, Dean Williams and Marshall Ganz to work I am doing as I complete my residency at Teach For All. For my strategic project, I was tasked with helping a group of social entrepreneurs tackle challenges in building the public and private sector support needed to advance the mission of their organizations. In this paper, I reflect on the question of how we help these entrepreneurs lead effective educational organizations in complex, diverse and changing environments. I focus on the interventions I implemented with the leadership teams of Teach For Japan and Teach For Brazil specifically, and share progress that these organizational leaders were able to make. In my analysis, I find I was required to practice leadership, go beyond the constraints of authority and partner with other functional team leaders within Teach For All to develop the capacity of the entrepreneurs we serve so that they can become more effective in leadership and management. I also find that being able to do good diagnosis proves to be difficult for a resident who is assigned to a high-impact initiative within the organization. Finally, my findings also reveal that Teach For All seems more organized to provide technical support to its partners and must work to develop its ability to provide support for the more complicated and adaptive challenges that its partners around the world face. Understanding how entrepreneurial leaders are able to meet build public and private sector support in a global context is of value to social entrepreneurs in the Teach For All network and education leaders around the world who must work across boundaries of difference to advance the mission of their organizations. The findings from this paper also have implications for my future work as an educational leader, the leadership development and management work of Teach For All, and the education sector in the United States and around the world.

English language learners must both acquire academic proficiency in English and master rigorous content in English to succeed. Such students are legally guaranteed equal access to education. However, school systems have historically failed to educate English language learners to comparable levels of achievement as their peers. In Denver Public Schools, a large urban school district, more than a third of students are English language learners. Increasing their academic achievement is a core priority. In this capstone, I catalog my experience designing and leading a multi-departmental initiative to provide support to twenty-five schools preparing to implement new instructional programs for English language learners. What follows is detailed analysis focused on how the opportunities and barriers to improvement discovered during the project can inform the district‘s long-term strategy regarding English language learners, follows. Specifically, I apply the lenses of effective instruction for English language learners, organizational coherence, adaptive leadership, and innovation to generate implication for me, the site, and the sector. This report is intended to benefit the Denver Public Schools in its ongoing efforts to improve academic achievement of English language learners as well as fellow practitioners engaged in similar work across the country.

The high cost of teacher turnover permeates the entire American K-12 public education system. As a result of a lack of support, lack of development opportunities and uncertain pathways for career advancement, too often teachers and school leaders leave the schools and school systems that need them the most. It is within this context that the Emerging Leaders Program (ELP) developed at KIPP Philadelphia Schools (KPS) in 2010 as a way to strategically cultivate future leaders for a growing portfolio of schools. Originally conceived of as an internal leadership development opportunity for teacher leaders, the ELP is now approaching the end of its first pilot year as a leadership learning and development program for 12 future leaders from KPS and other charter, district, and independent religious-affiliated schools. Through a generous grant from the Philadelphia Growth Fund, I was able to develop an expanded version of the ELP as the focus of my Strategic Project. My role as Leadership Development Fellow at KIPP Philadelphia Schools (October 2012-April 2013) was to expand the ELP to include both KIPP and (for the first time) non-KIPP teacher leaders, reconsider the pedagogical approach and reconfigure the curricular design to meet the needs of this new partnership, and to make the changes I thought were necessary based on best practices in the field of Adult Development and Learning. As such, the central focus of the ELP shifted from the purely technical aspects of management and leadership, to an adaptive and developmental approach of leadership development, specifically with regards to teacher leadership as a stepping stone to school leadership. This approach, I believe, more purposefully prepares future leaders for the complex demands of leadership by tuning in to the specific ways individuals make meaning of their leadership experience. Concretely, this shift expanded the scope of leadership learning from a managerial and task-oriented approach to one more focused on the development of emerging leaders by understanding the connections they make between values, beliefs and action as they make meaning of their individual leadership journeys. Central to the new format of the ELP are key design changes, informed by best practices in leadership development programming, and through the lens of adult development. Also informed by the KIPP Leadership Competency Model, conceived of by the KIPP School Leadership Team based at the KIPP Foundation, the ELP provides the opportunity for teacher leaders to come together once a month for 22 hours of professional development across a school year. Each ELP participant develops a Leadership Learning Action Plan which informs an Action Research Project at each of the participants’ school sites. Here, participants are able to practice their leadership in action while simultaneously making an impact on their school community. Small groups work within the broader ELP cohort to provide necessary and supportive feedback as projects unfold, while also serving as critical friends to one another across a wide range of schools. Finally, Intersession Coaching provides the “connective tissue” for the ELP by creating a space for participants to apply their new skills to their individual school contexts. Taken together, these components have coalesced into the first of its kind leadership development experience led by a charter network and also open to ALL teacher leaders in Philadelphia. Due to its initial success, the program will likely expand to reach three times as many teacher leaders in the next school year, building upon key learnings from this pilot year and continually improving with each ELP cohort by incorporating feedback from all stakeholders as well as by following the leadership progression and impact of participants over time.

Over the next thirty years, seismic demographic shifts will render the U.S. a “majority-minority” nation where people of color (now 37 percent) will comprise 57 percent of the population by 2043. This shift brings us to a crossroads. Will we as a nation act now by making savvy investments into social innovations and improvements that can result in increased educational attainment and overall quality of life for all citizens? Will we act and invest now to diminish the persistent disparities in factors such as high school graduation, college attendance, incarceration, and life-long earning potential that are strongly correlated at present with race and socioeconomic status? Though governments spend more than $500 billion annually on educational services in America, these public sector funds are highly restricted in their use. Instead, grants from private philanthropy have traditionally been the only sources of capital to launch, test or scale innovative new technologies, programs, products and services for the U.S. education sector. But grants as the lone capital source for educational innovation are insufficient to fuel the level of improvement our education system must achieve.The emergence of impact investing and crowdfunding over the last five years provides an exciting and potentially game-changing solution to this capital problem that may help us to meet the mandates of the future. This capstone examines my work between June 2012 and October 2013 as a doctoral resident at Tides Foundation on the design and launch of an online platform to facilitate impact investments from large numbers of people into entrepreneurial social enterprises whose products and services might improve outcomes in education, social equity, the environment and economic opportunity. The capstone recounts the process by which I attempted to advance this work based on four goals and fifteen corresponding objectives; explores the challenges and opportunities presented by an unexpected change in the organization’s leadership; and provides a glimpse into the most valuable lessons I gained during this process about management, pedagogy and policy. This capstone concludes with reflections, recommendations and possible implications of this work for my own leadership practice (particularly as a leader working to improve the schools and youth development initiatives “from the outside in”); for Tides Networks work in impact investing amongst public foundations; and for entrepreneurs and investors in the education sector at-large.