UC Berkeley Leadership for Educational Equity

Program (LEEP)

Rick Mintrop

mintrop@berkeley edu

With assistance from: Mahua Baral, Elizabeth Zumpe, and John Hall

CPED Essentials

• Excellence and ethics

• Making a positive difference

• Partnerships

• Problems of practice

• Professional knowledge base

• Signature pedagogy

Signature Pedagogy

For the professional education doctorate:

Design Development Studies

since 2006

Purpose

• Need of the field for cumulative practical design knowledge in school and district improvement

• Need of educational leaders for better decision making on ‘big’ programmatic and strategic decisions

• Need of schools and districts for a more powerful model of organizational improvement

The Provocation:

• Problems endure, but attention to these problems waxes and wanes

• ‘Solutions’ are created and maintained by advocates, activists, researchers, and industries in search for problems that may fit their solutions

• Problems addressed systematically, through a sequence of iterative inquiries and adjustments

• Problems framed from the user’s point of view

• Co-designs done with people, not to people

Garbage CanImprovement Science

Design-based Mental Model

• What behaviors or practices, exactly, need changing in the short or medium term?

• Where will we be 6 months from now in changing these practices?

• How do we know we got there?• Before we choose a solution path, what makes us

think that it will change people the way we envision? • How do our proximal changes fit in with our big goal

of improving student learning?

Sample Design Studies• Baham, E. (2014). School Capacity and Overload Review (SCORE):

Measuring School Capacity to Maximize School Improvement.

• Inglesby, B. (2014). Principals Utilizing Leadership for Special Education: The PULSE Workshop Model for Improving the Practice of Instructional Leadership for Special Education.

• Morizawa, G. H. (2014). Nesting the Neglected “R”: Writing Instruction within a Prescriptive Literacy Program.

• Penny-James, B. (2012). Introducing Cultural Literacy Content into Established, Skills-based Literacy Instruction.

• Soles, B. (2013). The SHU:SH Project (Slurs Hurt Us: Safety and Health): Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Students at School.

• Wayne, M. (2011). Visiting Classrooms: A Design Study to Support Principals’ Instructional Leadership.

Steps in the Design Process

• Framing and defining the Problem of Practice

• Generating an Intuitive Theory of Action

• Challenging the Intuitive Theory of Action with the professional knowledge base

• Theory of action

– Understanding the Problem

– Understanding the Change Process

• Intervention design

• Implementation of intervention

• Collecting Impact Data

• Collecting Process Data

• Data analysis and write-up

Design Example: Reducing Slurs

• Co-Design team at a social justice oriented high school

• Led by an EdD student who is the principal

• Following up on an anti-bullying campaign...

• What should we do next?

Your Turn: Defining the Problem of Practice

• According to your best intuition, how would you bound the problem of reducing slurs?

Share with a Partner

Framing and Defining theProblem of Practice

• Are rampant slurs a matter of student behavior?

• Are rampant slurs a matter of teacher behavior?

• Problem of Practice:

Many teachers ignore, and do not intervene when they hear, slurs.

Generating anIntuitive Theory of Action

• We clarify the current state

• We imagine a desired state to be attained at the end of the intervention

• We try to understand symptoms and causes of the problem

• We entertain an intuitive theory of change: actions or learnings that will move us closer to the desired state

Challenging the Intuitive Theory of Action

• Needs assessments

• Knowledge base: research and practical design knowledge

Back to the Example:Understanding the Problem

• Slurs are a pervasive phenomenon of youth culture

• Adult leadership is needed

• Teachers have fear and discomfort around slurs

• Silence, helplessness, and inaction ensue

Your Turn: Designing a Change Process

• What sort of change process can you come up with that might remedy the problem, as understood by the Ed.D. student/ Principal of the social justice high school?

Share with a Partner

Understanding the Change ProcessMotivation

• Dissonance

• Shared values/ guilt

• Collective commitments

• Efficacy

Knowledge and Competence

• Norms of communication

• Deep understanding: why do slurs hurt

• Strategies when encountering slurs

• Trial and error

From Theory of Action to Intervention

Collecting Impact Data

Sample Instrument:

Student Survey: Frequency of slurs; frequency of adults intervening

Collecting Process Data

Theoretical Base of Design Development Studies in LEEP

Initial InspirationBrown and Campione (1996) Fostering Communities of Learners

Cobb, Confrey, diSessa, Lehrer, and Schauble (2003) Role of Theory; Ecology of design

van den Akker (1999) Design development with results

Schön (1983) Reflective practitioner, rationality, intuition

Jonassen (2000) Problem solving for ill-structured problems

Copland, 2000; Timperley & Robinson, 1998 Problem solving in education administration

Carnegie Project for the Education Doctorate Signature pedagogy

Schön & Rein, 1995 Problem framingLater Sources

Plomp & Nieveen (2010); Netherlands Institute for Curriculum Development (SLO) (http://international.slo.nl/).

Practice of design development

Bryk, Gomez, & Grunow, 2011 Networked Improvement Communities

Martin (2009) Design thinkingBrenninkmeyer & Spillane (2008) Diagnostics- prognosticsBerwick (2008) Improvement science

Design Thinking• Rationality and Intuition

• Predictability and Uncertainty

• Planning and Creativity

• Linearity and Dialogue between means and ends

• Functionality and Appreciation

• Transferable design principles and Context specificity

The Design Development Study Logic

Domain Knowledge

While challenges are plentiful, transformative leaders for equity need actionable knowledge for three interrelated core problems:

– How to make their organization more effective

– How to enable their organization to facilitate complex learning

– How to insure that all members of their organization value students equally

The Rigor of Design Development• Visibility• Verifiability• Reliability• Validity

• Showing a plausible connection between outcome metric and process data

• Impact data: multiple baseline – varied growth on low-inference standardized metric

• Process data: soft, evolving qualitative data around process indicators related to activity chunks

• Iteration• Transferability

LEEP Milestone CoursesMile 1: Framing and defining the PoP; intuitive theory of action; challenging intuitions with knowledge base; needs assessment

- 1st milestone paper

Mile 2: Design development methodology- 2nd milestone paper

Mile 3: Planning the intervention; dissertation proposal; data collection instruments; implementation context

Mile 4: IRB; baseline assessment; completing proposal

Mile 5: Oral exam on relevant Knowledge Base for dissertation

Mile 6: Implementation of project

Mile 7/8: Data analysis: impact data, process data explaining impact; write up

DONE!

Design Development as Partnership

Upcoming Book

Design Development and School Improvement: Bridging Research and Practice with Equity-

Relevant Interventions in Local Contexts (working title)

A Practical Guide

Rick Mintrop with Mahua Baral, Elizabeth Zumpe, and John Hall

Prospectus: http://leep.berkeley.edu/leep/textbook

Studying Design Thinking in LEEP• Two-year self-evaluation on one cohort of 10

participants from 2012-2014; data from implementation of 9 design studies

• The data include:– Course materials

– Drafts of student papers

– Field notes from participant observers in courses

– Semi-structured and unstructured interviews with students

– Verbal protocols or “think alouds”

– 32 distinct analytical codes and a variety of meta-matrices

Leaders’ Heuristics Conducive to Design Development

• The leader is a change agent

• Change must yield results

• Solutions should be context-specific

• Our work is complex and uncertain and so is change

• School improvement is iterative

Heuristic “Traps” forDesign Thinking

• Problems are the absence of solutions• All problems are problems of practice • We just know: the ‘what,’ the ‘why,’ and the

‘what to do’ are fused• Change is a set of activities: learning is doing • Change is filling an empty vessel: to implement

is success• Means-ends relationships are matches between

a diffuse problem and a set of best practices

Research on Project Implementation

• Wearing multiple hats

• Logistic issues

• Shifting organizational priorities

• Unanticipated developments and design adjustments

• Effectiveness bias

• Reflection on one’s leadership

• Need for university partner

Underlying Principles of Design-based Projects

• Actionable Problem of Practice

• Pivot on results and outcome metrics

• De-personalized, no judgment or blaming

• Begins with one’s intuitive theory of action

• Challenging intuitions with the knowledge base

• Theory of action connects baseline and outcome

• Impact and process data plausibly explain outcomes

• Trial and error, iterations

• Corroborating or revising theory of action

• Design principles identified and applied to next iteration

Leadership for Educational Equity Program:

http://leep.berkeley.edu

Rick Mintrop:

mintrop@berkeley.edu

34