Existing literature points to skilled facilitation as a key factor in enabling a team’s success in the context of inquiry-based reform. There is little understanding, however, of how precisely facilitators make the needed difference. This study analyzes the moves of expert facilitators in a team-based reform found to be successful previously. It identifies and explicates five distinct categories of needed …
Persistently low-achieving schools often work with external partners to receive support in improving culture and academics. Strategic Inquiry is a school turnaround model that has been implemented in poor performing high schools in New York City. The goal of this study was to learn lessons from school-based facilitators as they implemented Strategic Inquiry in three …
Patterns of performance in schools are often quite constant; teachers and schools do the best of what they know, and typically get consistent results. There is much agreement among educational researchers that what’s needed is to move schools toward continuous improvement (e.g., Bryk et al. 2015; DuFour et al. 2005; Elmore 2007; Lieberman and Miller …
Improving high schools entails challenges that are “far easier to catalogue than to surmount” (Mazzeo, Fleischman, Heppen & Jahangir, 2016, p. 2). High schools have been the most difficult to reform because the challenges teachers face are arguably the hardest: skill gaps present since elementary school have widened; the demand to graduate all students college …
The following study of Strategic Inquiry (SI) in New York City’s Renewal High Schools offers a new answer to the perennial question that often dominates and divides reformers: How do students learn? Our analysis also challenges conventional wisdom about New York City’s Renewal program by suggesting there are successful components worth pursuing and adopting elsewhere. …
This study is an analysis of the curriculum used to teach writing at one US high school in which outcomes for students were extremely strong. The study surfaces what was different in the approach used from what is typically understood and promoted as best practice in the teaching of writing. It does so in order …
The Scaffolded Apprenticeship Model (SAM) is a team-based school improvement and leadership development program in which participants earn graduate-level credits and school leadership certification[1]. One key component of the SAM program is peer coaching, where SAM participants, or “coaches,” partner with colleagues, or “peers,” in their schools to examine the peers’ instructional practice. In SAM, the term “peer coaching” is used …
Developing school capacity to continuously improve student achievement is essential to the success of New York City’s strategy to empower schools and hold them accountable for results. The Inquiry initiative is the New York City Department of Education (DOE’s) approach to developing this capacity. Its goal is to develop school administrators’ and teachers’ skills in …
Strategic Inquiry is an innovative model for promoting teacher collaboration around identifying specific “learning gaps” that keep struggling students from succeeding. Gaps may include anything from the proper use of commas and conjunctions to concepts such as “slope” in math. The authors argue that addressing these critical learning gaps can lead to big changes in …
