School Improvement
Service Overview
Across the country, thousands of teachers and administrators at the classroom, school, and district level are expending lots of energy and resources trying to improve, in hopes of meeting the needs of all students. At Illuminate Education, we partner with districts to move from trying to improve to getting good at improvement.
Through the facilitation of Illuminate Education’s Professional Development team, educators take on an inquiry-based mindset to work collaboratively in cycles of continuous improvement. This process includes deepening educator understanding of current areas of success and teacher success, while analyzing the educational system that produces those results. Leaders then develop a theory of improvement to implement change. Leaders collect data, analyze and and examine data to determine if there was improvement, determine promising practices and scale.
Benefits
Setting aside time to continuously improve the outcomes for students is paramount in today’s educational environment. Through carefully designed facilitation, educators will develop the essential skills necessary to identify district or site issues preventing equitable outcomes for all students.
What You'll Leave With
During site or district-based networked improvement time, educators are guided through a process where they articulate the specific problem that needs to be solved. Educators will:
- Dive deeper and derive explanations about the particular shifts in practice they will attempt and articulate expected outcomes.
- Detail their cognition with specificity so others understand the “WHY.”
- Introduce their changes to the network and expand on actual results and improvement based on the respective changes.
- Adopt an inquiry stance based on plan-do-study-act cycles. It starts with describing the need for change and recording predictions (plan); recording what happened (do); comparing results to predictions (study); and deciding on the next steps (act).
Instructional leaders will gather the discipline and knowledge to get clarity on the change and the theory behind it, studying how and why things went differently than expected and taking the time record findings.
Dr. Abram Jimenez works with district leadership teams across the country to develop ways to ensure equitable outcomes for all students. Prior to coming to Illuminate Education, Dr. Jimenez, served as Chief of School in the San Francisco Unified School District, where he provided supervision and support to the local area Assistant Superintendents and 142 schools. As a senior district leader and key cabinet member building coherence, Dr. Jimenez lead the district-wide implementation of SFUSD’s strategic plan and supported the district's theory of action that lead towards continuous improvement. Abram holds a B.A. in Political Science and a minor in Education from UCLA; a Masters Degree in Educational Leadership Studies from the University of San Diego and Doctorate from the University of Southern California in K-12 Urban Leadership.
