San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) Continuous Instructional Improvement Study

Our study is designed to develop understanding of how a district leads learning for continuous instructional improvement at multiple levels of the system – within the central office, for a cohort of principals, within school leadership teams and within grade-level teams. The school reform literature (e.g., Elmore, 2000; Sebastian & Allensworth, 2012) discusses the importance of developing coherent instructional systems, but little research documents the processes through which instructional coherence actually develops within the nested but distinct contexts of classrooms, grade level teams, schools, and districts. We propose to continue the design-based implementation research (DBIR) project we began in 2014 to examine how leaders at the district and school levels develop instructional leadership capacity for improving teaching practices that are associated with positive outcomes for students. Our project involves a team of SFUSD central office administrators who are responsible for supervising and supporting elementary school principals and a team of SCOPE researchers. 

Our project has three overarching purposes:

1) To work alongside SFUSD administrators and the principals they supervise, documenting their combined efforts to develop principals’ capacity to improve instruction in their schools, and strengthening their efforts through our role as thought-partners;

2) To empirically examine how a district develops instructional coherence across the nested but distinct contexts of a school system to improve teaching and learning; and

3) To document the processes through which research-practice partnerships develop their own capacity to engage in work that is relevant and meaningful to both researchers and practitioners.