Chapter 10: Attending to Role Identities within Continuous Improvement

A few recent studies begin to illuminate the complex decision-making processes of those leading and designing educational improvement efforts (Biag & Sherer, 2021; Huguet et al., 2021; Ishimaru 8 Galloway, 2020; Mintrop & Zumpe, 2019; Yurkofsky, 2021). These studies surface some of the discourses, design heuristics, mindsets, and dispositions that animate how individuals understand and design improvement processes. Echoing decades of implementation research, these studies emphasize that leaders of improvement often bring forward past assumptions about both goals and designs for change, look for confirmation of existing ideas about solutions to problems, and aim for conventions based on broadly held ideas of “what works.” Given the complexity and uncertainty of educational transformation, leaders of improvement efforts can gravitate towards what Mintrop and Zumpe (2019) refer to as “habitual ways of problem solving, that is, mind-sets that are appropriate to the situations they regularly encounter” (p. 303). Just as teachers can implement new instructional activities in ways that perpetuate entrenched ideas about learning and students (e.g., Louie, 2017, 2020), so can those designing and researching approaches to educational change (Yurkosfky et al., 2020). Within efforts to make continuous improvement (CI) approaches more systematic, design-based, locally relevant, equitable, and just, intentional care must be taken to not bring forward ineffective underlying assumptions about learning and change.