Improvement Science in the Field : Cases of Practitioners Leading Change in Schools

While several texts provide pedagogical and theoretical insights on improvement science for faculty, graduate students, and educational leaders, practitioners’ voices are seldom heard. Improvement Science in the Field: Cases of Practitioners Leading Change in Schools fills this gap by presenting real-life cases of K-12 practitioners’ use of improvement science to lead change in their educational systems.
Improvement Science in the Field: Cases of Practitioners Leading Change in Schools contains two sections. Part I presents practitioners’ accounts of their use of improvement science to address actual problems of practice, such as closing discipline and achievement gaps, managing teacher stress and mental health, and improving school climate. Part II follows a tradition of case-based teaching in which authors provide part of their improvement journey and then invite readers to practice, discuss, brainstorm, and reflect on how they would address the problem presented using the tools of improvement science.

Edwin Nii Bonney earned his Ph.D. in educational leadership and policy analysis from the University of Missouri in 2021. His research centers on how educational leaders and educators disrupt and/or reinforce the marginalization of their minoritized, vulnerable, and racialized students’ languages, cultures, and histories. Dr. Bonney pays particular attention in his research to moments of disruption in and beyond educational spaces where students and community members are centering their own languages, cultures, and histories and are reshaping what is considered “normal” or standard. He has published several articles, book chapters, and policy briefs on decolonizing educational leadership, discourse analysis of educational policies and programs, refugee and immigrant education, school-community partnerships, and school-family engagement. Dr. Bonney teaches courses and advises students in the doctoral education program. He is interested in learning and working alongside educational leaders in tackling problems of practice so that their students can be equitably served.
Sarah Capello earned a Ph.D. in Administrative and Policy Studies in 2018 from the School of Education at the University of Pittsburgh and has nearly ten years of experience teaching in higher education at the undergraduate and graduate levels. One strand of Dr. Capello’s research focuses on transformative EdD education and supporting the growth and development of educational leaders who are scholarly practitioners through practitioner inquiry, doctoral assessments, and dissertation writing. A second strand of research focuses on instructional supervision for pre-service and in-service teachers. Dr. Capello has published articles in the Journal of Educational Supervision, Action in Teacher Education, College Teaching, Impacting Education, and has a forthcoming article in Teaching and Teacher Education. She currently teaches practitioner inquiry courses in the EdD program as well as chairs and serves on EdD dissertation committees.
Maxwell Yurkofsky obtained his Ed.D. in Educational Policy, Leadership, and Instructional Practice from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2020. He teaches in the Doctor of Education program and the Master’s in Educational Leadership program, and is committed to preparing school and system leaders to strategically utilize improvement science, organizational theory, evaluation, and design principles to inquire into and address high-leverage problems of practice. His research centers on understanding how school systems can organize for continuous improvement towards more ambitious and equitable visions of learning. Dr. Yurkofsky has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including Educational Researcher, Educational Administration Quarterly, Review of Research in Education, The Harvard Educational Review, Teaching and Teacher Education, Computers & Education, Teachers College Record, Educational Policy, and the Peabody Journal of Education. His dissertation won the “Dissertation of the Year” award from the Leadership for School Improvement Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association in 2021.