NYKids’ Carnegie Summit Presentation: Focusing on Lessons Learned about Continuous Improvement through the Pandemic

by Kristen C. Wilcox & Deborah Larrabee

This Carnegie Foundation Summit presentation revisits Fort Plain Junior Senior High school which has partnered with NYKids for a number of years in using NYKids’ positive outlier/deviance research in com bination with improvement science-based processes and tools in what we call COMPASS.

As described in previous blogs and recapped here, COMPASS is an acronym for a process NYKids developed in collaboration with our advisory board members including the New York State Council of School Superintendents (NYSCOSS) and the School Administrators Association of New York State (SAANYS) among others. “COMPASS” is informed by positive deviance study designs with (NYKids’ “odds-beating” studies one particular type of this work) and improvement science.

The “COMP” step calls for improvers to “compare” their processes, practices, policies and outcomes to other schools with similar demographics. Next, the “A” stands for “assess” and this prompts school improvers to assess the outcomes, causes for their outcomes, their local priorities, resources, and any constraints for improvement. This step is crucial in that it encourages improvers to stay “user-centered”, “problem-focused” (two of several improvement science principles), and ultimately take into account the systems surrounding their improvement effort.

The “Ss” that follow represent “Setting SMART goals and near-term aims” and “Selecting levers to improvement”. This involves improvement team members delving into data and research – both extant (from NYKids’ positive outlier studies and other sources) and their own (including through focus groups, empathy interviews, and self-assessment surveys).

These steps are followed by a continuous improvement process wherein teams develop an action plan (based on the improvement team’s theory of improvement), initiate the plan, and monitor progress through ongoing data collection and analysis. This is an iterative and recursive process fueled by school improvement teams made up of specialists, classroom teachers, counselors, and the school principal and others. It includes periodic formal “check the pulse” meetings with NYKids staff and professional development facilitators throughout the school year wherein data and take-aways are shared and aims are revisited and plans revised.

The goal of this work is to shift the focus from accountability to improvement in ways that are attuned to local needs and priorities. This is in service of helping all in the school and district share understandings of what they believe in and align what they are doing to achieve what they seek for kids, families, educators, and their communities to those understandings. Far from a technological intervention – this work is a human-centered experience and intended to help those closest to problems of practice articulate achievable goals, align their actions to their priorities, and build and sustain their schools as learning organizations that are welcoming and inclusive.

The Carnegie Presentation Highlights

Like in other schools around New York state, principal Larrabee from Fort Plain Junior Senior High School explained that the pandemic posed a number of strains on the Fort Plain staff, families, and kids. As outlined in our  , the journey through what Principal Larrabee described as “chaos” in the fall term kept her improvement team from focusing their efforts and working from a shared understanding of their goals going into the second half of the 2020-21 school year. As winter continued and the pandemic continued to force shifts to remote instruction and back to in-person instruction, she reached out to NYKids and NYKids’ partner and professional developer Nancy Andress for support

At the same time NYKids staff and research colleagues Dr. Hal Lawson, Dr. Kathryn Schiller, Dr. Francesca Durand, and Dr. James Caringi had been working on designing and implementing a new study on the effects of the pandemic on the workforce. The study was informed by the Minority Health Disparities task force at the University at Albany which sought to identify what communities were most at risk for detrimental impacts of the pandemic.

As Fort Plain is a rural school with relatively high percentages of children growing up in poverty, we were particularly interested in assessing their situation and helping them use their COMPASS team to address their greatest needs. NYKids offered this survey to Fort Plain Junior Senior HS and they jumped on it. The survey analysis revealed that many of their staff were experiencing significant stress and needed support. As principal Larrabee explained, “We were all working out of our comfort zones”.

What happened next was a deep dive into how people in the school and community were thinking about their current situation and what they wanted to happen in the future. NYKids with BOCES staff member Heather Mello and Nancy Andress conducted a number of focus groups with students, staff, and family members. This information along with the NYKids survey provided the Fort Plain Junior Senior High School team with ample information to plan their next steps.

Following the improvement science principles that “you cannot improve what you cannot measure” and the importance of “seeing the system that produced the outcomes”, NYKids provided support in the form of the development of a theory of improvement to help capture Fort Plain Junior Senior High School team members’ goal statements and assisted them with developing a plan for measuring progress.

Resources to Support Navigating the Pandemic and Continuously Improving

As you reflect on Fort Plain’s experience with NYKids and planning for end of year and summer professional development and improvement planning, please consider checking out some of these resources:

• The COVID-19 Response Survey and Resources: There is still time to participate in this brief survey (we will be closing it in the end of May). A unique benefit for those who participate is that our NYKids researchers will prepare a school-level report for you as well as resources to navigate workforce stress and secondary traumatic stress among staff, families, and students. To participate in the NYKids COVID-19 response survey. Please contact us at nykids@albany.edu.
• The complete Carnegie presentation is available at this link. It provides more detail about improvement science and rural school research in particular.

Please visit our webpage for other reports and presentations from our research in NY’s schools and as always, we welcome you to sign up for our Newsletter and reach out to us with feedback at nykids@albany.edu.