April 2024 CLEE News – Data and Impact

April 2024

Our collective power expands when we support each other to foster the unlimited potential of each and every student.

Use School Community Data for Improvement

Data can be a powerful tool for setting direction and monitoring progress. One of our most important tools for collecting data is CLEE’s validated Learning Community Survey (LCS). The survey measures the extent to which all the educators and leaders in a school are enacting the six Core Leadership Practices that research has found to increase adult collaboration, student learning and equity. It is similar to the PLC Survey many have used, but further articulated, validated, and aligned to practices that increase educational equity.

East Longmeadow Public Schools in Massachusetts has worked with CLEE for a number of years. We’ve supported them through implementing an Equity Audit, building leadership capacity to improve their MTSS and hiring practices, and now they are engaged in CLEE’s Equity Leader Accelerator Program (ELAP). As a sustained partner, the district has administered the LCS for many years. Hear from Heather Brown, Director of Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment at East Longmeadow, how regularly examining their growth and improvement has impacted the district.

Supporting, Not Blaming. “Data has been seen as a hammer in the past. It has been perceived as something that is used against us rather than supporting us as educators. Our work with CLEE puts data front and center, and makes it serve our needs. We have used it to drive improvements in instruction and set goals. Long term use has helped principals see the power of examining data to drive and measure growth.”

Seeing the Collective Agency of Educators. “LCS Data has led our work to different places and pushed our thinking in how we impact student outcomes we see in student testing data and beyond. It has helped us to understand needs. For example, the responses to the LCS question around holding each other accountable for agreed-upon norms have been low, so we plan to target setting and holding up norms as a practice. It also helped to have the context from CLEE that this is a common challenge in districts. 

Act Now, and Plan for the Future. “This takes time. You cannot fix everything in a year, but you push to improve every year. Using Foundations over and over has built this in as a habit. Continued use of protocols has created a base for practice and buy-in for their success. We are still building cycles and linking processes together for district-wide improvement.”

Mentoring is Reciprocal

Learning from the Equity Leader Accelerator Program

We are excited to share learning and resources from our innovative USDOE SEED grant-funded program, Equity Leader Accelerator Program (ELAP), currently underway in Massachusetts.

CLEE is supporting early career principals to enact MA DESE’s Anti-racist Leadership Competencies while concurrently supporting experienced leaders to serve as mentors in our 12 partner districts.

A core component of CLEE’s Equity Leader Accelerator Program (ELAP) is the mentoring experience in which school leaders discuss dilemmas and successes as they address educational equities in their school context with their mentors. While these meetings are often geared toward the challenges the mentee is facing, the mentor also benefits as they reflect on their own practice.

This year a mentee in the ELAP program identified that their Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) needed to shift from a predominant culture of nice/politeness to more data-focused conversations that included opportunities to check assumptions and biases about students. The mentor identified CLEE’s Cultural Categories of Change as a resource to collaboratively identify and plan specific leadership actions, including build unified expectations, create shared accountability, and support staff members to facilitate PLCs. As a result, staff at the mentee’s school began engaging in deep conversations about student needs and instructional best practices based on data, which led to significant growth for the students they were focusing on.

This prompted the mentor to reflect on collaborative staff conversations at their own school, and identified the What? So What? Now What? Protocol [You can read more in “Opening Up the Conversation through What? So What? Now What?” below] to keep small group conversations focused on best practices. An added bonus was the opportunity for staff to address hidden biases about student data instead of jumping to conclusions outside of the students’ realm of influence. The learning and action that resulted from one structured mentor-mentee meeting was a high impact win-win for both schools!

During the 2024-2025 academic year, this year’s mentees will mentor emerging leaders in their school. Mentoring within the same school context provides an even greater impact on student learning as Fellows lead alongside their mentors and support whole school instructional improvement. Through this collaborative effort, mentees will have greater influence on school-based decision making while also increasing diverse perspectives as part of the leadership team. 

Become a Certified Principal in Rhode Island in just 11 Months

Extended Application Deadline May 3

PRN is more than a certification program; it is an authentic residency where you are immersed in the principal role and mentored by an experienced leader. You also share your residency experiences with your cohort in a learning community to amplify your learning. Graduates are not only certified to be a principal, they are prepared to lead for equity in their setting. Don’t put off investing in yourself to increase your impact in education.

Learn Key Strategies to Collaborate for Equity in No-Cost Virtual Sessions

Share your experience in collaboration with colleagues from across the country. These are highly-interactive virtual sessions, rather than sit-and-get webinars. Each 2-hour session builds skills and gives you new tools to foster equity in your setting. Best of all, these sessions are being provided at no cost to you!

Sign up for as many sessions as you like; Space is limited:

• Integrating Equity-Centered Data Routines into Adult Collaboration – Thursday, April 25, 2024 4-6pm (Eastern)

• Analyzing Student Work to Drive Improvement in the Instructional Core – Thursday, May 9, 2024 4-6pm (Eastern)

Thank You for Your 401Gives Gifts!

Thank you for your gifts to 401Gives, Rhode Island’s day of giving, this week. Your donations to CLEE support nationally-recognized programs that drive student success. As a non-profit, CLEE relies on generous donors like you to amplify our work. Help us support educators who lead the immense task of transforming public schools into places of joyful, purposeful learning for each and every student.

Your support is still needed! Help grow the next generation of principals with a scholarship gift to the Principal Residency Network (PRN), CLEE’s residency-based building administrator certification program. Our hands-on program prepares aspiring school leaders to achieve high and equitable learning outcomes for students.

HTH Unboxed Podcast Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford on Improvement for Liberation

Dr. Hinnant-Crawford struck me with her challenge to examine process in a recent episode of the HTH Unboxed podcast,, “…we think about the outcomes of improvement and making sure we have an equity or justice centered outcome. But also, how do we make sure we have an equity and justice centered process?” She reminds us that it might be a lot easier to look at data to discover inequities, whereas looking in the mirror may be more difficult, as one may not want to see how they are perpetuating injustices or oppressions with processes that leave out the voices of others. While looking at data is a key component, only looking at the data omits other variables, including the extreme importance of others’ voices as a critical component in improvement science.

Dr. Hinnant-Crawford’s work connects directly to CLEE’s improvement process,echoing these sentiments with the same sense of urgency. CLEE’s Continuous Improvement Process works to support leaders, educators, youth, families and community members by collaboratively looking at student learning data to uncover and identify inequities. Using a team approach to move into continuous improvement cycles builds understanding that small changes can lead to bigger, more meaningful and systemic changes. This collaborative process includes the collective wisdom, voices, and ideas of each team member as equal contributors to the process improvement science.

Hinnant-Crawford mentions a tool that is similar to CLEE structures and tools that drive equitable processes, guiding educators to think expansively about continuous improvement, and act courageously toward increasing equity.

Opening Up the Conversation through What? So What? Now What?

Here is one thing I learned over many years of practice: telling someone how to solve a problem or dilemma means there is a 95% chance that the problem will not be solved and in some cases will get worse. There’s always the 5% of the time that the solution works as envisioned, however that’s not a great return.

In my experience, the conversations that produce the most change in a problem or dilemma are those that follow a conversational sequence designed to open up thinking, not provide a solution or answer. This sequence of questions, developed originally for use in the What? So What? Now What? Protocol, sets up a conversational model that opens up possibilities, supports individual agency, and keeps us working in our realm of influence.

This conversation unfolds as follows:
What? Ask the person: What is the dilemma/problem? 

So What? Ask the person: Why is it important to you? 

• Ask clarifying questions

• Use one or two of these stems to get at the heart of the matter:

  • “What I hear you say is…” 

  • “Why this seems important to you is…

  • What I wonder is…” or “The questions this raises for me are…”

  • What this means to me is…”

Now What? Ask: What are you going to do now?

This conversational model can be used by anyone, anywhere, about anything. It can happen in any group (principals, teachers, district administrators, students, families) of any size. It works as well in a conversation between two people as it does with a larger group. Discussions following this pattern allow us to support each other as collaborators working toward responses based in equity and collaboration to the ever-present dilemmas of our work.

This is one example of how a simple tool can have a deep and lasting impact on practice. Leading for equity and continuous improvement is rooted in collaborative practices like What? So What? Now What? CLEE’s Foundations in Facilitative Leadership gives you the skills, knowledge, and dispositions to lead this powerful collaboration in your own setting.

Each month, CLEE offers a question or two to help you reflect on what you are experiencing. Thinking about the importance of questioning and what your answers mean is one more step in your growth as a leader for equity.

Join CLEE on social media to follow the monthly questions and share your answers.

How are you using data to identify needs in your setting? Who is included?

The Resource book is back! 

The Resource Book is a selection of protocols curated into a spiral-bound book and organized into sections, ideal for both new and experienced practitioners who want easy access to our most popular tools.