A Practical Path For Continuous Improvement

IDEAS

A practical path for continuous improvement

By Michelle Pledger and Mari Lim Jones

October 2022

Continuous improvement is at the heart of all teaching and learning. Just as we strive to nurture our students’ growth and improvement, educators should be continually growing and improving. When we designed the Deeper Learning Hub Fellowship, an initiative to build teachers’ capacity in social and emotional learning and culturally responsive-sustaining pedagogy, we wanted to encourage teachers to engage in intentional and reflective improvement and accountability over time. However, we didn’t want the improvement process to be too complex to implement. For a classroom teacher navigating a plethora of competing commitments, the cognitive lift of learning and integrating continuous improvement tools can feel overwhelming — especially since the start of the pandemic. We launched the year-long fellowship in August 2020, just five months after the

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References

Deeper Learning Hub. (n.d.). What is deeper learning? deeper-learning.org/

Gay, G. (2000). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice. Teachers College Press.

Ladson-Billings, G. (1992). Culturally relevant teaching: The key to making multicultural education work. In C.A. Grant, Research & multicultural education: From the margins to the mainstream (pp. 102-118). Routledge.

Paris, D. & Alim, H.S. (Eds.). (2017). Culturally sustaining pedagogies: Teaching and learning for justice in a changing world. Teachers College Press.

Payton, J.W., Wardlaw, D.M., Graczyk, P.A., Bloodworth, M.R., Tompsett, C.J., & Weissberg, R.P. (2000, May). Social and emotional learning: A framework for promoting mental health and reducing risk behavior in children and youth. Journal of School Health, 70(5), 179-185.

Pledger, M.S. (2022). Liberate! Pocket-sized paradigms for liberatory learning. Living for Liberation.

Michelle Pledger

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Michelle Pledger (mpledger@hightechhigh.org) is director of liberation Deeper Learning Hub at High Tech High Graduate School of Education in California.