Continuous Improvement: Getting Started
By Jon Roure, Chief Innovation Officer and Executive Vice President at Student Leadership Network
Erin Grogan, PhD, Continuous Improvement Consultant at Grasshopper Research and Evaluation
If you work in education, you’ve probably heard someone talk about continuous improvement recently. In some organizations, “continuous improvement” can end up being simply a buzzword, without being a meaningful experience for the people participating. But it certainly doesn’t need to be that way. Thanks to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s generous support beginning in November 2019, Student Leadership Network has been engaged in deep learning about how to use the continuous improvement process to expand and deepen our impact on college access and postsecondary success outcomes for Black and Latinx students and students from underserved communities nationwide.
Root Cause Analysis
Our process was catalyzed with external support. We began by partnering with Education First to conduct an analysis of existing data in order to identify a network-wide problem of practice, which would be the anchor for the work. While we’ve always been proud of the outcomes we achieve with our students- our students graduate from high school at 4x the rate of their peers, with more than 20,000 students supported to enroll in college – engaging in this analysis uncovered areas where we can do better to ensure that all of our students at our partner schools fully benefit from our programmatic offerings. Specifically, this analysis illuminated disparities in our outcomes across factors including students’ race/ethnicity, gender, and GPA.
Identifying the gaps was just the first step. We needed to dig deeper to understand why students might be experiencing such different outcomes. Drawing on very helpful templates and tools for conducting equity-focused improvement, we engaged in root cause analysis – a structured process of asking “why?” when we identified potential explanations. But we didn’t stop at our own reflections. We also went out to our school partners and conducted empathy interviews to check our thinking and learn more from students, alumni, parents, teachers, Directors of College Counseling, and other school staff. Two issues—financial limitations and students’ sense of belonging—were particularly resonant across our interviews, site visits, and focus groups, as well as a recent alumni survey.
Setting our Aims and Theory of Action
Settling on these issues as key factors influencing student outcomes helped us narrow our focus to two aim statements that would become the goals for the next phase of our continuous improvement work.
Aim #1: Well-Matched/Best-Fit Postsecondary Enrollment: 94% of Black and Latinx students and students from underserved communities in CBI schools will directly enroll in college or another well-matched/best-fit postsecondary program
Aim #2: Early Postsecondary Momentum: 90% of Black and Latinx students and students from underserved communities in CBI schools will persist into their third semester of college
And, to address these aims, we developed the following theory of action:
If we consistently provide students, families, and educators with…
- robust, disaggregated student- and school-level data, including input from the school community;
- individualized school support, including tailored interventions for students at the margins; and
- relevant, culturally competent programming, partnerships and professional development
Then more CollegeBound Initiative students will successfully enroll in and persist through a well-matched/best-fit college or other postsecondary programs by overcoming barriers that often derail Black and Latinx students and students from underserved communities.
These shared commitments and the theory of action helped ground our organization-wide continuous improvement work with next steps that were clear and meaningful for our team. While there is some jargon to become familiar with as continuous improvement work unfolds, returning to these aims and what achieving them would mean for our students helped make this work feel less like “implementing a continuous improvement process” and more like simply “doing the work we usually do, but applying a more intentional DEI lens, searching for students on the margins.”
Next Steps
Completing this foundational work prepared us to take the next step: assembling a group of our Directors of College Counseling who were willing to engage in a facilitated continuous improvement pilot. Through the pilot, we asked them to use historical data to identify small groups of students who could benefit from specific support to stay on track toward postsecondary success. Learn more about how this pilot work unfolded across 10 of our CBI partner schools.
