Walk Through the Fire: Practicing Adaptive Leadership to Build a Systemic Approach to Family Engagement in a Large Urban School District
Citation
Rowland, Allison. 2016. Walk Through the Fire: Practicing Adaptive Leadership to Build a Systemic Approach to Family Engagement in a Large Urban School District. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard Graduate School of Education.Abstract
Although correlated with student achievement, strong family and community engagement is often at the margins, separate from the central work of school districts. This has previously been true in San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD), a district of over 131,000 students, the second largest in California. However, Superintendent Cindy Marten endeavors to directly address inequities in the system, and therefore aims to establish the conditions for each and every family to be empowered to support their student’s learning. This project, which became my strategic project, establishes a systemic framework for family engagement with three dimensions: growing family networks and leadership, cultivating trust among educators and families to take action together, and building families’ capacity to engage in high impact strategies to support student learning at home.The journey to the systemic approach took place at the school site and the systems level through, in part, addressing the beliefs and values maintaining family engagement at the margins. In clusters of schools we implemented Design Thinking, a human-centered process, whereby educators and community partners listen to families’ experiences, then take action to support students’ learning, together. Results show this process, with some adjustments, has the potential to be an engine for family engagement at school sites. At the systems level, leading the project generated political heat from key stakeholders facing difficult change and also provoked personal work to recover from my own assumptions and leadership missteps. Despite bumps in the road, the results of the systemic work are promising. We have generated increasing appetite and awareness for family engagement, as well as political support and leadership for the systemic approach. SDUSD is poised to integrate family engagement into their larger equity efforts with careful attention paid to building investment across the system through Design Thinking and integration into instructional work. Finally, California and districts across the country can learn from key steps to move a marginalized department or work to the center of district priorities.
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