LEADING SCHOOLS FORWARD
Evidence & Learning
Why do some schools improve and keep improving while others struggle to sustain progress?
WHY IT MATTERS
The milestones below trace how the framework was shaped, tested, and refined across classrooms, schools, and systems — in pursuit of that question.
THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORK
Foundations: Classroom Practice & Early Leadership (1995–2003)
The experiences that first revealed the importance of trust, relationships, and shared responsibility.
CHALLENGE
Understanding how students, adults, and organizations grow and improve.
WHAT CHANGED
Early insight that culture — not just instruction — determined whether students and adults could sustain growth.
CONDITIONS
Classroom teaching, leadership development experiences, and work in diverse educational settings.
REPRESENTATIVE GRADES & SCHOOLS
PK teacher assistant: OWU Early Childhood Center (suburban)
4th, 1st, and 5th grades: YE Smith, Helen Hunt, Holly Hills, and Gilpin (all urban)
K-12th grades, special education, summers: The Wediko School (alternative/therapeutic)
LESSONS LEARNED
Trust and shared responsibility are prerequisite conditions, not byproducts of good teaching.
School Turnaround & Organizational Recovery (2003–2009)
Leading the collaborative turnaround of three failing schools, K–12.
CONDITIONS
Shared purpose, faculty collaboration, trust-building, family engagement, instructional coherence, leadership development, and organizational redesign.
CHALLENGE
Reversing chronic underperformance across three schools without replacing staffs.
WHAT CHANGED
Enrollment increased, culture improved, achievement strengthened, and organizational confidence returned.
LESSONS LEARNED
Culture change precedes and enables instructional improvement — not the other way around.
REPRESENTATIVE SCHOOLS
Pikes Peak School of Expeditionary Learning, Pk-8 (rural)
Kaiser Elementary, Pk-6 (suburban)
Global Leadership Academy, K-12 (urban)
Refinement in a High-Performing International School (2010-2012)
An opportunity to explore how strong cultures continue improving without losing their identity.
LESSONS LEARNED
Improvement is not only about turnaround. During this period, exposure to organizational development and living systems thinking shifted attention from formal leadership and programs toward the conditions that shape performance.
WHAT CHANGED
Programs, services, and leadership systems were strengthened while preserving the school's culture and mission.
CONDITIONS
Stakeholder engagement, instructional innovation, student leadership, faculty development, and systems alignment.
CHALLENGE
How can already successful organizations continue to improve?
REPRESENTATIVE SCHOOL
Escuela Americana (American School of El Salvador), Upper School, Grades 9–12, elite-private
The First School-Based Implementation (2014-2015)
The first intentional school-based implementation of the framework.
CHALLENGE
A school facing continually declining achievement, enrollment concerns, organizational instability, and a highly negative culture narrative. It was also the first opportunity to intentionally implement and refine the framework within a school setting.
CONDITIONS
Shared purpose, values, behaviors, trust-building, faculty collaboration, team customization, leadership development, and measurement systems.
WHAT CHANGED
Enrollment increased, culture strengthened, achievement significantly improved, and organizational confidence returned.
LESSONS LEARNED
The framework could be intentionally implemented and adapted to a school setting. Improvement became a shared organizational effort rather than primarily a leadership initiative.
REPRESENTATIVE SCHOOL
Kestrel Heights Middle School, Grades 6-8 (urban)
CHALLENGE
A new K-8 school and leader were experiencing significant staff morale concerns, middle school challenges, parent dissatisfaction, and organizational growing pains.
The First Full School Prototype (2015-2017)
The first full prototype demonstrating how the framework could shape a school’s culture and growth.
CONDITIONS
Shared purpose, values, behaviors, organizational trust, leadership alignment, faculty engagement, team development, and hiring and measurement systems.
WHAT CHANGED
Employee enthusiasm significantly increased, parent engagement and satisfaction improved, academic growth strengthened, and enrollment demand expanded.
LESSONS LEARNED
The framework can be implemented from the beginning of a school's life, not only as a recovery tool.
REPRESENTATIVE SCHOOL
The Expedition School, Grades K-8 (suburban)
Sustaining School Improvement Beyond Individual Leaders (2017-2018)
Testing whether culture could endure beyond the leader who helped build it.
CONDITIONS
Shared purpose, values, trust, distributed leadership, and organizational ownership.
CHALLENGE
How can schools sustain culture when key leaders leave?
LESSONS LEARNED
Improvement that depends on a single leader is fragile. Improvement that becomes embedded in organizational culture is more likely to endure.
WHAT CHANGED
School strengthened its capacity to maintain coherence beyond individual leaders.
REPRESENTATIVE SCHOOL
Chatham Central High School, Grades 9-12 (rural)
Beyond Schools: Caswell Family Medical Center (2017-2018)
Evidence that the underlying principles extended beyond schools, consistent with the original framework.
WHAT CHANGED
Provider retention and patient satisfaction significantly improved, organizational stability strengthened, perfect HRSA operations assessment score achieved, and additional improvement grants secured.
CONDITIONS
Leadership alignment, shared purpose, organizational infrastructure, and culture development.
CHALLENGE
Years of financial losses, provider turnover, and organizational strain.
LESSONS LEARNED
The principles underlying sustainable improvement appear transferable across mission-driven organizations.
Scaling the Work: New Hanover County Schools (2018)
Exploring what organizational conditions look like at the large system level.
WHAT CHANGED
A three-year implementation design was developed but interrupted by external events, including Hurricane Florence, leadership transition, and relocation.
CONDITIONS
Central office leadership development and board engagement, distributed leadership, organizational assessment, and implementation planning.
CHALLENGE
How might organizational conditions be strengthened across a large educational system?
LESSONS LEARNED
Scaling sustainable improvement requires not only strong ideas, but stable conditions, leadership continuity, and long-term commitment.
CHALLENGE
Major implementation efforts were interrupted by Hurricane Florence, leadership transitions, relocation, and ultimately COVID-19.
Interruption, Reflection, and Refinement (2019–2020)
Implementation paused, but understanding deepened.
WHAT CHANGED
The interruption created an opportunity to step back from implementation and more deeply examine the underlying principles behind sustainable school and system improvement.
CONDITIONS
Reflection, continued learning, work with superintendents, and exploration of the broader research literature.
LESSONS LEARNED
Sometimes the most important learning occurs when implementation pauses and assumptions can be examined more deeply.
Research, Refinement, and Return to Practice (2020–Present)
Moving from implementation experience to a documented research-to-practice framework.
CONDITIONS
Three years back in the classroom practicing the framework at the student level across different settings, alongside doctoral research into principal preparation and continued framework development.
CHALLENGE
How can the framework be strengthened through research and depth of practice — and made ready for a committed school to actually use, independent of a consultant?
WHAT CHANGED
The work evolved from a consulting model into a fully documented culture-first framework, research-to-practice guide, and toolkit — inspired in large part by the challenges of a specific high-need school, community, and principal.
LESSONS LEARNED
Returning to the classroom confirmed that conditions must be built at the level of the adult experience before they can sustainably reach students. Doctoral research will work to better understand the structural explanation: most principal preparation programs do not explicitly develop leaders for this work.
REPRESENTATIVE SCHOOLS
University of Colorado Colorado Springs: Educational Leadership, Research, & Policy PhD Prog.
Steele Elementary (economically advantaged) and West K-8 (highly disadvantaged): 5th grade
THE EMERGING INSIGHT
Leadership mattered.
Instruction mattered.
But sustainable improvement consistently depended on something deeper: the organizational conditions that shaped trust, relationships, shared responsibility, and collective action.
Over time, the focus of the work shifted from improving individual schools to understanding the conditions that make improvement possible in the first place.
Scholarship & Publications
The framework is grounded in a growing body of peer-reviewed and applied scholarship.
“Built for Continuous Improvement: Professional Accountability in the Academic Setting”
Journal of Values-Based Leadership · 2023
Documents the organizational conditions and culture-first practices behind a North Carolina charter school's sustained improvement — including a 26-point employee enthusiasm gain in year one and a rise from a B to an A state academic rating.
“Colorado’s Alignment to Reduced Educator Turnover Based on the Work of Its Teaching and Learning Conditions Initiative”
A policy evaluation of why Colorado's statewide teaching and learning conditions survey has never reached 60% participation. Interviews with eleven system leaders found the survey passively administered and disconnected from its end-users. Primary recommendation: follow North Carolina's trust-first model, which consistently achieves 93% participation.
Educational Research: Theory and Practice, 36(2) · 2025
A comprehensive framework and implementation toolkit for schools ready to collaboratively build sustainable cultures of shared purpose, shared values, and shared responsibility.
Research-to-practice, implementation guide, and toolkit · 2026
Compliance to Commitment: A Culture-First School Framework
Leadership Before the Leader: How Principal Preparation Program Heads Perceive and Conceptualize Fostering Internal Cohesion in Schools
Explores how principal preparation program leaders perceive their role in developing leaders who can build and sustain cohesive school cultures — and whether that capacity is being explicitly prepared for.
Dissertation · University of Colorado Colorado Springs · In Progress
Leading Schools Forward remains a work in progress. The framework continues to evolve through implementation, research, reflection, and collaboration — and each new school, system, and setting it meets raises fresh questions about what helps improvement last.