The framework reflects more than two decades of experience across classrooms, schools, systems, and organizations — shaped as much by interruption and reflection as by implementation.
The Evolution of the Work
Foundations: Classroom Practice & Early Leadership (1995–2003)
Challenge
Understanding how students, adults, and organizations grow and improve.
Conditions
Classroom teaching, leadership development experiences, service learning, and work in diverse educational settings.
What Changed
Early experiences reinforced the importance of trust, relationships, expectations, belonging, and shared responsibility.
Lessons Learned
The earliest experiences in classrooms and with students, not programs, established that conditions shape outcomes before any initiative has a chance to work.
School Turnaround & Organizational Recovery (2003–2009)
Challenge
Multiple schools faced significant organizational challenges, including declining enrollment, academic concerns, organizational instability, risk of closure, or severe culture and behavioral issues.
Conditions
Shared purpose, faculty collaboration, trust-building, family engagement, instructional coherence, leadership development, and organizational redesign.
What Changed
Enrollment stabilized or increased, school culture improved, academic outcomes strengthened, and organizational confidence returned.
Lessons Learned
Turnaround is possible without heroic leadership — but only when the conditions for collective effort are built deliberately and quickly.
Representative Schools
Pikes Peak School of Expeditionary Learning, Pk-8
Kaiser Elementary, Pk-6
Global Leadership Academy, K-12
Refinement in a High-Performing International School (2010–2012)
Challenge
How can already successful organizations continue to improve?
Conditions
Stakeholder engagement, instructional innovation, student leadership, faculty development, and systems alignment.
What Changed
Programs, services, and leadership systems were strengthened while preserving the school's culture and mission.
Lessons Learned
Improvement is not only about turnaround. During this period, exposure to organizational development and living systems thinking shifted attention from leadership and programs toward the conditions that shape performance.
Representative School
Escuela Americana (The American School of El Salvador), Upper School, 9–12
Kestrel Heights Middle School, 6-8: The First School-Based Implementation (2014–2015)
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 improved, achievement strengthened, 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.
The Expedition School, K-8: The First Full Prototype (2015–2017)
Challenge
A new school and leader were experiencing significant staff morale concerns, middle school challenges, parent dissatisfaction, and organizational growing pains.
Conditions
Shared purpose, values, behaviors, organizational trust, leadership alignment, faculty engagement, team development, and hiring and measurement systems.
What Changed
Employee enthusiasm 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 — and that changes what's possible.
Beyond Schools: Caswell Family Medical Center (2017–2018)
Challenge
Years of financial losses, provider turnover, and organizational strain.
Conditions
Leadership alignment, shared purpose, organizational infrastructure, and culture development.
What Changed
Provider retention and patient satisfaction improved, organizational stability strengthened, the organization achieved a perfect HRSA operations assessment score, and additional improvement grants secured.
Lessons Learned
The principles underlying sustainable improvement appear transferable across mission-driven organizations.
Sustaining School Improvement Beyond Individual Leaders (2017-2018)
Challenge
How can schools sustain culture when key leaders leave?
Conditions
Shared purpose, values, trust, distributed leadership, and organizational ownership.
What Changed
School strengthened its capacity to maintain coherence beyond individual leaders.
Lessons Learned
Improvement that depends on a single leader is fragile. Improvement that becomes embedded in organizational culture is more likely to endure.
Representative School
Chatham Central High School
Scaling the Work: New Hanover County Schools (2018)
Challenge
How might organizational conditions be strengthened across a large educational system?
Conditions
Central office leadership development and board engagement, distributed leadership, organizational assessment, and implementation planning.
What Changed
A three-year implementation design was developed but interrupted by external events, including Hurricane Florence, leadership transition, and relocation.
Lessons Learned
Scaling sustainable improvement requires not only strong ideas, but stable conditions, leadership continuity, and long-term commitment.
Interruption, Reflection, and Refinement (2019–2020)
Challenge
Major implementation efforts were interrupted by Hurricane Florence, leadership transitions, relocation, and ultimately COVID-19.
Conditions
Reflection, continued learning, work with superintendents, and exploration of the broader research literature.
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.
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)
Challenge
How can the framework be strengthened through research and direct practice — and made ready for a committed school to actually use, independent a consultant?
Conditions
Three years back in the classroom practicing the framework with students across diverse settings, alongside doctoral research into principal preparation and continued framework development.
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 needs 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.
From Practice to Research
The experiences above shaped the development of the framework. The publications below represent efforts to document, refine, and share those lessons with educators, school systems, and leadership preparation programs.
Research & Publications
The framework continues to be refined through implementation, classroom practice, doctoral research, and scholarly publication.
Built for Continuous Improvement: Professional Accountability in the Academic Setting (2023)
Documents the organizational conditions and culture-first practices behind a North Carolina charter school's sustained improvement over five years — 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 (2025)
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.
Compliance to Commitment: A Culture-First School Framework (2026)
A research-to-practice framework, facilitation guide, and implementation tools for schools ready to collaboratively build sustainable cultures of shared purpose, shared values, and shared responsibility.
Dissertation Research (in progress)
What We Are Still Learning
Leading Schools Forward remains a work in progress. The framework continues to evolve through implementation, research, reflection, and collaboration. The current focus is on how principal preparation programs can more explicitly develop the organizational conditions that make sustainable improvement possible — and what it looks like when they do.
Interested in how school leaders, teachers, and organizational partners experienced this work?