DISTRICT SERVICES

District Strategic Mapping

In addition to the organizational assessment, we engaged several districts in our Strategic Mapping Process. The Strategic Mapping Process engages district leaders and staff, and sometimes principals and teachers, in a collective analysis of their capacity to support their schools in need of improvement. In this 2-day process, we assist the district in collectively identifying the challenges facing their schools and the strategies and resources that currently and potentially support their schools' improvement efforts. The process then engages district leaders and targeted staff to collectively consider how their current array of strategies and resources are addressing the central challenges facing their schools, as identified through their "collective sensemaking" of the challenges facing their schools. In addition to this analysis, the process allows district leaders and staff to collectively identify core challenges which are having the greatest systemic impact on the ability of their identified schools to make significant improvement. From this identification, district leaders and staff can then identify "high leverage" strategies and resources that can have the greatest impact on student achievement in their schools.

Outcomes:

During the 2-day mapping process, the district collectively considers:

• the central challenges facing their schools in need of improvement from significantly and substantively improving student achievement
• the array of challenges facing their targeted schools in need of improvement and how they relate and impact one another
• the two or three central challenges having systemic impact on the districts' ability to effectively foster and support student achievement in their identified schools
• the strategies and resources currently being employed by the district and its identified schools and the degree to which those district- and school-based strategies and resources directly or indirectly impact these identified central challenges
• district- and school-based potential strategies and resources that might have a greater impact on substantively addressing the challenges of the district and its schools to significantly raise student achievement.
• The Education Alliance at Brown University's staff facilitate this two-day process and subsequently provide the district with documentation of its collective analysis, potentially informing the district leaders on how the district and its schools might better be able to impact school improvement in their district.

For further information regarding the Strategic Mapping Process, please feel free to download and review the following materials:

District Strategic Mapping Process Overview
Sample Problem Diagnosis Map

Districts interested in participating in our District Capacity Building efforts are encouraged to review our services or contact Deborah Collins, the CSRQI project director, at (401) 274-9548 x260.