Chapter 7: Change as an Inquiry-Based Project
Treating District Transformation Like the Learning You Want to See in Classrooms
Part II: WHAT -- The Model
The principal came back from High Tech High with fire in her eyes. She had spent three days walking through classrooms where ninth graders were designing water filtration systems for communities in Tijuana, where eleventh graders were publishing original research on microplastics in the San Diego Bay, where teachers moved through rooms like research mentors rather than content deliverers. She sat down in the superintendent's office at Innovation USD and said what I have heard hundreds of principals say after visiting a transformative school: "I want to do this. I want to bring project-based learning to my campus."
The superintendent listened. Then he said something I did not expect -- something that, when I later transcribed and coded the interview data, became one of the most important exchanges in my entire study.
"Good," he said. "But you're not going to implement PBL. You're going to do PBL. Your transformation plan is the project. So let me ask you: What's your driving question?"
In that single response, the superintendent of Innovation USD revealed the second overarching finding of my doctoral research -- the finding that, more than any other, distinguishes the Fourth Industrial Superintendent from every change management model that came before. He was not telling this principal what to do. He was not handing her an implementation manual. He was not scheduling a series of professional development workshops that she would be required to attend. He was doing something far more radical: he was treating the organizational change process itself as an inquiry-based learning project. Discover, question, prototype, iterate. The same pedagogy he wanted in every classroom was the pedagogy he was using to lead the district.
This chapter is about the PRODUCE phase of the Shared Vision Framework -- how the Fourth Industrial Superintendent builds the human capacity needed to sustain transformation. But here is the insight that changes everything: in the model I observed at Innovation USD, you cannot separate the what of capacity building from the how. The process is the pedagogy. The medium is the message. When you lead change through inquiry, you produce a district of inquirers. When you lead change through mandates, you produce a district of compliers. The superintendent understood this in his bones, and it shaped every structure, every expectation, and every relationship in his district.
"Leading from the Middle": Flipping the Script on Top-Down Reform
American public education has a deeply ingrained addiction to top-down change. The pattern is so predictable it could be scripted: a new superintendent arrives with a bold strategic plan, the board approves it, central office designs the professional development, principals are told to implement it, and teachers close their classroom doors and wait for the next superintendent to arrive with the next plan. Researchers have documented this cycle for decades (Tyack & Cuban, 1995; Fullan, 2007; Hargreaves & Shirley, 2009). Elmore (2004) called it the "loose coupling" problem -- the persistent disconnect between what central offices mandate and what actually happens in classrooms. Hess (1999) went further, diagnosing American school reform as "spinning wheels" -- a perpetual motion machine of policy change that never reaches the instructional core.
The superintendent of Innovation USD broke this cycle, and the mechanism he used was deceptively simple: he led from the middle.
"Leading from the middle" is a concept that has gained traction in educational change literature, particularly through the work of Fullan and Quinn (2016), Hargreaves and Shirley (2020), and the international research on system-level reform. The core idea is that sustainable change does not flow from the top down or bubble up from the bottom; it spreads laterally through the middle layers of an organization -- the teachers, coaches, department heads, and principals who do the daily work of instruction. When these middle-layer professionals become the leaders and designers of change rather than its recipients, implementation becomes authentic rather than performative, and sustainability becomes structural rather than dependent on charismatic leadership at the top.
At Innovation USD, leading from the middle was not a philosophy. It was an operational reality with specific, observable structures. Teachers were not merely consulted about change initiatives; they led them. The superintendent negotiated with the teachers' union to create paid positions for teacher leaders who facilitated professional learning communities at every school site. These were not token positions. Teacher leaders designed agendas, selected protocols, facilitated data analysis, and coached peers -- functions traditionally reserved for administrators or external consultants. Principals, in turn, were reconceived not as instructional supervisors but as "lead learners" -- a deliberate term that signaled their role was to learn alongside teachers, not to evaluate them into compliance.
"Remember the whole design of the middle?" the superintendent told me during our interview. "That's brought me more credibility than anything else, moving us farther than anything else" (Martin, 2022, p. 88).
This is a significant departure from both Kotter's (2012) eight-stage model and the traditional superintendent's playbook. Kotter's model emphasizes the leader's role in forming a "guiding coalition" -- a group of senior leaders who champion the change. The Innovation USD superintendent did something more radical: he distributed the coalition throughout the entire organization. The guiding coalition was not his cabinet. It was every teacher leader, every site PLC, every principal who had designed their own transformation plan. When the coalition is the middle, the change does not depend on any single leader's charisma or tenure. It is woven into the daily practice of hundreds of professionals.
The research supports this approach. Hargreaves and Shirley (2020) found that the most successful education systems in the world -- Finland, Singapore, Ontario -- share a common feature: professional capital is distributed, not concentrated. Teachers are treated as professionals who design their own practice within shared parameters. Harris and Jones (2019) documented similar patterns across multiple countries, concluding that "leading from the middle" is the most effective strategy for system-wide improvement because it builds collective efficacy -- the shared belief among educators that they can make a difference for students. Donohoo (2017) demonstrated that collective teacher efficacy has an effect size of 1.57 on student achievement, making it the single most powerful influence on learning ever measured -- three times more powerful than socioeconomic status.
When I sat in on a teacher PLC at one of Innovation USD's elementary schools, I watched this dynamic in action. A third-grade teacher was presenting student work from a project on local water conservation. She had structured the project using the Buck Institute's (PBLWorks) Gold Standard framework, with a driving question, sustained inquiry, and public presentation. But she was not presenting the project as a finished success story. She was presenting it as a problem of practice: her English learner students had been fully engaged during the hands-on investigation phase but had struggled to articulate their findings in the final presentation. She wanted help from her colleagues.
What followed was not a consultant-led training session. It was inquiry. The PLC spent forty minutes examining student work samples, identifying patterns, generating hypotheses, and designing a prototype intervention -- academic language scaffolds embedded directly into the inquiry cycle rather than taught as a separate skill. They planned to try the scaffolds during the next project cycle and bring new student work back to the PLC in four weeks.
This is what leading from the middle looks like in practice. It is not romantic or abstract. It is teachers doing the intellectual work of improvement, supported by structures that give them time, compensation, and professional respect. And it mirrors, precisely, the inquiry-based pedagogy they are trying to create in their classrooms.
Non-Negotiable Goals, Autonomous Implementation: The SPSA/LCAP Alignment Model
If leading from the middle is the mechanism, then the Innovation USD superintendent's approach to accountability is the architecture that makes it possible. He described it to me with characteristic directness:
"You can never say that this is a top-down decision, right? How to do the work? All I ask for is the goals we need. That is non-negotiable. Then you are going to develop your plan for your site. You need to make it authentic" (Martin, 2022, p. 86).
This is a critical distinction that most change management literature glosses over. The superintendent was not advocating laissez-faire leadership. He was not telling principals to do whatever they wanted. He was drawing a sharp line between goals and methods. The goals -- equity, inquiry-based learning, culturally responsive pedagogy, measurable progress for Latino and African American students -- were non-negotiable. They were set at the district level, approved by the board, and embedded in the Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP). Every school in the district was held to the same goals, reviewed quarterly, and expected to demonstrate progress.
But the how was theirs.
Each school developed its own Single Plan for Student Achievement (SPSA), aligned to the district's LCAP goals but designed by the principal, teacher leaders, and site council to reflect the specific needs and assets of their community. One principal chose to pursue International Baccalaureate authorization, seeing the IB framework as the most rigorous pathway to inquiry-based learning at her site. Another principal focused on academic language development within PBL, recognizing that her school's large English learner population needed explicit linguistic support embedded in the inquiry cycle. A third built a maker space culture from the ground up, investing in fabrication tools and community partnerships that connected students to local engineers and designers.
"You set that framework of what has to happen, but you let them fit into it with their approach," the superintendent explained (Martin, 2022, p. 87).
This model resolves a tension that has plagued educational reform for decades: the tension between coherence and autonomy (Fullan & Quinn, 2016). Too much central control produces compliance without commitment -- teachers and principals go through the motions of implementation because they are told to, not because they believe in it. Too much site autonomy produces fragmentation -- every school operates in isolation, best practices do not spread, and equity becomes inconsistent. The Innovation USD model threads the needle by centralizing purpose while distributing practice.
The accountability structures were specific and relentless. Principals met with the superintendent quarterly for SPSA reviews, during which they presented disaggregated data on every student subgroup and reflected on what was working and what needed to change. These were not compliance checkpoints; they were inquiry conversations. The superintendent asked questions -- driving questions, not gotcha questions. What are you seeing in your English learner data? What did you try? What did you learn? What will you do next? Weekly check-ins with the assistant superintendent of educational services provided ongoing coaching support. Quarterly reports to the school board made the data public and the accountability transparent.
The critical innovation here is that the accountability structure itself mirrors the inquiry cycle. Schools are not simply reporting results. They are engaging in a continuous cycle of question, investigate, prototype, reflect, iterate -- the same cycle their teachers are asking students to engage in every day. Hubers (2020) has argued that sustainable educational change requires "reconceptualizing what it means to make educational changes that last" (p. 1), moving beyond implementation fidelity toward adaptive practice. The Innovation USD model is a living example of that reconceptualization.
For contemporary superintendents navigating AI integration, this model is immediately applicable. The non-negotiable goals might now include: every student will develop AI literacy, every teacher will have access to AI professional development, and AI tools will be evaluated for equity impact before adoption. The how remains with the sites. One school might pilot Khanmigo as an AI tutor in mathematics. Another might integrate AI-powered writing tools with explicit instruction in critical evaluation. A third might use AI to personalize inquiry pathways for students with diverse learning needs. The RAND Corporation's (2025) finding that roughly half of districts have provided AI training to teachers -- with massive disparities between low-poverty and high-poverty districts -- suggests that most districts have not yet reached even the "non-negotiable goal" stage. The model I observed at Innovation USD provides a proven architecture for how to get there.
The Problem of Practice Cycle
At the heart of Innovation USD's capacity-building approach was a cyclical process I documented in my dissertation as the Problem of Practice Cycle (Martin, 2022, Figure 8). This cycle operationalizes the change-as-inquiry principle at every level of the organization -- from individual teacher PLCs to principal cohorts to district leadership team meetings.
The cycle begins with a problem of practice -- not a mandate from above, not a trend from a conference, but a specific, observable challenge grounded in student data and teacher experience. At Innovation USD, problems of practice emerged from multiple sources: disaggregated achievement data, classroom observation during equity visits, student voice surveys, parent feedback from affinity groups, and teacher-identified challenges in PLCs. The key is that the problem is named with specificity. Not "our math scores are low" but "our African American fifth graders are demonstrating procedural fluency but not mathematical reasoning, particularly in problem-solving contexts that require academic language."
Once the problem is named, the cycle moves to research. District leaders and teacher leaders investigate frameworks, strategies, and tools that address the specific problem. This is not a superficial Google search or a vendor demonstration. At Innovation USD, investigation took multiple forms: book studies across all seventy administrators (the district read Fullan and Quinn's Deep Learning, Heather McGhee's The Sum of Us, and other texts selected for their relevance to current challenges), investigation teams that visited successful schools to observe practices in action, and framework analysis using protocols from PBLWorks, the social justice framework, and state curriculum frameworks (Martin, 2022).
The research phase feeds into resourcing -- but resourcing in this model is not the typical district pattern of purchasing a program and mandating its use. Professional development at Innovation USD was driven by evidence of student learning needs, funded through SPSA-aligned LCAP goals, and designed to build teacher capacity rather than impose teacher compliance (Martin, 2022). Each leader in the district became what one participant described as a "guide to the side" -- a resource provider and thought partner rather than a supervisor (Martin, 2022, p. 98).
Implementation follows, with the critical feature of teacher autonomy. Teachers receive coaching, frameworks, and support, but they design the instructional approach. This is where the inquiry principle is most visible: teachers are prototyping, not executing a script. They try an approach, collect evidence of impact, and bring that evidence back to the PLC for analysis.
Monitoring centers on student voice and student experience -- not merely test scores. The Innovation USD team conducted "rounds of inquiry" -- equity visits designed to observe not just teacher behavior but student engagement, student discourse, and the lived experience of learning in classrooms. Evidence of impact was measured at multiple levels: changes in lesson delivery, changes in student response, and progress monitoring data that captured growth over time rather than a single-point assessment (Martin, 2022). As the superintendent put it: "Assessment is multifaceted" (Martin, 2022, p. 106).
The cycle then iterates. Findings from monitoring feed back into the problem of practice, which is refined, and the cycle begins again. This is not a linear implementation timeline with a start date and an end date. It is a perpetual process of inquiry -- the same process that defines the best inquiry-based classrooms.
Senge (1990) described the learning organization as one in which "people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free" (p. 3). The Problem of Practice Cycle is the operational mechanism that makes Senge's vision actionable in a school district. It transforms the abstract ideal of a "learning organization" into a set of observable, repeatable, improvable practices.
Building a Learning Organization: The Infrastructure of Continual Growth
The Problem of Practice Cycle does not function in a vacuum. It requires an organizational culture that treats learning as the work of adults, not just children. At Innovation USD, this culture was built through four interlocking structures: book studies, equity visits, coaching, and professional learning communities.
Book Studies Across All Seventy Administrators
The superintendent required every administrator in the district -- all seventy of them, plus the school board -- to participate in shared reading. This was not optional. It was not an invitation to a book club. It was a professional expectation, and the texts were chosen deliberately to build shared language, shared analysis, and shared moral urgency.
When the district read Heather McGhee's The Sum of Us -- a text about how racial inequality harms everyone, not just people of color -- it gave principals and directors a common framework for talking about equity that went beyond guilt or defensiveness. When they read Fullan and Quinn's Deep Learning, it gave them a shared vocabulary for the pedagogical shift they were pursuing. The book studies were not about acquiring information. They were about building collective understanding -- the kind of understanding that enables a principal in one school and a director in central office to have a productive conversation about a problem of practice without first having to negotiate what the words mean.
This practice aligns with what Stoll et al. (2006) identified as a hallmark of professional learning communities that actually improve student outcomes: shared deprivatization of practice, reflective dialogue, and a focus on student learning rather than adult preferences. It also reflects the research on collective psychological ownership (Martinaityte et al., 2020), which demonstrates that when professionals share intellectual experiences, they develop a sense of collective ownership over the resulting innovations -- ownership that sustains implementation beyond any individual leader's tenure.
Equity Visits and Rounds of Inquiry
Perhaps the most powerful structure at Innovation USD was the equity visit -- a practice the district adapted from the instructional rounds tradition (City et al., 2009) but redesigned with an explicit equity lens. During equity visits, teams of district leaders and principals visited classrooms not to evaluate teachers but to observe student experience. The observation protocol centered on specific questions: Are all students engaged in intellectually meaningful work? Which students are doing the thinking and which are watching others think? Are English learners and students of color positioned as contributors or as passive recipients? Is the inquiry authentic or performative?
The data from equity visits fed directly into the Problem of Practice Cycle. When a pattern emerged -- for example, when observers noticed that in several classrooms, students of color were consistently assigned supportive rather than leadership roles in group projects -- that pattern became a named problem of practice, researched, addressed through professional development, and monitored for change.
This structure gave the district something that most accountability systems lack: formative data about the lived experience of learning. Standardized test scores tell you where students landed at the end of a year. Equity visits tell you what is happening in real time, in real classrooms, to real children. The superintendent explicitly rejected the notion that accountability could be reduced to a single metric: "How do we know that we've arrived? What I say through this process is, if we can be predictive of outcomes is when I know. I want to be predictive of the outcomes of how our students are going to do based on this work here" (Martin, 2022, p. 106).
Coaching and the "Guide to the Side" Model
At Innovation USD, professional development was not a calendar of workshops delivered by outside consultants. It was a coaching-embedded, job-integrated, evidence-driven process in which district leaders served as thought partners to principals and teacher leaders. The Director of Instruction and Innovation, for example, worked directly with teachers on PBL design, modeling lessons, co-planning units, and facilitating protocol-based analysis of student work. The Director of Ethnic Studies led the development of a social justice framework that required a minimum of five historical perspectives per course -- not as an add-on, but as a foundational design principle for curriculum.
Each of these leaders had been strategically appointed by the superintendent for their ability to function as what one participant called a "guide to the side" -- a term that deliberately invoked the constructivist teaching stance of the "guide on the side" rather than the "sage on the stage" (King, 1993). The parallel was intentional. Just as IBL repositions the teacher from knowledge deliverer to learning facilitator, Innovation USD repositioned district leaders from compliance monitors to capacity builders.
Professional Learning Communities
The PLC structure at Innovation USD was the connective tissue that held everything together. Every school had teacher-led PLCs that met regularly during protected, compensated time -- a direct result of the superintendent's negotiation with the teachers' union. PLC time was not used for administrative business, logistical updates, or test preparation strategies. It was used for the Problem of Practice Cycle: examining student work, analyzing data, researching approaches, designing interventions, and reflecting on impact.
The union negotiation itself is worth pausing on, because it reveals something important about how the Innovation USD superintendent conceived of teacher voice. In most districts, the union is treated as an adversary to be managed -- a body that negotiates salary and working conditions but is excluded from instructional decision-making. The Innovation USD superintendent treated the union as a partner in transformation. By negotiating paid PLC leadership positions for teachers, he accomplished three things simultaneously: he gave teachers economic recognition for intellectual labor, he built structural capacity for leading from the middle, and he created a political alliance with the union that insulated the reform from the kind of labor-management conflict that has derailed countless change initiatives (Rubinstein & McCarthy, 2014).
DuFour et al. (2016) have argued that PLCs are the most powerful strategy for school improvement when -- and only when -- they focus on four essential questions: What do we want students to learn? How will we know if they learned it? What will we do if they did not? What will we do if they already know it? At Innovation USD, these questions were asked not in the abstract but through the specific lens of equity: Which students are not learning? Why? What does our data tell us about differential outcomes by race, language, and socioeconomic status? What are we going to do about it -- not someday, but this week?
From IBL to AI: Extending the Change-as-Project Model
Everything I have described in this chapter was observed and documented during my 2022 dissertation research, before ChatGPT was released, before generative AI entered the mainstream consciousness, and before superintendents across the country began grappling with whether to ban AI, embrace AI, or pretend AI was not happening. The question I want to pose now is: Does the change-as-inquiry-based-project model hold up in the AI era?
I believe it holds up better than any alternative.
Consider the current landscape. The RAND Corporation (2025) reports that roughly half of districts have provided AI training to teachers, with massive disparities between affluent and under-resourced communities. By the 2025-26 school year, nearly all low-poverty districts will have trained teachers on AI, but only six in ten high-poverty districts will have done so. Meanwhile, 86% of students report using AI during the school year (Center for Democracy & Technology, 2025), and 60% of teachers have used an AI tool for their work, with those using AI weekly saving an average of 5.9 hours per week -- roughly six weeks over the course of a school year (Gallup & Walton Family Foundation, 2025).
The typical district response to this landscape has been one of two extremes: ban and restrict, or purchase and deploy. Some districts have banned ChatGPT and other AI tools outright, treating them as threats to academic integrity. Others have purchased AI platforms -- Khanmigo, MagicSchool, Brisk Teaching -- and pushed them into classrooms with minimal training and no coherent vision for what AI integration should accomplish. Both approaches fail for the same reason: they treat AI as a technology problem rather than a change leadership problem.
The Innovation USD model offers a third path -- one that GovTech (2025) implicitly endorsed when it argued that "organizations that will succeed with AI are the ones with leaders who understand that this is fundamentally about organizational change, systems thinking, and the courage to abandon what's comfortable for what's necessary." The Third path is to treat AI integration as an inquiry-based project.
What would this look like in practice? It would look like what Innovation USD did with IBL, updated for the AI era:
The driving question would be set at the district level: How do we ensure that AI amplifies the curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking of every student in our district -- especially those who have been historically excluded from technology's benefits?
The non-negotiable goals would be established: every student develops AI literacy, every teacher receives AI professional development, AI tools are evaluated for equity impact before adoption, and student voice data inform all AI decisions.
The methods would belong to the sites. One school might pilot AI tutoring in mathematics. Another might integrate AI writing tools with explicit instruction in critical evaluation and academic integrity. A third might use AI to personalize inquiry pathways for multilingual learners. A fourth might focus on teaching students to identify algorithmic bias -- connecting AI literacy to the social justice framework that Innovation USD had already embedded in its curriculum.
The Problem of Practice Cycle would drive iteration. When equity visit data reveal that AI tools are being used primarily for low-cognitive tasks -- generating worksheets, answering factual questions -- that becomes a problem of practice. When student voice surveys indicate that English learners feel less confident using AI tools than their peers, that becomes a problem of practice. When data show that AI tutoring produces initial gains that "soon evaporate" because students fail to acquire conceptual understanding (Education Week, 2025), that becomes a problem of practice -- one that the PLC investigates, prototypes a response to, and monitors through student evidence.
The CoSN (2025) AI Maturity Tool, which helps districts assess readiness across seven domains, and the Panorama Education (2025) framework for strategic AI planning both implicitly call for the kind of inquiry-based, leadership-distributed, equity-centered approach that Innovation USD modeled before AI was on anyone's radar. The model does not need to be reinvented for the AI era. It needs to be applied.
COVID-19 as Proof of Concept
In March 2020, when the pandemic forced every school in America to pivot to remote learning in a matter of days, most districts were caught flat-footed. Teachers who had never used a learning management system were suddenly expected to teach entirely online. Administrators scrambled to distribute devices and hotspots. Curriculum teams worked around the clock to translate paper-based lessons into digital formats. The result, for most students, was what education researchers politely called "emergency remote teaching" -- a pale, disembodied imitation of classroom instruction that left 41% of high school students disengaged entirely (Martin, 2022).
Innovation USD was not caught flat-footed.
One of the directors I interviewed had already created digital IBL training modules before the pandemic arrived. Because the district had invested in building teacher capacity for inquiry-based learning -- not just purchasing technology, but developing the pedagogical expertise to use technology meaningfully -- teachers had the intellectual infrastructure to adapt. They were not learning how to teach online; they were learning how to translate an inquiry-based pedagogy they already understood into a digital medium. The difference is profound.
This is the evidence that capacity building -- the PRODUCE phase of the framework -- is not merely an ideal. It is a survival strategy. The districts that weathered the pandemic with the least disruption to student learning were not the ones with the most technology. They were the ones with the deepest investment in adult learning (Fullan, 2023). They were learning organizations in Senge's (1990) sense -- organizations in which continuous professional learning was embedded in the structure of daily work, not bolted on as an occasional event.
Fullan's (2023) post-pandemic analysis in The Drivers makes precisely this argument: the four "right drivers" of system change are well-being and learning, social intelligence, equality investments, and systemness. The "wrong drivers" are academics obsession, machine intelligence, austerity, and fragmentation. Innovation USD, without using Fullan's terminology, had built a system around all four right drivers years before the pandemic tested it.
For the Fourth Industrial Superintendent in 2026, the lesson is unmistakable. AI is not the pandemic, but it shares a critical characteristic: it arrived faster than anyone predicted, it disrupted every assumption about how learning works, and it exposed every district that had been investing in compliance over capacity. The districts that will navigate AI successfully are not the ones purchasing the most AI tools. They are the ones that have built the learning organization infrastructure -- the PLCs, the coaching, the equity visits, the Problem of Practice Cycle -- that allows them to learn their way forward rather than mandate their way through.
"I'm not saying to be perfect," the superintendent told me during one of our conversations. "I'm just saying go through the process so we can learn" (Martin, 2022, p. 108).
That sentence is the PRODUCE phase in nine words.
How This Model Goes Further
Let me be explicit about what the change-as-inquiry-based-project model contributes that existing frameworks do not.
Fullan's Coherence Framework (Fullan & Quinn, 2016) tells you to cultivate collaborative cultures and deepen learning. It does not tell you how to structure the change process itself as a learning process. The Innovation USD model shows you how: driving questions, site-based prototyping, PLC-driven iteration, and equity visit monitoring.
Kotter's (2012) coalition-building model tells you to form a guiding coalition of senior leaders who champion the change. It does not tell you what happens when the coalition is the middle -- when every teacher leader, every PLC facilitator, every principal is a co-designer of the change rather than a recipient of it. The Innovation USD model distributed the coalition so deeply into the organization that the change did not depend on any single leader's charisma or tenure.
Khalifa's (2018) Culturally Responsive School Leadership tells you to center the experiences of marginalized communities. It does not provide the operational structures -- the SPSA/LCAP alignment model, the Problem of Practice Cycle, the paid PLC leadership positions -- that make equity-centered practice sustainable at scale. The Innovation USD model shows you the machinery.
And none of these frameworks explicitly address what happens when you treat the change process itself as the pedagogy you are trying to implement. This is the conceptual contribution of my research: the insight that when a superintendent leads through inquiry -- when the district's own transformation becomes the project -- the organization develops not just new practices but new capacities. It develops the capacity to learn, to adapt, to investigate, to iterate. In a world where 39% of worker skills will change by 2030 (World Economic Forum, 2025), where AI is transforming every industry and every profession, and where the only constant is the pace of change itself, the capacity to learn is the most valuable thing a school district can produce.
Discussion Questions
Practitioner Tool: The Change-as-IBL-Project Design Template
This tool guides superintendent teams through designing their next major initiative -- whether AI integration, pedagogical transformation, or any systemic change -- as an inquiry-based project rather than a top-down mandate.
Part 1: The Driving Question
Write a single driving question that captures what your district is trying to learn through this initiative. The question should be open-ended, equity-centered, and focused on student experience.
Example: How do we ensure that AI tools in our classrooms amplify inquiry and creativity for every student -- especially those who have been historically excluded from technology's benefits?
Your driving question: _______________________________________________
Part 2: Non-Negotiable Goals (Maximum Five)
What outcomes are non-negotiable? These are the "what" that every school must pursue. Keep them specific and measurable.
| # | Non-Negotiable Goal | How We Will Measure It |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | ||
| 2 | ||
| 3 | ||
| 4 | ||
| 5 |
Part 3: Site Autonomy Plan
How will individual schools design their own approach within the non-negotiable goals?
- What support will the district provide? (Coaching, frameworks, funding, time)
- What decisions belong to site teams?
- How will the SPSA alignment process work?
Part 4: Problem of Practice Cycle Timeline
| Cycle Phase | Timeline | Who Leads | Evidence Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Identify Problem of Practice | |||
| Research Frameworks/Tools | |||
| Resource Professional Development | |||
| Implement with Teacher Autonomy | |||
| Monitor Through Student Voice | |||
| Iterate |
Part 5: Student Voice Checkpoints
At what points in the initiative will you systematically collect and respond to student voice data? How will that data re-enter the Problem of Practice Cycle?
- Checkpoint 1 (Week ___): _____________________
- Checkpoint 2 (Week ___): _____________________
- Checkpoint 3 (Week ___): _____________________
Part 6: Sustainability Check
Answer honestly:
- If the superintendent left tomorrow, would this initiative survive? Why or why not?
- Is the coalition distributed deeply enough into the middle of the organization?
- Are teacher leaders compensated and structurally empowered?
- Does the Problem of Practice Cycle have a life of its own, or does it depend on a single leader's energy?
References
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