Over the past six months, I’ve had the great pleasure of traveling to districts across the country to speak with and learn from our new school partners who are committed to integrating important Mindsets, Essential Skills, and Habits (MESH), such as growth mindset and social awareness, into their daily practice. At the start of most of these engagements, educators tend to ask me one question more than any other: “Where do we begin?”
Drawing from improvement science, the Network Improvement Community Model (NIC) is a relatively new approach that provides a framework for deep, networked problem solving. For school and district leaders wanting to improve outcomes in a specific area, this model can serve an efficient way to organize participants. Too often we waste funding, personnel, and other resources toward admirable goals but with a vague understanding of the complexities of the problem. NICs hone in on a single, specific problem and concentrate the energies of all participants to resolve the problem in a cyclical process that creates immediate and actionable results...
