Continuous Quality Commitment: Iterative Learning Cycles to Meet System Challenges
Engaging in high quality continuous improvement work and looking at data for improvement requires a critical perspective that focuses on specific, intentional, continuous testing and that celebrates and learns from failures as much as successes.
When you let people participate in the design process, you find that they often have ingenious ideas about what would really help them. And it’s not a one-time thing; it’s an iterative process.
Melinda Gates
Continuous Quality Improvement
Teams enacting continuous quality improvement (CQI) in schools have the power to change systems in service of students with disabilities when the improvement work is of high quality. CQI is an iterative, disciplined framework where teams rapidly and repeatedly test new practices (often called “change ideas”) in the field. This type of collective improvement work requires the teams designing and leading the effort—known as “improvement teams”—to commit to a new way of working rather than traditional approaches of “one and done.”
The traditional approach often assumes that a one-time change can be powerful with little evidence of success or sustained implementation. Instead, in CQI, improvement teams work together to robustly identify areas in need of improvement, systematically test change ideas, implement those change ideas consistently with fidelity, and analyze ongoing evidence of impact. Accordingly, charter management organizations (CMOs) choosing to engage in CQI as a way of better serving students with disabilities need to learn new ways of identifying high-leverage changes that can powerfully support student success.
Key Considerations
Although various forms of CQI approaches exist, they are all grounded in a consistent set of principles and practices. In this brief, we highlight three specific practices, common across different forms of CQI, that CMOs in the NIC used in their CQI work:
Continuous and sustained testing: Iteratively testing change ideas through ongoing, repeated cycles is essential to learning about which practices best serve students and maintaining momentum in the improvement work.
Ongoing use of data: Routinizing the use of data is essential to ensuring that changes first enacted with small groups of teachers and students are meaningfully reducing barriers to student success.
Learning from failures as much as successes: Testing new practices will regularly result in both failures and successes. Learning from failures is as much a part of the CQI process as identifying and scaling successful ideas.
Explore More Findings
Topic 1
Systems Change to Support Students with DisabilitiesExplore Topic 1
Topic 2
Centering Students with Disabilities to Create Powerful ChangeExplore Topic 2
Topic 3
Champions for Change: Two Essential Roles for an Effective Improvement TeamExplore Topic 3
Topic 5
Get Ready, Stay Ready: Will and Capacity Checks Along the Improvement JourneyExplore Topic 5Stay Informed about Research Updates
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