Organizational Capacity and School Culture
Building Coherence to Sustain Reforms
Beginning in 2007, a SERP team comprised of faculty and doctoral students from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and leaders from the Boston Public Schools developed an assessment of schools’ internal coherence, and protocols to build coherence in the interest of improving instruction and sustaining reforms. The Internal Coherence Assessment and Protocol (ICAP) is designed to provide school leadership, and potentially system-level supervisors, with a structured body of information about a school’s capacity on each of the three dimensions of Internal Coherence: leadership focused on the support for instructional practice; whole school and team-level organizational structures and processes; and individual and collective efficacy beliefs. ICAP data profiles are designed to locate schools’ existing capacity on a developmental rubric along the various dimensions of the model. Professional development activities are suggested as next steps for each school guided by the provisional causal order underlying the work.
Lead researcher: Richard Elmore, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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Reducing Stress through Deep Breathing
Through the partnership work with Baltimore City Public Schools, a SERP team worked with administrators, teachers, and students to identify the biggest challenges undermining students’ academic perseverance, particularly as students start middle school. The environmental stressors led the team to develop a set of deep breathing exercises that teachers can use without training and free of charge.
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