At the onset of this school year the education community yearned for a return to normalcy, and yet the reality has been unexpected challenges faced by students, parents, teachers and administrators in what has become known as the next normal in education. We have seen a significant strain on the education system as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought forth a wide-range of student needs requiring social-emotional supports, innovative approaches for student engagement and more impactful strategies to accelerate student learning. This shift in education could best be phrased as “reimagining schools for the betterment of student learning” and should be considered as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for transforming climate, shaping culture, building capacity and creating coherence to achieve equitable growth in student learning. However, the beliefs, behaviors, confidence and shared understanding of the work at hand within and among schools has resulted in either growth, stagnation or regression in student learning.

Consequently, we have witnessed much variability in how teachers and leaders are attending to this challenging and critical work, and so, the book Schools on the Move (Westover & Steinhauser, 2022) has provided guidance for navigating this next normal in education to accelerate growth in student learning. Schools demonstrating success in light of the challenges at hand have embraced a collaborative inquiry mindset and structured process for co-leading improvement efforts. We would call these “schools on the move” that have employed robust collaborative inquiry processes to create clarity of focus, cultivate shared leadership, develop collective expertise and engage in continuous improvement. Prior to the pandemic, these four key drivers of improvement were delineated in the book Districts on the Move (Westover, 2019) and then further refined to establish school level improvement strategies. Now that almost two years have passed since the beginning of the pandemic, we are witnessing teachers, site administrators and district leaders embracing an agile and iterative improvement process to collectively seek out how best to reimagine schools for the betterment of student learning; equity in action. So that lessons learned from these schools on the move can serve as guidance for others to successfully navigate this next normal, each of the four drivers of school improvement are expanded upon to assist with shaping a coherent path of progress.

By design, a school improvement strategy must engage teachers and site leaders in the collective effort of accelerating student learning. Furthermore, district leaders need to be active participants so that school site support systems can be adapted and improved using insights gained from the work of school sites. Based on these criteria, the research points to collective teacher efficacy as the second highest effect size (1.39) strategy for improving student outcomes (Hattie, 2018).

“Accomplishing the maximum impact on student learning depends on teams of teachers working together, with excellent leaders or coaches, agreeing on worthwhile outcomes, setting high expectations, knowing the students’ starting and desired success in learning, seeking evidence continually about their impact on all students, modifying their teaching in light of this evaluation, and joining in the success of truly making a difference with student learning outcomes.”

When this improvement strategy is closely examined to discern the fundamental components giving rise to such high levels of student growth, four key drivers are found to be at the core: clarity of focus, shared leadership, collective expertise and continuous improvement. And the unifying factor that conjoins these four key drivers is collaborative inquiry. This model can serve as a framework for educators who desire to develop collective teacher efficacy.

But how is collaborative inquiry associated with both reducing the root causes of student learning variance and guiding improvement efforts to achieve equitable growth in student learning? Collaborative inquiry provides the structure for educators to lead and learn together productively and, in so doing, develops distributed leadership, grows professional capital, increases collective efficacy, and focuses efforts on the causes of student success and failure (Donohoo et al., 2016). The power of collaborative inquiry is that it “shapes a common mindset” promoting improvement of practices and growth in student learning and, at the same time, provides a “structured process for co-leading improvement efforts” to achieve continual growth in learning for all students.

For this reason, the engine of school improvement efforts is recurring collaborative inquiry cycles that consist of four phases: analyze, design, implement and refine. Analyze evidence of student learning to clearly define the problems of practice that are barriers to student learning growth. Design improvement strategies and identify evidence of learning for monitoring student progress, knowing the impact of teaching on student learning growth. Implement the improvement strategies and make adjustments along the way based on evidence of impact on student learning. Refine improvement strategies by clarifying what works best and why so that improvement efforts can be enhanced moving forward. Repeat the process as part of recurring teaching and learning cycles.