In this month’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview, Lauren Yoshizawa shares her insights on how research can remedy educational inequality and contribute to a more just future in education. Drawing from her work at the intersection of school improvement efforts and research use, Yoshizawa emphasizes the importance of contextual understanding, theoretical frameworks, and local expertise in addressing educational inequities. Yoshizawa is an Assistant Professor of Education at Colby College. Her research focuses on policy implementation and understanding when and how educational organizations change The LtC series is produced by Elizabeth Zumpe and colleagues from the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A pdf of the fully formatted interview is available on the LtC website.
Lead the Change (LtC): The 2025 AERA theme is “Research, Remedy, and Repair: Toward Just Education Renewal.” This theme urges scholars to consider the role that research can play in remedying educational inequality, repairing harm to communities and institutions, and contributing to a more just future in education. What steps are you taking, or do you plan to take, to heed this call?
Lauren Yoshizawa (LY): My answer to this question draws on two different areas of my work. Most of my
previous research has been positioned at the intersection between school improvement efforts and research use. The conventional way of understanding the role of research in supporting school improvement is through “instrumental use”—the idea that decision-makers will select and implement programs and practices based on available evidence of their effectiveness. Yet based on my research, I agree with others who have pointed out that evidence that something is effective is not the same thing as having a theory for why or how to get there. For example, when policies and tools that promote instrumental use are put into practice, they can yield narrow thinking about effectiveness (i.e., something either is or is not effective, has a large effect size or not) and about decision-making (i.e., to do something or not), while obscuring other ways that research can contribute to one’s thinking. A significant but often overlooked benefit of research is in providing frameworks for understanding problems and solutions (e.g., Farrell & Coburn, 2016; Trujillo, 2016).
Recently, I have been doing more work on rural education in my teaching and scholarship, which has also shaped my thinking about the power of theory and context in studying educational inequality. In a forthcoming chapter on “Educational Politics and Spatial Injustice,” I explain that it is not enough to document the fact that educational opportunities are unequally distributed across geography. To meaningfully inform policy and practice, our understanding of geographic inequities should be grounded in and contribute to theories on the spatiality of power, privilege, oppression, and representation. For example, research on educational access shows that where schools are closed, where new schools are opened, and where colleges are established tends to recreate and exacerbate racial and socioeconomic inequality (Buras, 2011; Hillman, 2016; Tieken & Auldridge-Reveles, 2019). As these scholars explain, theory helps us see that this is neither coincidental nor unavoidable but reflects capitalist and postcolonial systematic disinvestment in rural and urban communities, and structural racism that shapes how people value and divide neighborhoods and attempt to accumulate advantage. Furthermore, as many others have argued (e.g., Butler & Sinclair, 2020; Morrison et al., 2023), research and practice with marginalized and peripheralized communities, including rural ones, should consider the importance of place, of local voices and knowledges, and of problematizing simplified deficit narratives.
Therefore, when I think about the role that research can play in remedying educational inequality, I think of research that provides a conceptual roadmap for changing schools, that questions implicit assumptions about what problems demand what solutions, that sheds light on how change actually happens, and that draws on local, contextualized expertise. To emphasize these points, my courses rely heavily on partnerships with local schools, start with students listening to educators and decision-makers, and focus on articulating theories of change. I have spent the last few years in my research also listening to teachers describe their schools, their practice, and their efforts to change it. In my next research project, I plan to develop and partner with a network of rural teachers here in Maine who want to work on practitioner research. I hope this will be a way of building evidence about the unique and strengths concerns of rural schools and engaging educators in the process of using research to critically reflect on their practice (Penuel & Gallagher, 2017; Rust, 2009).
“When I think about the role that research can play in remedying educational inequality, I think of research that provides a conceptual roadmap for changing schools.“
LtC: In your research, you have observed and interviewed state, district, and school leaders to understand how they think about research and using research. What might practitioners and scholars take from this work to foster better school systems for all students?
LY: My work on research use corroborates other recent studies showing that decision-makers believe it is possible for research to be relevant, trustworthy, and valuable to their work (e.g., Penuel et al., 2016). But my study on how states and districts adapted and implemented the ESSA evidence requirements to fit their contexts revealed that the research community can do better. I see two major takeaways.
First, scholars should be attentive to the goals and concerns of practitioners who are trying to use research. In my 2021 article on states’ implementation of the evidence requirements embedded in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), I found that there are multiple ways to interpret the purpose of using research. Some state administrators suggested that the important thing is that, in the end, schools are using evidence-based practices regardless of whether or how they encounter research itself. From this perspective, the role of research is simply to circumscribe a set of promising practices, and the real challenge of improving schools rests on careful implementation. Other state administrators created resources and structures to guide educators through the process of consulting research when evaluating interventions and making decisions. And others focused on building their own repositories of local evidence. In my article, I wrote that these varied approaches reflected administrators’ perceptions of necessary tradeoffs between rigor and relevance, or between focusing either on “good” (research-informed) decisions or good implementation (of research-based practices). That is, administrators were skeptical that research existed that was well-designed with significant results and in contexts that could generalize to their diverse districts, or they saw evidence of effectiveness as separate from tools that helped them understand how to enact effective practices. Therefore, education researchers can make deliberate efforts to counteract what is sometimes seen as urban-centricity, studying what works in small schools and rural schools and schools serving different student populations, and/or highlighting to what degree and why they see their findings generalizing across school and student contexts. And researchers can more explicitly explain their findings contribute to a synergistic understanding of a particular phenomenon, combined with others’ work across a more diverse set of research methodologies. For example, an effectiveness study could highlight in-depth qualitative studies on what those interventions look like in the classroom and suggest practical measures that teachers could use to study their own implementation.
Second, making research useful to practitioners requires a focus on making research meaningful. In my 2022 follow-up study on district-level implementation of the evidence requirements, I suggest that policy efforts to simplify the process of research use (e.g., to distill considerations of research quality into single ratings, to consolidate findings in short summaries) may have unintentionally made it more difficult for practitioners to figure out how to integrate research into their own grounded understanding of what works and why. Drawing on a conceptual framework of research and practice as separate “cultural worlds” (Coburn et al., 2013), I examined the ways that research-based tools spanned the research-practice gap. I studied how practitioners made use of tools such as handbooks and templates that indicated where and how research should be used, and resources such as the What Works Clearinghouse and Evidence for ESSA repositories that summarize research conclusions. Such tools can capture particular understandings from the research community and bring them into practitioners’ decision-making meetings, but they also can lose context and nuance. I found that educators used these tools, but with more attention to compliance than to making meaning from research. I call this in part a problem of incommensurability between research-based knowledge—as simplified, packaged, and elevated by these tools— and educators’ deep practice-based knowledge. If scholars and policymakers want to support the meaningful use of research for improving schools, they might imagine what it would look like to articulate research findings, their value, and their implications in ways that, as CochranSmith and Lytle (1999) would put it, make them open to interpretation, interrogation, and integration with educators’ own knowledge.
“Making research useful to practitioners requires a focus on making research meaningful.”
LtC: Your work has explored policy implementation in schools and districts
operating in a variety of contexts, including some facing pressure to improve. What are some of the major lessons that practitioners and scholars of Educational Change can learn from your work?
LY: My research on evidence requirements has highlighted some of the challenges and unintended consequences involved in using policy pressure to bring about change, particularly when the expected change is very complex. Using research meaningfully to support school improvement often requires collaborative routines, trusting relationships with researchers or research brokers, and new ways of thinking—all things that take time to build, and therefore can be difficult or even illogical to impose or import. As I and others have argued (e.g., Weiss et al., 2008), evidence requirements have been incredibly powerful in shifting behaviors and increasing the presence of evidence, but it is not clear if the resulting practices can always be called meaningful research use. In their case, Weiss and colleagues observed practitioners consulting lists of approved evidence-based programs without reviewing any of the research about them, a response to pressure that focused on following the letter of the requirements (i.e., to have, in the end, adopted a qualifying program) but not their spirit (i.e., the considered integration of research findings into decision-making).
While I observed some of the same patterns, more commonly—and surprisingly—I found leaders who prioritized the spirit over the letter of the ESSA or their state regulations. They recognized that the goal of changing practitioners’ relationship to and habits of mind around research and evidence required a long-term plan. That is, they focused on a theory of change and made a roadmap. One state administrator, for example, envisioned a developmental trajectory for research use. She laid out a plan to help practitioners start by conducting their own research to build curiosity for evidence, and to make research relevant not by translating the work of others but by studying oneself. Building from this experience, practitioners could then gradually develop the skills and dispositions to seek, use, and conduct rigorous research.
By some definitions, some of what I observed above could be labeled as ceremonial responses to policies, or a lack of implementation fidelity. But I think of it instead as an example of leaders making policy pressure meaningful—related to “crafting coherence” (Honig & Hatch, 2004), but specifically about filling in the why and how when interpreting policy demands. I therefore see two lessons about trying to bring about improvement through accountability pressure and imposing requirements. First, my studies of research use raised concerns that maybe the very requirement of research use got in the way of it being done effectively and meaningfully, at least while practitioners were still learning; pressure is sometimes too blunt a policy tool to be appropriate across a long, complex change process. Rather, when I watched practitioners make their earnest efforts to meet the new ESSA evidence requirements in the first year of their implementation, I wished there was more guidance and accommodation acknowledging how short-term implementation might look different from long term implementation, and more articulation of what it might look like to develop over time as a research-using school or district. Second, given the multitude of external demands that typically face schools, leaders must consider when it might be important to buffer practitioners from particular pressures, so that they can focus their attention on the process of working toward a goal rather than on compliance (Honig & Hatch, 2004; Park et al., 2013).
LtC: Educational Change expects those engaged in and with schools, schooling, and school systems to spearhead deep and often difficult transformation. How might those in the field of Educational Change best support these individuals and groups through these processes?
LY: Recently, I interviewed teachers in the state of Maine about changes they made to their curricular or instructional practices in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. I was interested to hear from the ground up about how teachers conceived of change and made it happen. Over two rounds of interviews, first in spring 2023 and then again in spring 2024, my research team asked teachers to walk us through a change in their thinking and practice that they made during the pandemic and that they found to be impactful. We also interviewed about a dozen school and district leaders. Preliminary analysis has revealed some insights about what it takes for teachers to make change and what might support them. Building on Coburn’s (2003) conceptualization of depth in reform implementation, I coded each teacher’s change as low (surface level or external to teaching and learning) or high (involving teacher beliefs or how students interact with the curriculum and others). Almost half of the changes were low in depth when we interviewed teachers in 2023. These tended to be changes that started right away in the spring of 2020 and were made in response to some requirement or school or district professional development (e.g., to adopt a particular technology). But when we interviewed teachers again in 2024, a small group of these teachers described how their changes had increased in depth. As conditions changed in schools post-pandemic, they pivoted and figured out whether to drop the new practice, keep it, or adapt it. One possible takeaway is that a little cognitive dissonance may prompt teachers to reflect on not merely whether a new practice is better, but why and whether that “why” can be enacted in other ways.
I found a similar phenomenon when analyzing interviews with teachers and leaders who engaged in changes related to socioemotional learning (SEL). Teachers and leaders expressed a variety of interpretations and framings of SEL (e.g., an expression of care versus an area of professional knowledge). Sometimes the framing of SEL helped to draw connections between different parts of
teachers’ work and unify a school staff, but also sometimes the framing made it difficult to push for deeper change. The way SEL was framed depended on how leaders tried to acknowledge and clarify both the ways in which new SEL practices built on familiar practices and understandings and the ways in
which it would involve a learning curve. These findings build on some well-known truths about educational change. Teachers need time for sustained engagement with new practices and for critical reflection. Sometimes focusing on ease of implementation or simple effectiveness (i.e., “it works”) might shortcut those aspects of the change process. Making change seem familiar can be motivating, but
familiarity can lead to assimilating reforms into existing frameworks rather than deeper changes in thinking and practice (Spillane et al., 2002). Leaders can carefully reframe a change in ways that highlight where it differs from prior conceptions, and thereby motivate teachers to engage over a longer trajectory of professional learning needed to make that change.
LtC: Where do you perceive the field of Educational Change is going? What excites you about Educational Change now and in the future?
LY: As I discussed previously in this publication, what excites me most about the field of Educational Change right now is the opportunity to study how the pandemic opened a window for new thinking, new imperatives, and new practices—and which changes persist. As described above, my recent research has primarily focused on teachers’ experiences in the pandemic and the new possibilities they envisioned and made happen in their classrooms. I see this as a time to think broadly and search widely for examples of how schooling changed, bring them to light, and learn what really makes a window of
opportunity for change. The pandemic shed light on two important avenues for work in educational change. First, the pandemic brought attention to the salience of geography and spatiality, from
transportation and internet access and how access to these resources shape inequitable access to education, to reconsidering what constitutes a “learning space.” Second, there is heightened awareness of the importance of collegiality in schools after the pandemic disrupted many of those routines and norms, and there is a need in many places to figure out ways to address teacher isolation and rebuild
structures and cultures of collaboration. In my research about teachers’ responses to the pandemic, I was struck by how many teachers described a process of problem-solving, innovating, struggling, and learning almost entirely on their own. That is why I am so excited that colleagues in my region of central
Maine are taking steps to build new partnerships and networks between our districts, colleges, and universities to bring educators together and set some shared goals for professional development, research, and teaching.
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