In this month’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview, Carlos Sandoval shares his insights on how systems of schooling can be improved to create more affirming environments for minoritized students. Sandoval is an Assistant Professor at Clemson University, where his research focuses on building the capacity of school systems to drive equity-driven transformation. 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?
Carlos Sandoval (CS): As an improvement researcher and practitioner, my work is and has always been about working closely with educators at any and every level of the system to advance equity and justice. Most recently, I have been working with others to get improvement research to take a more critical turn in its work. Improvement research in this context refers to research aimed at solving problems of practice alongside practitioners, typically through iterative cycles of inquiry, design, and testing. That currently entails articulating the harm that can result when taking up improvement methodologies from industries like manufacturing without interrogating their analogy to education. I recently wrote a paper with Dr.
Rebecca Colina Neri (Sandoval & Neri, 2024), where we discuss how we can reorient improvement methodologies away from dominant outcomes (i.e., standardized test scores, attendance, preparing students for labor markets) and towards justice-focused outcomes (comfort, agency, and dignity). I
identify myself as being part of a growing community of improvement scholars who are seeking to
steer improvement into taking a critical turn, such as folks like Drs. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford (e.g.,
Hinnant-Crawford et al., 2023), Sola Takahashi (e.g., Takahashi et al., forthcoming), and Dr. Neri.
The current reality is that the structures that shape schools and schooling are organized to sort students. In particular, this sorting is often in service of achieving outcomes that educators, families, and
communities may not prioritize when thinking about their hopes and dreams for their children and students (Domina et al., 2017). While educators, families, and communities may espouse desires for
students to become skilled and get good jobs, when scholars interrogate that line of thinking more deeply, they find that what many families and communities really care about is ensuring that their students are affirmed, cared for, and afforded dignity and agency (e.g., Ishimaru & Bang, 2022; Ishimaru et al., 2023). Historically, minoritized students and people—Black, Brown, LGBTQ+, disabled students—are least likely to experience comfort, agency, and dignity in schools, in workplaces, and in their own communities.
What does that all mean, concretely, for my work? I imagine that question will consume me for a while! Right now, I am driven to use improvement research methods to prioritize outcomes that serve to improve students’ comfort, agency, and dignity in schools. For example, in a previous project, I led an
improvement network on preparing teachers to build on multilingual students’ strengths to participate in affirming learning environments (e.g., Sandoval & van Es, 2021). Our network deliberately chose that focus to prioritize the goal of recognizing students’ linguistic and cultural assets, rather than focusing on
something like improving the English language proficiency of so-called “English language learners,” where the goal is to assimilate students into a dominant linguistic culture while minoritizing those students’ linguistic strengths. I see that work as an example of what improvement for justice can look like. For example, teacher educators who had strong commitments to justice tended to problematize the framing of problems—e.g., by asking why low “English language proficiency” rate is considered a problem, whose problem it is, and what are the alternatives? Questions like this allowed us to engage with expansive notions of equity of the kinds that dreaming scholars like Megan Bang, Shirin Vossoughi, and Ann Ishimaru articulate when seeking educational justice (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016; Ishimaru et al., 2023). In the coming years, I aim to expand the lessons from that teacher preparation network as I collaborate with colleagues at Clemson who are experts in this problem space, such as folks like Heather Dunham and Lindsey Rowe (e.g., Dunham et al., 2022; Rowe, 2018).
“I am driven to use improvement research methods to prioritize outcomes that serve to improve students’ comfort, agency, and dignity in schools.”
LtC: Much of your work has involved direct collaboration and learning alongside practitioners to develop capacity for continuous improvement. What are some of the major lessons that practitioners and scholars of Educational Change can learn from your work?
CS: I have convictions to do just, right, and good work in the first position, and generate scholarly insight in the second position. This means that when I work with practitioners, I think about what they need from me to support them before I think about research questions I want to answer.
My research interests center around improving schools for Black, Brown, LGBTQ+, disabled, linguistically diverse, and other minoritized students. If practitioners have a problem they need or want to solve related to making schools better for minoritized students, and if they think my expertise with improvement methodologies can help them solve those problems, then I help them.
A common practice in research-practice partnership work is a negotiation of joint work between and among researchers and practitioners. In many of these arrangements, researchers and practitioners negotiate the focal problems of practice of their work, such that the joint work most closely meets the needs of practitioners while also aligning with the research interest of researchers (Penuel et al., 2013). While this is a crucial process through which researchers can get closer to the everyday work of schools and schooling, I personally do not engage in these kinds of negotiations. This is because my research agenda is driven more by felt need. When there is a colleague or practitioner who seeks my skillset and commitments to redress an injustice, I work with them to find a way to study it. The questions that drive my research agenda, then, are around understanding the kinds of activities that help practitioners solve the problems they want to solve, and then how practitioners actually go about solving those problems.
When I work with leaders, teachers, practitioners—people who are doing the work—my goal is to be of service to them and to help them solve their problems and redress injustices in their settings. Doing work that’s important to folks on the ground is always researchable and intellectually interesting to me, no matter how far away the problem spaces seem to be from my experiences or current expertise, and no matter how much the field already purports to know. Maybe it’s the naïveté of an early-career scholar, just three years post-Ph.D. and new to a faculty role, but I imagine that there can always be needed insights to share with the field through this approach to knowledge production.
To illustrate why I think the field has much to learn through collaboration with practitioners as a form of knowledge production, I’ll relay a story from when I was at a conference several years ago. I was talking to a district leader who worked in another state. This district leader oversaw math curriculum and instruction and was itching to work with faculty at their local university to help them address problems they were having with providing professional learning for teachers in mathematics. However, when they tried approaching the faculty, the faculty rebuffed the district leader and told them, “The field already knows what to do about this problem.”
I was floored. If the field already knew what to do about this problem, why was this district leader still experiencing it? Sure, we may have decades of rich insight to draw on from research on mathematics teaching, math teacher learning, and professional development activities for math teachers. But what the field doesn’t know is how all parts of our systems—every state department of education, every county office of education, every district, every school, and every teacher—can put into practice what we know from research.
So that’s my bent and that’s my (possibly naïve) conviction: I foreground the work that’s most important to the people on the frontlines and generate insight from what happens as we try to make change happen. This is not a completely novel insight, but it is an approach to scholarship that I’m committed to. I’ll let you know if this was a bad decision for my academic career in a few years. (If anyone out there reading this has some advice for me about all this, I’d love to chat!)
“I foreground the work that’s most important to the people on the frontlines and generate insight from what happens as we try to make change happen.”
LtC: In your research, you have explored power dynamics entailed in the practice of continuous improvement in education. What might practitioners and scholars take from this work to foster better school systems for all students?
CS: In currently available improvement scholarship, relational dynamics and moment-to-moment improvement practices tend to be far less documented and studied than the technical work of improvement. Because of that, existing research offers too little insight into the power dynamics at play in improvement efforts in education.
My advice for practitioners who are leading (or aspire to lead) improvement work is that attending to and managing interpersonal tensions and power dynamics is more important than the use of technical improvement tools.
I wrote a piece a couple of years ago on synthesizing as an improvement practice (Sandoval, 2023). Folks are welcome to email me for a copy if they’re interested in reading. The highlight is this: Improvement work goes through periods of divergence and convergence, or what Dr. Alicia Grunow and
colleagues (2024) call flaring and focusing. During the flaring parts of this work, people generate a bunch of ideas—about the problem, about what we should do about it. During the focusing parts, people coalesce around a much smaller set of ideas—usually a focal problem or a focal aim.
How that happens is something seasoned improvement practitioners know intuitively but haven’t often written down or systematically analyzed. I tried to address that gap by identifying a practice to get from divergence to convergence that I called “synthesizing.” During the practice of synthesizing, improvement practitioners move from a period of divergence (where educators share dozens to hundreds of ideas) to a period of convergence (where educators focus on one common problem or one common aim).
I also show how synthesizing is a power-laden practice. By “power,” I refer to actions that constrain and enable actions at another time and place (Watson, 2017). In this view, power is not a currency that is held; it is not distributed, shared, consolidated, granted, wielded, but is instead produced through action. I am producing power by writing a spotlight for this newsletter, constraining and enabling what SIG members read, and constraining and enabling what newsletter organizers can publish; the newsletter organizers produce power by giving me prompts and comments that constrain and enable what is within the bounds of this spotlight, and by choosing (or choosing not) to publish my words.
What happens when improvement facilitators take ideas and organize them—sometimes behind closed doors— produces a tremendous amount of power because it has an outsized influence on which improvement efforts the group focuses on. In my paper, I highlighted how I (the improvement facilitator) produced power by foregrounding the justice-focused ideas that people generated. I had an outrageously outsized influence on how that work unfolded, and at the time, I was not quite aware that that’s what I was doing. Although I produced power by foregrounding justice-focused ideas, my new awareness of the hidden operation of power raised questions for me about the possibility that improvement facilitators might produce power by peripheralizing justice. Indeed, during my experience as an improvement practitioner for over a decade, I have regularly heard stories of how improvement practices can peripheralize justice. Their stories are not mine to share here, but I hope those who experience this will share their stories because the field needs to hear them.
So if an improvement practitioner—or an aspiring one—is reading this, my advice is to attend to how they produce power, including in seemingly mundane moments and activities. Whose voices do you privilege when you take everyone’s ideas and try to synthesize them? Whose voices do you push to the margins? No improvement practitioner can avoid doing these things, but you can be aware of them and critically reflect on how they are shaping the work.
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?
CS: I’ll speak from what I have done in my work helping districts and educational leaders think about transformation. I don’t know if this is the best way, and I would love to hear alternatives. The most impactful way I’ve gotten folks to think hard about systems transformation is to ask questions about what they care about and then create opportunities for them to interrogate what they say they care about.
In my experience as an improvement coach, I find that leaders often have assumptions about what students are capable of, what teachers and building-level staff are doing, and about what’s preventing schools from creating learning environments that enable students to experience comfort, agency, and dignity. Often, I find that these assumptions are built more heavily on intuition than they are on witnessing what is happening in schools. Because of this, a big part of the work I do has centered around helping those who lead schools and school systems get closer to work that’s happening on the ground. Learning to see and hear what’s actually happening is a core activity that, I believe, challenges false assumptions and generates new ideas about what’s possible. Drs. Parker Andreoli and Hans Klar (2020) illustrated this in their study of a rural research-practice partnership. They studied an improvement effort that began as a focus on reducing misalignment between formative assessments and standardized tests; after they guided educators through an investigation into that problem, leaders found that the real problem was not misalignment, but that there was variation in teachers’ understanding of curricular standards. Similar examples of leaders seeing, listening, and learning their way into “the real problems” abound in a recently published and rich volume edited by Dr. Edwin Bonney and colleagues (2024).
That work of learning to see and hear, by the way, is worth documenting and sharing with the field. The insights we generate from improving schools go far beyond (and can be far more interesting than) merely getting results in improving outcomes.
LtC: Where do you perceive the field of Educational Change is going? What excites you about Educational Change now and in the future?
I feel woefully under-qualified to speak on where I think this field is going, partly due to where I am in my career trajectory, but mostly due to the fact that I’m an improvement researcher trained as a learning scientist who has a keen interest in practice as defined by. organizational theorists; only in the past few years have I begun to identify as being in this particular field.
But from what I’ve seen and experienced, what excites me is how much energy there has been and continues to be around doing collaborative education research approaches and seeking to center issues of equity and justice. Ten years ago, I was just a scholarly baby with a limited scope on what this field was, but even I could feel how hard my mentors fought to get others to care about research that’s done
collaboratively with educators and fought even harder to get people to care about inequities
and injustices.
Now, it seems like collaborative research and centering justice have been embraced and become normal. I’m sure there are still fights to be had, but it does not feel like things folks have to defend nearly as hard as they used to. There are so many different arrangements of collaborative education research efforts— improvement science, design-based implementation research, community-based design research, and on and on (Penuel et al., 2020) —and they all have commitments to enabling research to play a role in transforming systems to better serve students that our systems of schooling have traditionally failed.
So, I’m excited to have at least a foot in this world and to learn from folks who have fought and those who have come to embrace doing just, good, and right work.
References
Bang, M., & Vossoughi, S. (2016). Participatory design research and educational justice: Studying learning and relations within social change making. Cognition and instruction, 34(3), 173-193.
Bonney, E., Capello, S., & Yurkofsky, M. (2024). Improvement Science in the Field Cases of Practitioners Leading Change in Schools. Rowman & Littlefield.
Domina, T., Penner, A., & Penner, E. (2017). Categorical inequality: Schools as sorting machines. Annual review of sociology, 43(1), 311-330.
Dunham, H., Murdter‐Atkinson, J., Nash, B., & Wetzel, M. M. (2022). Building on linguistic strengths: Tenets of a culturally sustaining teacher. The Reading Teacher, 75(6), 677-684.
Grunow, A., Park, S., & Bennett, B. (2024). Journey to Improvement: A Team Guide to Systems Change in Education, Health Care, and Social Welfare. Rowman & Littlefield.
Hinnant-Crawford, B., Lett, E. L., & Cromartie, S. (2023). Using Critical Race Theory to Guide Continuous Improvement. In E. Anderson, & S.D. Hayes (Eds.) Continuous improvement: A leadership process for
school improvement, 105-124.
Ishimaru, A. M., & Bang, M. (2022). Designing with families for just futures. Journal of Family Diversity in Education, 4(2), 130-140.
Ishimaru, A. M., Bang, M., Nolan, C. M., Rajendran, A., & Chen, J. C. (2023). Expanding Theories of Educational Change in Family & Community-Led Designs. Journal of Family Diversity in Education, 5(2), 83-114.
Ishimaru, A. M., Bang, M., Nolan, C. M., Rajendran, A., & Chen, J. C. (2023). Expanding Theories of Educational Change in Family & Community-Led Designs. Journal of Family Diversity in Education, 5(2), 83-114.
Penuel, W. R., Coburn, C. E., & Gallagher, D. J. (2013). Negotiating problems of practice in research–practice design partnerships. Teachers College Record, 115(14), 237-255.
Penuel, W. R., Farrell, C. C., Anderson, E. R., Coburn, C. E., Allen, A. R., Bohannon, A. X., … & Brown, S. (2020). A Comparative, Descriptive Study of Three Research-Practice Partnerships: Goals, Activities, and Influence on District Policy, Practice, and Decision Making. Technical Report No. 4.
National Center for Research in Policy and Practice.
Rowe, L. W. (2018). Say it in your language: Supporting translanguaging in multilingual classes. The Reading Teacher, 72(1), 31-38.
Sandoval, C., & Neri, R. C. (2024, September). Toward a continuous improvement for justice. In Frontiers in Education (Vol. 9, p. 1442011).
Sandoval, C., & Van Es, E. A. (2021). Examining the practices of generating an aim statement in a teacher preparation networked improvement community. Teachers College Record, 123(6), 1-32.
Sandoval, C. (2023). Synthesizing as a power laden facilitation practice in a networked improvement community. Journal of Professional Capital and Community, 8(1), 47-61.
Takahashi, S., Sandoval, C., Jackson, B., Cunningham, J., & Taylor, C. (Forthcoming). Practical measurement for equity and justice. Frontiers in Education, 9.
Watson, M. (2017). Placing power in practice theory. The nexus of practices: Connections, constellations, practitioners, 169-182.
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