The foundation is beginning to outline the first of the three strands of our strategy: a cohort of districts and a process through which teams of state, district and school leaders work in tandem with experts in relevant fields to address critical problems of education leadership practice. Our approach incorporates several key attributes:

• User-centered. The starting point of the district engagement will be the pressing problems that district leaders themselves identify, within the context of the foundation’s mission, so that the district has full ownership of the work. The foundation will marshal resources and facilitate a process to help devise solutions.
  


• Embedded. Collaborative problem-solving will occur within the district so that the work is positioned to have practical application and immediate impact. Locating “design teams” within the district will also enable partners from other disciplines to understand more clearly the environment and realities to which they are responding. The inclusion of state-level policy experts and community members will ensure that the broader context in which districts operate is reflected in developing solutions.
  


• Practical. The work of teams will focus on designing practical solutions and tools that district leaders can put to immediate use to meet urgent needs related to instruction.
  


• Cross-Sector. Transforming education will require insights from sectors beyond K-12. Therefore, the co-design process will be structured to draw from relevant expertise in a wide variety of fields. These include education, psychology, neuroscience, engineering, technology, public policy, adult learning and behavior change. A co-design process that teams district leaders with experts from their own and other fields can avoid the pitfalls of typical “us/them” consulting arrangements and lead to innovative solutions.
  


• Systemic. The approach will focus on identifying root causes by addressing both the immediate manifestations of problems and their deeper systemic context. School districts are complex organisms that require a sophisticated understanding of relationships, incentives and priorities. An approach that takes into consideration the system as a whole will enable leaders to do more than meet immediate needs; it will develop the capacity for sustainable improvement.

The goals of this approach are to:

• Solve targeted problems relatively quickly and practically.
  


• Translate these solutions to gains in student achievement within three years.
  


• Support district leadership in generating cultural shifts toward collaboration, structured learning, multi-disciplinary perspectives and creative problem-solving.
  


• Move from incremental change to more transformative outcomes by significantly improving systems capacity to deliver an excellent education to all children that prepares them for a 21st century, global environment.