Theories of Action, Logic Models, Implementation Plans, and Evaluations
From this page, you can visit the website we built to support education leaders, practitioners, and partners working to strengthen continuous improvement (CI) systems in schools, districts, and state agencies. Whether you’re just getting started or you’re deep into system design, our practical resources, tools, and examples can help you apply CI principles to your work.
Why Continuous Improvement?
Continuous improvement has roots in 20th-century quality-improvement work, including the Japanese practice of kaizen: making purposeful changes, learning from what happens, and continuing to refine the work.
Applied to education, CI means intentionally and iteratively improving things in ways that respond to the realities of schools and students. It’s not a one-time initiative or an isolated project, but a way of thinking and working that helps education systems adapt and grow over time.
What You’ll Find on Our Continuous-Improvement Website
The site brings together a foundational paper and resources for four connected tools:
- Foundational CI paper: Build shared language and explore the principles, challenges, and practices that support effective continuous improvement in education.
- Theory of action: Clarify what you want to change, how you expect change to happen, and why your strategy should produce the intended results.
- Logic model: Map the connections among your resources, activities, outputs, and expected outcomes.
- Implementation plan: Translate your strategy into clear responsibilities, timelines, routines, and progress markers
- Evaluation plan: Identify what you need to learn, determine what evidence to collect, and use the findings to refine your work.
Each tool page links to a field guide, template, and checklist you can use or adapt.
