Ways for Educators to Learn as They Go

Helping educators learn and improve can have an enormous impact on children and the students’ educational outcomes, which, according to Senior Lecturer Elizabeth City, is why teachers and school leaders need to take the time to learn on the job.

“As educators we are sometimes weirdly bad at learning. We need to get better at learning as we go,” says City. “It’s our core business but we often go so fast that we don’t pause to do some learning and then apply that learning going forward.”

What K–12 educators often need, City says, are the tools to develop a proper vision for their school’s educational goals so they can carry out those goals in the work they do. At SXSW EDU 2025, City — in collaboration with The Holdsworth Center, which aims to improve public schools and student outcomes in Texas by developing education leadership — shared some of the tools that can help educators in their own learning:

Continuous improvement 

Educators can assess their methods of student learning and evaluate school performance using this systemic approach based on the improvement science work from the Carnegie Foundation. By assessing teaching methods, policies, and student outcomes, educators can collaborate, find areas for growth, and make changes based on data and feedback.

Adopt. Adapt. Abandon.

After trying new approaches in their practice, educators should aim to adopt ideas that work best, adapt if things can be improved, or abandon ideas altogether that do not work. City demonstrated this concept at SXSW by having participants assemble a Mr. Potato Head as fast as possible, learning from their mistakes and trying again.

This method can be applied to any organizational and structural experimentation in the workplace, says City. Shaving a few seconds off Mr. Potato Head assembly time may seem small, but learning how to improve best practices using immediate feedback is the goal no matter how large the task in a school.

Build a quality vision

Leaders need a clear vision in order to guide their schools’ changes and improvements over time, says City.

“Most places have vision statements, and those are often really laborious things to come to. A lot of effort goes into that, a lot of parsing words,” says City.

Campus leaders can create a quality vision for their school, she says, using seven essential aspects, the first six highlighted in Strategy in Action: How School Systems Can Support Powerful Learning and Teaching, by City and Rachel E. Curtis.

The seventh dimension, added when City began working with The Holdsworth Center to develop professional development materials for schools in Texas, is particularly resonant as technology evolves and learning situations are changed by crisis and disruptions, says City.

“The children we serve, the families and communities we serve, are always changing and so very much is the world around us,” she says. “So we not only have to be nimble, we have to always be learning.”

Think big. Act small. Learn fast.

Educators should “think big” about their vision but “act small” to move toward it by implementing minor student-facing changes over short periods of time. Learning the impact of those changes then determines what experimental tweaks to keep and informs future modifications.

As pictured above in the PDSA cycle: Make a plan, then do it. Next, study the results, and finally act on that data to create a new plan. Working through each step quickly helps groups learn fast, easily discarding methods that don’t work while finding ways to improve.

“The idea is to get quickly to the test,” notes City. “Sometimes we spend so long planning that we don’t have enough time doing, and then we are definitely gassed for the studying and learning part.”

Bend the arrow

The goals of continuous improvement often mean making mistakes, says City. But taking the time to evaluate those mistakes and set goals over smaller periods of time while ultimately working toward an overall vision, means educators can evaluate results and then pivot if those changes ultimately fail.

“Most of the time we act in straight lines. We try something, we try something else, we try something else,” City says. “But in any improvement cycle, the thing that bends the arrow back on itself is the learning part. We try something, we learn something, we use that something to try a new thing.”