Hub leadership is a critical driver of the domains of activity described in NIC Health and Development Framework. To this end, our leadership team—led by Don Peurach from The University of Michigan—examines hub leaders and hub leadership practice.
Understanding Hub Leadership Practice
By understanding more about the black box of hub leadership, we seek to generate research for the field and tools to support hub leaders.
Field building
We seek to bridge the disconnect between hub leaders as the linchpins of improvement networks and the lack of a readily indexed research base to inform the study, practice, or evaluation of hub leaders and hub leadership. We believe that the field needs research on hub leadership that is practical, contextual, theoretical, historical, and instrumental.
See the Publications section for our most current thinking about hub leadership.
Supporting hub leaders
Hub leaders are people in the hub organization who share responsibility and accountability for the development, operations, and success of improvement networks. This is complex, dynamic, and important work. We understand hub leadership practice to include:
- Identifying persistent problems of practice that undermine educational access, quality, and equity, and that defy ready solutions.
- Approaching these problems as symptomatic of deeper, interdependent problems, and analyzing the systems that produce those problems.
- Developing theories of interdependent solutions that target primary points of leverage in these systems, on the assumption that small numbers of these problems interact to have disproportionate, negative effects on educational quality and equity.
- Designing these solutions, systematically testing their implementation and effects, and discerning which to adapt, adopt, or abandon.
- Managing new knowledge, resources, and tools thus produced to sustain improvement in originating contexts and to spread improvement to new contexts.
We build tools to support hub leaders in practice. See our tools here.