Background: Through its Children First initiative, New York City policymakers promoted collaborative inquiry as a process for helping administrators and teachers use student data to improve instruction and raise student achievement. Since 2007, city schools were expected to engage higher proportions of faculty in the inquiry work each year.…

The road to improvement has taken the staff of a high-poverty urban school from isolation to collaboration. The innovations that were developed based on the basis of the collective analysis of school wide requirements have helped the John Williams Elementary School No. 5 in Rochester, New York, to create pathways to excellence and become a…