Shawn Thomas Loescher

Urban Discovery Schools · Cheif Executive Officer

Innovation is a buzz word that is subjective and can illicit palpable feeling of organizational pride or fear. But what is innovation? What are some of the frameworks that produce the environments that embrace innovation? What are the characteristics of innovative leadership that create an organizational culture that values not just innovation, but...

Within the literature, action research (AR) has been described as a method and a dispositional approach. This overview of the attributes of AR takes the position that AR is a dispositional approach to research methods that has desirable methods associated with it. This presentation to doctoral students at East Stroudburg University of Pennsylvania...

This was the presentation of the American Educational Research Association's (AERA) action research dissertation of the year for 2020 that was presented at the special interest group meeting at the AERA Annual Meeting 2021.

Design thinking (DT) has demonstrated promising use in a wide variety of fields. Rather than a method, DT represents an approach that requires relinquishing preconceived notions of solutions, having a high tolerance for ambiguity, seeking to identify needs before engaging in problem-solving, being human-centered, and engaging in a reflective proces...

In the spring of 2020, educators and community-based organizations were thrust into new ways of interacting and providing supports to our children and families. Many will continue with this challenge for the foreseeable future. In this session we will discuss the complexity of what has happened, developing the health disposition of innovators, prac...

The events of 2020 represented environments where change was necessitated by circumstance. However, a continuing problem of practice for the public sector is driving a culture of innovation. In this session we will discuss how to move educational institutions and community-based organization from being risk-adverse to being places where the spirit...

In the spring of 2020, students across the United States joined others across the world in school closures. Educators and youth workers were thrust into new ways of interacting with students. Many will continue with this challenge for the foreseeable future. In this session, we will discuss the complexity of what has happened, the health dispositio...

In the English language, there are two common understandings of the word Ontology, that of being and becoming. Action research is guided by understandings of the past, is grounded in the present, and is solutions orientated towards a more ideal future state. Guided by the literature and contextual knowledge, an action researcher may simultaneously...

Students may be situated within complex systems that are nested within each other. This complexity may also envelop institutional structures that lead to the socioeconomic reification of student post-secondary opportunities by obscuring positive goals. Building on previous cycles of action research, this multi-strand mixed-methods action research s...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlBf2CQmeT0 Statistical probability is designed to help us make more informed decisions, but it measures the past, not the future. "Don't let anyone tell you that we know what's going to happen next, because we don't." These words, spoken by a NICU doctor overseeing the care of Shawn Loescher's prematurely born chil...

Design thinking (DT) can be considered a method, approach, or disposition towards problem solving, organizational development, and community building. The traditions of DT date to the 1950’s and originate from a variety of design sciences. In this UC San Diego, Design @ Large presentation, Dr. Loescher explores DT and how it can be utilized to tran...

Design thinking (DT) is both a method and mindset applicable in a broad range of fields and industries. Some of the defining features of DT included focusing on need definition before problem solving, abdication of preconceived outcomes, being situated towards ambiguity, being human-centric, and having a reflexive process that seeks to increase con...

School and school district culture are artifacts of the policies, practices, and beliefs of the institutional systems, communities, and national structures in which they are embedded. Often times these systems remain unchecked and carry hidden assumptions about who, what, when, where, and why educational experiences occur within the context of the...

Design thinking (DT) is both a method and a dispositional approach to problem solving, organizational development, and learning. The traditions of DT go back to the 1950’s and have been used in a variety of fields. Some defining features of DT include focusing on need definition before problem solving, abdication of preconceived outcome, being situ...

The I am College and Career Ready Student Support Program (iCCR). The iCCR was a collaboratively designed system utilizing a PAR (Herr & Anderson, 2015; Ivankova, 2015) structure that (a) provided staff and stakeholder professional development on a graduation profile that identify post-secondary needs for all students, (b) collaboratively set posit...

Students may be situated within complex systems that are nested within each other. This complexity may also envelop institutional structures that lead to the socio-economic reification of student post-secondary opportunities by obscuring positive goals. This may be confounded by community misunderstandings about the changed world that students are...

This was the presentation given with the dissertation Hope as Strategy: The Effectiveness of an Innovation of the Mind.

There is a growing body of literature on the application of Hope Theory (HT; Snyder, 2002) to advance student achievement in schools. The purpose of this multi-cycle, mixed-methods, action research study was to continue exploratory investigations on positive goal formation and examine a district-wide innovation to reduce pathway complexity. Qualita...

The purpose of this qualitative cycle of action research was to explore how urban educational leaders form and created justifications about the expectation levels for students that are categorized by the State of California as being high need. My previous cycles of action research have examined institutional, cultural, and individual aspects of my...

What motivators and pedagogical values within the administration’s immediate control might encourage teachers to self-initiate a change in their instructional practice to Project-Based Learning (PBL)? This action research study examined why some teachers self-initiate a change to PBL.

Research supports that Project-Based Learning (PBL) has a positive impact on student achievement and prepares students with 21st century skills. With over 150 years of presence in American pedagogical practice PBL is rarely used as a primary teaching strategy. This action research study examined why some teachers self-initiate a change to PBL. Find...