Leading Inquiry-Focused Continuous Improvement

Today's school and district leaders navigate increasingly complex environments where the mandate has shifted decisively from management to meaningful, equity-centered improvement. Rather than simply maintaining systems, leaders are now expected to drive iterative change — examining why outcomes differ across racial, ethnic, gender, and learning-challenged groups, and honestly confronting how existing systems may deepen those gaps. Meeting this challenge demands a new kind of leadership fluency: one grounded in disciplined inquiry. Approaches such as improvement science, action research, and quality improvement offer structured pathways for leaders to investigate persistent problems of practice, understand systemic variation, and test solutions with rigor and intentionality.This work is neither simple nor incidental — it requires sustained skill-building and a genuine inquiry orientation. Submissions that engage practitioners and scholars in using varied data to examine problems deeply and drive equity-focused improvement are especially welcomed.This Research Topic seeks to advance a comprehensive understanding of inquiry-focused continuous improvement in educational leadership. The goals are to illuminate how improvement is effectively led, collaborated upon, and organized across diverse roles and contexts; to clarify what constitutes credible evidence of progress; and to identify how leaders are best prepared for this work. Equally important is understanding how individual perspectives shape improvement efforts and how policy and organizational barriers either enable or constrain them. Ultimately, the issue aims to build a coherent, equity-centered knowledge base that bridges research, preparation, and practice.The Research Topic invites articles that address:• How is successful inquiry-focused improvement led in practice?• How do leaders collaborate with staff to engage in problem solving and continuous improvement in school and district contexts?• How individual perspectives shape the leadership of inquiry-focused improvement?• How differing organizational roles can be leveraged to facilitate inquiry-focused continuous improvement?• How leaders are prepared for inquiry-focused continuous improvement (e.g. program or training models, inquiry-focused dissertation research support, and means of evaluating students’ work)?• What counts as evidence for/of improvement?• How do policy and organizational barriers impact action inquiry (such as research review boards, conflict of interest policies and so forth)?• What are the similarities and differences in continuous inquiry modalities?Other topics are welcome provided they align with the scope of the issue. A variety of methodologies and methodological approaches will be considered. Topic editors: Margaret Terry Orr, Chad R Lochmiller Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/82829/leading-inquiry-focused-continuous-improvement