YES Prep Public Schools

Leadership is an essential element of work to improve safety in hospitals. Leading Change in the Culture of Patient Safety by Dennis Wagner and Tom Evans, MD describes progress on national hospital patient safety in the last two decades in the United States. It focuses on key elements that drove the public and private Partnership for Patients initiative, which was organized and led by the United States Department of Health and Human Services and its Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Driving elements of the initiative included a clear bold aim, a focus on will, ideas, and execution, use of the scientific principles guiding the diffusion of innovations, and systematic use of leadership mindsets and methods to advance a culture of safety in US hospitals. The chapter includes a case study of the Iowa Healthcare Collaborative's experiences and results as a leading contributor of Partnership for Patients work at the state and regional level to reduce early elective deliveries and to improve hospital safety. The case study provides a specific example of how the leadership methods and principles were applied by the Mary Greely Medical Center in Ames, Iowa.

From 2013 to 2017, Rockman et al. developed and tested various strategies for assessing the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of novice and experienced STEM teachers. The research, conducted as part of Rockman’s external evaluation of the Mathematics and Science Teacher Education Residency (MASTER) project, began with a review of existing tools, followed by a pilot study with metrics built around authentic student work. The metrics, customized for math and science teachers, asked teachers to analyze students’ learning needs and offer ways to address them. While the research revealed differences within and across disciplines—in, for example, how teachers prioritize procedural and content knowledge—it also confirmed that PCK was a multifaceted, often elusory concept, variously defined by discipline, subject, classroom context, and topic. As researchers explored ways to create reliable tools that captured the nuances of PCK but still generated meaningful data that could inform MASTER development, partners continued to look for ways to fold PCK into teacher training in meaningful ways. Their development of specific objectives for what teachers with strong PCK do in the classroom allowed researchers to examine PCK situated in practice, using not a single tool but multiple methods. Analyses of lesson plans over residents’ clinical year and retrospective interviews with MASTER-trained teachers, in their induction year, provided complementary opportunities to explore instantiated PCK, defined by both classroom practice and teacher readiness. The lessons learned confirm the challenges of assessing PCK within and between subject areas, as well as some opportunities for research and development around teacher training.