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Schools on the Move

Guest(s): Jay Westover and Christopher Steinhauser
Date: 06/27/2022
Run time: 27:18
Season 3, Episode 9

A coherent system has never been more important for schools. In fact, the best buffer against crisis, learning loss, and changing human resources is a school that has uniform systems, shared language, and a common vision. This net provides the structure for continuous learning at both the teacher and student level. If you are a district leader, the trick is to keep all the schools in focus and on the same page so that that the system moves like one organism. Our guests today will help clarify this complexity and map a path for keeping schools on the move.


Episode Audio

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Jay Westover Photo

Jay Westover

Jay Westover has provided leadership training and school improvement consulting in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Education, state departments of education, colleges, educational service centers, and school districts across North America. Over the past fifteen years, his work has focused on developing capacity of school district systems to close the gaps of college and career readiness. Creating coherent systems of continuous improvement has been a central aspect of state-wide, regional, and local partnerships including the Association of California School Administrators, more than a dozen County Offices of Education, and over 100 school districts.

Jay’s role at InnovateEd is lead advisor for state-level, county-wide, and local school district partnerships, client executive leadership coaching, and guiding the expansion of consulting services. His passion is working alongside leaders to simplify the complexities of developing school district capacity and coherence for sustainable improvement.


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Christopher Steinhauser Photo

Christopher Steinhauser

Christopher J. Steinhauser served as superintendent of the Long Beach Unified School District from 2002 to 2020; the fourth largest school district in California serving approximately 70,000 students. With more than 39 years of experience in the diverse Long Beach school system, Chris has earned a national reputation for improving student achievement and closing achievement and opportunity gaps. To ensure that there were equitable outcomes for all students in the school system, Chris implemented a continuous improvement process known as The Collaborative Inquiry Process/Quarterly Visits where teams of educators from different schools would visit each other’s sites to review student outcome data and observe teaching and learning. The purpose of this process was to make real-time changes based on formative assessment data to better meet the diverse academic and social/emotional needs of the students in the system. These site visits would occur three to four times per year. Under his leadership, Long Beach earned the national Broad Prize for Urban Education and qualified as a finalist for the award five times. In a 2010 report by McKinsey & Company named Long Beach as one of the world's 20 leading school systems -- and one of the top three in the United States in terms of sustained and significant improvements. The school district was later listed among the world's top five school systems by the nonprofit Battelle for Kids organization.

Long Beach students, 70 percent of whom receive free and reduced-price lunches, annually earn more than $100 million in college scholarships. Thirteen Long Beach high schools were named in 2020 to be among the top 12 percent in the United States by U.S. News and World Report. Under Chris’s leadership, the Long Beach College Promise was developed which became a model for the State of California and the nation on providing two years of free college to every student that enrolled in a community college upon graduating from high school. Since the implementation of the Long Beach College Promise, the college going rate for students in the Long Beach USD has been consistently higher than the State of California and the nation. To ensure that all students were college and career ready upon graduation from high school, Chris implemented industry based pathways system-wide through the Linked Learning approach to ensure equitable outcomes for all high school students.

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Peter M. DeWitt Photo

Peter M. DeWitt

Peter DeWitt (Ed.D) is the founder and CEO of the Instructional Leadership Collective, and approaches everything with a learner's mindset. He was a K-5 teacher for 11 years and a principal for 8 years. For over 12 years, he has been facilitating professional learning nationally, and internationally, based on the content of many of his best-selling educational books. 

DeWitt's professional learning relationships are a monthly hybrid approach that includes both coaching and the facilitating workshops on instructional leadership and collective efficacy. His work has been adopted at the state level, university level, and he works with numerous school districts, school boards, regional networks, ministries of education around North America, Australia, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and the U.K.

Peter writes the Finding Common Ground column for Education Week with Michael Nelson and they host Corwin’s Leaders Coaching Leaders podcast. In 2020 DeWitt co-created Education Week's A Seat At the Table where he moderates conversations with experts around the topics of race, gender, research, trauma and many other educational topics.

Peter is the author, co-author or contributor of numerous books and his articles have appeared in educational research journals at the state, national and international level. His books have been translated into numerous languages. 

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Michael Nelson Photo

Michael Nelson

There is no more noble profession than that of an educator was what Michael Nelson’s mom said almost every day while he was growing up. For almost 40 years, Michael has been an educator. His mom would be pleased.  

Even though Michael still considers “teacher” as his  primary title, he has served in roles of principal, district instructional leader, superintendent, assistant executive director developing professional development for the state of Washington, and currently as the Thought Partner for the Instructional Leadership Collective.


Michael has received many state and national awards during his time as a principal and superintendent. As principal, his school received the National Blue Ribbon Award from the United States Department of Education. As a superintendent, he was named Washington state’s 2019 Superintendent of the Year. During his tenure as superintendent, Michael was elected President of the Washington Association of School Administrators (WASA) by his peers. 


Michael Nelson co-facilitates coaching, keynotes, and workshops with Peter DeWitt. Their first book “Leading with Intention” was released in May 2024.

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Related Titles

Featured Publication
Schools on the Move
Leading Coherence for Equitable Growth

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