I am abandoning this study.
The study aimed to expand on patterns identified in two smaller load reduction leadership studies that explored smaller sets of extreme examples using similar methods. Those studies analyzed 14 and 30 NYC School Quality Review documents, representing opposite ends of school impact and discipline, respectively, and both had significance p < .001.
The present study included 120+ Quality Review documents and was not limited to extreme cases. With 25% of documents analyzed, it was not on track to reach significance, even at p < .05.
This experience has not led me to abandon load reduction leadership as a theory to explain school-level performance differences. Applying the Duhem-Quine thesis has led me to reject using Quality Review documents to measure leaders' impacts on cognitive load beyond the most extreme cases.
This may close out what I can do with Load Reduction Leadership without much more involved IRB and COIB processes. So, it may be a while before I can publish another article on this theory.
I finally finished the first draft of The School Leaders' Atlas of Load Reduction Leadership. It extrapolates cognitive load theory to describe leadership practices that differentiate consistently improving schools from the rest.
This practitioner-facing guide, based on the codebook used in the last few LRL studies, summarizes heuristics and concrete actions leaders can take to overload staff less frequently and create space for long-term school improvement.
In response to what's happening on most other social media platforms, I transitioned most of my online activity over to Blue Sky.
Hopefully, we can connect there.
I post about things I read and the work I do.
I've been working on publishing and presenting stuff. The publications section of this site is now up and running. It lists the talks I've given and papers I've written about load reduction leadership.
As I--and other folks--publish and share work using the framework, this page will be updated with canonical LRL studies.
Also, with the dissertation and the first round of conference papers done, I plan to create more resources here before switching my focus back to academic research and publishing.
The Implementing LRL page is still a work in progress and much of the rest of this domain are placeholders. However, this represents a bare-bones version of this site. There is a somewhat-readable articulation of how to start using this framework for school improvement, a version of the survey leaders can use to monitor staff cognitive load, and a few pathways to dig deeper.
For now, I'll continue building this site out when I'm not working on other academic publishing.
LRL is important and everyone should have access to it. So, I will post all canonical research and tools here; this may be a side project, but its not a side hustle.
I hope other researchers building from this framework will share this commitment.