Carnegie Foundation President Anthony Bryk recounts his experience of facilitating a workshop activity that enabled participants to accelerate their collective problem-solving and helped them see the power of attacking a common problem as a structured network.
When we look for “bright spots,” we tend to see the tools or practices that we believe contribute to the positive results in certain classrooms, schools, or districts. In this way, we identify the what of improvement; but are we overlooking how these changes came to be?
Studies on the effects of educational programs often focus on “fidelity of implementation.” But this approach often fails to consider the complexity both of the programs themselves and of the demands they place on the contexts in which they are carried out.
In response to Carnegie President Anthony S. Bryk's post on expanding the conversation about learning to improve, we received numerous responses. President Bryk replies to two of them in this post.
Since 2008, Carnegie has been working to find a better way of learning how to improve. We have learned a great deal by doing, including that this work is a continuous improvement task. We invite you to join in on this ongoing process.
White paper, Improvement Research Carried Out Through Networked Communities: Accelerating Learning about Practices that Support More Productive Student Mindsets, explores improvement science as a way to address problems facing educators.