Teachers at High Tech High, a network of charter schools in San Diego County, say using improvement science has cultivated collaboration; set guidelines for clear, measureable goals; fostered innovative ideas; and encouraged more teachers to start improvement networks.
The idea of forming collective action networks is growing among educators as they realize that today’s complex problems can’t be solved by one person alone. But there’s more than one type of community and which is best depends on the type of problem to be solved.
Policy can do a lot to support positive changes, but policy alone isn’t effective in such large, diverse, and complex arenas as education, wrote policy analyst Paul Lingenfelter in comments solicited by the federal Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking.
Networked Improvement Communities may hold the key to ending decades of educational inequity that have resisted most other efforts at reform.
What will it take to make effective, lasting, and scalable education improvements? It’s not a silver bullet. Policymakers and practitioners must start working together to design solutions based on research and evidence.
In a session on leading the transformation of large complex systems at the 2016 Carnegie Summit, three superintendents discuss how they shaped improvement in their school districts by adopting strategies that resonate with three of the principles of improvement science.
In a recent SSIR article, Srik Gopal and Lisbeth B. Schorr make the case that an uncritical application of the "Moneyball" ideal is a flawed approach that overlooks "the fundamental realities of how complex social change happens."
Grantees of the Overdeck Family Foundation, sent to the 2016 Improvement Summit to gain perspective on a networked improvement approach, reflect on their experience at the event and share major takeaways for their ongoing work.
At the Carnegie Summit, panelists from the Gates Foundation and National Science Foundation shared their thoughts about how NICs integrate the collaborative structures and disciplined approaches necessary to accelerate educators’ efforts to improve.
At the Carnegie Summit, Hahrie Han shared insights from her research on participation and activism. One of the big questions she addressed is, how can we best mobilize people to work toward change together?
In his 2016 Carnegie Summit keynote, Bryan Stevenson reminded us of the power of getting "proximate" to suffering to deepen understanding. This blog post explores how this relates to the first core principle of improvement.
At the 2016 Carnegie Summit, Alex “Sandy” Pentland shared his research in the field of social physics that can help us understand the relationships between human behavior, collective experience, and the spread of ideas.
At the 2016 Carnegie Summit, Anthony S. Bryk gave a glimpse of what it looks like to struggle towards a common understanding of a problem and develop a working theory of improvement.
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.
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