Implementing Educational Innovations at Scale

Abstract

There is growing concern among researchers and governmental officials that knowing what works in education is important, but not enough for school improvement. Sound evidence alone is not sufficient for large-scale, sustainable change, both because practitioners may consider it irrelevant to their own problems of practice or run into challenges when they try to implement. Failed attempts at replicating positive outcomes in new (or simply expanded) settings underscore the need for a different relationship between research and practice, one that takes a systemic perspective on improvement and transforms the role for research. In this article, we describe the new science of improvement and where it sits in the evolution of research on education policy implementation. We discuss the roots of the approach as well as its key features. We explain how the work differs from that of traditional research and end with illustrations of this difference from our experiences with the National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools.

A Multiple Streams Analysis of Recent Changes to State-Level Dyslexia Education Law

“…Moreover, many states still have pending dyslexia legislation. We cannot know what effects, if any, these changes will have on student achievement or school practice because policy implementation is a critical factor but a complicated process (Cohen-Vogel et al, 2015; Cook & Odom, 2013). We think it is important to emphasize that recent legislative changes may or may not lead to an increase in the number of students that are ultimately identified as having dyslexia.…”

“…This is a limitation for any policy analysis because it overlooks feedback cycles and the inflow of new actors and ideas that may lead policy actors to adapt their goals and strategies. In educational contexts, the focus on agenda setting is particularly limiting because policy implementation tends to be complicated by both the legislative process, the actual translation of law to practice, and, of course, the very implementation process itself (Cohen-Vogel et al, 2015; Cook & Odom, 2013). Focusing exclusively on agenda setting may be useful in certain instances, but generally, doing so would obscure what happens in schools.…”

Designing for Trust-Building Interactions in the Initiation of a Networked Improvement Community

“…The peripheral position instead aligns with more collaborative design approaches that center the user (the educator, in this case). Positioning the researcher this way may suggest a structural component to the shift in researcher role in the context of research-practice partnerships that are described (e.g., Cohen-Vogel et al, 2015). This insight presents an important follow up investigation of the networked position of the researcher.…”

“…For many years, education researchers and policy makers devised technical innovations to improve learning at scale, and formulated processes to ensure the appropriate implementation of these programs (Slavin, 2002). In recent years, however, the education policy and research community has come to realize the promise of social innovations, particularly through including educators in the change process (Cohen-Vogel et al, 2015). This realization is seen in the emergence of research-practice partnerships as a promising pathway to engage in systems-level change (Coburn and Stein, 2010).…”

Research on Continuous Improvement: Exploring the Complexities of Managing Educational Change

“…First, the forebears of CI methods come from a variety of sectors, disciplines, and epistemological traditions. For example, improvement science and the quality movement originated in the manufacturing sector (Deming, 1982) and then spread to health care (Cohen-Vogel et al, 2015), sociocultural theory emerged from study of apprenticeships (Lave & Wenger, 1991), and Argyris et al's (1985) and Argyris and Schön's (1997) work in organizational learning and action science spanned across sectors. Interestingly, although these forebears draw heavily on the work of John Deweyhence his centrality in our network diagram-CI methods rarely cite Dewey's work directly.…”