Implementing Educational Innovations at Scale: Lessons From Improvement Science

• In Event: 66.080 - Roundtable Session 26
  In Roundtable Session: 66.080-7 - Implementation: Insights From the National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools

Abstract

With a growing concern that knowing what works in education is “not enough” for school improvement, the Institute for Education Sciences (IES) has launched a set of new grant initiatives to support efforts to “build the capacity to implement what works and the capacity to measure, check, and adapt to changes” (as cited in Sparks, 2012). These initiatives (Topics 1 and 2 of RFA 84.305H; RFA 84.305C) are intended to encourage researchers to explore processes by which schools in different contexts can continue to improve over time.
Continuous improvement research (CIR), as the approach is known, draws on lessons from implementation science and design-based research, and relies on the sustained engagement of both researchers and practitioners over multiple years or even decades. In the words of Tony Bryk, President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, an early purveyor of the approach in education, CIR brings researchers and educators together to answer, “what is the problem we're trying to solve, what is the change we're putting in place, and how will we know if that change is an improvement?" (Bryk, 2012). CIR focuses on cycles of improvement, in which partners in the work develop, test, and tweak interventions.
Reaction to the approach by those in education has been positive, with scholars and others speaking favorably about the direction IES is taking. Robert Granger, the immediate past president of the William T. Grant Foundation, for example, argues that IES’s continuous improvement initiative could produce a new model for education research, where the gold standard “isn't to run a trial” but “seeing consistent results across a number of conditions.” Stephen Raudenbush, chairman of the University of Chicago's Committee on Education, agrees: “While we can learn an enormous amount from interventions, they won't produce the broad changes we need.” On behalf of the Knowledge Alliance, Michele McLaughlin says the CIR focus is needed because "even the most cutting-edge practices, built on high-quality research and proven through rigorous testing, will have little measurable impact if not properly implemented” (as cited in Sparks, 2012).
This paper details how continuous improvement research – and the Plan, Do, Study, Act cycles at its core – can help bridge the research-practice divide and build capacity for implementation at scale. Beginning with a section that delineates the PDSA framework, the paper describes an application of PDSA by the research and development center as it worked collaboratively with Broward County Public Schools to implement a new innovation in its high schools.

Authors

• Lora A. Cohen-Vogel, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Allison Rose Socol, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Qi Xing, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Christopher Harrison, Florida Southern College

• Danielle Allen, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill