With Scale in Mind: An Integrated Model of School-Based Design and Implementation

• 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

Despite decades of ambitious reform, high schools have generally been unable to improve students’ academic performance, particularly among students from traditionally lower-performing subgroups (Cohen, Moffitt, & Goldin, 2007; Elmore, 1980; Rowan, 2002). Further, practices that may be effective in certain sites are rarely spread to new school contexts. Previous approaches to scaling up—the process of deep, consequential, and sustained change that teachers and schools make in response to a new program or intervention—have rarely been able to achieve this goal (Coburn, 2003). In this paper, we present a conceptual framework for the research and development center, which is designed to foster scale (Coburn, 2003). Unlike other reform models that separate design from implementation, we assert that uniting these elements builds the knowledge, will, and capacity to scale up innovative practices.
Through our preliminary work in three high schools in two large urban districts that serve a large number of students from traditionally underserved racial/ethnic groups—Broward County Public Schools (BCPS) and Fort Worth Independent School District (FWISD)—we offer this conceptual framework as the basis for the center’s implementation work. Our model begins with an organizational structure for undertaking school-based change that draws on the combined expertise of developers, researchers, and local practitioners in the process of designing, implementing, refining, and assessing the effectiveness of interventions that emerge from the districts where the change efforts are scaled. The Center’s model seeks to surmount many of the perennial challenges inherent in implementation, by involving school and district stakeholders in designing, developing, testing and adapting as well as implementing the innovation. This level of involvement aims to help implementers understand the need for the innovation and also involve them in design, thereby engendering their buy-in and commitment and developing their capacity to implement the design.
In this paper, we review the literature on educational implementation, with a particular focus on the challenges of previous school reform efforts and then describe our integrated approach to design, implementation, and scale. We focus on our phased implementation approach where the output from each phase of the process—Research, Design and Development, Implementation, and Scale Up—is used to inform the work of the next phase. Rather than a linear progression from phase to phase, the work is iterative and incremental. For example, initial implementation of the innovation occurs on a small scale as the different components of the innovation are tested and further developed. Aspects of the design are then revised, tested, and a local evidence base is built around the effective practices of the design and is gradually scaled in, as teachers and other adults adopt practices in additional classrooms and grades. We describe this process as phased implementation. Compared to the conventional research-to-practice pathway that emphasizes fidelity of externally designed elements without sufficient attention to local contexts, the center has developed an integrative model of design, implementation, and scale up that seeks to address the persistent research-to-practice gap.

Authors

• Christopher Redding, Vanderbilt University - Peabody College

• Katherine Taylor Haynes, Vanderbilt University

• Marisa A. Cannata, Vanderbilt University