Social Learning–Powered Improvement

• In Event: How a City Learned to Improve Its Schools: Chicago's Story

Abstract

Through this period, a collective cognition—what learning scientists call social learning—emerged and matured. As individuals proximate to the actual work of improving schools directly engaged with others, it created possibilities for new collective understandings to form around the shared tasks of improving schools. Being in the thick of it, and with a responsibility for making things better was different from the more passive stance of being on the sidelines and criticizing the inadequacy of others’ efforts. Such experiences forced a reconciliation between two compelling but very different ways of knowing—research and policy-based theories about how to improve schools; and the actual lived experiences of students, teachers, parents, and community members attempting to do this work.
Despite these encouraging developments, much work remains. Underperforming schools still cluster on the south and west sides of Chicago in very poor, racially isolated African American and Latino communities. These were the communities that disproportionately experienced school closings and loss of their neighborhood schools.

Author

• Al Bertani, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Presenting Author