Mapping Where Innovation Happens

• In Event: Innovative Technology Practices to Support Equitable Schooling

Abstract

Where are K–12 schools innovating across the country in pursuit of equitable, student-centered learning? This question spurred the creation of the [BLINDED] project, a collaboration among researchers and practitioners to map where innovation is occurring, and what kinds of innovative practices schools are pursuing.

Based on interviews with leaders in the field of personalized, student-centered learning, we identified the following barriers to understanding and scaling innovation:

-A limited subset of schools receives the most public recognition for innovation. Learning about innovative schools is through existing social networks, creating an echo chamber that distorts and diminishes the larger landscape of student-centered learning.
-The absence of a comprehensive picture of innovation means that diverse approaches showing promise for communities experiencing marginalization, may go unnoticed by funders, researchers, and others.
-Ultimately, if the field is to pursue evidence for what works for whom in what circumstances, more comprehensive data sources will be needed to document the specific innovative approaches being used.

The [BLINDED] project used a discovery-driven planning approach (McGrath & MacMillan, 2009) to test a process for crowdsourcing information about innovative schools around the country, particularly those that are less well known at a national level. The project uses snowball sampling (Parker et al., 2019) and aggregates self-reported perspectives from education-focused organizations and school leaders to identify schools pursuing innovation and document innovative practices.

The [BLINDED] project conducted three rounds of crowdsourcing over three school years. The dataset now includes 483 schools. Overall, schools consistently represent a wide range of contexts and communities in 48 states and the District of Columbia. Most importantly, the crowdsourcing methodology appears to indicate some success at surfacing schools that are innovating while still under the radar. Up to three quarters of nominated schools did not appear in a comparison set of schools from 11 other commonly-referenced lists and databases.

The [BLINDED] project’s wealth of data on schools’ reported practices reveals insights, both suspected and surprising, about the approaches innovative schools are pursuing, and in what circumstances. For example:

-Among schools that participated in the project in both 2018-19 and 2020-21, blended learning was most often added as a practice during this timeframe.

-Systemic inequities were reported as a key catalyst for innovation in about half of participating schools.
Locale (urban, suburban, or rural) was the biggest predictor of [BLINDED] schools selecting equity-focused practices in 2020-21.

The dataset offers a view into innovation in a sample of schools pursuing leadership-backed, schoolwide approaches to student-centered learning. While not intended to be nationally representative, the project nevertheless has demonstrated success at surfacing examples of school innovation that are not widely recognized. The study has documented a variety of use cases for the data among education funders, intermediary organizations, researchers, and school system leaders. For the research community specifically, the dataset offers a rich source of potential study sites as well as a source of hypotheses to investigate based on up-to-date information about the approaches schools are pursuing to drive equity and improve student experiences.

Author

• Chelsea Waite, Christensen Institute