90-Day Cycles are a structured method to develop and test new processes, tools, practices or knowledge frameworks in support of improvement work. This handbook details how to plan and execute a 90-Day Cycle and includes examples from practice.

This session, presented at the 2023 Summit on Improvement in Education, introduces the role of disciplined inquiry in improvement efforts and unpacks key moves and considerations to support learning about a change idea utilizing a plan-do-study-act (PDSA) cycle.

This fourth post in a series on networked improvement community (NIC) initiation spotlights issues related to building a culture that supports the successful launch of networked improvement work. In it, leaders from the Network to Transform Teaching (NT3—initiated and maintained by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards) reflect on their experience initiating a NIC.

This is the second post in a series designed to explore and bring to life the framework for initiating networked improvement communities (NICs). It offers an example of how one network organized to build the expertise and capacity of network leaders and members to learn through disciplined inquiry.

Improvement coaches encounter common kinds of challenges as they work with teams towards different improvement aims. Four categories of challenges, drawn from interviews with improvement coaches about their practice, can be used to understand the specific needs of an improvement team in order to help that team move forward. Resources include additional questions that can help a coach reflect on their practice.

This session, presented at the 2020 Summit on Improvement in Education, explains how change packages are developed and how they can be used to scale effective ideas.

These resources focus on how coaches can help teams build efficient and effective inquiry routines using PDSA cycles. Materials include a tool to help a coach to reflect on a PDSA artifact as well as short video clips.

This session, presented at the 2022 Summit on Improvement in Education, introduces key causal system analysis tools and discusses how fishbone diagrams can be leveraged to organize root causes and to deepen shared understanding of the problem and the system producing it.

This session, recorded at the 2020 Summit on Improvement in Education, explores considerations for organizing an improvement effort and building a learning system to develop and refine a theory of improvement and make progress towards an improvement goal.

This session, recorded for on-demand viewing as part of the 2021 Summit on Improvement in Education, presents six dispositions of educational improvers, as well as organizational resources and conditions that can foster them.

Network hub teams can use this self-assessment tool to identify strengths and areas for growth as they support the development of a NIC as a scientific-professional learning community. The tool describes seven domains of effort that are essential for operating a developing networked improvement community through its first 1-3 years after launch.

The Developmental Progressions Framework describes aspects of a partnership between a school district and university that can be used to set goals and identify next actions to deepen and strengthen the collaborative relationship.

This special issue of the Peabody Journal of Education unpacks essential issues and challenges related to launching and operating improvement networks. The articles center on network health and development, elevating lessons learned from research into networks involved in the Gates Foundation’s Networks for School Improvement (NSI) initiative, with attention to network organization, leadership, and development over time.

This session, presented by Community Design Partners at the 2021 Summit on Improvement in Education, introduces empathy interviews as a tool for understanding the perspective of others when doing improvement work. The session introduces approaches and mindsets for conducting empathy research as a core practice in human-centered continuous improvement.

This session, recorded at the Carnegie Summit in 2021, introduces the Evidence for Improvement Framework. The Framework illustrates how improvement networks can be conceptualized and measured using a three-level nested model composed of (1) a working theory of improvement towards achieving their aim, (2) an improvement enterprise that functions as a scientific learning community, and (3) environmental contexts that may constrain or enable improvement efforts.

This paper offers an integrated perspective on how evidence can be marshaled by network leaders and their analytic partners to inform improvement networks in advancing productive change. The related video provides an introduction to the Evidence for Improvement framework.

This fifth post in a series on networked improvement community (NIC) initiation draws on an analogy to pop-up business. Through comparing and contrasting the features of the two kinds of organizations, the author seeks to deepen understanding of the particular nature of NICs and the process of NIC initation.

Facilitating Improvement Teams℠ is an intermediate-level course that engages coordinators, facilitators, and those who support improvement teams in hands-on, practical learning experiences. Activities focus on building participants’ skills in facilitating small improvement teams through cycles of testing and learning. This course is fee-based.

This blog post summarizes five areas of activity for an initiation team launching an improvement effort. Synthesizing ideas presented in “A Framework for the Initiation of Networked Improvement Communities” (Russell et al, 2017), it describes each of the five areas and offers a related example.

This session, presented at the 2020 Summit on Improvement in Education, shares how narratives can be used to foster improvement culture and shared identity among networked improvement communities and teams.

The Foundational Handbook in Improvement Research in Education elaborates the intellectual foundations, explores the organizational and policy contexts, reviews approaches, and examines methods of improvement research.

This paper summarizes findings of an exploratory study to understand important dispositions common among educational improvers. Drawing on interviews with educators involved with Networked Improvement Communities, the authors identify six dispositions of improvers, as well as organizational resources and conditions that can foster them.

Existing in many different sectors, high-reliability organizations achieve consistently high-quality outcomes while avoiding serious accidents and failures. This session, recorded at the 2020 Summit on Improvement in Education, explores how those organizations organize themselves to make failure unlikely, and what we can learn from them that might be applied in education.

How a City Learned to Improve Its Schools offers comprehensive analysis of the astonishing changes that elevated the Chicago public school system from one of the worst in the nation to one of the most improved.

This is the first post in a series of designed to explore and bring to life the framework for initiating networked improvement communities (NICs). This post outlines the framework itself, summarizing five domains of NIC activity organized around the core problem of practice the NIC seeks to address.

Hub leadership teams support the development of a NIC and its ability to function as a scientific, professional learning community that is continuously learning from its efforts. These resources include a framework for understanding the different processes that hub leaders manage as well as tools for a hub team to organize its work in service of the network.

This casebook and discussion guide is designed for improvement coaches, individually and in groups, to learn through reflecting on and analyzing instances of coaching practice. The guide includes categories of coaching dilemmas, a discussion protocol, and coaching considerations. Watch the related video for an introduction to the categories and the protocol.

Improvement in Action highlights six examples of rigorous, high-quality improvement work in districts, schools, and professional development networks across the country. These examples provide evidence of how different organizations put the six improvement principles introduced in Learning to Improve into practice in order to realize significant results for the students they serve.

Improvement Reviews are structured sessions for improvement teams and networks to ask for and receive feedback on specific aspects of their work. Scheduled at intervals during an improvement effort, reviews provide an opportunity for presenting teams to reflect on their work and to invite feedback from reviewers with outside perspective and relevant expertise related to specific problems of practice.

Improvement Science in Practice: Finding Solutions Through Iterative Testing℠ is an intermediate-level course for individuals and teams seeking to strengthen their ability to learn through disciplined, rigorous inquiry cycles. This course is fee-based.

Improving America’s Schools Together: How District-University Partnerships and Continuous Improvement Can Transform Education includes stories, examples, and tools from 11 district-university partnerships using improvement science as a shared method to advance local priorities for students and educators.

This facilitator’s handbook and related teaching materials prepare an experienced improver to lead a group through a case-based simulation of an extended improvement effort. Participants experience an improvement journey from initial problem identification through to seeing measurable improvement and sharing effective changes through simulation activities.

Introduction to Networked Improvement Basics℠ is an online course that introduces how improvement science brings discipline and specific methods to problem solving to improve outcomes reliably at scale. Participants develop conceptual understanding of the principles and practices of improvement science and build skills to apply improvement methods to real problems of practice. This course is fee-based.

This session, presented at the 2022 Summit on Improvement in Education, explores how examination of variation can point to opportunities for improvement and support focusing improvement resources in a system. Presenters demonstrate using Shewhart charts to understand variation, and ways to use tools to investigate variation to answer questions posed in an improvement journey.

This glossary organizes a selection of key terms used in the book, Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better, that have formal meaning.

Learning to Improve shows how a disciplined approach to inquiry, combined with the power of social learning in a network, can accelerate improvement in education. The text introduces Six Improvement Principles that organize the approach, and illustrates them in action with examples from documented improvement efforts.

This session, pre-recorded as part of the virtual 2020 Summit on Improvement in Education, explores ways that measurement for improvement differs from measurement for other purposes in education. It introduces the concept of a “system of measures” and offers a case example of how a such a system functions to inform an improvement effort.

This self-assessment tool enables network initiation or hub teams to assess their readiness to launch a networked improvement community. It can help teams to identify strengths as well as opportunities to build capability and internal capacity, or where external support may be needed in order to successfully launch a NIC.

The Networked Improvement Learning and Support (NILS™) platform supports social learning and improvement testing within networked improvement communities (NICs). Purpose-built to support improvement work across a network, the technology supports bringing together different forms of expertise and allows improvers to share and build on each others’ learning. This service requires subscription.

This is the third post in a series designed to explore and bring to life the framework for initiating networked improvement communities (NICs). Anchored in the reflections of leaders from the Mathematics Teacher Education Partnership on their experience initiating a NIC, this post spotlights issues related to leadership, organization, and operations that support the successful launch of networked improvement work.

Networks have the power to accelerate learning when they organize around a shared theory of improvement. This session, recorded at the 2021 Summit on Improvement in Education, explores different ways of organizing and sequencing learning in a network, as well as considerations for network leaders as they design a learning strategy. Case examples in the session illustrate different learning strategies as well as routines for updating a shared theory of improvement based on network learning.

This sixth post in a series on networked improvement community (NIC) initiation focuses on how network leaders consider the policy, political, and economic environments in which their networks operate. Author Don Peurach argues that while network leaders must focus on developing and supporting the continuous improvement activities of their networks, they must also attend to the external environments that can do much to enable, constrain, and complicate their work.

This session, presented at the 2024 Summit on Improvement in Education, discusses key considerations for planning to spread or scale a change idea in a new context. The session includes a handout to help you plan for how to attend to social factors related to the diffusion of innovations as well as key conditions of systems change.

This site offers definitions, guidance, examples, and technical briefs related to leveraging practical measures for continuous improvement. Designed to help the user get started with practical measurement, the site includes a path from getting started through identifying and testing a measure as well as a resource library.

Read or watch this keynote delivered by past Carnegie President Anthony S. Bryk at the 2017 Summit on Improvement in Education. In it, Bryk discusses the promise of networked communities to address educational inequities.

Run charts are an important tool for representing data in an improvement effort, for understanding variation over time, and for making evidence-based decisions. This session, recorded for the virtual 2020 Summit on Improvement in Education, details rules and practices for creating and interpreting these data displays.

In this session, offered at the 2021 Summit on Improvement in Education, presenter Huggy Rao, professor at the graduate school of business at Stanford University, shares ideas about scaling change within organizations. The session is builds on ideas and research from the book Scaling Up Excellence that Prof. Rao co-authored with Robert Sutton.

The Six Improvement Principles are core organizing ideas for improvement science. They speak to how problems are unpacked and understood and to how learning towards improvement is undertaken.

In 2018, the Center for Urban Education Leadership, University of Illinois at Chicago was recognized with the Spotlight on Quality in Continuous Improvement. The UIC story spotlights an innovative principal development program that has used disciplined continuous improvement strategies over an extended period of time to reshape how a university and its local school district can partner to fundamentally transform principal preparation.

The Central Valley Networked Improvement Community (CVNIC) was recognized with the Spotlight on Quality in Continuous Improvement in 2018 for its work to improve mathematics outcomes for 5th graders in seven rural, agricultural districts in Tulare County in the Central Valley of California. CVNIC’s work across that county is an example of how a regional support entity such as a County Office of Education can play an effective role in building the human and organizational capacities to effectively engage in improvement work and make improvement happen at scale.

The Connecticut RISE Network was recognized in 2020 with the Spotlight on Quality in Continuous Improvement for its work with schools across nine districts to significantly raise high school graduation rates through a focus on 9th grade on-track attainment. The network’s efforts are an example of collective action to use data to pinpoint needs, form hypotheses regarding potential improvements, and pursue ideas to advance student achievement.

The Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) works to develop skilled educators equipped to support all learners and aims to improve standards-driven instruction in every discipline at every grade level, K-12. In 2019, LDC was recognized with the Spotlight on Quality in Continuous Improvement for its use of disciplined inquiry processes to test and refine the core elements of their program design.

The Learning Collaborative, a networked improvement community of four charter networks in Tennessee, formed around raising persistently low literacy achievement scores for their students. The network’s work is an example of the power of marrying content-based professional learning for teachers to improvement science to produce gains in teaching and learning. In 2018, the Memphis KIPP Wheatley Learning Collaborative was recognized with the Spotlight on Quality in Continuous Improvement.

The National Implementation Research Network (NIRN), in partnership with the Kentucky Department of Education, was recognized with the Spotlight on Quality in Continuous Improvement in 2018 for their work with educators at the school, district, regional, and state levels to marry implementation and improvement science. In support of the state’s goal to dramatically improve mathematics achievement by strengthening the use of innovative, evidence-based mathematics practices, the partnership created a learning system where practice informs policy, and policy enhances sustainable practice.

Northwest Regional Education Service District (NWRESD) serves schools and districts in four counties in northwestern Oregon. They formed a 9th grade success network of 31 high schools in their region that connected schools to one another, and strengthened the teaming and efficacy of adults in schools, in service of keeping students on-track to graduate. In 2019 NWRESD was selected as a Spotlight on Quality in Continuous Improvement honoree because of its efforts to enhance interagency collaboration to make measurable improvement on a state-level education policy priority.

The Queensland Department of Education (Australia) was honored with the Spotlight on Quality in Continuous Improvement in 2019 for its 10-year improvement journey which dramatically transformed the nature of instruction and achieved compelling improvements in student outcomes. In its efforts the Department has used data to inform and align decision making across the system, refined a School Improvement Model that defines roles and practices for teachers and leaders, and cultivated professional communities that support schools learning from each other.

StriveTogether and United Way of Salt Lake joined together to convene an impact and improvement network of school and community stakeholders from three school districts to tackle chronic absenteeism in grades K-3. They were recognized with the 2018 Spotlight on Quality in Continuous Improvement for the work of that network.

In 2018, the nonprofit organization Fundación Educacional Oportunidad was recognized with the Spotlight on Quality in Continuous Improvement for its work to improve the language skills of economically disadvantaged preschoolers in Chile. Fundación’s work is noteworthy for blending insights from scholarship, quality improvement, and on-the-ground expertise in support of children’s learning.

The University of Chicago Network for College Success (NCS) partnered with high schools in the Chicago Public School district to create conditions in 9th grade for student success to and through high school and college. In 2020 NCS was recognized with the Spotlight on Quality in Continuous Improvement for its networked approach to cultivate postsecondary readiness and success for all students by translating research into practice and supporting high school leaders to organize their schools for improvement and innovation.

The Carnegie Teaching Commons is a searchable collection of instructional resources for the teaching of improvement science and networked improvement communities. The Commons is designed for use by coaches, facilitators and leaders who are developing the dispositions and skills of others to use improvement science and learn together in networks.

This session, recorded at the 2021 Summit on Improvement in Education, explores the human side of change. Grounded in the Institute for Healthcare Improvement Psychology of Change Framework, the session includes reflections from a panel of leaders about their work supporting improvement in their contexts.

This paper describes a framework for network development. The framework describes the technical core of improvement activity as well as how networks structure roles and relationships and foster norms and identities that form the social structure of the community working and learning together. View the related video for an introduction to the framework with examples.

Thriving networked improvement communities (NICs) exhibit distinct social structures that support and enable the technical improvement work that the NIC is organized to undertake. This session, recorded at the 2021 Summit on Improvement in Education, discusses how those features can be recognized, assessed, and developed.

This Reflection Guide summarizes the findings of a Carnegie Foundation project to understand how executive leaders in education transform their organizations to be capable of producing new levels of system performance through the use of improvement science principles. It includes questions to support leaders to reflect on their own practice in three domains of leadership for system transformation. Watch the video to hear from leaders who have used the guide in their practice.

This blog post discusses the challenge of bringing empirically-warranted solutions into new settings in ways that are sensitive to local conditions and contexts. Contrasting integrity of implementation with fidelity of implementation, author Paul LeMahieu offers considerations for designing for implementation with integrity.

This 2015 blog post introduces the distinctive features of Networked Improvement Communities (NICs) and identifies some of their advantages for accelerating learning about high-leverage educational problems.