This series of blog posts presents resources for educators from the 2021 Summit on Improvement in Education (and elsewhere). This offering includes the second volume of resources focused on Leadership.
Addressing complex educational problems using positive deviance requires detective work. The task: to discover “outliers” who have succeeded under conditions where most others fail; uncover the strategies they use; and design opportunities to share those strategies.
Variability is everywhere in education. Everything from a school’s location to the textbooks it uses impact student learning. The Six Sigma approach to improvement emphasizes data analysis to reduce variance and inefficiency in school processes to help all students succeed.
Everyone has a stake and a say in the Lean approach to improving educational achievement. The school improvement model evolved from Toyota’s philosophy of building a culture in which all employees were empowered and expected to be part of providing the best possible product.
The implementation science approach to improvement in education centers on how to accommodate local school variables and other contextual factors that can impede successful implementation of change ideas, by creating teams that include external facilitators and specialists.
A school performance framework in California’s Oakland Unified School District gives schools a multi-faceted and detailed look at where they need to improve based on more than a dozen measures of both academic achievement and the culture and climate of the school.
A broad collaboration of stakeholders, from teachers and administrators to researchers and designers, is a key element of design-based implementation research, a school change approach illustrated by an effort to improve genetics instruction from kindergarten to high school.
Social relationships are key to the potential of networked improvement communities to accelerate and sharpen education change using the improvement science approach. Veterans of the process explain how they keep strengthening those connections while expanding their networks.
When the Kentucky Department of Education wanted a strategy to significantly increase the number of high school students prepared for college and/or careers, it turned to deliverology, a method used by British Prime Minister Tony Blair to make good on his campaign promises.
A special issue of the journal Quality Assurance in Education breaks down seven approaches to improvement in education, beginning with the networked improvement model. Explore key features and principles of this method through a successful example of helping new teachers.
A networked improvement community in Tennessee that’s applying improvement science to address literacy rates finds that journey mapping helps to see the system more clearly, to build empathy for students affected by the problems, and to focus their improvement work.
Policy can do a lot to support positive changes, but policy alone isn’t effective in such large, diverse, and complex arenas as education, wrote policy analyst Paul Lingenfelter in comments solicited by the federal Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking.
What will it take to make effective, lasting, and scalable education improvements? It’s not a silver bullet. Policymakers and practitioners must start working together to design solutions based on research and evidence.
The new federal guidance on using research to improve schools is outlined in Education Week’s Inside School Research blog. In the post, Ash Vasudeva, Carnegie’s Vice President for Strategic Initiatives, voices his support for the move to close the gap between school improvement research and the places where the intervention will…
In a recent SSIR article, Srik Gopal and Lisbeth B. Schorr make the case that an uncritical application of the "Moneyball" ideal is a flawed approach that overlooks "the fundamental realities of how complex social change happens."
At the 2016 Carnegie Summit, Alex “Sandy” Pentland shared his research in the field of social physics that can help us understand the relationships between human behavior, collective experience, and the spread of ideas.
Permanent link to page: https://www.carnegiefoundation.org/blog/how-ideas-spread-in-and-between-groups-lessons-from-social-physics/
