Special Issue on New Frontiers in Scaling Up Research
The past several decades have seen a substantial amount of time, resources, and expertise focused on producing sustainable improvement in schools at scale. Research on these efforts have highlighted how complex this challenge is, as it needs to attend to building teacher support and participation, aligning with the organizational context, and building capacity among stakeholders across organizational levels. Despite this substantial research base on implementation and scale, new reform efforts often repeat the same challenges, leading to calls that school systems—and the researchers and developers who work with them—need to fundamentally change their approach to educational improvement at scale.
To date, most improvement efforts have focused on identifying “what works” and disseminating that school systems, while attention has focused on how organizational and social contexts shape how, and for whom, reforms work. These new approaches to scale have taken several overlapping forms, including bringing improvement science structures and processes into education, design-based implementation research, and research-practice partnerships. What these efforts share is a focus on improvement at scale that requires researchers and educators to work in partnership to design, implement, and scale education innovations. Re-focusing on educational improvement at scale, rather than program implementation at scale, means recognizing that improvement comes not from just faithfully executing a highly developed program, but integrating new practices with existing systems and building collective knowledge about how practices lead to educational outcomes.
With my colleague Stacey Rutledge, I recently edited a special issue of the Peabody Journal of Education focuses on what has been learned from these new approaches to scale. The articles draw from four different improvement efforts across multiple states and contexts to achieve educational success at scale. The articles include:
Introduction to New Frontiers in Scaling Up Research, by Marisa Cannata and Stacey Rutledge.
The introduction to the special issue sets the context for why new approaches to scale are needed and the forms these efforts have taken. It provides a context for each article in the special issue and outlines several key tensions in scaling up that are lessons from the National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools.
Partnering for Improvement: Improvement Communities and Their Role in Scale Up, by Marisa Cannata, Lora Cohen-Vogel, and Michael Sorum
This article describes different forms of improvement communities and the commonalities between them. It describes the improvement communities established in the National Center on Scaling Up’s partnership with Fort Worth ISD and the opportunities and challenges experienced in those communities.
With Scale in Mind: A Continuous Improvement Model for Implementation, by Christopher Redding, Katherine Taylor Haynes, and Marisa Cannata
The conceptual framework in this paper puts forward a model for continuous improvement that integrates design, development, and implementation. We argue that involving district stakeholders in all phases of the improvement process enhances the possibility of scale up.