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Steps to Schoolwide Success

Mar. 18, 2020—We are beyond excited to announce the release of our newest book! Steps to Schoolwide Success: Systemic Practices for Connecting Social-Emotional and Academic Learning, by Stacey A. Rutledge, Marisa Cannata, Stephanie L. Brown, and Daniel G. Traeger, tells the story of developing, implementing, and scaling an improvement initiative in Broward County Public Schools. Aimed at...

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Using Networked Improvement to Build Student Ownership and Responsibility

Dec. 18, 2019—Marisa Cannata, Christopher Redding, and Tuan D. Nguyen have a new paper published in Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, entitled Building Student Ownership and Responsibility: Examining Student Outcomes from a Research-Practice Partnership. The paper focuses on the link between a growing emphasis on the importance of co-cognitive traits and the emergence of research-practice partnerships to...

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Dilemmas of research-practice partnerships

Mar. 13, 2019—The National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools has worked in partnership with two of the nation’s largest school districts since 2010 to test an improvement process that brings together researchers, developers, and educators to scale collaboratively designed innovations aimed at reducing disparities in educational attainment. In this article, we draw on this partnership work...

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System learning for organizational change

Feb. 23, 2018—Improvement requires learning. When we are trying to improve an organization, we need to attend to not just individual learning, but collective learning. This paper presents evidence from a unique reform model that allowed teachers and other educators in a large urban district to collaborate with one another in the development of an innovation meant...

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Increasing principal influence over hiring

Jan. 10, 2018—My newest paper, with Mimi Engel and Chris Curran, uses seven waves of the Schools and Staffing Survey to explore trends in principal influence over hiring new teachers in their schools. Published in the Journal of Educational Administration, “Principal influence in teacher hiring: documenting decentralization over time” sheds light on an important topic in policy...

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Special Issue on New Frontiers in Scaling Up Research

Oct. 13, 2017—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...

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Research on educator engagement in continuous improvement

Jul. 31, 2017—Ariel Tichnor-Wagner, John Wachen, Marisa Cannata, and Lora Cohen-Vogel have published a new paper in the Journal of Educational Change. This article, “Continuous Improvement in the public school context: Understanding how educators respond to plan-do-study-act cycles” reports on what we’ve learned about introducing continuous improvement research in two large school districts.The last 5 years have...

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New research on effective high schools

Jun. 20, 2017—I have published a new paper in AERA Open, along with my colleagues Thomas Smith and Katherine Taylor Haynes. This article, “Integrating Academic Press and Support by Increasing Student Ownership and Responsibility” reports the results of our intensive case study research on higher and lower performing high schools in one of our partner districts. Using...

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Read Spring 2017 Conference Papers

May. 10, 2017—I had a busy spring, with many conference presentations. See below to read the working papers I presented. Cannata, M., Redding, C., Brown, S., Joshi, E., & Rutledge, S., Joshi, E. (2017). How Ideas Spread: Establishing a Networked Improvement Community. Presentation at the Carnegie Foundation Summit on Improvement in Education in San Francisco, CA, March...

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Paper on Using Teacher Effectiveness Data in Hiring

Jan. 20, 2017—I have published a new paper in Educational Administration Quarterly, along with my colleagues Mollie Rubin, Ellen Goldring, Jason Grissom, Christine Neumerski, Timothy Drake, and Patrick Schuermann. This article, “Using Teacher Effectiveness Data for Information-Rich Hiring” examines how the hiring process is changing as a result of teacher evaluation reforms. New teacher effectiveness measures have...

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