Posted by Marisa Cannata on Thursday, October 12, 2017 in News.

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.

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.

Dilemmas of Prescriptive Practices and Perceived Alignment in Program Implementation, by Mollie Rubin, Susan Kemper Patrick, and Ellen Goldring

We examine initial implementation of a teacher-driven school re-culturing program in two high schools. We examine two distinct components to understand the extent of early implementation at the two schools: the nature of program practices, and how its goals and practices align with teachers’ existing practices and pedagogical beliefs. We highlight the tension between encouraging immediate uptake of program practices, and the long-term goals of school-wide.  In particular, we find that prescriptive practices, and those that are already aligned with teachers’ beliefs and perspectives about teaching, can be implemented with little pre-existing capacity and may lead to more consistent and quicker initial implementation, but this type of implementation may not encourage sufficient understanding of the program goals, and may inhibit the diffusion of practices moving forward.  Complex and abstract concepts requires a greater degree of skills, knowledge and understanding on the part of teachers.

Scaling Personalization: Exploring the Implementation of an Academic and Social-Emotional Innovation in High Schools, by Stacey Rutledge, Stephanie Brown, and Kitchka Petrova

This article explores the scaling up process associated with the implementation of a school-wide academic and social emotional reform called Personalization for Academic and Social-Emotional Learning (PASL).  Drawing from 97 semi-structured interviews with administrators, guidance counselors and teachers, I track ways in which participants in the schools described the ideas undergirding PASL as well as how they understood the bundle of practices and organizational routines aimed at institutionalizing personalization.

COMPASS-AIM: A University/P–12 Partnership Innovation for Continuous Improvement, by Kristen Wilcox, Hal A. Lawson, and Janet I. Angelis

This multiple case study investigated 228 school leadership team participants’ perceptions of an intervention called COMPASS. This article describes how COMPASS engages teams of educators in applying improvement science principles P-12 settings and describes the outcomes achieved.

School Processes That Can Drive Scaling-Up of an Innovation or Contribute to Its Abandonment, by Denis Newman, Jenna Zacamy, Valeriy Lazarev, and Lin Lin

This five-year study focused on school processes that promote the scaling-up of a high school academic literacy framework.  We found that initial teacher participation in team meetings and school-wide commitment to the innovation predicted “scaling-in” within schools.