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In spring 2003, HGSE and Temple University’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Technology in Education Consortium (MAR*TEC) convened the Ed School’s first Usable Knowledge working conference. Participating were 80 researchers, policymakers, and practitioners whose work centers on technology and scaling up in education. Wirth Professor Chris Dede and senior lecturer James Honan worked with Temple’s Laurence Peters to edit Scaling Up Success: Lessons Learned from Technology-based Educational Improvement, a book that captures the work of the conference. On Tuesday, May 3, HGSE will host an Askwith Education Forum inspired by Scaling Up Success at which adapting technology-based educational innovations and bringing different models and best practices to scale will be discussed.
Q: Why is scaling up so difficult in the field of education, particularly when it has been so successful in other fields? A: In our opinion, there are a few factors that relate to the particular challenges of scaling up innovations in schools and school districts. First, a number of teaching innovations occur within the classrooms of individual teachers, but there are not always opportunities or mechanisms for generalizing innovative practices of a single instructor within a school or across schools in a school district. Second, there is a wide variation among schools and school districts with regard to the particular context within which teaching and learning are taking place—what works in one school setting may not be effective in another setting. Lastly, the constantly evolving federal and state political environments within which educational leaders operate may account for some of the difficulties associated with scaling up innovations in school and school district settings. An example to demonstrate the contrast between education and other environments comes to mind: In the fast-food industry, it is quite possible that an innovative practice in a single location might be easily scaled up to many stores in the franchise and perhaps to other types of restaurants without the same challenges we face in educational settings. Q: In Scaling Up Success, you write, “A dynamic relationship should exist between practitioners and policymakers in an environment that encourages and supports local innovation so that it might become a model for best practice that then gets fed back into the larger system.” How do you suggest that practitioners and policymakers create and maintain this dynamic relationship? A: As part of scholarship on scaling up, a team of researchers—[Phyllis] Blumenfeld, [Barry] Fishman, [Joseph] Krajcik, [Ron] Marx, and [Elliot] Soloway—developed a framework for evaluating the fit between innovations and intended contexts of use. Three dimensions of usability—capability, policy and management, and school culture—are arrayed as three axes originating from a common point (the origin, which represents the current capacity of the district to use the innovation) to form a three-dimensional space. The innovation is mapped into this space, and its distance from the origin represents a gap between the capacity required to successfully use the innovation and the current capacity of the school district.
Conceptualized in this manner, scaling up involves closing gaps that exist between the innovation’s demands and an organization’s capacity. Closing a gap on the culture axis—the extent to which an innovation adheres to or diverges from the existing norms, beliefs, values, and expectations for practice at different levels of the system—may entail providing opportunities for teachers and administrators to gain new visions of practice and policy consistent with features of the innovation. Closing a gap on the capability dimension may involve providing professional development for teachers and administrators, or modifying activities and redesigning technology to reduce new knowledge and skills required for effective implementation. Finally, closing a gap on the policy and management dimension may require changing school and district policies and procedures, as well as adapting the innovation to improve its fit with current practices. All of these initiatives foster new types of dynamic relationships between policymakers and practitioners. Q: How can school districts, administrators, and educators deal with such inevitable overturn and maintain stability of the sake of scaling up? A: Stable leadership and stable funding help to increase the likelihood that innovative teaching strategies might spread to multiple schools and school districts. Leadership turnover can occur at all levels of a school district. However, if ownership of successful innovations can be transferred to multiple constituencies within a school or school district, then perhaps those innovations might persist during inevitable leadership transitions. The key to addressing instability in funding of educational innovation is to identify and seek longer-term sources of financial support for these initiatives. School districts, administrators, and educators admittedly face a number of challenges regarding instability in both leadership and funding. However, by including various constituencies in the process of educational innovation and by being proactive about identifying sustainable funding for innovative teaching practices, successful practices and techniques might be scaled up within and across schools and school districts. Q: How will scaling up help achieve the School’s goal of “professionalizing” the education field? A: Basing scalable innovations on strong, stable leadership; teacher ownership; and community support is a pattern commonly seen in successful systemic reform. Education researchers [Jason] Snipes, [Fred] Doolittle, and [Corinne] Herlihy conducted a study, “Foundations for Success: Case Studies of how Urban School Districts Improve Student Achievement,” sponsored by the Council of the Great City Schools and MDRC. This study focused on determining which large urban districts have improved on a system-wide scale and what common factors across these district initiatives seem responsible for successful reforms.
There were three major findings on district characteristics that promote success in systemic reform: First, urban school districts that have improved performance on a broad scale share certain preconditions for reform, such as political and organizational stability over a prolonged period and agreement among school board members, the superintendent, and community leaders that student achievement is the top priority. Also, district leadership can play a key role in scaling up improvements through strategies such as setting district-wide goals, holding district- and building-level administrators personally accountable for results; adopting uniform curriculum and instructional approaches that apply to every school; and redefining the main role of the central office as one of guiding, supporting, and improving instruction at the school building level. And finally, faster-improving urban school districts provide principals and teachers with early and ongoing assessment data, along with training and support to help them use these data to improve teaching and learning. These are all characteristics of successful professional organizations in other sectors of society and illustrate the ways in which many strategies for effectiveness generalize across professions, fields, and disciplines. Q:You stress the need for "usable knowledge" and for research that is accessible to practitioners. How have the contributors to Scaling Up Success attempted to execute the same goals in their work? A: In their paper for the book, Dewey Goes Digital: Scaling Up Constructivist Pedagogies and the Promise of New Technologies, lecturer Stone Wiske and professor David Perkins demonstrate how HGSE’s WIDE World professional development initiative illustrates how successful scalability projects are infused with usable knowledge. The design of WIDE World is based on two central assumptions. First, improving education requires bridging the knowledge-action gap—the gulf between current understandings of best practice and actual practice. One strategy is to cultivate research-based pedagogical craft while adapting to or adjusting the context to support wide-scale change. Second, designs should be based on explicit scaling models: causal theories about how the designs address some, if not all, aspects of craft and context as they are complicated at scale by problems of magnitude and variation. The scalability model for WIDE World that emerges from these assumptions relies on human interaction rather than prepared materials to build teachers’ capacity for innovation. WIDE World utilizes expert coaches to provide tailored support and suggestions and to promote interaction among peers as teachers change their practice, to manage mutual adaptation of WIDE innovations and local context, and to augment the support provided by materials. For More Information
HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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