Conference Overview

Need
The passage into law of policies such as “No Child Left Behind” has spurred educators’ interest in importing innovations successful in other venues, to help their districts meet ambitious timetables for student achievement. In particular, practitioners and policymakers are striving to scale up technology-based educational interventions, which offer the promise of substantial gains in learner outcomes to meet the progressively higher levels required for all types of students by new legislation. Advanced computing and telecommunications are enabling sophisticated improvements in teaching, learning, and schooling (e.g., standards-based teaching and assessment, data-based decision making, effective organizational management) that encompass many strategies for reform. Further, using these strategies for increasing educational effectiveness provides a means for realizing the power of substantial investments recently made in information technology through the federal e-rate and similar funding mechanisms. Because learning technologies help to standardize content and delivery, educators are also attracted by ways in which this innovation can meet demands for “scientifically based research” proving efficacy.

Unfortunately, attempts to transfer into many school settings an educational intervention successful in one place have proven very difficult. Because of the strong influence of local contextual factors on any educational process, modifications in both the intervention and its new settings-of-usage are essential for success outside the initial site. Conventional research and dissemination approaches provide few insights into understanding and implementing this process of adaptation, so traditional improvement strategies generally fail to surmount challenges of replication and “scaling up.” However, insights are emerging in the research community studying technology-based educational improvement about how to transfer and scale successes. Moreover, findings about replicating technology-based innovations can generalize to many other types of educational improvements, further enhancing interest in this topic.

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Purpose
Both Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (HGSE) and Temple University’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Technology in Education Consortium (MAR*TEC) have been energetically engaged with the problems of implementation of reform for decades. These institutions have been particularly concerned with issues endemic to urban education, studying ways technology-based innovations can make an impact in areas of greatest need. As a result of this work, HGSE and MAR*TEC have decided to collaborate on a small working conference of researchers, policymakers, and practitioners whose work centers on “Scaling Up Success: Lessons Learned from Technology-based Educational Improvement.” This conference will synthesize insights from leading researchers working on challenges of transfer, generalization, scaling up, and adaptation of successful educational interventions. Participants in this meeting will include scholars studying these challenges, educators from implementation sites involved in their research, and national and state policymakers. This will enable representatives of these three communities to share their insights and to connect the “missing dots” between theory and practice that often undercut promising innovations.

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Content
We will hold the conference at HGSE March 20-21, 2003. About eighty people will participate, by invitation only. Prior to the conference, eleven of the researchers participating will develop short commissioned papers about their work that all attendees would read in advance. Each of these papers will describe a model of transfer/adaptation and a related real world example; these will provide the foci for initial conference sessions. At the start of these sessions, the scholar will give a brief summary of his or her paper, and an educator involved in that implementation will present field-based perspectives on this conceptual framework. The remainder of the session will center on attendees discussing the strengths and limits of that model for scaling-up.

The ideas and experiences of the participating scholars exemplify leading-edge thinking about scaling up success in pre-college education.

At the conference, HGSE Dean Ellen Condliffe Lagemann will deliver the opening address (which will also serve as foreward for the conference volume); she will also write the volume’s conclusion. Later sessions at the conference will focus on identifying similarities and differences among these models and their underlying theories, as well as on delineating the implications of this comparative analysis for educational practice and policy. Participants will also examine alternative methodologies that document and explain the contextual interdependence of interventions and settings. Based on this, the group will develop an agenda for further research needed on this topic.

HGSE faculty (e.g., Kate Bielaczyc, Allan Collins, Richard Elmore, Tom Hehir, Ilona Holland, Susan Moore Johnson, Glenn Kleiman, Kay Merseth, Dick Murnane, Bob Peterkin, Paul Reville, David Rose, Bob Schwartz, John Willett) will participate in the two days of conference activities and aid in orchestrating the various synthesis discussions (on comparative frameworks, methodologies, and chapters in the conference volume. MAR*TEC staff will develop a chapter in the conference volume on implications of these ideas for regional centers and labs as facilitators of transfer and adaptation.

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Contribution
Through aiding with policy formulation and by providing examples of best practices, the insights from this conference will aid policymakers and practitioners to meet their responsibilities under the new Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization and the No Child Left Behind legislation. The research community will also benefit through the dissemination of sophisticated models and methods for understanding the process of successfully adapting educational innovations effective in some other setting.

HGSE’s Chris Dede and Jim Honan, and MAR*TEC’s Laurence Peters will serve as editors of the conference volume. (HGSE is initiating a series of conferences on “Usable Knowledge: Linking Research and Practice” and anticipates a series of similar publications under this heading.)

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Intended Audiences
The audience for the knowledge obtained from this conference is a broad range of practitioners, scholars, and policymakers seeking insights on enabling large-scale educational improvement. The conference volume will have five target audiences:

1. faculty members who teach courses on educational innovation, reform, dissemination, or policy
2. faculty members who teach courses on learning technologies
3. practitioners and policymakers seeking insights about scaling up educational improvements
4. technology vendors seeking to understand developing a substantial market share in education
5. scholars seeking sophisticated models and methods for understanding the process of successfully adapting educational innovations.

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Dissemination
This Web site has been designed to serve as a national knowledge portal on scaling up. Part of the Web site is private, only for conference participants, and will serve as a vehicle for reading the draft conference papers in advance. The knowledge portal open to the public will phase into existence over a period of half a year, starting about a month after the conference. This portal will feature:

• Streaming video excerpts from presentations and discussions at the conference
• Streaming “video commentaries” in which participating HGSE faculty each host a six-minute analysis of contrasting viewpoints on an important issue raised at the conference
• Streaming video of brief interviews with selected, distinguished participants on their ideas about scaling up
• Brief written excerpts from the conference papers
• Links to other research materials—at HGSE and elsewhere—on scaling up educational innovations.

In addition to these and other features of the knowledge portal, we plan to present research results and findings from our conference at the national conferences of major professional associations in education, such as the American Educational Research Association and the International Society for Technology in Education.

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