Sessions & Materials

Summaries of Conference Papers

The Challenge of Usable Knowledge in "Scaling Up":
New Ways of Linking Research to Practice

Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, Harvard University

Until recently, simple, linear input/output models dominated the study of learning and instruction. We now see things differently and it is our insistence on effective instruction that has fueled interest in questions of scale. One useful way of thinking about this issue is to consider problems of scale in education as a subset of questions pertaining to the concept of "useable knowledge" and related issues of design, context, and sustainability. Like "scaling up," "useable knowledge" helps us understand how we can harness new ideas and inventions to actually work toward solving educational problems.

Putting Local Schools Behind the Wheel of Change:
The Challenge of Moving from Successful Practice to Effective Policy

Fred Carrigg,
Special Assistant to the Commissioner for Urban Literacy
New Jersey Department of Education
Margaret Honey
Vice President and Director
EDC Center for Children and Technology
and
Ronald Thorpe
Senior Program Officer, Education
The Wallace-Reader's Digest Funds

The challenge we discuss in this paper is the tension between scale and localization as it pertains to the interweaving of successful practices at the local level and policy at the state level. How, in the field of education, do we help best practices to scale while recognizing the necessity of localization and the importance of context, relevance, and ownership?

In this paper, we will look at two levels of scaling: first within a district, and second within a state, and we will examine the emerging practices and strategies that are being put in place to ensure coherence and support across different levels of the education system. Our analysis is grounded in three broad assumptions:

• To the best of our knowledge, states have little experience in taking a successful local model and converting it to policy in an attempt to scale the model. Understanding is limited as to how such a process might be successfully realized.
• Coherence and support across state, district, and school levels is essential to enabling the process of localization to work effectively.
• The issue of scale is anchored in processes that enable schools and districts to localize practices relevant to them. Understanding how policies can both structure and support practices of localization while maintaining high levels of coherence and consistency around the goals of the policy is essential to enabling reforms to scale.

The context for this paper grows out of more than a decade of successful school reform work in Union City, New Jersey. The reform efforts in this Latino, urban district have resulted in more than 80% of Union City Students meeting state standards, dramatic increases in the number of students attending tier one and two colleges and universities, and remarkable declines in the number of students opting out of school. Much of the district's reform efforts can be credited to the leadership of Fred Carrigg, who was Union City's Executive Director of Academic Programs for more than twelve years. Mr. Carrigg is presently "on loan" to the New Jersey Department of Education serving as the Special Assistant to the Commissioner for Urban Literacy. In this position, he is working to find ways to do for the poorest districts in the state what he was able to accomplish in Union City.

Barry Fishman, University of Michigan and
Deborah Peek-Brown, Detroit Public Schools

This chapter presents a diagnostic framework for evaluating the capacity of school organizations and the capacity demands of innovations in order to determine their "fit." Capacity is considered in terms of organizational culture, policy & management, and technical capabilities. "Gaps" in capacity are closed through a collaborative effort between the school and innovation provider, requiring modifications on the part of both. The framework was developed as part of the work of the Center for Learning Technologies in Urban Schools (LeTUS), and two examples of the framework in action are described from the collaboration of the Detroit Public Schools and The University of Michigan. The nature of "scale" is re-examined, and challenges for collaborative relationships between schools and universities are considered.

Technical Assistance through Design Partnerships

Louis Gomez and Brian Reiser, Northwestern University

The Center for Learning Technologies in Urban Schools (LeTUS), established in 1997, is an organization focused on helping urban school districts support children in regular engagement in ambitious science across the middle grades. In the 2001-2002 school year, there were approximately 250 enactments of LeTUS curricular units in Chicago Public Schools engaging more than 4000 Chicago students in technology-infused inquiry science units. This chapter describes how a research and development organization at Northwestern evolved to become a technical assistance organization for the schools in a large public system. We will discuss our form of technical assistance, one of design partnerships, developed in this work. We consider the rationale for a model of technical assistance based on design, and the specific implementation of design partnerships we have pursued, namely design activities around science materials design and support.

Designs for Improvement: Processes of Inquiry in Practice

Susan R. Goldman
The University of Illinois at Chicago

The focus of this chapter is the design of two reform efforts whose goals are to build the capacity of educational systems to improve student learning in the urban context of Chicago. These designs are based in lessons learned over the past 10 years about effective and sustainable educational reform from the efforts of researchers and professional developers working in Chicago schools as well as elsewhere in the United States (e.g., Bryk, Edelson, Goldman, Gomez, Raphael, Reiser, Smylie, Wagreich). These researchers concur that a central challenge in effective and sustainable educational reform is that of creating a context in which all of the participants "own" the reform process, not just the reform practice. Addressing this challenge entails professional preparation and development models that build capacity within individuals and organizations for ongoing inquiry into teaching and learning. Inquiry-based approaches to teaching and learning support learning with understanding. Such "usable knowledge" is necessary for individuals to be able to adapt what they have learned to new situations. Learning experiences need to be grounded in problems of practice and the realities of classroom life. Important processes in inquiry include developing questions, gathering evidence, and reflecting on what the evidence indicates about instructional decision making and further inquiry questions. The inquiry process transforms the way teachers think and learn about their own teaching and learning and their students' learning. Social structures such as learning communities, practitioners' networks, and study groups are important supports for learning because collaborative inquiry provides a supportive context for sustained reflection on teaching practices and student understanding. Two new initiatives that have been designed with these assumptions at the forefront are discussed, one in literacy and the other in mathematics and science. The design of these projects will be compared with approaches in Union City and Detroit.

Research to Support Scaling Up Technology-based Educational Innovations

Barbara Means and Bill Penuel
Center for Technology in Learning
SRI International

Educational policymakers are calling on the research community to rigorously evaluate and clearly articulate “What Works?” This seemingly straightforward approach is appealing in its simplicity, but, we would argue, seriously flawed as a basis for scaling up educational interventions in general, and those involving sophisticated uses of technology in particular. What is needed instead is research that sheds light on the more complex question “What Works When, and How?” This alternative statement of the problem draws researchers’ attention to the need to deal with issues of implementation and context in their designs in a way often neglected by studies focused on main effects. After reviewing aspects of technology-based educational innovations that make them highly dependent on implementation processes and contextual factors, we provide a set of heuristics for evaluating technology-supported educational innovations in ways that will inform the process of supporting scaling up those innovations. We illustrate the application of those heuristics with CTL’s evaluation of the GLOBE web-based environmental education program. We conclude with thoughts on the relationship between evaluative research and innovation scaling.

Sam Stringfield and Jeff Wayman
Center for Social Organization of Schools
Johns Hopkins University
and
Mary Yakimowski
Baltimore City Public Schools System

This chapter will cover four areas. The first is research on “scaling up” schoolwide reforms in the 1990’s, from which we will forward a series of what we believe are general rules in those contexts and testable hypotheses in the area of efforts to “scale up” technology use in schools. The second will be a brief argument that, to date, the most productive use of computers has been in the storing, re-arranging, and reporting of quantitative data. We do not believe that this history need not fully define the future, but that it will remain a valuable component of the worldwide use of computers. We will assert that while school districts have spent hundreds of millions, and almost certainly billions, of dollars developing centralized, computerized student record keeping systems, those huge data sets have been of very little use or value in assisting professional educators in adapting their annual, let alone daily, instructional programs. Third, we will briefly describe some of what we believe would be valuable characteristics of a useful teacher- and principal-practice data system. We will use those characteristics to frame an examination of many of the ongoing efforts to develop teacher- and principal-useful adaptations of school systems’ databases. Some of those efforts are local, some national. Some are for profit, some not-for-profit. We believe that our survey of the nationally disseminated products has captured all of the major “products” on the market. We are certain that our survey of local efforts has not; but we believe that it includes most of the “major” efforts. We look forward to learning about other efforts. Finally, we will present suggestive amounts of data from three contexts, indicating the possible value of making more data/information more available to local educators. The three are the Calvert/Barclay experiment in Baltimore, the High Reliability Schools effort in Wales, and the Baltimore City Schools reform efforts over the last several years.

[Dinner Talk] Success in the Great City Schools: Lessons Learned

Michael Casserley, Director, Council for Great City Schools

Accountability Systems and Scaling Up:
Using Dynamic Statistics Software for Valid, Fair Instructional Decision-Making

Jere Confrey and Katie Makar, University of Texas—Austin

This chapter will focus on discuss what is really involved in having teachers use data from high stakes tests to inform instructional decision making. We will concentrate on what teachers would need to know to make use of data in an equitable and fair manner, using the Texas high-stakes test TAAS as an example. We will build from the case of the school going low-performing based on a small group of AA students in a largely Hispanic school.

Teachscape and the California Governor's Reading Initiative: Technology Meets Curriculum Enactment at Scale

Mark Atkinson, Teachscape, Inc. and Louis Gomez, Northwestern University

Teachscape is presently engaged in an unprecedented to provide online professional support to teachers. This effort is being undertaken in partnership with California's Reading First Technical Assistance Center, which is responsible for the oversight of California's Reading First Initiative.

The scope and complexity of this effort raises several important questions regarding the use of technology to support teachers in their professional development. Those questions include the following:

• What are the challenges that an educational technology service provider faces when attempting to support a large-scale professional development initiative?
• To what degree can support for the enactment of curriculum be the primary mechanism for the enhancement of teacher knowledge?
• Can large-scale professional development support for curriculum enactment be a lever for more equitable student outcomes?

The ability of technology to support large scale implementation of professional development initiatives is directly attributable to one's willingness to develop highly customized solutions.

David Perkins and Stone Wiske, Harvard University

This chapter focuses on the ways that online professional development and the particular advantages of networked technologies help to overcome some of the usual challenges in scaling up teachers' active experimentation with constructivist pedagogy. We describe WIDE World's scaling model, focusing primarily on its educational dimensions with a bit of attention to its marketing and financial dimensions where we see significant puzzles.

Chris Dede, Harvard University and Robert Nelson, Milwaukee Public Schools

Like the Greek sea-deity Proteus, who could transform among a myriad of shapes, information technology can assume many forms in the service of improved educational outcomes and organizational effectiveness. Our society is still discovering ways that emerging interactive media can empower student learning, educators’ professional development, efficient administration, links between schools and community, and partnerships with distant experts. This chapter describes the many ways that a single set of core investments in sophisticated computers and telecommunications is leveraged to empower transferring and scaling up innovations in the Milwaukee Public Schools. Research on MPS design and implementation process has developed heuristics that can generalize these protean benefits to other educational settings.