Innovator Vol. 35 No. 3 - Spring 05: Learning Partnerships
Return to contents Making a Real Difference: Scaling up Education Reform
Impediments to a vision of widespread, high quality educational practice across disciplines that offers challenging opportunities for all students are daunting. However, many School of Education faculty members are tackling questions about how to do this head on, in collaboration with K-12 colleagues.
“When you are in classrooms, you influence what happens. It does no good if the ideas work only in a few classrooms with the very best teachers, or when you are present to help things run the way you expect them to run. So we ‘scale up’ reform to make sure these ideas work in a variety of different classes so that all students (and all teachers) can benefi t from the innovation.”
Partly in response to the No Child Left Behind Act, educators, policymakers, and citizens are talking about the need for schools and teachers to use “research-based practices” called for by federal legislation. While community-members and legislators may think that teachers, schools, and districts across the nation should simply implement research findings, or “just do it” as the Nike motto suggests, educational researchers have learned over the last 30 years just how difficult it is to affect “the core of schooling,” (Elmore, 2001) whether through teacher education, new policies, new incentives, or professional development.
Impediments Include Competing Policies and Lack of Access
Dean Karen Wixson, who has spent much of her career working closely with educators in Michigan and across the nation on questions of literacy policy, and practice, says she’s learned that there are significant impediments to use of research findings
by practitioners: “Most practitioners don’t have access to the research information they would need to do their jobs more successfully. Many haven’t been immersed in opportunities to learn how to read or conduct research. There is a very big issue
of access.”
Wixson adds, “There are systemic issues. How teachers are educated, how curricula are developed, and how professional development is undertaken—these are often completely separate systems. We’re just now starting to create vehicles for
integration and interaction. Also, on the university side, research agendas are often dictated by funding sources, sometimes several notches removed from the day-to-day issues that teachers and administrators want and need help with.”
Wixson’s colleague, Walgreen Professor Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar, agrees and suggests that “too little instructional research is represented at the level of actual classroom teaching practice. Often, researchers describe principles or provide general descriptions of instructional interventions. But teachers need to understand the innovation at the level of practice in order to envision what to do in their particular contexts.” She also says that she’s found that teachers have “very little time made available for very demanding innovations. Some teachers are experiencing whiplash as their schools adopt a new math curriculum while in the midst of implementing a new writing program as a response to state policies or low test scores. Meanwhile, the schools are told to create safety plans, take a day workshop for state accreditation needs, and implement another set of tests to document student achievement. It’s just not reasonable to expect educators to make so many changes in
their practice in so many directions so quickly.”
“We can’t be arm chair innovators. What we create must work in schools.”
Addressing Scale-Up and Modes of Dissemination
Over the past 20 years, educators and researchers have learned a great deal about improving instruction at the individual classroom and building level by conducting “design experiments.” According to the late Ann Brown, a psychologist at UC Berkeley and a pioneer of design experiments,, who collaborated with UM’s Annemarie Palincsar, design experiments aim “to create innovative educational environments while also studying them.” (p. 225, An Elusive Science)
Improving education beyond the confines of a single classroom or school, however, involves “the development of capacity thousands of times over.“(Fullan, 1999) Educators sometimes refer to this process of spreading innovations as “scaling up.” Practically, it means taking the reform from the design experiment level, where researchers may interact with classroom educators often, to the school, district, or regional level or beyond, and trying to enact these practices in multiple contexts with a diverse group of teachers and students.
Scaling up matters, because, as Joseph Krajcik, professor of science education, says, “When you are in classrooms, you influence what happens. It does no good if the ideaswork only in a few classrooms with the very best teachers, or when you are present to help things run the way you expect them to run. So we ‘scale up’ reform to make sure these ideas work in a variety of different classes so that all students (and all teachers) can benefit from the innovation. Scaling up is still a design experiment in that it takes several years of working closely together to adapt the innovation. But unlike typical design experiments, scaling calls for sustained and practice-based professional development on a grand scale if the innovation is to be sustained.” Attempting to go to scale allows researchers to explore different types of questions—questions of policy, professional development, and materials design for
teachers and students.
Krajcik, and SOE colleagues Barry Fishman, Phyllis Blumenfeld, Elizabeth Moje, Elliot Soloway and Lee-Ann Sutherland from the Center for Highly Interactive Classrooms, Curricula, and Computing in Education (commonly known as hi-ce), along with Professor Nancy Songer, a professor of science education, have devoted twelve years to middle school science and technology integration design experiments and scale-up efforts in collaboration with the Detroit Public Schools through the Center for Learning Technologies in Urban Schools. Hi-ce researchers have abandoned “horse race studies of outcomes that compare treatments,” instead “striving for conceptual and practical congruence” between reform practices and proposed contexts, by collaborating directly with teachers and administrators to design and enact the reforms. “Scalingdoes not mean that the university brings an innovation to the district,” says Krajcik, “but that we work with them to adapt it to their context and needs using what we know and understand about the desired impact.” In examining their efforts, which included scaling from two schools and four teachers at the beginning of this partnership with the district to 28 schools and over 100 teachers total over the last seven years, they found that “a coordinated, systematic model of reform is more likely to develop the capacity…and culture
necessary” for “adopting and sustaining change.” (p. 163) As a result of their work, the Detroit Public Schools and hi-ce received the 2004 Urban Impact Award from the Great City Colleges of Education for their collaborative partnership to improve the education of urban children.
Through her experiences with “reciprocal teaching,” a complex instructional strategy that has been demonstrated to improve children’s comprehension of complex texts, Palincsar has learned firsthand how difficult it can be to get innovativepractices widely implemented with fidelity. While instructional procedures designed to improve text comprehension, such as “reciprocal teaching” or “questioning the author,” are part of the educational lingo, few practitioners have had opportunities to learn enough to be able to implement these complex instructional strategies so that student learning is enhanced. She notes that most teachers do not have access to the long-term professional learning communities such as those provided through systemic reform efforts such as the National Writing Project. Rather, many have access to textbooks “that now contain general, and probably unhelpful explanations of “reciprocal teaching,” or “questioning the author.” And while many districts and schools have access to relatively expensive sets of videotapes addressing specific reforms, many of these do not contain very informative representations of these practices, regardless of the advertised contents.
“more and more research programs from federal and state education departments are requiring similar exploration of these openings and strategies for dissemination.”
Palincsar and others are now beginning to address the question, “How can we engage in this process called ‘scale-up’ in less than ideal circumstances?’” In research funded by the National Science Foundation, she and her colleagues are studying the role of a web-based hypermedia tool that contains hun dreds of video clips demonstrating effective instructional practices for comprehension. This tool can beused in highly individualized ways to support teachers with diverse expertise and interests. She is not alone in these efforts either, as more and more research programs from federal and state education departments are requiring similar exploration of these openings and strategies for dissemination.
Lessons from Leaders Involved in Scale-Up
A recent report prepared for the Ford Foundation by RAND Education, Expanding the Reach of Education Reforms: Perspectives from Leaders in the Scale-Up of Educational Interventions, (2004), begins to summarize lessons learned from intervention projects that have attempted to scale up, including projects focused on individual teachers (Cognitively Guided Instruction, National Writing Project), individual schools (Direct Instruction, Success for All, Co-nect, High Schools That Work, among others), and clusters of schools (America’s Choice, Project Grad, Bay Area School).
Some of the findings include the following:
--No matter the target of reform or the design construct, the scale-up process is necessarily iterative and complex and requires the support of multiple actors.
--If scale-up is to succeed, the actors involved, including developers, district officials, school leaders, and teachers, must jointly address a set of known, interconnected tasks, especially aligning policies and infrastructure in coherent ways to sustain practice.
UM School of Education faculty Brian Rowan, David Cohen, and Deborah Ball’s Study of Instructional Improvement, an independent, longitudinal, multi-method study of three reform designs enacted in 120 elementary schools across 40 districts in 7 states, explores specific factors associated with success in the efforts to take such programs to scale. This study begins to add a detailed, qualitative and quantitative portrait of scaling up across multiple models and establishes an innovative framework for conducting research on such a complex concept.
Findings from RAND and from the Study of Instructional Improvement signal a broad call for collaboration among researchers and educators at all levels to find ways to implement reforms given the challenges faced in schools. Krajcik’s comments echo
the direction of SOE in addressing this. “We can’t be arm chair innovators. What we create must work in schools. We need to ensure that the faculty of our school have the vehicles in place to ensure that what we do gets translated correctly in schools and classrooms.”
Resources:
Blumenfeld, Phyllis; Fishman, Barry; Krajcik, Joseph; Marx, Ron; Soloway, Elliott. “Creating Usable Innovations in Systemic Reform: Scaling Up Technology Embedded Project -Based Science in Urban Schools.” Educational Psychologist 35:3 (2000)
149-164.
Glennan, Thomas K., Jr.; Susan J. Bodilly; Jolene R. Galegher; Kerri A. Kerr. Expanding the Reach of Education Reforms: Perspectives from Leaders in the Scale-Up of Educational Interventions. RAND, 2004. http://www.rand.org/publications/MG/MG248
Lagemann, Ellen Condliff e. An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Education Research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
