Getting Ideas into Action: Building Networked Improvement Communities in Education

Item

Title

Getting Ideas into Action: Building Networked Improvement Communities in Education

Abstract/Description

Schools today confront ambitious new societal goals aiming at greater learning for more students. Simultaneously, we are demanding that our educational institutions operate more efficiently. A growing cadre of scholars and policy organizations argue that responding to these challenges requires a fundamental reorganization of the connections among research and practice. This chapter details new ways for scholars and practitioners to engage together in disciplined inquiry organized around specified problems of practice improvement. It describes the social organization of networked communities aimed at systematic learning from practice to improve it. Embedded within the day-to-day work of such improvement communities are multiple cycles of design, engineering, and development (DEED) that generate numerous small tests about what works for whom under different circumstances. We call this improvement research. The chapter details a core set of structuring agents necessary to form such networked improvement communities (NIC). We illustrate these ideas drawing on early design experiences from an emerging NIC seeking to address the extraordinary high failure rates in developmental mathematics in community colleges. These “developmental” courses currently operate as a barrier to opportunity, blocking access to both occupational training certification and transfer to 4-year institutions. We posit that research and practice properly arranged can reframe the opportunity equation.

Author/creator

Bryk, Anthony S.

Gomez, Louis M.

Grunow, Alicia

Date

2011

In publication

Frontiers in Sociology of Education

Editor

Hallinan, Maureen T.

Pages

127-162

Publisher

Springer Netherlands

Resource type

Research/Scholarly Media

Resource status/form

en Published Text

Scholarship genre

en Theoretical

IRE Approach/Concept

Design, Engineering, and Development (DEED) Cycle

Networked Improvement Community (NIC)

Improvement Science

Developmental Math

Language

en

Open access/full-text available

en No

Peer reviewed

en Yes

ISBN

978-94-007-1575-2 978-94-007-1576-9

URL

Publisher Webpage for Chapter

Alternate version

Getting Ideas into Action: Building Networked Improvement Communities in Education

Citation

Bryk, A. S., Gomez, L. M., & Grunow, A. (2011). Getting Ideas into Action: Building Networked Improvement Communities in Education. In M. T. Hallinan (Ed.), Frontiers in Sociology of Education (pp. 127–162). Springer Netherlands. http://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-94-007-1576-9_7

Cited in

Critical Perspectives on the Contexts of Improvement Research in Education

Critical Social Network Analysis as a Method for Examining How Power Mediates Improvement Efforts

Design Thinking and the Learning Sciences: Theoretical, Practical, and Empirical Perspectives

Place

Dordrecht

Item sets

Handbook Chapter 17 Citations

OB Citations - Design Thinking and the Learning Sciences

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