Welcome
The Improvement Research in Education (IRE) Knowledge Commons is an open access platform that supports teaching, learning, and sharing resources about the complex and growing field of IRE. This site is a living resource: It is intended to grow and change to match the needs and interests of the IRE community. This introductory page describes some of the ways you can both use the IRE Knowledge Commons and help it to improve.
Whether you are entirely new to improvement scholarship, an experienced improvement scholar eager to engage with emerging perspectives, or an educator seeking new tools for teaching and learning, you've come to the right place. The IRE Knowledge Commons not only connects you with IRE-focused research, pedagogical materials, multimedia, and other resources--it also provides you with opportunities to contribute to those resources.
What is Improvement Research in Education?
Improvement Research in Education aims to produce, use, and refine practical knowledge that addresses specific opportunities, problems, and needs of particular learning contexts. It entails iterative cycles of inquiry, design, implementation, and evaluation by collaborating researchers, professional educators, and other stakeholders. IRE encompasses a constellation of approaches and traditions that serve these goals, making IRE an intellectually rich yet complex field to navigate. These approaches and traditions can be informed by different assumptions, and can endorse different perspectives, practices, and priorities. This site is intended to help you not only in exploring the complexities of IRE, but also in finding common ground with scholars and educators who may conceptualize matters of improvement in different ways.
How to Get Started
New to the Site? Join us by registering and logging in
Once you've joined the site, you'll have access to its full range of features.
Not Sure How to Begin Learning (or Teaching) about Improvement Research in Education? Click here
Check out our page of curated resources to help you "Learn (and Teach) About IRE," which will provide you with several conceptual and practical starting places for deeper engagements with IRE.
Looking for Resources? Visit our IRE Resource Repository
This site's resource repository is designed to connect you with the materials you need. You'll find links to published scholarship, pedagogical materials, videos, podcasts, organizations supporting IRE, and more. The repository will also point you to unpublished documents, shared directly by the IRE community members who created them.
Want to Contribute to the IRE Knowledge Commons? Click here to find out how
As a living resource, the IRE Knowledge Commons depends on your contributions to continuously improve. The site has been designed with ways for you to share your resources, to comment on and tag existing resources, and to give us feedback, all of which will help to keep the IRE Knowledge Commons current and useful to the community.
Curious about What's New on the Site? Visit this page
Check out the latest developments on the site, including a list of recent additions to our repository.
Want to Know More about this Site and its Developers? Click here
Our "About" page includes information about initial development team, about how the site was developed, and about related papers and publications.
The IRE Knowledge Commons was co-designed by collaborators from the University of Michigan Marsal Family School of Education and the School of information, in dialogue with members of the Improvement Scholars Network. Initial development was made possible by a grant from the Spencer Foundation (Grant #20190070). The views expressed are those of the designers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Spencer Foundation. The IRE Knowledge Commons is now maintained by the Improvement Scholars Network (ISN).