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
Date
In publication
Editor
Pages
127-162
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Resource type
Research/Scholarly Media
Resource status/form
Published Text
Scholarship genre
Theoretical
IRE Approach/Concept
Open access/full-text available
No
Peer reviewed
Yes
ISBN
978-94-007-1575-2 978-94-007-1576-9
Alternate version
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
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