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Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better
As a field, education has largely failed to learn from experience. Time after time, promising education reforms fall short of their goals and are abandoned as other promising ideas take their place. In Learning to Improve, the authors argue for a new approach. Rather than “implementing fast and learning slow,” they believe educators should adopt a more rigorous approach to improvement that allows the field to “learn fast to implement well.”
Using ideas borrowed from improvement science, the authors show how a process of disciplined inquiry can be combined with the use of networks to identify, adapt, and successfully scale up promising interventions in education. Organized around six core principles, the book shows how “networked improvement communities” can bring together researchers and practitioners to accelerate learning in key areas of education.
Continuous Improvement in Education
In Continuous Improvement in Education, the authors provide examples that illustrate how continuous quality improvement methodology is being applied in education toward the goals of making education more efficient, effective, and equitable. The examples are organized in three broad categories: at the level of classroom instruction, system-wide, and improvement efforts with collective impact.
Continuous Improvement in Practice
Calls for “continuous improvement” in California’s K-12 education system are central to current discussions about school improvement in the state. Yet, definitions of continuous improvement vary, and knowledge of what continuous improvement looks like in practice is limited. To advance the conversation, this brief helps to define continuous improvement both in theory and in practice. As part of this work, we discuss the extent to which California policymakers and practitioners are engaged in continuous improvement efforts, how they define continuous improvement, and the barriers and gaps in support for this work.
Journey to Improvement: A Team Guide to Systems Change in Education, Health Care, and Social Welfare
The challenges we face in education, healthcare and social welfare are multi-faceted, reflecting the complex systems we live in. Out of urgency and often the best of intentions, organizations implement new policies, technologies, and other innovations to tackle these issues, and hope for the best.
However, addressing these challenges requires more than heroic individuals with silver bullet solutions. We need teams with diverse expertise that know how to learn together and use their collective knowledge to redesign our social systems for the improved well-being of our communities.
Journey to Improvement serves as a roadmap for teams ready to follow a different path to better outcomes. Drawing on their decades of on-the-ground experience leading improvement work in different social sectors, the authors walk teams through the various phases of an improvement journey, from launching the team, to trying ideas in practice to spreading those that work. The book highlights the personal, relational and technical aspects of taking an improvement science approach and illustrates these ideas through real world examples from across the social sector and around the world.
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