UCLA

Networked improvement communities provide a promising approach for improving education’s most pressing problems. By uniting diverse practitioner experiences with expert subject knowledge and an improvement science evaluative framework, networks of multiple schools can collectively solve persistent educational challenges. However, networks have their own challenges. Teachers and administrators are required to learn and apply improvement science methods in order to successfully participate in the network. Given their extensive daily duties, learning these technical tools may be difficult and daunting. The challenge of building improvement science capacity can be further exacerbated by the diversity of multiple school contexts.

Through an explanatory single case study, this study examines how to prepare five schools to successfully participate in one networked improvement community, which sought to improve math instruction. This study utilizes interview, observation, surveys, and document and artifact analyses to provide a detailed narrative of the network’s first year. Specifically, it investigates how the network hub built the improvement science capacity of its members, and what facilitated improvement science implementation by the schools, including how meaningful learnings were generated.

The study imparts three broad categories of findings. First, the findings confirm the importance of building a network hub team with expertise in the both the content area and improvement science. These experts should work closely together to establish two synergistic visions for building mutual capacity, whereby teachers can learn the technical tools and methods within the context of their classrooms. Second, by working closely with schools and establishing consistent in-school collaborative work structures, the network hub team can foster consensus and coherence in the fundamental network components and support educators’ ability to complete Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) cycles. Third, network learnings are primarily generated through the PDSA structure, particularly its reflective practice component. In education, where complex problems may be related to underlying instructional assumptions about student learning, networks should consider how to cultivate double-loop learning in addition to the more instrumental improvements of single-loop learning. Finally, this study offers a model for new networked improvement communities to follow when building the improvement science capacity of educators.