Author Topic: Obstacles to a Culture of Improvement  (Read 563 times)

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rangerrebew

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Obstacles to a Culture of Improvement
« on: January 26, 2019, 04:18:14 pm »
Obstacles to a Culture of Improvement


By Michael J. Petrilli 01/24/2019   


If this era is to become a Golden Age of Educational Practice, we need successful, evidence-based practices—to the extent that they actually exist—to spread far and wide. Many ideas for how to get educators to use such practices are inherently top-down or “supply side” approaches—build tools or products or school models on top of the evidence base, and then market them to schools. Focus a lot on the fidelity of implementation, which also implies engineering solutions that can be implemented in the real world, with real teachers, without making the instructor’s job even harder than today. I will explore all of that in future posts.

But there’s another take on the challenge, one that’s bottom-up and focused on the “demand side.” It’s intuitively appealing, as it builds teacher buy-in from the get-go: It’s about developing a “culture of improvement” in a school or school system.

The basic notion is simple, if tough to actuate: Rather than start with answers—like a new curriculum, or assessment system, or digital learning program—begin with questions. Develop systems and processes that encourage educators to ask: How can we get better at our craft? How can we solve a specific problem that we are seeing in our own classrooms? And how might we team up with similar schools or systems as we embark upon this quest?

https://www.educationnext.org/obstacles-to-culture-of-improvement/