A networked improvement community focused upon student-centered reading practices in 13 schools in the US: effects of higher implementation frequency on reading outcomes

In 2016, 10 universities launched a Networked Improvement Community (NIC) aimed at increasing the number of scholars from Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) populations entering science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) faculty careers. NICs bring together stakeholders focused on a common goal to accelerate innovation through structured, ongoing intervention development, implementation, and refinement. We theorized a NIC organizational structure would aid understandings of a complex problem in different contexts and accelerate opportunities to develop and improve interventions to address the problem. A distinctive feature of this NIC is its diverse institutional composition of public and private, predominantly white institutions, a historically Black university, a Hispanic-serving institution, and land grant institutions located across eight states and Washington, DC, United States. NIC members hold different positions within their institutions and have access to varied levers of change. Among the many lessons learned through this community case study, analyzing and addressing failed strategies is as equally important to a healthy NIC as is sharing learning from successful interventions. We initially relied on pre-existing relationships and assumptions about how we would work together, rather than making explicit how the NIC would develop, establish norms, understand common processes, and manage changing relationships. We had varied understandings of the depth of campus differences, sometimes resulting in frustrations about the disparate progress on goals. NIC structures require significant engagement with the group, often more intensive than traditional multi-institution organizational structures. They require time to develop and ongoing maintenance in order to advance the work. We continue to reevaluate our model for leadership, climate, diversity, conflict resolution, engagement, decision-making, roles, and data, leading to increased investment in the success of all NIC institutions. Our NIC has evolved from the traditional NIC model to become the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL) AGEP NIC model with five key characteristics: (1) A well-specified aim, (2) An understanding of systems, including a variety of contexts and different organizations, (3) A culture and practice of shared leadership and inclusivity, (4) The use of data reflecting different institutional contexts, and (5) The ability to accelerate infrastructure and interventions. We conclude with recommendations for those considering developing a NIC to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

Networked Improvement Community (NICs) are increasingly recognized as a social innovation for orchestrating sustained change in education. NICs are one type of a research-practice partnership that provides a model for researchers and educators to bring insights about what works locally to scale. A critical aspect of NIC success is the emergence of relational trust across the participant network. At initiation, therefore, NIC leaders must create the conditions for long-term development of relational trust, which can be operationalized to be the existence of reciprocated, help-based interactions. To understand how NIC leaders foster these reciprocated, help-based interactions, this paper leverages social network and qualitative data to explore how the core activities of a NIC might foster help-based interactions amongst participants. This paper is a case study of how social network and qualitative data analysis might be applied to the design and development of NICs, and social innovation more broadly. We explore the context of the Personalization in Practice - Networked Improvement Community, which brought together 21 educators from five schools around a common challenge. Our analysis highlights how collaborative design activities created the conditions for relational trust to emerge: sparking interactions around shared practices, creating situations for participants to ask for help, and encouraging reciprocated, help-based interactions. Our findings demonstrate how specific collaborative design activities can foster the kinds of trust-building networks necessary for NIC success. This paper presents an applied case of using analytic research methods for the design of social innovation. The triangulation of social network and qualitative data provided insight into the internal dynamics of the partnership and has implications for development measures of network health. We found that the social network data described that interaction changed, but did not indicate which activities led to these changes. This case contributes to emerging research on how to measure the effects Networked Improvement Communities on participants and their practices. We demonstrate, on a practical level, how social network and qualitative data might be used to generate network-level data for improvement, and we contribute theoretical insight into the way collaborative design creates the conditions for the long-term development of relational trust.

In order to scale innovations in education, a Networked Improvement Community (NIC), forms a network of members with diverse expertise from a variety of contexts. By testing innovations in diverse settings and coordinating what is learned from the tests, a NIC builds an infrastructure for addressing educational problems. To gain a deeper understanding of coordination and collaboration in a NIC, I take a case-based approach to build a theory of coordinated collaborative action in a NIC. Drawing upon qualitative and social network data from an operating NIC, I seek to understand the nature of the NIC's coordinated collaborative action and uncover mechanisms that facilitate consequential joint work.

This experience report details the lessons learned while launching a Networked Improvement Community (NIC) with 23 teachers in Texas as part of the NSF-funded Accelerating Women's Success and Mastery in Computer Science (AWSM in CS) project. Conceived to address the persistent gender inequities in computer science (CS) education, the NIC was designed to bring together researchers and practitioners to collaboratively develop and implement solutions with the goal of increasing female participation in CS courses. This experience report explores the lessons learned, such as the importance of building a sense of community, trust, and collaboration, before jumping into problem solving as a NIC. Additionally, the report addresses considerations for sustaining the NIC virtually given the logistical constraints placed on teacher collaboration during the school year.

This chapter is a case study of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's Pathways™ program. The goal of the Statway®™ and Quantway®™ pathways is to improve the success rate of community college students who place into developmental mathematics. What makes these programs unique is their strategy of building a particular kind of professional network, what Carnegie refers to as a Networked Improvement Community (NIC), to organize and lead an array of continuous improvement processes. NICs are a social mechanism through which the collaborative designs and practical theories produced by design-based implementation research (DBIR) can become live resources for the improvement of systems. NICs are comprised of highly structured groups of education professionals, working in collaboration with designers and researchers, to address a practical problem. Driver diagrams are introduced as a tool for organizing the improvement work of NICs. After briefly describing several drivers behind the Pathways program, the chapter details the main elements of the network organization driver as a distinct approach to building communities aimed at improving education. Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. –Dr. Paul Batalden, Dartmouth Medical School

Even though K-12 mathematics educators have embraced the role of graphing calculators and computers, student use of technology in tertiary mathematics has been slow to implement in the USA context. Enter March 2020, a global health crisis, and the shift to online and remote learning. The immediate and dramatic cessation of in-person modes of instruction was experienced at all levels of education and in all disciplines. With respect to tertiary mathematics, student use of instructional technology shifted from optional use of homework websites, digital discussion boards and flipped classrooms to an absolute necessity to support student participation in mathematics courses. Our research group has been studying the process of departmental change towards active learning in the undergraduate calculus sequence. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we worked with twenty-three university mathematics departments in the United States as part of a Networked Improvement Community (NIC). During the pandemic, we observed the adaptation of instructional practices to sustain student interaction in remote virtual environments. This paper highlights changes observed within our NIC regarding attempts to sustain active learning during the global pandemic. In addition, a NIC can provide the necessary community for grappling with challenging problems at any time.

In this article, we describe a researcher-practitioner partnership (RPP) that used a networked improvement community (NIC) approach to translate social-psychological interventions into educational practices to enhance student motivation and learning. Specifically, we highlight one of our first collaborative projects to develop and scale up an intervention to teach middle school students about adopting a growth mindset (Dweck, 2006) to address our practitioners’ concern that many of their students lacked the belief that they could learn. Using Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles, we show how we (a) successfully adapted a previously used growth mindset intervention designed for college students into a computer app appropriate for middle school students, (b) embedded using the app in different middle school contexts to promote growth mindset thinking, and (c) linked students’ growth mindset thinking to improved academic performance. We also discuss how this work was conducted as part of a networked improvement community sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching called the Student Agency Improvement Community.

The Mathematics Teacher Education Partnership is a consortium of over 90 U.S. universities and colleges, along with partner school districts, focused on improving the initial preparation of secondary mathematics teachers. The Partnership uses a Networked Improvement Community design that incorporates improvement cycles to develop adaptable interventions across contexts, as well to scale interventions across the Partnership to support comprehensive program improvement. Rather than addressing a single dimension of a secondary mathematics program, the Partnership is undertaking parallel lines of research in multiple areas. To illustrate the power of the approach, this chapter will more deeply explore one of those lines of research related to clinical experiences: A “research action cluster” (RAC) consisting of representatives of 24 university-led teams is working to improve the clinical experiences of secondary mathematics teacher candidates. This RAC has employed improvement science methods to developed resources that support improved models for both student teaching and early field experiences, as well as professional development for mentor teachers.

The Mathematics Teacher Education Partnership (MTE-Partnership) was formed to address the undersupply of new secondary mathematics teachers who are well prepared to help their students attain the goals of the Common Core State Standards and other college- and career-ready standards. This national consortium of more than 90 universities and 100 school systems has been organized as a Networked Improvement Community (NIC), which combines the disciplined inquiry of improvement science with the power of networking to accelerate improvement by engaging a broad set of participants. Initiating a NIC involves a number of challenges described in the NIC Initiation Framework. This case study analyzes the MTE-Partnership’s progress in one domain of that framework: network leadership, organization, and operation. Areas of discussion include convening the network, establishing a membership framework and participation structures, building leadership and hub functions, developing a communications infrastructure, and finding necessary resources.

Networked improvement communities (NICs) offer an approach for administrators, researchers, content experts, and teachers to co-develop, test, and spread instructional improvements. This study analyzed the effect of teachers’ participation in a NIC on growth in their students’ mathematics achievement in comparison to teachers in the same district who received the same mathematics professional learning but did not participate in the NIC activities. We found that the students in the classes of teachers who participated in a NIC demonstrated significant improvement in mathematics in the program’s second year.

Actively engaging students in learning mathematics is crucial to student success and equitable teaching and learning. Yet, this practice requires instructors to shift teaching strategies, which is not easily accomplished, particularly by themselves. In this chapter, we report on a longitudinal study of mathematics departments in the process of shifting department norms and practices in support of active learning and inclusive teaching. The research-informed change efforts have drawn on theories of institutional change and Networked Improvement Communities (Bryk AS, Gomez L, Grunow A, LeMahieu P. Learning to improve: how America’s schools can get better at getting better. Harvard Education Publishing, 2015). Data include interviews with tertiary mathematics instructors, course coordinators, department chairs, deans, other campus administrators, and students, as well as document analyses. Analyses of the data from three institutions, through the lens of networked improvement communities, reveal that some of the most important drivers of change related to institutional change to enact active learning are shared tools and resources, professional development, policies and structures, and connections across a network to other mathematics departments engaged in similar efforts.

One of the major challenges in educational reform is supporting teachers and the profession in the continual improvement of instruction. Research-practice partnerships and particularly networked improvement communities are well-suited for such knowledge-building work. This article examines how a networked improvement community with eight school-based professional learning communities—comprised of secondary science teachers, science and emergent bilingual coaches, and researchers—launched into improvement work within schools and across the district. We used data from professional learning communities to analyze pathways into improvement work and reflective data to understand practitioners’ perspectives. We describe three improvement launch patterns: (1) Local Practice Development, (2) Spread and Local Adaptation, and (3) Integrating New Practices. We raise questions about what is lost and gained in the transfer of tools and practices across schools and theorize about how research-practice partnerships find footholds into joint improvement work.

The use of networks to support and scale school reform initiatives and educational programs are becoming more and more prevalent. Through an initiative of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT), an emerging organizational form known as a Networked Improvement Community (NIC), offers an infrastructure for implementing and improving educational innovations. Fundamental to the work of this network is the collaboration of multiple actors and teams at multiple sites. Yet, this collaboration across time and space does not just happen. It requires coordination mechanisms to guide the actions of those involved in collaboration. This research seeks to build an initial conceptual framework to study how the joint work on an educational reform happens in a distributed or networked organizational environment. A NIC is a case of one such environment.

A growing body of research demonstrates the benefits of engaging students as partners to improve tertiary education. Yet, more research is needed to understand how students can support critical transformations outside of the classroom context. In this qualitative study, we explored how a networked improvement community (NIC) engaged students as partners toward critically transforming introductory tertiary mathematics courses in spring 2023. Using an open coding process, we analyzed field notes, interviews, and journals from NIC members to develop themes describing the NIC’s positioning of students. We compared these themes to Holen et al.’s (2021) framework on student-institutional partnerships. Findings reveal four positions students may adopt in critical transformation efforts: democratic participant, apprentice, consultant, and beneficiary. This study contributes to the field’s understanding of ways students can influence larger structural and cultural systems that impact student success, as well as challenges inherent in this work.

This study examines if experienced and student EFL teachers differ from each other in terms of: (a) their use of student performance cues, (b) their instructional actions in response to student performance cues, (c) their instructional goals and instruction-related knowledge they recalled applying during the process of EFL instruction. Transcriptions of videotaped lessons of five experienced and five student EFL teachers and explanations of their instructional goals and instruction-related knowledge were analyzed. The results indicated that there were patterns of similarities and differences between experienced and student teachers' instructional actions and thoughts. The results concerning the differences between experienced and student teachers confirmed the findings of previous studies conducted in instructional contexts with native speakers of English. Moreover, a comparison of the findings of this study with those of a previous study on the instructional thoughts and decisions of ESL student teachers indicated that there may be patterns of goals and instructional actions that are unique to ESL/EFL instructional contexts.