More than a Network: Building Professional Communities for Educational Improvement

Abstract

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