The following concepts are gleaned from an article in Scaling Up Success (2005, John Wiley & Sons, Inc) by Chris Dede, James P. Honan and Laurence C. Peters. Please think about them as you progress through the last years of your grant.
1. Educational improvement must be an ongoing systems-level activity, especially if it is to be scaled up.
2. Educational improvement must occur at multiple levels, with alignment across levels.
3. Collaborations and partnerships are critical to educational improvement, but they are hard work.
4. Educational improvement efforts need to be studied and documented, so that they can contribute to the development of a systematic knowledge base about efforts to innovate, scale up innovations, and then sustain them.
5. The core of educational improvement is building human capacity for effective performance at all levels of the educational system, but especially at those levels most proximal to students.
6. Change is initiated, sustained, and carried through systems by people.
7. Social structures such as learning communities, practitioners' networks, and study groups can facilitate change.
8. Educational practitioners need opportunities to learn with understanding, so that they grasp the principles of educational improvement efforts and not just the practices and procedures.
9. Inquiry-based approaches to professional development build knowledge that makes sense.
10. Changes in thinking and practice come about through hard work in a context that provides opportunities to try out changes in the classroom and to receive feedback and coaching.
How does these concepts and ideas apply to your project? What do you need to be doing in order to implement these thoughts? These challenges can provide the framework for ongoing dialogue among your staff and with partners.
No comments:
Post a Comment