The co-op bookstore for avid readers
Book Cover for: Learning to Improve: How America's Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better, Anthony S. Bryk

Learning to Improve: How America's Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better

Anthony S. Bryk

As a field, education has largely failed to learn from experience. Time after time, promising education reforms fall short of their goals and are abandoned as other promising ideas take their place. In Learning to Improve, the authors argue for a new approach. Rather than "implementing fast and learning slow," they believe educators should adopt a more rigorous approach to improvement that allows the field to "learn fast to implement well." Using ideas borrowed from improvement science, the authors show how a process of disciplined inquiry can be combined with the use of networks to identify, adapt, and successfully scale up promising interventions in education. Organized around six core principles, the book shows how "networked improvement communities" can bring together researchers and practitioners to accelerate learning in key areas of education. Examples include efforts to address the high rates of failure among students in community college remedial math courses and strategies for improving feedback to novice teachers. Learning to Improve offers a new paradigm for research and development in education that promises to be a powerful driver of improvement for the nation's schools and colleges.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Harvard Education PR
  • Publish Date: Mar 1st, 2015
  • Pages: 280
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.90in - 6.00in - 0.70in - 0.80lb
  • EAN: 9781612507910
  • Categories: Administration - GeneralEducational Policy & ReformLeadership

About the Author

Bryk, Anthony S.: - Anthony S. Bryk is the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Gomez, Louis M.: - Louis M. Gomez holds the MacArthur Chair in Digital Media and Learning in the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is a senior partner at Carnegie.
Grunow, Alicia: - Alicia Grunow is a senior partner and codirector of the Center for Networked Improvement at Carnegie.

Praise for this book

"Learning to Improve is a content-rich, thoughtful, practical and well-organized resource for anyone committed to improving schools. It inspires practitioners, researchers and policy analysts to work together in networked improvement communities to 'learn fast to implement well.'"--Mary B. Herrmann, School Administrator
"Extremely interesting throughout, the text suggests a plan-do-study-act cycle in which reform starts small and then gradually expands as educators study their failures and learn from those mistakes."-- J.D. Neal, Choice Magazine
"Guided by 'improvement science' pioneered in the medical field, Learning to Improve shows how education could finally stop its reform churn...The book's vision is ambitious--and far more likely to succeed than the reform churn we've tolerated for decades." --Lisa Hansel, Thomas B. Fordham Institute