Lora Cohen-Vogel, School of Education
Running from 2010 through 2015, the National Center for Scaling up Effective Schools was a five-year partnership between researchers and educators in two of the nation’s largest school districts. Together, its partners enacted a four-stage model of improvement. To begin, the improvement efforts were grounded in a research phase aimed at identifying programs, policies and practices that were effective locally. Research showed that higher-performing schools worked to build strong relationships between students and teachers, ground academic experiences in students’ lives and interests, and increase teachers’ awareness of students’ academic, social, and emotional needs. These findings became the foundation of a “design challenge” that guided the second stage of the improvement process – innovation design and development, as partners worked to construct a prototype. The prototype that emerged became known as Personalization for Academic and Social Emotional Learning, and comprised five components: 1) Rapid check-ins (RCIs), 2) Goal setting, 3) Intentional use of information, 4) Educator teams, and 5) Norms of engagement. Through the integration of these components, Center partners hoped to create and scale a ‘culture’ of personalization in their schools. Following this design and development stage, the process moved into its third phase: testing and implementation, wherein new participants from three schools joined the work and teams were tasked with refining the prototype and adapting it within the complex contexts of their individual schools. To accomplish this, teams used rapid-cycle testing – also known as Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) cycles – through which they systematically learned “what works,” iterated upon their innovation, and improved it over time. Finally, the process shifted to the “scale-up” phase. Here, teams continued to implement the innovation while leveraging the PDSA cycles to gradually scale the innovation within the initial schools and out to new school sites.