Walking Together: A Practical Guide for Strengthening Partnerships Between Schools, Families, and Communities

Imagine this: A community comes together to set a vision for its public schools. In local libraries, neighborhood associations, school cafeterias, and places of worship, families sit down together and share their hopes and dreams for their children. They think about what schools need to do to better equip students Read more

Building and Supporting Improvers

In the Carnegie Commons blog, authors Jennifer Russell and Maggie Hannan explore how Networked Improvement Communities (NICs) can build educators’ capacity to use improvement science to learn from practice. Improvement science offers methods to guide disciplined inquiries that generate knowledge to improve practice. Improvement research—the inquiry processes that lie at Read more

Establishing and Sustaining Networked Improvement Communities

Networked improvement communities are a relatively new type of collaborative research partnership between researchers and educators. With facilitation from researchers, educators identify problems of practice, the factors that drive the problems, and promising solutions. They then engage in iterative cycles of designing, implementing, testing, and redesigning solutions, while learning from Read more

What Role Can Online COPs Play in Achieving Teacher Excellence?

The US Department of Education is continuing its work to determine how online communities of practice (COPs) may help teachers improve their practice.  For the past year, the Department’s Offices of Innovation and Improvement (OII) and Educational Technology (OET) have been researching several critical issues that may influence the effectiveness Read more