Giving Compass' Take:

•  There are challenges to implementing an approach that focuses on a culture of improvement which encourages educators to start with questions rather than solutions. 

• This approach will be successful based on the assumption that schools are committed to improving. For schools with limited resources and educators, inspiration can be hard to come by. What can education leaders do to invigorate hope, change, and the drive to improve? 

• Read about these four ideas to improve schools in 2019. 

If this era is to become a Golden Age of Educational Practice, we need successful, evidence-based practices—to the extent that they actually exist—to spread far and wide.

But there’s another take on the challenge, one that’s bottom-up and focused on the “demand side.” It’s intuitively appealing, as it builds teacher buy-in from the get-go: It’s about developing a “culture of improvement” in a school or school system.

The basic notion is simple, if tough to actuate: Rather than start with answers—like a new curriculum, or assessment system, or digital learning program—begin with questions. Develop systems and processes that encourage educators to ask: How can we get better at our craft? How can we solve a specific problem that we are seeing in our own classrooms? And how might we team up with similar schools or systems as we embark upon this quest?

This is the approach popularized by Tony Bryk and his colleagues at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The Bryk model offers a great structure and process for improvement. Because it has educator engagement at its core, it can overcome the buy-in challenge that is the death of so many other reform efforts. And it can lead to local solutions that make sense for a given school’s context, solutions that deal with the inherent nuance and complexity of instructional practices and the evidence that might inform them.

But can it succeed at helping our schools improve, at a national scale, and in a measurable way? I’d love to be proven wrong, but I have three specific concerns.

Read the full article about culture of improvement education system by Michael J. Petrilli at Education Next