Background/Context: In early childhood, using play as a pedagogical tool can be a way to ensure children have access to an education that involves worthwhile opportunities to learn that are ripe with joy and aim toward fostering depth of knowledges. There are numerous possibilities for the types of play a classroom can offer children, so when a…

Background/Context: The passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002 and the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015 spurred changes in the way educators use data. On the one hand, the policies inspired educators' awareness of large gaps in achievement between subgroups based on gender, race, and socioeconomic status. On the other hand, the policies…

Background: Traditional methods of implementing educational innovations face a number of critical challenges that have problematized efforts to improve practice, particularly at scale. Recently, continuous improvement approaches have gained attention, offering structured, iterative processes for developing innovations that incorporate the wisdom…

Background: Substantial research on reform implementation highlights numerous challenges to implementing innovations at scale with depth and sustainability, yet new reforms continue to encounter many of the same challenges. This has led to calls for researchers to work in partnership with practitioners to design, implement, and scale educational…

Background: Getting educational reforms "to scale" continues to be a primary preoccupation of scholars, but such studies tend to remain focused on the organizational or other characteristics of the school(s) receiving a given innovation. Purpose: This article brackets the organizational elements of reform dissemination to consider the…

Background/Context: This study examines the implementation of an academic and social-emotional learning innovation called Personalization for Academic and Social-Emotional Learning, or PASL. The innovation was designed, tested, and implemented using a continuous continuous-improvement model. The model emphasized a top-and-bottom process in which…

Context: Educational reform efforts have taken the form of different school models intended to reduce educational inequality. Personalized, interest-based schools and academically focused, "No Excuses" schools are two leading small-school designs with sharply contrasting approaches to innovation. Given mixed research findings about the…

Background: Research suggests a number of benefits from teacher participation in school improvement--chief among them that it can increase teacher receptivity to innovation and reform adoption. Improvement science has been put forward as a new paradigm for involving local school stakeholders in the improvement process. Purpose: We describe the…

This chapter describes a model for continuous improvement that guides the work of the National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools, or NCSU. NCSU is a research and development center funded by the Institute for Education Sciences, the research arm of the United States Department of Education. At the core of the Center's work is an innovative…

Background/Context: The challenges documented in the literature on research-practice partnerships and similar school-university collaborations are outlined in the literature review in this issue. Yet only a collaboration among multiple educational and community organizations could create a synergy powerful enough to achieve the multifaceted goals…

Background/Context: A fundamental tension has long existed between school reform proposals and actual teaching practice. Despite a large literature on teacher change, the discontinuity between innovation and practice continues and many attempts to reform teaching fail to be enacted in most classrooms. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of…

Background: Over the past 30 years, the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement (MST), one of the largest social movements in Latin America, has developed a series of pedagogical practices for public schools that support the movement's struggle for agrarian reform in the Brazilian countryside. The MST's educational initiatives can be viewed in terms…

Background/Context: Teacher education faculty face increasing pressure to simultaneously strengthen and reform teacher education programs while maintaining research productivity. The demands placed on teacher education programs to increase relevancy by strengthening clinical components of teacher preparation has once again reached the fore. The…

Background/Context: Little research has directly examined whether principal leadership can increase the degree to which teachers work together regularly in focused ways around content. Prior research has shown that reform efforts seeking to alter the process of teaching can be successful if teachers collaborate to build capacity and improve…

Background/Context: Under supplemental educational services ("supplemental services"), a parental choice provision of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), schools that have not made adequate yearly progress in increasing student achievement are required to offer low-income families free, afterschool tutoring. Existing research shows low…