Scaling Educational Innovations

This volume stimulates critical discussions of the different variants of implementation, translation and scaling research approaches. It presents an integrated collection of different implementation and scaling studies that analyse the different facets of co-design, learning design, curriculum development, technology development, professional development and programme implementation. It also provides critical reflections on their impact and efficacies on transforming practices, informing policy-making, and theory derivation and improvement. The chapters in this volume will provide readers a deeper understanding of scaling of educational innovations in diverse socio-cultural contexts.

Drawing from the information presented at conference sponsored by the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Mid-Atlantic Regional Technology in Education Consortium, leading educators, researchers, and policymakers, Scaling Up Success translate, theory into practice and provide, a hands-on resource that clearly describes different models for “scaling up” success. This important resource is filled with illustrative examples of best practices that are grounded in real-life case studies of technology-based educational innovation3⁄4from networking a failing school district in New Jersey to using computer visualization to teach scientific inquiry in Chicago. Scaling Up Success show how the lessons learned from technology-based educational innovation can be applied to other school improvement efforts.

Scaling Impact introduces a new and practical approach to scaling the positive impacts of research and innovation. Inspired by leading scientific and entrepreneurial innovators from across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East, this book presents a synthesis of unrivalled diversity and grounded ingenuity. The result is a different perspective on how to achieve impact that matters, and an important challenge to the predominant more-is-better paradigm of scaling. For organisations and individuals working to change the world for the better, scaling impact is a common goal and a well-founded aim. The world is changing rapidly, and seemingly intractable problems like environmental degradation or accelerating inequality press us to do better for each other and our environment as a global community. Challenges like these appear to demand a significant scale of action, and here the authors argue that a more creative and critical approach to scaling is both possible and essential. To encourage uptake and co-development, the authors present actionable principles that can help organisations and innovators design, manage, and evaluate scaling strategies. Scaling Impact is essential reading for development and innovation practitioners and professionals, but also for researchers, students, evaluators, and policymakers with a desire to spark meaningful change.

Innovation and Scaling for Impact forces us to reassess how social sector organizations create value. Drawing on a decade of research, Christian Seelos and Johanna Mair transcend widely held misconceptions, getting to the core of what a sound impact strategy entails in the nonprofit world. They reveal an overlooked nexus between investments that might not pan out (innovation) and expansion based on existing strengths (scaling). In the process, it becomes clear that managing this tension is a difficult balancing act that fundamentally defines an organization and its impact. The authors examine innovation pathologies that can derail organizations by thwarting their efforts to juggle these imperatives. Then, through four rich case studies, they detail innovation archetypes that effectively sidestep these pathologies and blend innovation with scaling. Readers will come away with conceptual models to drive progress in the social sector and tools for defining the future of their organizations.

This collected book is about the eduLab projects, an initiative with focus on Scaling Change through Apprenticising and Ecological Leadership, designed to surface and spread ground-up information and communication technology-based pedagogical innovations. It presents the goals and rationale behind eduLab, an overview of the research projects conducted by its principal investigators during its funding tenure, as well as synthesizing thoughts on the entire endeavor. This book not only marks the achievements of the eduLab programme but also serves as inspiration for future projects. It presents Singapore education in action – a continually evolving and adapting education system that delivers a system well known for its high quality as much as it is forward-looking.

This open access book addresses the evasive problem of why truly effective educational innovation on a wide scale is so difficult to achieve, and what leaders may do about this. Examining the case of system-wide reform processes centering on teaching a thinking-rich curriculum, it discusses general issues pertaining to implementing deep, large-scale changes in the core of learning and instruction. The book emphasizes challenges related to professional development, assessment, achievement gaps, and the tension between knowledge and skills in 21st century curricula. It summarizes insights the author has gained from approximately 25 years of engaging with these topics both as an academic and as a practitioner who led a national change process. With a Forward by David Perkins

This book offers an ecological perspective to understand the opportunities and complexities of spreading and sustaining educational innovations. It explores the imperatives underpinning educational reforms and identifies the role of schools in developing, disseminating, and sustaining changes in Singapore’s educational context. It also includes international case studies that examine the dialectical relationships between structure, people and culture and demonstrate that cultivating ecologies involves leveraging affordances and resources across the education system to create new contexts, synergies and capacities. Further, it argues that educational innovations and reforms also need to consider tacit knowledge and conditions of transfer, which may be ambiguous and challenging. Few books address the nuances and interactions of innovation and change across levels of the education ecology – from the micro (classroom), meso (organisation / school), exo (partners), macro (policy) and chrono (time scales) levels. The ecological perspective adopted in this book explores the dynamic tensions in order to understand the interplays of policy and school-level influences that contextualize school innovations. By presenting multiple voices and views, it allows impediments and affordances of innovation diffusion to be discussed holistically, which is an integral caveat for nurturing a sustainable ecology that enables innovations.

Scale-Up in Education, Volume 1: Ideas in Principle examines the challenges of 'scaling up' from a multidisciplinary perspective. It brings together contributions from disciplines that routinely take promising innovations to scale, including medicine, business, engineering, computing, and education. Together the contributors explore appropriate methods for estimating the effects of innovations in larger, more diverse settings and provide theories and models to guide the design of innovations most likely to remain viable at large scales. Specially-commissioned commentaries also discuss the analytical requirements and theoretical possibilities of a program of educational research on scale-up built upon these foundations. This volume is ideally suited for researchers, policymakers, and graduate students charged with determining the effectiveness of educational interventions. With its insights into the conceptual and methodological prerequisites for obtaining rigorous, actionable evidence of intervention effects, the volume provides reading for program evaluation courses in schools of education and public policy.