This book is a step-by-step guide for improving student learning in higher education. The authors argue that a fundamental obstacle to improvement is that higher educators, administrators, and assessment professionals do not know how to improve student learning at scale. By this they mean improvement efforts that span an entire program, affecting all affiliated students. The authors found that faculty and administrators particularly struggle to conceptualize and implement multi-section, multi-course improvement efforts. It is unsurprising that ambitious, wide-reaching improvement efforts like these would pose difficulty in their organization and implementation. This is precisely the problem the authors address. The book provides practical strategies for learning improvement, enabling faculty to collaborate, and integrating leadership, social dynamics, curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and faculty development. In Chapter 2, the authors tell a program-level improvement story from the perspective of a faculty member. Chapter 3 inverts Chapter 2. Beginning from the re-assess stage, the authors work their way back to the individual faculty member first pondering whether she can do something to impact students’ skills. They peel back each layer of the process and imagine how learning improvement efforts might be thwarted at each stage. Chapters 4 through 9 dig deeper into the learning improvement steps introduced in Chapters 2 and 3. Each chapter provides strategies to help higher educators climb each step successfully. Chapter 10 paints a picture of what higher education could look like in 2041 if learning improvement were embraced. And, finally, Chapter 11 describes what you can do to support the movement.

As a field, education has largely failed to learn from experience. Time after time, promising education reforms fall short of their goals and are abandoned as other promising ideas take their place. In Learning to Improve, the authors argue for a new approach. Rather than “implementing fast and learning slow,” they believe educators should adopt a more rigorous approach to improvement that allows the field to “learn fast to implement well.” Using ideas borrowed from improvement science, the authors show how a process of disciplined inquiry can be combined with the use of networks to identify, adapt, and successfully scale up promising interventions in education. Organized around six core principles, the book shows how “networked improvement communities” can bring together researchers and practitioners to accelerate learning in key areas of education. Examples include efforts to address the high rates of failure among students in community college remedial math courses and strategies for improving feedback to novice teachers. Learning to Improve offers a new paradigm for research and development in education that promises to be a powerful driver of improvement for the nation’s schools and colleges.

This book focuses on central issues that are key components of successful planning, development and implementation of LSAs. The book's main distinction is its focus on practice- based, cutting-edge research. This is achieved by having chapters co-authored by world-class researchers in collaboration with measurement practitioners.

Improving Schools to Promote Learning is a concise and common-sense examination of all the moving parts that drive student learning. The book ties together the research, policies, and practices relative to the state, district, school, classroom, and family, and explains their effects on student learning. The author covers an array of topics, including technology, charter schools, turnaround initiatives, and instruction in specific subject areas. Herbert J. Walberg’s book continues the work of previous publications from the Center on Innovation & Improvement (Handbook on Restructuring and Substantial School Improvement and Handbook on the Statewide Systems of Support) that connect research to practice at various levels of the education system. The book is accessible to a wide audience, including educators, school board members, parents, and policy makers. Walberg includes action steps in every chapter, providing practical recommendations for improved student achievement. The author also offers select references for additional material on the best research and most effective practices.

This open access book presents contemporary perspectives on the role of a learning society from the lens of leading practitioners, experts from universities, governments, and industry leaders. The think pieces argue for a learning society as a major driver of change with far-reaching influence on learning to serve the needs of economies and societies. The book is a testimonial to the importance of ‘learning communities.’ It highlights the pivotal role that can be played by non-traditional actors such as city and urban planners, citizens, transport professionals, and technology companies. This collection seeks to contribute to the discourse on strengthening the fabric of a learning society crucial for future economic and social development, particularly in the aftermath of the coronavirus disease.

This book is a fictionalized account of how a licensed school teacher developed, implemented, and refined the application of Lean principles and applied them to her classroom instructional practice to complete the delivery of her assigned curriculum while at the same time ensuring her students achieved mastery learning of the material presented. While the first edition focused on instructional process improvement, this second edition expands on that foundation to include application of the Lean principles and strategies to enable students to improve their individual learning processes and thus become more successful learners. This second edition lays out a blueprint for schools and teachers across the USA, and indeed around the world, who are struggling with how to use traditional education techniques to improve student learning outcomes. This elusive goal has been the number one focus of the American education industry and trillions of dollars of investment for the past 50 years. Up until the previous decade, educators refused to look outside their own industry for solutions. But financial challenges have forced them to look outside that box. Many schools and districts are now discovering the benefits of adopting Lean into their business model to achieve greater efficiency with taxpayer dollars on the administrative side. Some larger districts have established Lean offices or departments within their organization. This has helped with budgeting, but the model has not yet been used on a large scale to improve student learning performance – every school/district’s primary mission. This book lays out the blueprint for teachers and administrators to use simple Lean strategies and tools to achieve that elusive goal. The application is no longer theoretical. It has been proven to be effective by those who have used it. Lean principles and strategies, as applied to education through this real-life case study, are explained in easy-to-understand terms, not in manufacturing Lean jargon. Scenarios used are from real life events common to all educators. Examples of forms, tools adapted to the needs of educators, and results are included. The book is written in an easy to understand narrative style. Reviewers of the original version – educators who knew nothing about Lean – stated they could easily understand the concepts presented and implement the model using nothing more than the book as a guide. The book’s presentation eliminates teacher procrastination resulting from having to figure something out and how to apply it to your work yourself when you have no extra time available for that purpose. It also eliminates the need to hire a Lean consultant – a plus for districts strapped for cash but desiring to implement an improvement solution.

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.