This quote is by Robert Slavin, researcher and director SOE’s Center for Research and Reform in Education. I found it in this new short report by John Hopkins School of Education (SOE). They asked three nationally recognized researchers at their institute to share their experiences and lessons learned in bringing their successful evidence-based programs to scale.
So what is needed to bring a program to scale? What are the challenges involved? How do you bring a program to scale and not sacrifice quality? And how do you convince school leadership to implement more effective practices?
Another quote, by Robert Balfanz: “Finding the right balance between a school or district’s situation and an evidence-based model is often a challenge. Adapting a model to local conditions, such as length of the school day or preferred curriculum, increases the school’s buy-in and willingness to implement the model. Doing this while maintaining fidelity to the elements of the model that have been shown to drive improvement is where the delicate balance needs to occur.”
Reblogged this on The Echo Chamber.
Hi Pedro- Though I can’t help with an evidence base for selecting a whole curriculum, I hope you and your readers will be interested in what I’m doing with my new company, Balefire Labs. We are an educational app review service that evaluates mobile apps for ages 0-19 yrs with a focus on instructional quality.
Because we can’t test 150,000+ educational apps, we rely on scientific research to tell us what instructional design and usability design features are most critical for positive student learning outcomes. Then we evaluate apps according to that standard list of 12 criteria.
Hope you’ll check us out: http://www.BalefireLabs.com. My creation of this company (which launched in August) arose out of exactly the frustration expressed by Slavin. Thanks!