Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better

by Anthony S. Bryk

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.

Genres: Education, Leadership, Nonfiction, Teaching

Audible Audio

First published March 1, 2015

Reviews

[Todd · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a best in class book. Tony Bryk is a thought leader. He is a bit of a bricoleur, pulling helpful theories and practices from W Edwards Deming, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and other fields. He has developed a useful and helpful method for undertaking improvement. The weakest part is the idea of the networked improvement communities; fortunately, that is not essential to the method. In any case, the method that Bryk and his Carnegie Foundation team have developed works in most fields in addition to their particular specialty in education. If you are interested in continuous improvement ("improvement science") or even if you are not, check this out.

[Laurie Thurston · Rating 3 out of 5]

The premise is that education will benefit from Improvement Science…but is it science? I’ve been in education for 34 years and was part of the small school initiative mentioned in the Introduction that ‘failed’ in Oregon in the early 2010s. And ai agree that it was set up to fail, which was I left the organization. While the concept of what is needed to initiate change is well argued, there are so many moving parts in school systems that bringing all the iterations to scale is not realistic. Not saying we shouldn’t keep trying, but choose what problems you want to solve with care, include the stakeholders and protect teachers from being destroyed by this extra work. If you really want teachers to try new strategies and track progress, they can’t teach 200 kids and have three preps a day. That, I promise you, is not sustainable.

[Becca · Rating 4 out of 5]

The general structure and approach described here is promising for educational improvement. I'm still trying to work through what I think about the valorization of failure as a necessary component of improvement (is it? does it have to be?) with the reality that the kids who are already most marginalized and most harmed by the ed system are the ones who are going to suffer most from those "necessary" failures.

[Heidi · Rating 4 out of 5]

More required reading for graduate school, but I would say this was my favorite book of them all. In a very practical way, the authors outline how we can use specific tools to make improvement science an integral part of consistent education reform in a lasting way. Now if only our education leaders could implement these strategies!

[Kevin Parkinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pretty good book about design thinking, problem solving, decision-making, standards of practice / guidelines, impact, field building, and strategy, all within an education context. At times a bit boring and now a tad dated, but overall a pretty good book with some good ideas. Excited to try it out.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent introduction to improvement science in education. Much better than Improvement Science in Education: A Primer that covers much of the same ground, but with worse graphics and clunkier prose. If we were to embrace these ideas (published 9 years ago now) in education we might actually make real progress on realizing stronger outcomes in public education.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clear message regarding the flaws of our current systems and well thought-out explanation of a solution. It is spot on with its focus on more decentralized systems for school improvement. I recommend this book to anyone taking a hard look at improving the institution of education.

[Joe Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book I was required to read during my M.Ed. program on Admin., Supervision, and Curriculum. I have been in the Field of Education for 11 years. None of the other reviews I saw accurately reflected the contents of this book, nor did the reviewers have any sort of credentials mentioned.

[Catherine]

I thought this book was good! There was nothing astonishing in this book but it did a great job of outlining things we already know help improve systems and organizing them along with data to demonstrate the order and importance. Great read for anyone in a leadership position.

[Lmoore · Rating 3 out of 5]

Outdated. The reference to the literacy collaborative over and over, when that has been demolished by the research in the science of reading made some of the points the authors are attempting to make weak.

[Kristy Grey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great theory, but the language was much too technical.

[Mikayla · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ok book. Lots of information. Didn't particularly keep my attention. But a good textbook for the class I took.

[Ricardo Garcia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Required book to read for M. Ed program, but book was so accessible and language was perfect for folx hoping to get into educational leadership.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this for work. Some interesting ideas about how to reform education by focusing on making changes at small levels and scaling up.

[Jeannie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was another required read for my Ed.D program, and while useful, it proved to be a bit dry.

[Elianne del Campo · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 stars bc just a very non-fiction book for a class, but still learned a lot, so slay :D

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a summary of the development of a Network of Improvement (NIC). The examples come from education and rely on a lot of health care QI projects.

[Toya Glen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading about improvement science and learning more about reforms that have impacted my career.

[Wes Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Awesome and dense intro to using Improvement Science in educational settings. I listened to the audiobook, but I will buy a physical copy to reference and for the graphics.

[Bri (readingknitter) · Rating 4 out of 5]

For more, check out girlwithabookblog.com!

Learning to Improve: How America's Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better is a book written by a group of researchers (Anthony S. Bryk, Louis M. Gomez, Alicia Grunow, and Paul G. LeMahieu) and is the culmination, in their own words, of "learning from six years of pragmatic activity at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching." One of my supervisors gave me this book when I was put on a new project at work doing some tasks with the New York City Department of Education. Since I had never worked with or studied how central teams function within a school district and I hadn't spent any time in New York schools, I had quite a learning curve ahead of me. (Side note to the clueless like Past Bri: central teams are basically administrators who usually work for a school district and not individual schools.)

This book helped provide me with a lot of necessary insight and served as a great introduction to understanding how districts function and the relevant language used in the field. However, the book would probably be redundant to anyone who has studied or experienced how district-level reforms impact American schools.  For a newbie like me, the best parts of this book are the pieces that felt like a deep literature review, such as the vignette that discussed the role of instructional coaches within the Los Angeles Unified School District or the concise explanation of the how the Danielson Framework evaluates educators. All of this information on how districts choose to evaluate practitioners in order to hopefully increase student learning gains was a terrific aid to me and helped me more easily navigate the terms and references related to my project at work.

While I learned quite a bit from reading this book, I could have done without all of the constant references to Networked Improvement Communities, or NICs, which is the term created by the authors for their new form of "educational [Research & Design] which joins together the discipline of improvement science with the dynamism and creative power of networks organized to solve problems." Even though I found the frequent mention of the NICs to be monotonous, the authors' desire to make NICs a common term is likely the reason they compiled this book in the first place. I mostly skimmed the last chapters (6 and 7) as they primarily revolved around deeper discussion of the importance of NICs and weren't particularly relevant to me.

Overall, this book was a great read for me and my supervisor really knew what they were doing when they recommended it to me. However, I don't think Learning to Improve is written in an accessible or interesting way for someone who doesn't work in my field.

[Eric Kalenze · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wasn't expecting to like this much, as I assumed it would contain a lot of the reform-y, system-change-y myopia I rail against in my own book.

I was quite wrong.

I mean, I have a number of issues with this work overall, but I must hand it to Bryk & associates: they get and honor a lot of the education enterprise's issues better than most--and their approach (with a bit more evidence basis, of course) is worth fully working out. It has much more potential than many of the reform mandates operating currently. I am very intrigued by it and am glad to have read about it.

(I plan to blog on this in more detail soon at A Total Ed Case, time willing.)

[Jordan Munn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book puts new labels on old ideas, which is a bit obnoxious. Nonetheless, most of the ideas are very good and are worth at least consideration in the education sector, even if the suggested implementation of some of them seems highly unrealistic.

[Tanya · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book for digging deeper into school improvement. Provides examples of how improvement science can be applied in schools. Using the PDSA cycle, teams can use research-based methods to identify a problem and test solutions. Good refresher on managing change one focus at a time.

[Samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

This wasn't terrible, I didn't even write any angry notes in the margins.

[Casey · Rating 3 out of 5]

One need only read page 172 and 173.