Conference Agenda

Around the globe, educational systems are grappling with the challenges of expanding access to high-quality learning opportunities for all students. Achieving these goals requires unprecedented levels of professional expertise in areas ranging from curricular content, pedagogy, modalities of learning, and more. One implication of ambitious goals, and their concomitant demands on professional knowledge, is that conventional modes of professional development are unlikely to suffice. Instead, we must redesign educational systems to operate as learning organizations that support the generation and use of professional knowledge, and that provide opportunities for continuous reflection and experimentation. In this session, we spotlight three approaches to system transformation in England, Singapore, and the United States. Each case describes a collaborative endeavor to transform traditional schools and systems into learning organizations, while also analyzing the obstacles they contended with throughout their work. By leveraging variation among cases, the session will provide an opportunity for participants to consider the actual work of system transformation as it unfolds in differing contexts. Each author team will give a 10-minute presentation, followed by discussant commentary. Then the audience will have time for small group discussion aimed at identifying questions to fuel a whole group discussion among authors and attendees.

This paper argues that system leaders who want to develop evidence-informed practice across multiple local schools must find a sweet spot between purism and pragmatism in terms of how evidence is integrated with wider professional learning and improvement efforts. It draws on an ongoing evaluation of the Western Excellence in Learning and Leadership (WELL) initiative – a GBP 3.9 million three-year programme (2021-24) which aims to improve educational outcomes for young people, with a focus on disadvantaged youth, across an isolated and deprived area of Cumbria (United Kingdom). A core thrust of WELL’s approach is to strengthen the use of evidence by schools in the 121 schools it supports, including through a partnership with the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) (the UK’s educational ‘what works’ centre).

WELL support to schools includes a suite of evidence-based professional development programmes, themed networks, and events. In addition, each school receives annual funding of between £4500-£22,600. Headteachers decide how this money is spent but must attend training on the EEF’s ‘Putting evidence to work – a school’s guide to implementation’ (Sharples et al, 2018) and produce an evidence-based action plan.

The paper asks: What does WELL tell us about the opportunities and challenges facing local system leaders as they seek to strengthen evidence-informed professional learning and improvement at scale?

Access to research by practitioners is important but is unlikely to change established behaviours on its own (Nutley, Walter and Davies, 2007). School leaders play a key role in mobilising evidence and facilitating professional learning within schools, although changing existing norms has proved challenging in many contexts (Hall and Hord, 2001).

The WELL evaluation (authors) includes:

· Implementation and Process: observations; surveys and case studies;

· Impact: compares WELL-supported schools’ test outcomes with a matched sample.

WELL has been able to piggy-back on the EEF’s established ‘what works’ syntheses and tools. This has offered advantages but also carried risks. An overly narrow focus on ‘what works’ evidence risks downgrading other valid forms of evidence, such as school-level assessment data. Furthermore, there are many gaps in the EEF evidence base: for example, in areas such as leadership and curriculum development, which are not amenable to Randomised Controlled Trial-type evaluations. ‘What works’ approaches also risk reducing appetite for innovation – if schools can only adopt ‘proven’ approaches, why would they try something new?

The evaluation highlights a need for WELL’s leaders to balance purism and pragmatism in pursuit of collaborative evidence-informed improvement at scale. While a ‘what works’ purist might insist on only allowing the most rigorous evidence be applied by schools, this would have limited school engagement in Cumbria. Equally, an overly pragmatic and flexible approach might not be demanding enough to achieve genuine change. The sweet spot appears to be in between, focussed on school engagement, working flexibly within a clear process and set of tools, and encouraging a collective process of learning about how ‘evidence’ can add value.

This paper draws on a large-scale classroom-based longitudinal study in Singapore’s primary and secondary schools to critically examine the relationships between national assessment reforms, teacher learning, shifts in assessment practices, and system changes in the wake of a global policy push from summative assessments towards formative forms. In the recent decade, national assessment initiatives have been implemented by the Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) (2009) to promote the use of formative assessment to enhance student learning. This was a deliberate attempt to shift schools away from a high-stakes examination culture that is deeply ingrained in Singapore society (Cheah, 1998). Initiatives such as the Primary Education Review and Implementation Holistic Assessment (PERI HA) and others are designed to create opportunities and space for teachers and students to use assessment for learning practices and reduce examination pressure. PERI HA in particular includes teacher professional development and school reforms so that teachers can employ a broad assessment repertoire to support student learning. Despite such system strategies, in doing so, a “contact zone” manifests where “cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (Pratt, 1991, p. 34). Schools become sites of contestation on the values of education and on assessment priorities, with teachers playing out system tensions through resistant and creative strategies around assessment practices.

The paper therefore unpacks the emergence of the contact zone over time, drawing from a critical discussion of Singapore’s educational policies and initiatives, and empirical findings from the CORE Research Programme (CORE) that describes changes to teaching and learning in Singapore’s primary and secondary classrooms from 2004 to 2022. Specifically, in recent years and building on prior national initiatives, MOE (2020) introduced an enhanced professional learning roadmap, termed “SkillsFuture for Educators” (SFEd), to further support teachers’ professional development in six prioritised ‘areas of practice’ (AoP) that are critical to improve the system and schools. SFEd provides learning infrastructures and resources alongside existing network structures, within- and across-schools, to enhance professional learning for teachers. Among the six AoPs is Assessment Literacy to help teachers improve competencies in designing meaningful assessments; such professional learning builds on and extends the work of PERI HA in an attempt to evolve schools into learning organisations centred around assessment improvements.

Alongside policy implementations over the decades, the systems-oriented CORE documents pedagogical shifts and has provided research evidence for further refinements to curriculum development, professional learning and pedagogical and assessment improvements. CORE’s long-term examination of transformation at the classroom level and linking it to broader system changes allows for a critical analysis of the relationship between policy enactment and pedagogical events in classrooms, their mediating processes and consequences for teachers and students (Luke et al, 2005). With a specific focus on assessment practices in classrooms from 2004 to 2022, CORE’s findings therefore sheds light on the complex interplay between system-level reforms, teacher learning structures, opportunities and challenges, and teachers grappling in the contact zone between well-intentioned national imperatives and sedimented sociocultural beliefs.

Two prominent efforts to transform public education in the US are research-practice partnerships (RPPs) and school improvement networks. These strategies take aim at entrenched organizational pathologies that have long undermined educational improvement, by supporting the redesign of educational systems to embed professional learning in the day-to-day work of schools. Improvement networks involve a set of schools, often connected through a central hub, that engage in a collective effort to solve problems of practice and to learn through collaborative inquiry (Barletta, et al., 2018; Katz & Earl, 2010; Kubiak & Bertram, 2010). RPPs, conversely, involve long-term engagements between research organizations and districts dedicated to supporting educational improvement (Farrell et al. 2021), creating a context in which research and practitioner communities forge shared understandings, norms, and ways of working (Farley-Ripple et al. 2018).

This paper applies boundary spanning theory to support a comparative analysis of RPPs and improvement networks. The importance of boundaries—epistemic, organizational, and cultural—is a common feature across the organizational learning literature. Boundaries represent “a socio-cultural difference leading to discontinuity in action or interaction” (Akkerman and Bakker, 2011, 133). Examples of boundaries include the fissures between home and school, work and family, and professional education and practice (Buxton, et al., 2005). A boundary is marked by a collision of norms, values, and legitimate behavior that complicate communication, but also create potential for learning.

The results draw on two separate programs of research conducted by the individual authors over several years: a qualitative comparative case study of two RPPs in large urban districts and a mixed methods case study of over forty improvement networks within a national initiative. The approach taken in this specific paper, however, is conceptual in nature in that the results are derived from the application of theory to distinct professional learning approaches.

The paper sheds light on similarities and differences in the assumptions and challenges that undergird RPPs and improvement networks. Examples of shared assumptions include: teachers and leaders can generate practical knowledge when working with others from outside their immediate work context; and the knowledge generated from partnership work can be effectively applied in partners’ context-specific settings; structural constraints, such as time, scheduling, and distance, can be managed to allow for sustained joint work. A common challenge is that RPPS and networks must contend with professional norms that favor personal experience over general knowledge, and autonomy over collective action.

These commonalities are offset by differences. For example, network-based collaboration and learning require practitioners to traverse the boundaries that separate individual schools (e.g., students, district context, curriculum), whereas RPP boundaries are more epistemological in nature in that they involve bridging differing conceptions of knowledge held by researchers and practitioners.

In applying boundary spanning to RPPs and improvement networks, we provide a framework for comparing partnerships among schools and other organizations that are looked to as models for innovative forms of professional learning. The popularity of these partnerships speaks to the importance of developing analytic tools that surface their key assumptions, potential, and inherent challenges.