Alicia Grunow

The challenges we face in education, healthcare and social welfare are multi-faceted, reflecting the complex systems we live in. Out of urgency and often the best of intentions, organizations implement new policies, technologies, and other innovations to tackle these issues, and hope for the best. However, addressing these challenges requires more than heroic individuals with silver bullet solutions. We need teams with diverse expertise that know how to learn together and use their collective knowledge to redesign our social systems for the improved well-being of our communities. Journey to Improvement serves as a roadmap for teams ready to follow a different path to better outcomes. Drawing on their decades of on-the-ground experience leading improvement work in different social sectors, the authors walk teams through the various phases of an improvement journey, from launching the team, to trying ideas in practice to spreading those that work. The book highlights the personal, relational and technical aspects of taking an improvement science approach and illustrates these ideas through real world examples from across the social sector and around the world.

The challenges we face in education, healthcare and social welfare are multi-faceted, reflecting the complex systems we live in. Out of urgency and often the best of intentions, organizations implement new policies, technologies, and other innovations to tackle these issues, and hope for the best. However, addressing these challenges requires more than heroic individuals with silver bullet solutions. We need teams with diverse expertise that know how to learn together and use their collective knowledge to redesign our social systems for the improved well-being of our communities. Journey to Improvement serves as a roadmap for teams ready to follow a different path to better outcomes. Drawing on their decades of on-the-ground experience leading improvement work in different social sectors, the authors walk teams through the various phases of an improvement journey, from launching the team, to trying ideas in practice to spreading those that work. The book highlights the personal, relational and technical aspects of taking an improvement science approach and illustrates these ideas through real world examples from across the social sector and around the world.

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 rate of failure among students in community college remedial math courses and strategies forimproving 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.

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 rate of failure among students in community college remedial math courses and strategies forimproving 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.