Background: Substantial research on reform implementation highlights numerous challenges to implementing innovations at scale with depth and sustainability, yet new reforms continue to encounter many of the same challenges. This has led to calls for researchers to work in partnership with practitioners to design, implement, and scale educational…

There is increasing interest in researcher-practitioner partnerships, particularly those that take the form of a networked improvement community. In this paper, we describe the partnership between the National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools and the Fort Worth Independent School District to build student ownership and responsibility. By…

The last 5 years have witnessed growing support amongst government institutions and educational foundations for applying continuous improvement research (CIR) in school settings. CIR responds to the challenge of implementing effective educational innovations at scale by working with practitioners in local contexts to understand "what works,…

The last 5 years have witnessed growing support amongst government institutions and educational foundations for applying continuous improvement research (CIR) in school settings. CIR responds to the challenge of implementing effective educational innovations at scale by working with practitioners in local contexts to understand ''what works, for…

This paper presents evidence from a unique reform model that allowed teachers and other educators in a large urban district to collaborate with one another in the development of an innovation meant to improve student ownership and responsibility. In this longitudinal case study, we describe school stakeholders' learning about the design, the…

This article is situated at the intersection of two trends in education research: a growing emphasis on the importance of co-cognitive traits and the emergence of research-practice partnerships to more effectively scale effective practices. Our partnership focused on building student ownership and responsibility for their learning, which means…

This chapter describes a model for continuous improvement that guides the work of the National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools, or NCSU. NCSU is a research and development center funded by the Institute for Education Sciences, the research arm of the United States Department of Education. At the core of the Center's work is an innovative…

The conventional approach to scaling up educational reforms considers the development and testing phases to be distinct from the work of implementing at scale. Decades of research suggest that this approach yields inconsistent and often disappointing improvements for schools most in need. More recent scholarship on scaling school improvement…

Market reforms in education are part of the educational policy landscape in many countries. Central to arguments for market reforms is the idea that competition and choice will spur changes in schools to be more innovative, which in turn will lead to better student outcomes. We define innovation in terms of a practice's relative prevalence in a…