Our education systems must provide access to quality and equitable educational opportunities so all students can reach their full potential. Increasingly urgent issues, such as environmental threats, economic crises, and the recent global pandemic, have highlighted the need for education systems to be flexible and resilient in times of stress to…

This article focuses on the teacher community as an agent of school development, and in the context of teacher engagement in new educational practices, it discusses how school change can be analyzed as a process of creating and transforming professional knowledge (orientation pattern). The qualitative research was conducted in 2015-2016 at 12…

To improve teaching and learning outcomes, teachers and head teachers need whole-system support to build professionalism and enhance their practice. Roles at the middle tier of education systems, or those professionals working between the school and central level, offer unique capacities to facilitate collaboration, broker knowledge, scale…

To improve teaching and learning outcomes, teachers and head teachers need whole-system support to build professionalism and enhance their practice. Roles at the middle tier of education systems, or those professionals working between the school and central level, offer unique capacities to facilitate collaboration, broker knowledge, scale…

Sixty-six school districts and more than 150 schools in the state of Kansas are participating in the Kansans Can Redesign Project. In this article, we present a case study of using Design Thinking as a systemic process to structure continuous school improvement. The collage of real-life scenarios presented in our case shows the integration of…

The world needs great individual educational changemakers capable of identifying problems and creating bold, scalable solutions. But the world also needs Dream Teams--groups of talented administrators, teachers, staff, students, and community members who are passionate about making things better for kids, believe that school-based change is the…

This paper provides a research-based framework for promoting institutional change in higher education. To date, most educational change efforts have focused on relatively narrow subsets of the university system (e.g., faculty teaching practices or administrative policies) and have been largely driven by implicit change logics; both of these…

This is a reflection on a case of in-service teacher education. Two Swiss teachers, assisted by a change agent, were developing an innovative teaching approach, inspired by Wiggins & McTighe's methodology Understanding by Design (UbD). While one developed a real understanding and mastery of this approach--improving therefore his professional…

This paper describes a method for accelerating educational improvements nation-wide through the activities of one or more catalyst organizations, which would stimulate interaction between educational systems personnel and promising new ideas. It highlights measures to correct present shortcomings, which exist because there is no strong linkage…

Project objectives aim at developing and testing organizations that facilitate research and development activities in the schools; and at developing and testing the effectiveness of the means whereby schools select, introduce, and utilize the results of research and development. The Model for Educational Improvement is a theoretical construct that…

This examination of the operation of teams in the Pilot Communities Program is chiefly historical in character. Based on intensive examination of proposals, evaluation studies, reports, memoranda, and interviews with personnel involved in the program, it was written by two university professors who had not been involved in the actual program. The…

This booklet details a methodology for infusing almost any subject into a school district's ongoing curriculum. The process involved three interrelated parts: infusion, community, and stewardship. The infusion component makes it possible to upgrade teacher's skills, improve classroom management, strengthen community-school cooperation, and diffuse…

This study describes an attempt to introduce change into an educational system. A new science program (MATAL) consisting of new teaching materials, teaching strategies and training courses--was developed and implemented in kindergarten classrooms. Major hypotheses were that (1) the kindergarten is a system; educational change will be achieved…

This booklet was developed as part of the Pilot Communities Program and focuses on how to develop and use teams in schools. The first section of the book, entitled "The Groundwork for Building a Team," includes the rationale for and definition of a team and discussions of: (a) team goals and objectives and real world constraints; (b) selection of…