Due to the "wicked problem" of the Academy's resistance to innovation, new teaching and learning programs struggle to become integrated into the fabric of the Academy, which slows the uptake of evidence-based practices. This wicked problem is rooted in the lack of slow, intentional mechanisms for cultural change in the Academy. In this…

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…

Dorothy Negropontes was a key player in the creation of the Community Learning Campus (CLC), an innovative collaboration of education and community leaders in Olds, Alberta. A former Assistant Superintendent with Chinook's Edge School District, she co-chaired the steering committee that developed the project, served as its executive director…

Does teacher professional development make a difference? How do we know? While researchers and policy-makers acknowledge that teacher professional development (PD) needs to be assessed and evaluated, there is often little clarity as to how this can be achieved. Evaluation of teacher PD by schools has been described as the weak link in the PD chain…

The U.S. Office of Education's National Diffusion Network is designed to transport and systematically promote the adoption of validated innovative programs throughout the nation. The 13 case studies in this publication are intended to provide a comprehensive overview of the state facilitator effort and accurately represent the range and diversity…

Past and present research has provided evidence to support the claim that technologies for teaching and learning must be pedagogically sound. However, educational technologies are also part of a complex process involving the people in the implementation of the innovation. In this paper, I review existing research and explain what both of those…

This study evaluates the Community-School Relations Workshops, a component of the Learning and Action through Social Education and Reading (LASER) program. The workshops are designed to help school-community representatives to work on problems of mutual concern. The study considers two questions: (1) Assuming the workshop is capable of bringing…

Reviewing recent research on efforts to improve the quality of public schooling in the United States, this paper focuses on evidence suggesting that negative by-products often accompany innovations and, moreover, that innovators have tended to disregard their capacity for leaving schools in worse condition than they found them. The analysis…

The problems of changing a school system require a systematic approach that coordinates various efforts within the system. A model, developed by Professor Goodson and his staff, deals with the design of a change-agent team and the work that such a team might perform. The model requires four functions to be performed: Diagnosing problems, planning…

A pre-planned team approach to educational change is described to maximize the chances that education majors and public school students willfully receive the types of improved learning experiences new curricula and organizational innovations promote. Public school and college change agents participating in an action lab sponsored by the…

The individuals who use, or neglect to use, an innovation such as mainstreaming are the key to success or failure in change efforts. The concepts of individual stages of concern about an innovation and levels of use of the innovations are discussed. It is suggested that these dimensions can be used as diagnostic tools for facilitating change and…

A key assumption of the Concerns Based Adoption Model (CBAM) is that change is a process, rather than an event. The Procedures for Adopting Educational Innovations Project is working to identify and verify diagnostic dimensions of CBAM, and to develop tools to measure the developmental status of users and non-users; these concepts will help change…

Describes a project that changed the social studies curriculum by changing the method of teaching. (MB)

A two-part report, sponsored by the Northwest Regional Exchange, focuses on the role of technical assistance in educational settings. This document, part I of the report, presents an overview of major research and literature findings, including the extant knowledge base and the state of the art in technical assistance. The introduction discusses…

This document reports the experiences of organizational development specialists and compares organizational development with two other change strategies. Organizational development aims to increase the effectiveness of task groups in schools by teaching them how to communicate clearly, use systematic methods to solve problems, draw out and use…