Leading Educational Innovation and Improvement

Pursuing goals for ambitious teaching and learning requires that students, teachers, and educational leaders learn to work together in new ways. This course engages learners in exploring four leading logics of educational innovation: strategies and approaches to producing and using knowledge to improve educational practice and outcomes at scale, across many classrooms, schools, and systems. These logics include:

• Shell enterprises
• Diffusion enterprises
• Incubation enterprises
• Evolutionary enterprises

Each of these logics has been used successfully in different types of classrooms, schools, and systems, though each also features traps and pitfalls that complicate universal usage.

To understand both their potential and their pitfalls, learners will apply these logics in analyzing exemplary cases of large-scale, practice-focused educational innovation in the US and abroad.

With deeper understandings of these logics, learners will be able to be strategic in designing and managing local innovation. They will also be able to identify external programs and projects that can serve as effective partners in innovation and improvement.

This course is part of the Leading Educational Innovation and Improvement MicroMasters Program offered by MichiganX.

With roots in industry and in health care, improvement science is a disciplined approach to educational innovation that supports teachers, leaders, and researchers in collaborating to solve specific problems of practice. Improvement science brings discipline and methods to different logics of innovation by integrating:

• Problem analysis
• Use of research
• Development of solutions
• Measurement of processes and outcomes
• Rapid refinement through plan-do-study-act cycles.

For teachers, school leaders, and system leaders, improvement science moves educational innovation out of the realm of “fad” and into the realm of research-based, evidence-driven continuous improvement, with the goal of increasing the effectiveness of educational practice.

That, in turn, will support schools and systems in responding to calls to improve opportunities to learn and student performance and calls to reduce achievement gaps by improving the day-to-day work students, teachers, and leaders.

In this introduction to improvement science, developed in collaboration with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, learners will explore:

• Problem-specific and user-centered design and analysis
• Differences in implementation and outcomes as resources for improvement
• Improving systems to improve practice
• Driving improvement through measurement, evidence, and disciplined inquiry

This course is part of the Leading Educational Innovation and Improvement MicroMasters Program offered by MichiganX.

With principles of improvement science as a foundation, new knowledge about the continuous improvement of educational innovations is rapidly emerging among communities of educational professionals and researchers, as they work together in new ways to solve practical problems, improve student performance, and reduce achievement gaps.

Developed in collaboration with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, this course will use case studies to take learners deep into the design, organization, and management of three innovative approaches to large-scale, practice-focused continuous improvement that have currency in the US and abroad:

• Design-Based Implementation Research
• Implementation Science
• Networked Improvement Communities

For each case, learners will use logics of innovation to analyze the central strategy of each approach, and they will use principles of improvement science to analyze how each uses disciplined methods to address practical problems faced by teachers and leaders.

This course is part of the Leading Educational Innovation and Improvement MicroMasters Program offered by MichiganX.

This capstone course will feature knowledge, disposition, and performance assessments that examine growth along dimensions critical to the effective leadership of educational innovation and improvement.

Learners will apply knowledge and principles of ambitious instruction, logics of innovation, improvement science, and exemplary cases to case studies of large-scale, practice-focused innovation. In doing so, they will identify and explain strengths in these innovations. They will also identify problems and challenges faced by these initiatives and, then, propose means of organizing and managing in response to those problems and challenges.

This course is part of the Leading Educational Innovation and Improvement MicroMasters Program offered by MichiganX.