STEM & the Outside World - Making the Environmental Connection (Happy Earth Day!)

Guest Blog: Connecting environmental education and STEM

Submitted by Christina on Fri, 2013-04-19 14:57

What are the learning goals of environmental education? How are they best accomplished? How do they support the broader goals of improving students’ STEM skills?

Students have an innate curiosity – even wonder – about the natural world around them. Environmental education (EE) taps into their enthusiasm and provides them the knowledge and skills to solve 21^st-century challenges. Early connection with the environment also equips students to make everyday decisions that improve the quality of their lives and the health of our planet.
The goals of EE can be accomplished well through project-based learning and hands-on exploration of the outdoors. Local, place-based environmental projects provide relevant learning experiences for students and an opportunity to make a meaningful difference in their communities.

Through EE, students learn not only STEM content, but also develop the critical thinking, problem-solving and decision-making skills that are critical for success in STEM careers where substantial growth is expected. Further, studies indicate that young people who experience the natural world and have more opportunities to play and learn within it are more likely to choose science or related fields as careers.

What are the opportunities and obstacles to introducing students to environmental education?

While field trips and opportunities to explore nature centers and other nonformal education settings are valuable to sparking interest and deeper knowledge about the environment, lack of time and resources can make it challenging for teachers to provide those opportunities. Increasingly, schools are investing in enriching the more accessible laboratories for learning that exist right outside the classroom door, in a nearby park, the schoolyard, school garden -- even the school building itself. Recognizing the national priority on successfully engaging more students in STEM, significantly more environmental science content is being integrated across multiple disciplines. There are expanded opportunities within the new Next Generation Science Standards to emphasize science learning through an environmental context, through content on human impacts on the natural world.

What do policymakers and decision makers need to know when thinking about STEM learning and environmental education?

Research and survey findings indicate young people have a strong interest in the environment. Total employment in STEM jobs is expected to increase by twice as much as all other jobs by 2018 and environmental science jobs are expected to grow by 25% by 2016 – the fastest among the sciences. Sources and additional statistics can be found in the new Tech & Our Planet infographic.
In 2011 the U.S. Department of Education developed the Green Ribbon Schools recognition award, which honors schools that are exemplary in reducing environmental impact and costs; improving the health and wellness of students and staff; and providing effective environmental and sustainability education, which incorporates STEM, civic skills and green career pathways. This year, as part ofNational Environmental Education Week, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan did a PSA that speaks to the important connection between EE and STEM.

Submitted by Jennifer Tabola, senior director of education, National Environmental Education Foundation

Sim City EDU (Youth Community Design 101 - Outside)

With only a few weeks away to go until the beta launch of SimCityEDU, we invite you to begin thinking about creating and sharing your own SimCity-based learning tools.

 

For the past couple of months, former social studies teachers Rick Brennan and Jason Darnell (founders of the Histrionix Learning Company and makers of the civilization game Historia) have been helping us kick start the community learning by designing a slew of exciting new lesson plans. We had the chance to speak with Brennan and Darnell about their experience writing SimCityEDU curriculum. We're thrilled to share that conversation with you below. 

 

Keep your eyes peeled for our newsletter next week: We're unveiling a prototype lesson plan from the SimCityEDU database, and we want your feedback!
 

---

What makes the SimCityEDU community a valuable resource for teachers? 
Jason Darnell: SimCityEDU offers a support platform for teachers to share specific successes from their classrooms. More than that, the community itself is a curriculum collaboration tool for twenty-first century teaching. Bringing a game like SimCity into the classroom requires both teachers and students to step outside of their traditional roles in the classroom and to collaborate and create through game play.

Can you walk us through a lesson plan you’ve created for the database?  
Rick Brennan: One of our lesson plans is called ‘Power to the People.’ Students role-play the job of SimCity mayor, prioritizing public works projects they might want to build. Should they build a hospital or school first?  A police station or a public park? And why? And what if their SimCity citizens disagree with their decisions? What then? Once students finalize their list of priorities, they must defend their decisions by writing a persuasive essay. So, the lesson helps teach popular government, public works, and how to write an original essay—all at once!

How easy or difficult is it for teachers to create curriculum around the SimCity game?
RB: I think SimCity is inherently a learning-rich environment, so teachers should find it rather easy to make connections to their curriculum, no matter the class they teach. After playing the game, so many classroom connections came to mind that I had to stop writing them down!

What feature of the game do you think will inspire teachers the most? 
JD: I’m looking forward to seeing how teachers incorporate SimCity’s new multi-player component into their lesson plans. The fact that students will be able to work collaboratively to solve real-world problems really opens up the possibilities of lesson planning and classroom implementation.

Any advice for users as they begin submitting their own lesson plans?
RB: I’d recommend designing the lesson plans with different teacher types in mind. And also, remember to walk your readers through the lesson plan step by step.

Have you developed any type of approach while writing curriculum for SimCityEDU that teachers might find helpful when creating/submitting their own lesson plans? 
RB: I’d suggest that teachers set aside a few hours to get lost in SimCity’s stunning, real to life game play – and be sure to take notes, because this game is a twenty first century teaching tool.


What aspect of the SimCityEDU community excites you most? 
JD: Well, the community itself! Very soon we’ll have an online platform filled with the stories, experiences and works of teachers across the country and beyond. Also, bringing SimCity into the classroom will hopefully prompt teachers to adjust or adapt their classroom roles, since the game aids in their instruction. We see SimCityEDU as a major step in the right direction for public education.

Youth Civic Engagement for 21st Century - (MacArthur, Digital Media & Learning - Google + talk - February 19th, 1:00 PM)

LIVE

FEB

19

1:00 PM EST

Nicole Mirra & Charlene Ortuno: Empowering Youth Civic Engagement in the 21st Century

How can parents, teachers, and mentors support innovative youth civic endeavors, both in- and out-of-school?

About This Speaker

Nicole Mirra is a high school English teacher at Animo Watts College Preparatory Academy in Los Angeles, CA, and the coordinator of the UCLA Council of Youth Research: a university-school partnership program that engages students and teachers from five Los Angeles public schools in research aimed at challenging educational inequalities and fostering transformative civic engagement. She is also Chair of the "Envisioning 21st Century Education" track at DML2013.

Charlene Ortuno is an English teacher at iPrep Academy, a magnet high school school in Miami-Dade County Public Schools. She also serves as a curriculum consultant for "Teen Thoughts on Democracy," a project at Florida International University's museum, library, and research center called "The Wolfsonian."

Resources

How to Participate

• Join the Google+ Hangout with Charlene and Nicole
• Watch, submit questions, and connect with others live on Livestream
• Watch live on the ConnectedLearning.tv home page
• Watch live on the Connected Learning Google+ Page
• Contribute to the #connectedlearning Twitter hashtag chat

Add to my calendar

Community/Business Partnerships - Youth Community Design 101

Build After-School Partnerships

By Anthony Jackson on January 30, 2013 4:27 AM

Last week we looked at how to build partnerships with business. Today I want to focus on creating stronger partnerships for after-school programs. In order to achieve global competence, young people need access to a variety of global learning experiences. No single school or after-school program can do it alone. Partnerships between after-school programs, schools, and communities are essential to preparing youth for future success.

Mapping the Community
Within every community, no matter its size or location, there are connections to other parts of the world. These connections can create starting points for exploring the world, as well as resources that can support global learning after school.

One way to get started is to create a mapping project for youth to survey their community. Support your students as they identify key cultural and international assets in your community that can help them relate to the wider world. Help them see connections between local and global realities, and learn about the many nuances of identity and culture. Youth can organize the information they collect by mapping these assets geographically and listing the specific resources that are available.

Engaging Youth in Developing Partnerships
Young people can play a critical role in interacting with partners around global learning. Involving youth in conversations with current and potential partners can make relationships with stakeholders more successful. It builds young people's sense of ownership in their program while helping them develop global competence by building their skills in communication and collaboration, among others.

Once the relationship is established, there are many ways for youth to take the lead in learning from—and with—your partners. In Milledgeville, Georgia, the High Achievers Program has incorporated a global learning focus by creating a unique structure for partnerships, programming, and staffing that engages youth as global learners and global educators year round. During the afterschool program, high-school aged youth learn about different countries and cultures linked to current events in the U.S. and their community. Through a partnership with the Peace Corps, these students participate in the Peace Corps World Wise Schools curriculum and Skype with Peace Corps volunteers living abroad. Students compare what they are learning about global issues with issues that affect them in their community. Then, the high school youth are hired to serve as camp counselors for younger students, ages 6-12, who attend globally themed camps held over spring break and during the summer. During the Global Spring Break Camp, high school youth help their younger peers explore a different country each day, while during the Global Summer Camps, students explore a different country each week.

The High Achievers program relies on strong community partnerships for its success. In addition to the partnership with the national Peace Corps, the program works closely with the Georgia College and State University at Milledgeville. College interns gain required experiential learning hours by working with the high school students throughout the year to identify global topics, issues, and examples that the students then research and convert into activities for the spring break and summer camps for younger children. International faculty and students from the college visit the program throughout the year to talk about their native cultures as well.

Building Stronger Business Ties
Rethink existing business partnerships for opportunities to support global learning. For example, you may work with a local business that provides a small amount in funding to your program each year. While a financial contribution is welcome, the relationship could provide an opportunity to involve businesspeople from the company. They could act as guest speakers who lead workshops about their experiences visiting and/or working in other countries, or mentors who can help youth understand how their local business is connected to the global economy.

In addition to providing opportunities for your business partner to become more closely connected to youth in your program and the community, their involvement helps educate a future local workforce familiar with the company and the countries where the company works.

What is good for youth is also good for their community. Community partnerships that help students become globally competent can also help them become highly skilled workers, active citizens, and well-informed participants in your community—and in today's globalized world.

Connected Learning, Out-of-School - Experiences & Networks (MacArthur Foundation)

Research: Education Could Use More 'Connected Learning'

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 01/17/13

The possibilities inherent in digital learning won't in and of themselves flatten the global playing field for students, according to new research, unless we first give attention to the idea of creating "connected learning environments." These are learning environments in which everyone can participate, learning happens by doing, cultivation of interests is paramount, and everything is interconnected. What gets in the way is a down economy with a struggling labor market, a growing gap in access to educational opportunities based on how much a family is able to spend on its children for "out-of-school enrichment activities," and the impact that a rapidly evolving and highly commercialized media separated from academic purpose is having on young people.

A group of American and British researchers have put together a reportthat advocates for a design for learning that is "peer supported," "interest-powered," and "academically oriented." The point is to help young people link personal interests, often pursued online, to academic and career endeavors and civic engagement with the help of friends and "caring" adults.

"Connected Learning: An Agenda for Research and Design," published by the Connected Learning Research Network, is designed to give educators, policy makers, parents, and others a framework for rethinking how education might be molded to connect individual interests with academic and work achievement in order to help young people overcome adversity and attain the kind of recognition that can make a difference in their lives.

Among the recommendations offered by the report's authors: "Close the gap between the no-frills learning that too often happens in-school and the interactive, hands-on learning that usually takes place out of school. Take advantage of the Internet's ability to help youth develop knowledge, expertise, skills and important new literacies. [And] use digital technology to combat the increasing reality of the haves and have-nots in education."

The stakes are high, suggested Mimi Ito, chair of the Research Network and a professor in residence at the University of California, Irvine. "Without a proactive educational reform agenda that begins with questions of equity, leverages both in-school and out-of-school learning, and embraces the opportunities new media offers for learning, we risk a growth in educational alienation among our most vulnerable populations."

Research: Education Could Use More 'Connected Learning'

• 01/17/13

Although new media offers "tremendous potential" for advancing learning, she added, "Right now, it's only the most activated and well-supported learners who are using connected learning to boost their learning and opportunity."

What does connected learning look like? As an example, the report offers the story of "Clarissa," a 17-year-old who grew up in a "working class" suburb of San Francisco. Along with a couple of friends, she was heavily involved in an online role playing Web site, Faraway Lands, where she spent a lot of time developing lengthy written descriptions of characters, including their history and location. "It's something I can do in my spare time, be creative and write and not have to be graded," because, "you know how in school you're creative, but you're doing it for a grade so it doesn't really count?" Clarissa told her researcher. Encouraged by peers on the site, the teenager converted some of the results of her writing into a screenplay for a school assignment and then used samples from her work as part of college applications. She ended up being accepted to two private colleges, one in Boston and the other in Orange, CA.

Other examples profile:

• A self-employed Web comics artist who found his passion online and taught himself how to create his own comics through a variety of online tutorials, reporting that he learned "few of his current skills in the formal educational context";
• A Manhattan public school that dedicates two weeks at the end of each trimester to putting student teams in charge of learning activities, which may include building Rube Goldberg machines, writing and performing short plays, putting on outdoor games, and building sculptures from recycled materials; and
• A sixth grade fan of online video game Minecraft, who was encouraged by teachers to help set up a school Minecraft club and do creative writing in class about it.

In most of the profiles, the young people have cobbled together a learning environment that combines their online interests with peer feedback and academic activities.

The report's authors state that the design of connected learning environments follows three principles: They're production-centered with access to digital tools for producing and creating content in a myriad of ways; they have a "shared purpose," that brings together people of all ages and cultures around "common goals and interests"; and they're "openly networked," using online platforms and digital tools to make learning resources available to everybody.

"Connected learning is about progress and it's about something everyone in education agrees is urgent and important--the unprecedented opportunity we're seeing to rethink an approach to education where all young people can realize their learning potential and their right to thrive," said Connie Yowell, director of education at the MacArthur Foundation, which supports the Research Network. "In today's networked world that is so rich in social connection, we have been handed the ability to suddenly be able to make hands-on, real-world, inquiry-based learning far more accessible. It's not a question of how we can achieve this--we have that in our sights now--it's a question of will."

Partnership with Community Design Center - Involving Students in Community Design - Field Trip!

http://www.communitydc.org/

Rural/City Connectivity, Knowledge Exchange

Rural After-School Efforts Must Stretch to Serve

Ryan Livingston and fellow 4th grader Sailor Mashe play an electronic game during after-school activities in Camdenton, Mo. The games are designed to increase motor skills, agility, proficiency in counting, and physical fitness.

—Ryan Henriksen for Education Week

Funding and transportation are common challenges

By Diette Courrégé

Premium article access courtesy of Edweek.org.

Read more FREE content!

• Printer-Friendly
• Email Article
• Reprints
• Comments
• 
  
• 

One of three grants Linda Barton relies on to provide out-of-school programs to her students will run out this month.

With two other grants still in play, Ms. Barton is perhaps in a better situation than most such providers, but she's trying to figure out how to maintain her existing programs in her Lander, Wyo., community until she can get more money.

"The funding is always a challenge," she said.

Ms. Barton is the executive director of a K-12 before- and after-school program, Lights on in Lander, in the central part of the sparsely populated state. The school-based program is financed with public dollars and serves nearly 340 students.

Rural out-of-school programs such as those Ms. Barton runs face a host of challenges because of their isolated locations. Inadequate funding, access, transportation, and staffing are among the biggest obstacles.

Despite increasing national attention to the potential for out-of-school programs to enhance school offerings and provide academic enrichment, leaders in rural areas mostly agree that their troubles, exacerbated by the economic crisis of recent years, aren't getting easier.

"Most programs that we surveyed are actually worse off than three years ago at the height of the recession," said Jen Rinehart, the vice president of research and policy for the Afterschool Alliance, based in Washington.

Obstacles Identified

For after-school providers in rural communities, much like their urban counterparts, the economy is an ongoing challenge to their ability to provide high-quality programming to enough students, said Ms. Rinehart, citing recent studies.

"The indication is that rural communities seem to be right in line with the overall after-school picture, which is not optimistic," she said.

A 2011 Harvard Family Research Project report found that out-of-school-time programs in rural areas had positive effects on students, but they face problems that urban and suburban programs did not.

The report, "Out-of-School Time Programs in Rural Areas," highlighted high family poverty, low funding, lack of transportation, and a shortage of qualified workers as some of the biggest issues facing rural communities.

On funding, rural areas generally have smaller populations that limit financial resources. They receive less federal, state, and local money for after-school services compared with urban and suburban areas, according to the study.

Another report, "Uncertain Times 2012," released this year by the Afterschool Alliance, found that nearly four out of 10 programs reported that their budgets were worse today than at the height of the recession in 2008.

Sherry Comer, the director of after-school services for the Camdenton, Mo., school district, greets kindergartner Bernice Gopar during a program for English-language learners in the sparsely populated community.

—Ryan Henriksen for Education Week

That lack of money is huge for Sherry Comer, who has directed an after-school program in Camdenton, Mo., for 14 years. Her program was one of the original recipients of the federal 21st Century Community Learning Center grants, and it's relied on a combination of sources, such as federal Title I and economic-stimulus money, to keep afloat since then.

"It is exhausting, and it takes a lot of my time to keep the balls juggled," said Ms. Comer, who serves on the Missouri AfterSchool Network board. "It's consistently been a challenge since we started. I'm always looking for where we can get funding."

Out-of-School Enrichment

Many rural communities rely on 21st Century Community Learning Center grants to serve their students. The program offers funding for centers that provide academic-enrichment opportunities during nonschool hours for children, especially those who are considered poor and attend low-performing schools.

The $1.2 billion program is formula-based and allows states to decide how to distribute the money. There's no mandate for a rural set-aside, although some states award grant applicants more priority points if they are rural.

An estimated 8.5 million children are in after-school programs nationwide, and more than 1.5 million are in those funded by that pot of federal money, according to the Afterschool Alliance.

Sylvia Lyles, the director for academic improvement and teacher-quality programs in the U.S. Department of Education's office of elementary and secondary education, which oversees the 21st Century grants, has rural areas on her agenda because they face so many difficulties. She has worked closely with some states on solutions.

"From my vantage point, I don't believe it's getting harder [for rural schools]," she said. "I think it's a hard issue."

In some communities, the lack of money can lead to a lack of access, which is troubling for rural after-school advocates. One national study found that 57 percent of rural parents who said their children didn't participate in after-school programs cited the unavailability of such programs, compared with 37 percent of suburban parents and 36 percent of urban parents.

Ms. Rinehart of the Afterschool Alliance pointed to data that show children in rural areas were the least likely of all geographic groups to take part in after-school programs because those programs didn't exist where they lived. That was particularly true among low-income rural families, she said.

"Given the research that we have, perhaps there should be additional focus on rural communities because we know that kids in those communities are least likely to be able to access after-school programs," Ms. Rinehart said.

Children get off the bus at a drop-off point outside Camdenton. The buses travel to designated locations throughout the 372-square-mile school district where parents are waiting for their children.

—Ryan Henriksen for Education Week

The isolation of rural communities can make transportation to and from out-of-school programs a costly and time-intensive prospect. Rural areas typically don't have the public-transportation systems available in more-populated areas.

"It's harder to keep the kids here and to get them home," said Ms. Comer, the Missouri after-school provider. "Transportation is a huge barrier."

Ms. Comer spends roughly 15 percent of her program's budget on transportation, but that's still not enough to be able to deliver students to their front doors. The program trimmed costs by creating drop-off points, and those work well until later in a given month, when parents run low on money, she said. When parents can't afford the gas to get to work, much less pick up their child from a drop-off point, the child can't stay after school, she said.

Finding the staff needed to run out-of-school programs can also be difficult. A smaller workforce, low education levels, and high poverty rates make it tough to recruit and retain employees.

In Wyoming, it's hard to find employees who are willing to come in and work for two hours in the middle of the afternoon with no benefits, Ms. Barton of Lights on in Lander said.

Finding Success

It's also hard to find money or time to offer additional training, and there's no money set aside to provide for cost-of-living adjustments or raises, which Ms. Barton called a flaw in the federal 21st Century grant program.

"How do you run these programs effectively and meet the requirements that are becoming much more demanding in terms of expectations?" she said.

The international child-welfare organization Save the Children began its work in Appalachia about 75 years ago, so its roots are in rural communities. It started focusing more on after-school programs in 2005, which was when Ann Mintz designed a literacy-based program to build children's skills outside of school.

What started in about 30 schools now has spread to 156 serving more than 19,000 students in 14 states. Save the Children targets high-poverty schools with a high percentage of struggling readers.

"We have found our niche to be rural, but the program we've designed would work anywhere," Ms. Mintz said. "There wasn't another entity that was coming into rural areas to provide out-of-school programs. If you look at cities, there are some fabulous out-of-school programs. We didn't see any for rural areas."

In some ways, she said it's becoming easier to operate rural programs, but other issues have made it more difficult.

"Transportation just doesn't get any better," she said. "It probably gets worse with gas prices going up."

Equipping staff members with the necessary tools and skills requires creativity and resourcefulness. Long-distance communication tools such as online video chats have made it easier to support those implementing on-site programs, but it's been harder to provide the ongoing, face-to-face training that's needed, Ms. Mintz said.

"There's no replacement for face-to-face time," she said.

Despite the problems, after-school programs have become embedded in many Wyoming communities, which have come to rely on and expect them, said Ms. Barton, who is also the executive director of the Wyoming Afterschool Alliance. Still, rural programs struggle to follow the best practices of national programs and policy models that often don't translate well in their communities, she said.

Localized Application

She described her home state as an example. National out-of-school advocacy groups have suggested scheduling meetings with mayors' policy aides, but that is out of touch with what goes on in Wyoming, she said.

RELATED BLOG

Visit this blog.

Local officials often serve in those roles part time, and they don't have a staff. The same is true for state lawmakers, who don't even have offices.

"I think that people don't really understand the definition of rural in the same way," Ms. Barton said.

Many rural programs have come to rely on statewide after-school networks in 41 states that are committed to helping ensure children have access to high-quality after-school care, Ms. Rinehart said.

"Those have really taken on the challenges with rural communities," she said, adding that they've tried to create infrastructure to link rural programs.

Ms. Comer agreed, saying Missouri's statewide network has helped her programs be successful.

"You have a cohesive system that helps you sustain," she said. "It's not easy, and it's work."

Coverage of leadership, expanded learning time, and arts learning is supported in part by a grant from The Wallace Foundation, at www.wallacefoundation.org.

Vol. 32, Issue 14, Pages 8-9

Building a Networked R&D Collaboratory (Overview: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching) Submitted by Jim Ross

Getting Ideas Into Action: Building Networked Improvement Communities in Education (PDF)

http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/sites/default/files/bryk-gomez_building-nics-education.pdf?utm_source=Ready+News+D3+-+13&utm_campaign=Ready+News&utm_medium=email

"While innovations abound in education, we argue that the field suffers from a lack of purposeful
collective action. Instead, actors work with different theories of the same problem, activities are
siloed, and local solutions remain local."

"In this essay, we focus on an alternative social organization for this activity network: How might
one structure and guide the varied and multiple associated efforts necessary to sustained
collective action toward solving complex improvement problems?"

"Open networks abound in education. In the main, they function as free-floating idea bazaars,
contexts for self-expression, and places to share information. In fact, the current social
organization of educational R&D functions much like an open network. It is characterized by a
multitude of voices lobbying for preferred approaches, but with weak mechanisms for directing
intentional action that cumulates in coherent solutions to complex problems. In this regard,
educational R&D’s inability to orchestrate such improvement is akin to a market failure."

"The terrain for possible innovation is vast and complex. The roadmap organizes the challenges to be confronted in this space in agreed upon ways. It establishes standards for how developments in different domains must fit together, and then sets micro-targets, domain by domain. In these ways the roadmap helps to coordinate he activity so that different innovations in hardware and software can be expected to interoperate at designated times in the future. In the industry’s view, road mapping is a “practicalapproach to deal with the complex process of technological innovation” (Schaller 2004:13). In essence, the roadmap reshapes accountability relationships that go beyond the confines of an individual firm or laboratory (Schaller 2004). Participants, both individuals and firms, are not autonomous actors operating within a disconnected marketplace. Rather, they form a densely connected network of peers who share a focused interest in common regions of the roadmap."

Absent a working theory of the whole, interventions fail because of externalities not considered (also known as implementation failures), even though these are often predictable. For example, curriculum
interventions often fail because of inadequate professional development. At base here is a natural human tendency to grasp for promising solutions or best practices without fully understanding how such solutions must be integrated with other solutions and pre-existing organizational conditions.

(21st Century Digital Learning Environments Process - Similar to Roadmap & Driver Diagram presented by Carnegie - our graphics designed to aid this process)

RoadmapDriver Diagram

"In general, a driver diagram has three key elements: targets, primary drivers, and secondarydrivers. The target is one of the community’s agreed upon outcomes from the program improvement map. The primary drivers are the major causal explanations hypothesized to produce currently observed results. Secondary drivers, in contrast, are interventions in the system aimed at advancing improvement toward targets."

***** "In principle, each cycle propels some bit of local learning. When parallel development activities occur in different sites at the same time, a network can learn from the ensemble of these experiences."

******* "This practice of learning through doing enlivens the mantra of continuous improvement that deficits are a treasure. Each process failure provides an opportunity to learn and to improve both locally and network wide."

******** "Applied research in education today has become hyper-concerned with the internal validity of the individual field trial. Treatises on modern causal inference place primacy on the word cause while largely ignoring concerns about the applicability of findings to varied people, places and circumstances. In contrast, improvement research must take this on as a central concern if its goal is useable knowledge to inform broad scale change. This consideration has important implications."