Tight but Loose: Scaling Up Teacher Professional Development in Diverse Contexts

Abstract

As part of its educational and social mission and in fulfilling the organization's nonprofit charter and bylaws, ETS has and continues to learn from and also to lead research that furthers educational and measurement research to advance quality and equity in education and assessment for all users of the organization's products and services. Abstract This series of papers was originally presented as a symposium at the annual meetings of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) held between April 9, 2007, and April 13, 2007, in Chicago, IL. The authors represent school districts and departments of education across the United States, as well as researchers at Cleveland State University, Educational Testing Service (ETS), the Institute for Education in London, and the University of Wyoming at Laramie. All of the current ETS staff, along with Dylan Wiliam and Marnie Thompson, worked at ETS for several years on an iterative research and development program, out of which grew the Keeping Learning on Track ® (KLT) program.These papers represents the thinking about the theory behind the KLT program, describes the range of contexts used to implement the program, and illustrates the inherent tensions between the desire to maintain fidelity to a theory of action and the need to demonstrate flexibility in order to accommodate local situations. Papers 2 through 6 present descriptions of five implementations in chronological order.Key words: Keeping Learning on Track, KLT, teacher learning communities, TLCs, assessment for learning, AfL, formative assessment i IntroductionTeaching and learning aren't working very well in the United States. Considerable effort and resources, not to mention good intentions, are going into the formal enterprise of education, theoretically focused on teaching and learning. To say the least, the results are disappointing. Looking at graduation rates (one aggregate measure of the effectiveness of current practice) is sobering. Nationally, graduation rates hover below 70% (Barton, 2005), a figure that is certainly not the hallmark of an educated society. Worse, for the students who are most likely to land in low performing schools-poor students and students of color-graduation rates are even more appalling. The Schott Foundation (Holzman, 2006) reported a national graduation rate for African American boys of 41%, with some states and many large cities showing rates around 30%. Balfanz and Legters (2004) even went so far as to call the many schools that produce such abysmal graduation rates by a term that reflects what they are good at: dropout factories. The implications of such educational outcomes for the sustainability of any society, much less a democratic society, are staggering.Learning-at least the learning that is the focus of the formal educational enterprisedoes not take place in schools. It takes place in classrooms, as a result of daily, minute-to-minute interactions between teachers and students and the subjects th...

Conducting Educational Design Research

“…They recommended a "tight but loose" framework for scaling up teacher professional development, featuring "tight" adherence to central design principles with "loose" accommodations to the needs, resources, constraints, and particularities that occur in any school or district, but only insofar as these do not conflict with the intervention's underlying theory of action. Much of their work, and that of colleagues who have been directly or indirectly affiliated with the Keeping Learning on Track program (see also Wylie, 2008), has yielded lessons about intervention tolerance, gathered from empirical investigation and critical reflection on the tensions between the desire to maintain fidelity to a theory of action and the need to demonstrate flexibility in order to accommodate local situations.…”

What Is or What Might Be the Legacy of Felix Klein?

“…Nowadays, "scaling up", or the transfer of research results to schools and classrooms, is an important aspect in educational research (e.g. Wylie 2008). To make this transfer constructive, a close cooperation of teachers, teacher educators, professors from universities, administration people and policy makers is necessary.…”

Taking Teacher Learning to Scale: Sharing Knowledge and Spreading Ideas across Geographies

“…With reflection like Wylie (2008), we identify a central challenge of scaling up a professional development intervention as essentially one of managing fidelity to the design with the necessity of adaptation (Klein et al, 2015). Their research documented the organization's "tight but loose" theory of scaling up, which combines an obsessive adherence to central design principles (the tight part) with accommodations to the needs, resources, constraints, and particularities that occur in any school or district (the loose part), but only where these do not conflict with the theory of action of the intervention.…”