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Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better

Anthony S. Bryk,

Louis M. Gomez,

Alicia Grunow,

Paul G. LeMahieu

3.91 · Rating details · 188 ratings · 11 reviews

As a field, education has largely failed to learn from experience. Time after time, promising education reforms fall short of their goals and are abandoned as other promising ideas take their place. In Learning to Improve, the authors argue for a new approach. Rather than “implementing fast and learning slow,” they believe educators should adopt a more rigorous approach to ...more

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Kindle Edition, 274 pages

Published March 1st 2015 by Harvard Education Press

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May 25, 2020 Christopher Sanacore rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This book serve as a tool-kit for jumpstarting improvement work in districts and schools. It's accessible and firmly lay outs productive protocols and guidelines. It was a bit jargony at times that may be difficult for some educators and central office personnel to digest but it's an invaluable resource for introducing improvement science to education communities and providing reliable implementation methods for tangible, measure-able and inclusive change. ...more

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Apr 16, 2020 Heidi rated it really liked it · review of another edition

More required reading for graduate school, but I would say this was my favorite book of them all. In a very practical way, the authors outline how we can use specific tools to make improvement science an integral part of consistent education reform in a lasting way. Now if only our education leaders could implement these strategies!

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Dec 31, 2019 Michael rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Clear message regarding the flaws of our current systems and well thought-out explanation of a solution. It is spot on with its focus on more decentralized systems for school improvement. I recommend this book to anyone taking a hard look at improving the institution of education.

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Aug 07, 2020 Kristy Grey rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Great theory, but the language was much too technical.

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Jul 31, 2018 Jim Hiller rated it liked it · review of another edition

A fun story with lots of twists! ;)

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May 26, 2015 Bri (readingknitter.com) rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: for-work, read-during-2015

For more, check out girlwithabookblog.com!

Learning to Improve: How America's Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better is a book written by a group of researchers (Anthony S. Bryk, Louis M. Gomez, Alicia Grunow, and Paul G. LeMahieu) and is the culmination, in their own words, of "learning from six years of pragmatic activity at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching." One of my supervisors gave me this book when I was put on a new project at work doing some tasks with the New Yo For more, check out girlwithabookblog.com!

Learning to Improve: How America's Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better is a book written by a group of researchers (Anthony S. Bryk, Louis M. Gomez, Alicia Grunow, and Paul G. LeMahieu) and is the culmination, in their own words, of "learning from six years of pragmatic activity at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching." One of my supervisors gave me this book when I was put on a new project at work doing some tasks with the New York City Department of Education. Since I had never worked with or studied how central teams function within a school district and I hadn't spent any time in New York schools, I had quite a learning curve ahead of me. (Side note to the clueless like Past Bri: central teams are basically administrators who usually work for a school district and not individual schools.)

This book helped provide me with a lot of necessary insight and served as a great introduction to understanding how districts function and the relevant language used in the field. However, the book would probably be redundant to anyone who has studied or experienced how district-level reforms impact American schools. For a newbie like me, the best parts of this book are the pieces that felt like a deep literature review, such as the vignette that discussed the role of instructional coaches within the Los Angeles Unified School District or the concise explanation of the how the Danielson Framework evaluates educators. All of this information on how districts choose to evaluate practitioners in order to hopefully increase student learning gains was a terrific aid to me and helped me more easily navigate the terms and references related to my project at work.

While I learned quite a bit from reading this book, I could have done without all of the constant references to Networked Improvement Communities, or NICs, which is the term created by the authors for their new form of "educational [Research & Design] which joins together the discipline of improvement science with the dynamism and creative power of networks organized to solve problems." Even though I found the frequent mention of the NICs to be monotonous, the authors' desire to make NICs a common term is likely the reason they compiled this book in the first place. I mostly skimmed the last chapters (6 and 7) as they primarily revolved around deeper discussion of the importance of NICs and weren't particularly relevant to me.

Overall, this book was a great read for me and my supervisor really knew what they were doing when they recommended it to me. However, I don't think Learning to Improve is written in an accessible or interesting way for someone who doesn't work in my field. ...more

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Jul 31, 2015 Eric Kalenze rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2015-nonfiction, education-issues, 2015-education

Wasn't expecting to like this much, as I assumed it would contain a lot of the reform-y, system-change-y myopia I rail against in my own book.

I was quite wrong.

I mean, I have a number of issues with this work overall, but I must hand it to Bryk & associates: they get and honor a lot of the education enterprise's issues better than most--and their approach (with a bit more evidence basis, of course) is worth fully working out. It has much more potential than many of the reform mandates operatin ...more

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Nov 11, 2015 Tanya rated it really liked it · review of another edition

A great book for digging deeper into school improvement. Provides examples of how improvement science can be applied in schools. Using the PDSA cycle, teams can use research-based methods to identify a problem and test solutions. Good refresher on managing change one focus at a time.

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Jun 19, 2015 Jordan Munn rated it liked it · review of another edition

This book puts new labels on old ideas, which is a bit obnoxious. Nonetheless, most of the ideas are very good and are worth at least consideration in the education sector, even if the suggested implementation of some of them seems highly unrealistic.

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