At the Nexus of Improvement Science and Teaching Introduction to a Special Section of the Journal of Teacher Education

Traditional Research and Development (R&D) in education specifies a process of extensive development, followed by testing through the use of methodologies that privilege attribution of effects to causes. If warranted, the program is then turned over to the field for spreading as a "research-based practice." Rarely are similar impacts ever realized. The simple reason is that although attributional research helps us to know that some practice can produce some effect, it does little to show us how to produce those effects--over and over and across people and places. Context matters greatly when attempting to get promising, yet often complex, ideas into practice. New people (with varying knowledge, skills, and dispositions), new organizational structures, differing policy environments, and more challenge the idea that implementation is or ever will be a simple turnkey activity. The rubber meets the road when people seek to bring programs and innovations that have shown some measure of promise into practice effectively, reliably, and at scale. Whether the goal is to innovate (develop new programs), spread warranted practices (see them taken up in new places and contexts), or scale efficacious programs (expand their use within established contexts), the exigencies of the real world intervene time and again. The R&D enterprise continues to manifest an approach that does not (indeed, cannot) respect this immutable fact. The articles in this special section take up this conversation as it connects to teacher learning. In particular, the articles are inspired by recent interest in the emerging field of Improvement Science within education and the perspectives it brings to teaching and teacher learning. Recently, in the field of education, there has been growing interest in a set of tools, approaches, and methodologies comprising an R&D enterprise that has been collectively termed Improvement Science. This scientific approach to R&D, applied in business and industry for over 75 years (Deming, 1994) and more recently in professional settings such as health care (Berwick, Godfrey, & Roessner, 1990), is being adapted for use in education settings as well (Bryk & Gomez, 2008). Where attribution has served as the gold standard for education research until now, improvement science posits a different and complementary standard, one that is every bit as necessary as the historical gold standard--replication. Rather than simple replication, the practical and pragmatic improvement emphasis shifts the focus to the ability to achieve effective results reliably and across contexts. Typically, education R&D applies traditional research approaches to what are development problems. This traditional research, with its privileging of causal attribution, necessarily imposes constraints (e.g., there must be a singular treatment and it must be implemented with great fidelity) and controls (e.g., exogenous factors eliminated, managed, controlled to the extent possible) that greatly reduce its ability to produce knowledge that informs, much less ensures, the use of the object practices in real, practical (and most often varied) settings. Improvement science offers a necessary complement to this traditional research. It uses tools of disciplined analysis and rigorous inquiry to ensure the effective instantiation of complex practices at scale and across contexts. It addresses the practitioner's plaint, "There's so much that worked for someone, somewhere--but it never seems to work for me." Improvement science, and any R&D enterprise based upon it, would be characterized in its most comprehensive form by six guiding principles (Bryk, Gomez, Grunow, & LeMahieu, 2015): 1. Make the work problem specific and user centered: Improvement science starts with a deceptively simple question, "What is the specific problem or problems we are trying to solve?" Moreover, it asserts that we can only understand problems of practice when they are examined from multiple perspectives, most especially including those of practitioners. …