In addition to analyzing educational research and practice in the U.S., we are looking to other sectors and other countries for practices that might enhance the effectiveness of education R&D in the U.S. We are examining three domains namely medicine, agriculture, and business, in which practice is reputed to be based more directly on R&D than it is in education. We are also including a chapter on Japan because Japanese students meet high levels of academic achievement and because Japan’s approach to connecting research and practice contrasts substantially with that of the U.S.

The Network commissioned a group of authors, including Network members, to write background papers. In January 2004, Network members met with the authors at its quarterly meeting to refine the general themes of the project. Background papers were completed and reviewed during the summer of 2004. Each chapter was reviewed by a scholar with relevant expertise and a practitioner—someone who works within the context that the chapter discusses. Appendix E lists the chapters, authors and reviewers for this project.

A small conference will be held in September 2004 where all authors, some of the reviewers, and Network members discuss individual papers and themes that cut across the papers. Based on the conversations at this meeting, the authors and Network members will revise the papers and publish them as a volume. Final chapters are due at the end of 2004.

While final chapters are being completed at the time of this description, we have already been able to glean some lessons from the writing that has been done. For example, we have found that shortcomings of linear researchpractice models of R&D are not limited to education. Commercial organizations have long struggled with this issue. Many have created "departments of innovation" to develop and test new ideas for the company's product stream. Often, however, there have been disconnects between the innovators and the people who market the company's products because innovators do not fully understand the needs of the company's customers. Corporations are finding that a more effective approach to innovation requires a corporate culture in which engineers, customer representatives, and workers participate collaboratively in a process of identifying, defining and pursuing new problems and opportunities. In the book Corporate Creativity, by Robinson and Stern (1997), for example, there are many powerful examples of company employees providing insights that had been overlooked by groups of "innovators" who lacked contact with everyday practices. In many ways, the "innovation-based culture for change" model (which involves collaborations among the various stake-holders), is analogous to the model of co-participation that our Network sees as necessary to promote ambitious teaching and learning. By learning from the successes and failures of corporations, we hope to be able to inform the development of rigorous yet nimble research systems that can continuously adapt to change.

Our study of the field of medicine, likewise, is revealing similar problems of a disconnect between research and practice, but also some promising practices that might be applied to education. For example, in medicine there exist more institutionalized strategies for creating consensus about best practices than currently exist in education. An impediment to evidence-based practice in education is that the evidence is often fragmented, contradictory, and hard to access. We hope to be able to borrow practices from medicine to suggest very specific strategies in the field of education for creating more coherence, consistency, and clarity in the information about evidence available to practitioners.

Closer to home, we have learned from our chapter on the use of evidence in schools that the social context of schools can affect their ability to implement education reforms. In more affluent communities, flexible and open ended initiatives which require deep teacher comprehension and encourage professional judgment are more likely to be adopted. However, in poorer districts, more tightly-scripted and micromanaged reforms are typically implemented. While these kinds of less flexible reforms sometimes produce short-term improvements in student learning, their longer-term impacts are questionable. In low income districts, with high staff turnover and low student achievement, these quick results combined with more easily implemented procedures make these less complex reforms attractive. But the kinds of ambitious learning we aspire to for all students cannot be achieved with these kinds of basic reforms.

The combination of the chapter on the culture of schools and the chapter on Japan is also instructive. The chapter on schools points to the importance (and typical lack) of a strong culture of colleagueship and teacher research and learning. The chapter describing educational practices in Japan is replete with descriptions of specific practices and policies that promote and sustain this culture. We will not be the first to call attention to the value of some of the practices in Japan, but we will be able to discuss them in the context of other norms and practices that are required for effective education R&D and reforms that promote ambitious teaching and learning.

Our conference provided us with the opportunity to examine and discuss the findings of these chapters and their cross-cutting themes. We also plan to put all chapters and summaries of the central points made at the conference on-line, to create a conversation among authors, reviewers of the chapters and Network members. We will invite a broad array of participants to contribute to these discussions – including people who work in the contexts the chapters discuss (e.g., teachers and principals in schools; researchers in universities; education entrepreneurs in the private sector).

2005

In addition to publishing a volume, we plan to write brief prescriptive documents targeting specific audiences. For example, briefs summarizing the recommendations may be written for school administrators, school of education deans, funders of education R&D, and people in nonprofit intermediary organizations and the business sector. We plan to disseminate these briefs using several different strategies, including using professional and trade publications.

The findings from the synthesis project will also be carefully analyzed to help us address the three core issues of the Network mentioned above.

Section I: The Nature and Culture of the Work

Section II: Outside Of Education and Outside the U.S.- What Others Are Doing

Section III: Summing it up