Networked Learning: Strategies and Tactics (post #8)
Ever obsess about why so many scientific breakthroughs occur more or less simultaneously by multiple scientists working independently?
Maybe that’s just me; it’s still true. (This offbeat account in Cracked is very funny.) Partly it’s because scientists are reading the same papers and going to the same conferences. But it’s also because the way scientists and inventors generate and test ideas is super inefficient, with innovations guarded in labs until funding is secured, patents have been applied for, and articles are published in journals. This is rarely to the benefit of Progress or Humankind.
The non-profit sector struggles with the same challenges, for some of the same reasons (fighting for limited funds) and some different reasons (there are few fora for sharing our innovations, and contexts are so different), with the same negative impact on Progress and Humankind.
One of the key opportunities of networked impact is the potential for learning that drives coordination and improvement of all kinds.
President Bill Clinton captures this aspiration when he spoke to the network in our earliest days:
If all you do is give us a hundred thousand teachers to assure America’s continued prosperity and growth for the next thirty years, that may be worth a lifetime; but if you do it in a way that causes more people to understand the essential characteristic of cooperation in building alliances so that everybody’s money goes farther and their good ideas get spread and our not so good ideas get dropped, you may literally change the future of this country and the future of the nongovernmental organization movement and the world.
Since the beginning, inspired by the work of Atul Gawande, first in his writing on cystic fibrosis and then in more recent pieces such as Big Med and The Hot Spotters, we’ve been striving to deliver on that promise. With hundreds of organizations all working in their own contexts on the shared challenges of excellent STEM teaching, we are perfectly positioned to create a vibrant exchange of learning; identify promising practices and understand how to adapt and spread them; understand what is not working, and help people modify or end it; and, through that, improve STEM teacher preparation and support for tens of thousands of teachers nationwide. (When I worked with then-Chancellor Joel Klein at the NYC Department of Education, I often fantasized about how great it would be if the function of HQ, the “center”, were to collect experiments and learnings from across our network of 1000+ schools and share out promising interventions with the whole community, so that everyone could benefit from the hard work of the many pioneering schools whose breakthroughs were otherwise relegated just to their four walls. When I started designing 100Kin10, I was finally in the position to try to put those musings into action.)
So what do we do?
First, we collect data from all of our partners in our annual survey. This provides the bedrock information to fuel our research and learning agenda.
Second, we aggregate that and other data to help partner organizations understand the landscape, conducting and commissioning our own trend-analyses, data analyses, and literature reviews.
Third, we help partners find other organizations doing similar work, so they can work better, faster, and more efficiently on shared problems and leapfrog innovation instead of recreating the wheel (or simultaneously discovering the polio vaccine). We do this in bespoke connections that we make, introducing partners working on similar issues to one another; in “connection concierge” at our Summit, in which every participant is connected to someone from whom they can learn and someone who can learn from them; and in issue-area focused webinars and conference sessions.
Fourth, we create a platform for peer-to-peer sharing of promising practices, first through what we called Notables and now through Steal This Sessions.
Fifth, we bring partners together with experts around specific challenges to more deeply understand the root causes and use human-centered design to create or commission innovative solutions.
We have run three competitions to work with leading researchers at the University of Chicago to run randomized control trials to test three promising interventions designed by three different partner organizations; the third is still in progress, and the first two have yielded promising results for the field. As we analyze the ROI of such investments, we’re asking hard questions about whether to run a fourth.
Of all the areas 100Kin10 is working on, creating this vibrant learning exchange to drive improvement remains the most elusive. There is still a gap between what we do and the rich potential of what we could do. I think this is partially because I — and the non-profit field more broadly — am still shaking off the vestiges of an outdated approach to looking at innovation spread, what I’ll call “just tell me what works.” This manifested in the “What Works Clearinghouse”, in hundreds of conferences and working sessions on “scale”, and in millions and millions of dollars invested. The idea, promulgated especially by business-inflected philanthropy, is that, if only we could isolate practices and measure them rigorously, we would know what works and could package it and ship it out to organizations around the country, which could then adopt it whole-cloth. When it didn’t work, we would say that the failure was one of fidelity of implementation: The idea was perfect; those faulty humans who were implementing it just didn’t get it right.
It turns out that there is no fidelity of implementation, and context is king. The key to learning and progress is in the alchemy of a great idea and its successful adaptation — not adoption — in diverse settings.
On the short list of other components that might together add up to a learning exchange worthy of the promise of a network, starting with efforts getting ready to launch all the way to things we fantasize about but are unlikely to do anytime soon:
- Create ongoing communities of practice to focus on making improvements on core challenges;
- Bring organizations struggling with similar challenges together with relevant experts in ongoing learning communities to accelerate progress against those persistent challenges;
- Crowd-source questions that matter to practitioners working in schools and offer graduate fellowships to engage a group of rising stars in doing applied research on the questions that actually matter to universities, schools, museums, and others working with STEM teachers; and
- Hire a crack team of analysts/ethnographers/writers to go deep into the data to answer the questions that the data themselves only begun to elucidate, such as “do the organizations that recruit for X or Y characteristic have teachers that are more likely to have Z impact on students?” or “what is actually happening in the three organizations that are using X tool for learning about the results of their teachers’ work?”
The vision of a network of vibrant exchange, in which the knowledge of the whole even begins to approximate the collective knowledge of the parts, is the grail. I’d love your thoughts on how we can get closer to it or what you’ve tried in your own work.
