Context matters more in program improvement than comparison to other programs

by Marilyn Strutchens, PhD, MTEP Outreach Hub leader, Central Alabama MTEP Team leader, and change coach

The Networked Improvement Community-Transform project, or NIC-Transform, was launched in 2018 to explore how MTEP’s progress could better support the work of local secondary mathematics teacher preparation programs in transforming their practices to align with the MTEP Guiding Principles and the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators’ standards. In 2019, MTEP 2.0 began to emerge with the goal for local programs to organize themselves as NICs with a formal theory of action (including aim and driver diagram) and engage in and document Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles aimed at improving aspects of their program as defined in their theory of action. The core framework of improvement science, according to Catherine Lewis’s 2015 essay exploring its potential and challenges within education, is the PDSA cycle, a process for rapid cycles of learning from practice. The PDSA cycle is coupled with three fundamental questions that drive improvement work: 1) What are we trying to accomplish? 2) How will we know that a change is an improvement? and 3) What change can we make that will result in improvement?

Since Fall 2020, MTEP 2.0 Program NICs have been working on transforming their programs. Members of the leadership team and others with experience using the NIC model were assigned to Program NICs to serve as change coaches. Change coaches engage in cycles of planning/implementation/reflection with Program NICs to provide individualized support for their transformation efforts. MTEP 2.0 also provides monthly interactive workshops, dubbed NIC-Casts, to provide additional input on aspects of forming a NIC and to allow participants to interact with others going through the process.

As change coaches are working with Program NICs, they are finding that some teams are challenged with moving forward because of assumptions that if they are not where other teams are in the process of improvement, then they are not making progress, or they do not see how they are going to get to where others are in the journey. This kind of thinking is contrary to the nature of NICs. Each Program NIC needs to examine its own program and think about the root causes of the obstacles or barriers to program transformation. For example, each team needs to assess its situation and determine whether the voices that need to be at the table are there. If there are missing voices, then perhaps a PDSA cycle should be conducted to determine how to recruit them.

As a change coach and a program leader, I have found that establishing monthly meetings where we consistently discuss major goals for program transformation and plan PDSA cycles helps the team audition potential improvements and take small steps toward progress. As a team, we have made strides toward our goals, even though we are not where we ultimately would like to end up. I think that each team should set goals for their programs based on the AMTE Standards for Preparing Teachers of Mathematics and the MTEP Guiding Principles. These standards and principles should serve as barometers for program improvement over other teams’ accomplishments. In fact, Paul LeMahieu, Carnegie Foundation senior advisor to the president, asserts in a 2011 blog post, “What we need is less fidelity of implementation (do exactly what they say to do) and more integrity of implementation (do what matters most and works best while accommodating local needs and circumstances).”

In addition, LeMahieu contends that when we design for implementation with integrity, we design differently—both the process and the characteristics of the resulting programs. He recommends that NICs:

1. Identify goals as measurable aims.
   
2. Develop a comprehensive and public articulation of the problem and the system that produces it.
   
3. Guide development with clearly articulated design principles, including essential characteristics that are definitional to the solution.
   
4. Create generative structures that accommodate integrative adaptations while enforcing essential characteristics.
   
5. Identify/encourage/embrace/but test variants.
   
6. Enter into authentic partnerships (NICs) to promote fidelity of common goals, shared values, shared power, and real problems to solve; and
   
7. Discipline the implementation effort with a commonly held measurement model that ensures accomplishment and with the rigor of improvement research to test local adaptations for validation as improvements.

1. Mathematics Teacher Education Partnership (MTE Partnership). (2021). Updated guiding principles for secondary mathematics teacher preparation. Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. https://www.aplu.org/wp-content/uploads/Updated-Guiding-Principles-for-Secondary-Mathematics-Teacher-Preparation-Programs.pdf
   
2. Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators. (2017). Standards for Preparing Teachers of Mathematics. https://amte.net/standards
   
3. LeMahieu, P. (2011). What we need in education is more integrity (and less fidelity) of implementation. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. https://www.carnegiefoundation.org/blog/what-we-need-in-education-is-more-integrity-and-less-fidelity-of-implementation/
   
4. Lewis, C. (2015). What is improvement science? Do we need it in education? Educational Researcher, 44(1), 54-61. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X15570388