Key Take-aways from The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching on Networked Improvement Communities

By Kristen C. Wilcox and Maria Khan

Recently NYKids team members attended the “Collaborative Learning and Technology in Networked Improvement Communities (NICs)” webinar hosted by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Panelists included: Anthony S. Bryk, author of Learning to Improve and Senior Fellow, Carnegie Foundation; Jojo Manai, Senior Associate, Collaborative Technology, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; and, Susan Haynes, Partner Success Manager, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

The webinar offered an overview of what networked improvement communities (NICs) are and how they function. During the webinar, the discussants shared information and their experiences with NIC design including:

• What structures are necessary to ensure robust learning opportunities happen across a practicing community
• How data are collected and new knowledge is generated
• What tools and technologies help catalyze and sustain learning in and across a NIC

How is learning within a NIC organized?

NICs build on and often augment existing professional communities through horizontal connections across affinity groups and vertical connections through different levels of an organization.

NICs are characterized by one important characteristic: they seek to accomplish clearly defined and measurable outcomes and are thus thought of as “communities of common accomplishment”.

NICs organize work through a “hub” or a “leadership team” that supports ongoing learning via the following actions:

Bring people together to better understand core problems and this is done by…

• Developing a shared understanding of the problem by asking what the specific problem is we are trying to solve
• Examining the system by asking why it is we are getting the outcomes we get

Develop a shared working theory of improvement and this is done by…

• Seeking input and sharing of voices from various stakeholders
• Identifying shared aims and potential drivers for improvement

Enact continuous improvement cycles and this is done by…

• Identifying high leverage change ideas
• In light of resources, capacities, and priorities – making the appropriate scale of changes
• Examining data and asking – how are our change ideas working and how are our change ideas work differently in different settings and with different people?
• Continuing the cycle of testing…

How is learning and innovation accelerated with(in) a NIC?

NICs are guided by a profound understanding of the problem and the system that produces the outcomes, and they are organized to hasten learning and innovation.

Learning and innovation is accelerated within a NIC by designing a collective learning system.

The webinar included a demonstration of Carnegie’s Networked Improvement Learning and Support (NILS) online platform which is designed to facilitate the initiation and development of NICs and is conveniently offered in an online format.

NYKids and NICs

Here at NYKids, we are rooted in the mission to inform, inspire and improve through our user-friendly performance tracker, our positive outlier research, and our direct support for continuous improvement (COMPASS-AIM).

By blending NYKids’ research on positive-outliers with improvement science principles that are at the foundation of how NICs function via COMPASS-AIM we offer a unique model for accelerating learning. And we always invite more districts and schools on board to tackle important problems affecting children and youth.Next steps: A call to improve together…

• To engage with NYKids research team and our school partners in NIC work, please email us at nykids@albany.edu or visit our webpage for more information on COMPASS-AIM.
• To learn more about NICs, check out NYKids R&D Director and Associate Professor, Kristen C. Wilcox’s spring 2022 course (description below and link to spring schedule). This course is part of a two-course series and a capstone workshop yielding a micro-credential in improvement science leadership. Contact kwilcox1@albany.edu for more information or sign up today.

EPL/TAP 663: Networked Communities: Building A Culture of Practice Improvement

This course will introduce students to how improvement science can be used to foster the creation of networked improvement communities (NICs). We will learn how such communities improve the pace, scope, and capacity for learning. In particular, we will focus on cultural elements that such NICs share across sectors (be that medicine, industry, social systems or education) such as their capacity to encourage vulnerability, sharing, transparency, and create a shared purpose and vision among its team. With this in mind, we will also focus some of our attention and readings on how “the hive mind” works – that is how communities of thinkers can be brought together for the purpose of innovation and diffusion of ideas, drawing on some of the most recent scholarship in the field (on sociology, psychology, and educational researchers among others) to learn how humans can better work, think, and collaborate together to solve today’s most wicked problems.