Education Week - March 18, 2015 - 12

DIGITAL DIRECTIONS > Tracking news and ideas in educational technology
www.digitaldirections.org
'Education Innovation Clusters' Aim to Improve Schools
Regional networks
emerging across U.S.
By Michele Molnar
"Education innovation clusters"-
regional partnerships among school
districts, research organizations,
private companies, and other groups
to improve schools-are evolving in
cities and regions around the world,
but so far their work has been mostly
insular, seldom shared beyond a local
geography.
But that parochial approach for
sharing lessons learned is changing,
fueled by a rising demand for
knowledge about what is and is not
working to improve schools, especially
around digital teaching and
learning. Although cluster designs
vary, they are largely focused on
identifying breakthroughs in learning
technologies, use of research on
learning, and the development and
acceleration of new educational
tools and approaches, according to
the U.S. Department of Education.
To help coordinate and accelerate
the growth of education innovation
clusters, Washington-based Digital
Promise, an ed-tech advocacy
group, announced this month that
it is designing a network that will
share lessons learned in these hubs
with schools in the United States
and abroad.
"The idea is to amplify and coordinate
the activities of different entities
with the eye to come up with
better tools, better policies, and better
practices," said Steven Hodas, a
practitioner-in-residence at the Center
on Reinventing Public Education
at the University of Washington. He
was hired by Digital Promise to lead
a study on the impact of education
innovation clusters.
Pooling Assets
An education innovation cluster,
Mr. Hodas said, is an approach that
people in a city or region can use to
pool talents, perspectives, and assets
to tackle challenges that are
facing schools, and usually features
one organizing entity such as a
school district or university working
with partners to provide support
and services to schools. They often
start informally and evolve into
more structured efforts over time.
In addition to the 14 U.S.-based
clusters, five other countries have
active educational innovation hubs.
Clusters tend to differ based on the
needs of schools in a given area and
the organizations that support them.
Usually, a cluster includes researchers,
ed-tech companies, universities, investors,
developers, and foundations or
nonprofits. They can originate with a
clear ed-tech focus, as has happened in
Boston with LearnLaunch and Baltimore
with EdTech Maryland. Another
place they can start is in universities'
graduate schools of education, such as
the University of Pennsylvania and
Digital Promise, an
ed-tech advocacy group,
is designing a network
that will share lessons
learned from "education
innovation clusters"
in the United States
and other countries.
In addition to the
partnerships shown
on this map, there are
clusters in Australia,
England, France, and
Israel.
SOURCES: Education Week;
Digital Promise
Houston
MULTIMEDIA: Access an online map to learn more
about the clusters. www.edweek.org/go/clusters
the University of Virginia.
Or, school districts can be the organizing
force, as occurred in the New
York City schools with the iZone,
and is now happening in Nashville,
Tenn., where the school district is
working with Alignment Nashville,
which has built a framework for developing
community schools.
"It's not necessary for the district
to be the convener for teachers,
schools, and students to benefit,"
Mr. Hodas said. But when a district
is the convener, he said it adds "political
capital," because it signals
from top leadership that addressing
the district's challenges in innovative
ways is a high priority.
"The point of all this is to help
school leaders make better decisions
about the tools they're bringing
into classrooms," said Katrina
Stevens, the senior advisor for educational
technology at the Education
Department, who will be working
with Mr. Hodas as he studies
the clusters.
Promising Ideas in Pa.
Last August, Digital Promise convened
the 14 U.S.-based clusters for
a meeting in Pittsburgh, which is
considered home to one of the most
mature innovation hubs, said Sara
A. Schapiro, the director of Digital
Promise's League of Innovative
Schools, a national coalition of 57 districts.
Pittsburgh's cluster includes
about 200 organizations coordinated
by the Sprout Fund, a nonprofit that
has invested about $1.3 million in
100 innovative learning projects and
programs since 2009.
"The best clusters we've seen are
where all the community partners
are working together to support the
teaching and learning that's happening
in districts," said Ms. Schapiro.
12 | EDUCATION WEEK | March 18, 2015 | www.edweek.org
Cathy Lewis Long, the Sprout
Fund's founding executive director,
said more than 50 Pennsylvania
school districts take part in the cluster's
activities. (See Education Week,
Jan. 14, 2015.)
"A lot of people said, 'What's happening?
What's in the water there?'"
joked Ms. Long. "There's been so
much transformation in the area's
school systems."
Two of the districts-the rural
South Fayette Township schools
in McDonald, and the suburban
Elizabeth Forward schools in Allegheny
County-have become
widely known for trying innovations
within the cluster and sharing
their findings with districts nearby
and across the United States and
around the world.
For instance, a building for grades
3-5 that recently opened in the
3,000-student South Fayette district
has been specifically designed with
curriculum innovation in mind-a
first floor features an environmental
curriculum focus for 3rd graders,
a second floor highlights earth and
space for 4th graders, and a third
floor has a dedicated robotics area for
5th graders, said Bille Pearce Rondinelli,
the superintendent of the South
Fayette schools. That's just one way
this rural community is helping its
students develop skills that will prepare
them for college and careers.
To Bart Rocco, the superintendent
of the 2,700-student Elizabeth Forward
schools since 2009, innovation
became an imperative when he realized
students needed to be engaged
in learning in different ways. "We
were losing some kids as dropouts,
and losing others that enrolled in
cyber charters," he said.
A grant to establish a "gaming
academy" with help from Carnegie
Mellon University in Pittsburgh was
the beginning of the quest to move
the use of technology to a higher
level in schools. Elizabeth Forward
agreed to pilot programs, such as
eSpark's iPad app, which school officials
say helped boost scores for kindergartners,
and 1st and 2nd grade
special education/Title I students,
an average of 25 percentile points in
reading and math after a semester.
The district also redesigned the high
school media center to feature recording
studios, performance spaces,
mobile devices, and a coffee shop.
"We wanted to create an environment
to make school 'cool' again,"
said Mr. Rocco, "and provide a structure
where [students] could think
about their future."
Speeding Up Development
Richard Culatta, the director of the
office of education technology at the
federal Education Department, said
improving lesson sharing among
clusters can help scale "what works"
much faster. "If you're building a tool
or an app and your whole team is
three people, and you're doing this
on the side while you're teaching
or whatever, the idea of running a
three-year randomized controlled
study doesn't make sense," he said.
"We need to show how that can be
accelerated."
Ms. Stevens added that having a
connected-cluster structure could
be instrumental in developing a
methodology so experimental trials
could be conducted in different parts
of the country, providing "data that
has some rigor to it, so the information
will be meaningful."
Companies that work with clusters
might find it easier to try out
their products with participating
schools, but Mr. Hodas cautioned
that "it would be a mistake for a
company to look at this just as an
opportunity to pilot.
"For all these participants, the
question they need to ask is not just,
'What can I get out of it?,' but also,
'What can I learn?,' " Mr. Hodas said.
Ms. Schapiro said an eventual
outcome of Mr. Hodas' research will
be the creation of a "playbook" that
will explain the workings of clusters,
and another convening of all the
clusters and interested parties.
"We don't want to be prescriptive,
that it has to be this type of community
partner that's coordinating a
cluster," she said. What is important
is that "a school district remains at
the center of what they're doing, and
that all activities center on driving
teaching and learning."
Deciding how to measure outcomes
will be one of the goals of Mr.
Hodas' research.
"Right now, there's not a lot of
systematic ways of thinking about
outcomes" in an education innovation
cluster, he said. Identifying a
cluster's primary goals is a first step
in that work, and it will help formalize
what gets measured.
Ultimately, the clusters could have
widespread impact, though. While the
greatest benefits accrue to those who
participate in the cluster, when the
information is shared through a network
of interested parties-like the
Education Department or the League
of Innovative Schools-"any school
can benefit," Ms. Schapiro said.
Coverage of trends in K-12 innovation
and efforts to put these new ideas and
approaches into practice in schools,
districts, and classrooms is supported
in part by a grant from the Carnegie
Corporation of New York at
www.carnegie.org. Education Week
retains sole editorial control over the
content of this coverage.
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Education Week - March 18, 2015

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