The right network for the right problem

Educators are increasingly realizing that individuals working in isolation can’t adequately address the teaching and learning problems facing us today, whether it’s the individual teacher toiling alone in the classroom or the isolated school in a district. The fact is, the problems of achievement, attainment, and equal opportunity that educators grapple with today weren’t created by individuals. They were created by systems. And they won’t be addressed through isolated action.

Educators need to find ways to produce effective coordination among the many processes and actors that are part of the achievement equation. Faced with challenges of their own, many other sectors have turned to collective action networks — otherwise known in education as communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991), professional learning communities (DuFour & DuFour, 2010; Hord, 1997), and design partnerships (Penuel, Coburn, & Gallagher, 2013). In large-scale engineering design, collective action has been responsible for creating the Boeing 787 Dreamliner; in software engineering, for developing the Linux operating system; and in health care, for solving the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) puzzle. In education, our version of collective action is to help education systems and the individuals in them perform teaching and learning tasks better. Instead of teachers doing this in isolation, with their insights locked away in their local settings, the focus on networks is about releasing that nascent collective energy in education. The aim of network activity is to solve problems of practice more quickly by creating ways for more people to take advantage of the skill, expertise, and knowledge of many others. When the network is large, you can tap the creative efforts of many different people, increasing the odds that someone somewhere will figure out something better.

Here, we describe one particular network form — networked improvement communities (Bryk, Gomez, & Grunow, 2011; Bryk, Gomez, Grunow, & LeMahieu, 2015) — that can be of great value to educators as they tackle complex problems of practice.