“To suppose that scientific findings decide the value of educational undertakings is to reverse the real case. Actual activities in educating test the worth of the results… whether they really serve or not can be found out only in practice.”
John Dewey, Sources of a Science of Education
It is essential to measure progress. A scalable system for measuring improvements in teaching practices will provide teachers the confidence to drive much needed innovation and customization in their instruction. Without a scalable system, teachers continue to practice in a void and/or with limited connection to colleagues to share in the development of their work. Via an effective platform, teachers will be able to measure their success through lesson study and improvement cycles.
But measuring success in education is extraordinarily challenging. Success in education is manifest not at the end of a year, but a decade or more later, when students are participating in civic responsibilities like voting and sitting on juries, when they are joining the job market, and when they are pursuing a fulfilling life. The lag between the delivery of education and the effects of it are what make the politics of education so difficult. And understanding the whole child — character as well as knowledge and skills — is an essential part of teaching, one that is hardly captured in testing culture.
Practitioner research provides an approach to measurement. In the time since John Dewey’s Sources of a Science of Education, we have learned that randomized, controlled trials are both practically and ethically complicated. Further, their results are not always useful. The great diversity of school and student bodies demands locally relevant approaches to teaching. In this context, practitioner research — iterative experimentation in the classroom — has become an increasingly valid approach to developing a knowledge base of practices known to drive student success.
CORE RESEARCH POSSIBILITIES
An effective platform would provide innumerable research opportunities. Several core research questions focus on enhancing teachers’ ability to perform practitioner research and form a diverse and dynamic knowledge base of effective practices — a professional memory for education that feeds back into the practice of future generations of educators. These questions start with the open questions of what works in the classroom and how teachers plan their work, and extend to questions about how technology can inform, facilitate, and improve that work.
- What works in the classroom? (Action research)
- The evidence is strong that well-executed continuous improvement cycles like lesson study improve student performance. How effectively and in how many ways can continuous improvement cycles like lesson study extend into the online space?
- How do good practices spread in education? (Diffusion research and network analysis)
- How can a social network built around curricular objects measure diffusion patterns, and how might that inform the promotion of high quality work across environments?
- How do teachers plan? (Ethnographic research)
- Nearly every teacher uses online resources, but not all of teacher lesson planning is online. When and why do teachers consult online resources and tools in the lesson planning process? What is the role of online resources in the teacher planning cycle?
- How might better information design support teacher work? (Design research)
- How do different models of information presentation influence teacher efficacy and time when lesson planning?
- How might data inform understanding of the lesson planning process? (Data mining)
- If a digital platform for iterating lessons captures changes in lessons at scale as they evolve, what can we learn from aggregate improvements to lessons, and how can that inform professional development around lesson design?
A thousand questions might dig beyond these questions, born out not only by the masses of data that emerge from platforms, but more importantly from the human connections that are grown. Teachers are historically isolated. How might we explore the human experience of being a teacher who is connected to other teachers around the substance of our practice?
The (Unrealized) Promise of the Internet
Fulfilling the Need: Program Design
Appendix A — Mission: Improvement
Athena: A Prospectus 
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