“Focus on consistency, and you achieve mediocrity; focus on excellence, and you achieve consistency.”
Phil Libin (2013)
The objective of establishing a professional memory for the field of education is to improve the quality of teaching in the U.S. and the world. This mission is both ambitious and humble. Delivering on it is simple in principle but immensely challenging in practice. In principle, we understand the factors that lead to student preparedness, we believe we know the core elements that constitute a high-quality curriculum, and we know what makes effective teaching, but human beings are complex creatures, and the multiplicity of our experiences prohibits the practical application of any one approach to every setting. So, success at the mission of improving teaching means focusing on awareness, implementation, and development of the world’s immense diversity of effective practices. A successful platform for a professional memory that supports teachers is the best path to pursuing this work at scale.
WHY “IMPROVEMENT”?
Education is a complex system; as a system, it cannot be completed or accomplished, only continuously developed. A system in which diverse students continually enter schools shaped by ever changing forces, and a system in which high level decision-making is decentralized both across states and within individual schools — a system like this will always be in flux: new students and new teachers enter the system every day, and there are mechanical processes to standardize how they behave. When the experience of teaching and learning is constantly changing as cultural and technological forces change people and schools, then an approach to educating a nation (or globe) can never be fully optimized, perfectly tuned, or, certainly, completed. It is a perfect example of a wicked problem (Rittel & Webber, 1974). Approaching the problem of a system of education through the lens of improvement recognizes this complexity. It is appropriate for several reasons:
Improvement is a process, not an outcome. A focus on how to get better recognizes the need for local solutions to problems. It stakes no claim on what any given school or state should teach. It is curriculum agnostic. Instead, it facilitates the examination of teaching and curriculum, and it leaves the conclusions for how best to change it to local decision-making. This process is applicable in any context with any priority.
Improvement science recognizes the value of practitioner research. For reasons both practical and ethical, high cost, randomized, controlled trials are extraordinarily difficult to run in education. Practitioner research, however — through inquiry, action research, lesson study, or other techniques — generates readily useful knowledge while contributing to a knowledge base of classroom practices. Supporting this approach further acknowledges the diverse nature of education solutions.
Best practices don’t always exist; effective practices do, and can be continuously improved. While general research does yield principles that are applicable across settings, such as belief in growth mindsets, improvement principles enable teachers to test out and recursively iterate implementations of these principles. For example: understanding growth mindsets is different from being able to foster them in students. How we foster growth mindsets can take shape in hundreds of ways; each of these can be refined and improved.
A platform can support improvement practice by providing a space in which practices can be easily compared, revised, and shared. Teachers can easily gather feedback on practices at scale and in a variety of different contexts, enabling more rapid learning and iteration. Teachers in search of communities of practice can find them more easily and begin the improvement process.
Eventually, this kind of practitioner collaboration can enable the seismic and incremental shifts that stakeholders, including teachers, are eager to see.
SEISMIC AND INCREMENTAL CHANGE
“What should they know of England, who only England know?”
Rudyard Kipling, “The English Flag”
Sometimes change happens seismically, sometimes incrementally. A new tool or method, for example, might dramatically disrupt a previous tool or method, such as when the automobile replaced horses in the first half of the 20th century, cutting the US horse population by almost 90% (Kilby, 2007). This is seismic change. Repeated iteration might refine a method or tool, however, such as the way automotive fuel efficiency gradually increased after 1965 (EIA, 2012). This is incremental change. Similar kinds of change — both seismic and incremental — happen in education.
Seismic shifts
In 1999, James Stigler and James Hiebert first published The Teaching Gap (Stigler & Hiebert, 2009), a book that brought research on Japanese and German teaching techniques to popular audiences in the US. The book, based on rigorous ethnographic research into a variety of teaching practices around the world, argues in part that one of the largest obstacles to improvement in schools is the lack of awareness teachers have of how different teaching can look. Teachers’ classrooms are like Plato’s Cave, in which people develop an incomplete understanding of the world because they have limited knowledge.
A review of the literature that connects teacher professional development to student achievement found a similar pattern: outside speakers that introduced new techniques and perspectives were among the leading sources of changes in practice. The conclusion is that seismic shifts in teaching — teaching that switches to a new method or approach — can be one of the largest drivers of improvement (Guskey & Yoon, 2009)
The foundational idea behind a platform approach is that, because of their isolation, teachers simply aren’t aware of other methods and practices for doing what they do: 10,000 teachers might teach The Great Gatsby, but none have any idea what the others are doing. The establishment of an easily navigable professional memory which contains varieties of practices is an essential tool for driving seismic change in education. It begins by enabling teachers to easily find a wide variety of practices from which they can select the best option for their setting. It’s no wonder that books on effective decision-making often begin with widening one’s options before making a decision (Heath & Heath, 2013).
Then, once people adopt a seismic change, customizing different practices for individual contexts becomes the close, hard work of teachers and schools. This means starting by empowering teachers with the equivalent of a lawyer’s complete case history on a given topic, exposing them to the decades of thinking that has gone into a particular argument, and then providing the structure for them to craft their own.
Incremental shifts
Crafting the best lesson for a particular classroom takes time and deliberate effort. Helpfully, techniques for incremental improvement are manifold and well documented. Lesson study, improvement science, critical friends groups: all of these and more have a rich history of implementation.
Improvement science offers the simplest model for incremental improvement. “All activity in improvement science,” say Anthony Bryk and others, “is disciplined by three deceptively simple questions:
- What specifically are we trying to accomplish?
- What change might we introduce and why?
- How will we know that a change is actually an improvement?” (Bryk et al, 2015)
Detailed methods for acting on questions like these exist in documentation on lesson study, protocols for critical friends groups, practices for leveraging professional learning communities, programs for professional development, the templates for Understanding by Design, and more. This kind of approach crosses sectors. It is apparent in agile methodology, kaizen management practices, design thinking, and virtually every artistic endeavor that goes through the drafting process.
What matters is how disciplined the approach is and whether adequate resources are directed to the work. In education in America, resources are the most significant obstacle to incremental improvement, specifically the amount of time allocated for effective professional development like this. With time, teachers can then participate in “well organized, carefully structured, purposefully directed” professional development “focused on content or pedagogy or both” (Guskey & Yoon, 2009).
Teacher support, therefore, is best when made up of two parts: 1) engaging teachers with new, diverse ways of teaching that seismically expand their perspectives, and 2) engaging teachers with ongoing, deliberate improvement cycles that incrementally shift their practice. A platform approach provides a mechanism for teachers to replace the time that they currently spend drawing up new ideas from scratch with time spent easily finding novel approaches, customizing them, and then contributing to a shared knowledge base through improvement structures. At scale and across networks, teachers match interests and contexts and build communities of practice that are not only necessary to enable ongoing seismic and incremental improvement, but also driven by passions and interest. This prospectus details the platform and structures to support this kind of growth.
The (Unrealized) Promise of the Internet
Fulfilling the Need: Program Design
Appendix A — Mission: Improvement
Athena: A Prospectus 
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