Our Networked Improved Community

How do Networked Improvement Communities Work?

Networked Improvement Communities (NICs) were developed as a means to implement educational innovations (Bryk, Gomez and Grunow, 2010) – in our case, with the goal of integrating climate education throughout the curriculum and designed to engage our particular students.  NICs use a deeply participatory process that tightly and dynamically couple practice and with research using rapid feedback cycles to drive adaptation toward collectively defined goals. In NICs, decision-making occurs as close to the practitioner level as possible – hence teachers are centered in the CELI NIC. NICs are spearheaded by Network Initiation Teams (NITs). Beyond initiating the network, the NIT:

• Leads, organizes and operates the NIC
• Develops the network culture, norms, and identity;
• Develops the theory of practice improvement;

LeMahiue (2015) distinguishes learning communities (whose members share a common interest to learn from and with each other) from NICs, which he defines as “communities of common accomplishment” that seek to accomplish a clearly defined and measurable outcome.  LeMahiue specifies the other three distinctive features of NICs as communities that are: “guided by a deep understanding of the problem, the system that produces it and a theory of improvement relevant to it; disciplined by the rigor of improvement science; and coordinated to accelerate the development testing and refinement of interventions and their effective integration into practice”.  Success requires the development of teachers’ personal capacities (e.g. content knowledge, pedagogy, technology skills), densely networked communications among practitioners and administration, and administrative buy-in to the vision and support of the enterprise (Mitchell and Sackney, 2011). 

The CELI Networked Improvement Community

The CELI NIC network structure is based on the social theory that system transformation occurs when a critical mass of individuals within a group embraces an idea. While critical mass may vary from 10 - 40%, the key accelerant for conversion to new ideas is strong densely networked social ties (see Figure 1), which results  from highly interconnected social networks facilitated by “wide bridges” between subgroups (see Figure 2) (Loeffelholz 2020). We have also embraced Black Lives Matters concept of a ‘leaderful’ movement (i.e., one with a highly distributed and dynamically emergent leadership). CELI crafted itself on a flat, highly interconnected, non-hierarchical model, with all participants having access to all others participants, encouraging the emergence of new ideas and initiatives from any part of the network, and embracing their collective ownership. 

As shown in figure 3, our CELI networked improvement community involves participants from three primary institutions (Cal State East Bay, Cesar Chavez Middle School (CCMS), and THS). In CELI, each school has its own NIT, which shares educational innovations to the broader school community, through a variety of means. The NITs are led or co-lead by a science teacher, but consist of broadly multi-disciplinary teams of about 13 educators, teaching coaches, and administrators. NIT teachers share CELI curriculum and pedagogy with their non-NIT colleagues, typically through their departments. The university team facilitates the entire process (including proposal writing, budget management, procurement, resource sharing, participant stipends, professional development training, network organization, and research) and conducts the research.