Bringing Scientific-Professional Learning Communities into Practice: Exploring Variation in Educational Improvement Network Health and Development

The Improvement Network Health and Development Framework (INHD Framework) sets a vision for a complex new organizational form for practical problem solving: the Networked Improvement Community (NIC). One critical test of this idealized framework is to explore its usefulness in describing variation in these deliberatively formed, temporary problem-solving networks as they are operationalized in the public school context. This article explores the health and development of 34 improvement networks catalyzed by the Gates Foundation’s Networks for School Improvement (NSI) initiative using evidence generated from a survey-based measurement system. We present evidence that at least six NSIs from the sample of 34 have normative practices and member attitudes that strongly align with the INHD Framework, suggesting that some intentional improvement communities aligned with the framework have come into existence, while another subset of five NSIs were significantly struggling to realize the idealized vision of a scientific-professional learning community. Following these high-level patterns, we examine evidence from program documentation to cross validate patterns found in network health and development identified through the survey.