Advances in Research on Reading Recovery

Scaling and Sustaining an Evidence-Based Intervention

Jerome V. D'Agostino

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367892920
• eBook ISBN: 9781351207737
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

There is no shortage of innovative educational programs – the challenge is learning how to scale and sustain those with strong evidence of effectiveness. This book focuses on Reading Recovery – one of the few educational innovations that has successfully expanded and established itself in several educational systems in the world. Developed by Marie Clay in New Zealand during the mid-1980s, Reading Recovery is an intensive intervention for young students who are struggling to learn how to read, and has expanded to several countries across the globe over the last 30 years.

Providing evidence of the intervention's effectiveness both in the short- and long-term, this volume presents in-depth studies to elucidate why the program is effective; discusses the trials and tribulations in scaling and sustaining the program; and approaches scaling and maintaining from theoretical and practical perspectives. The contributors to this book explain how Reading Recovery has established itself because it has maintained a strong focus on evidence; developed a deep sense of community among its practitioners; and was at the forefront in enhancing professional development of the teachers who delivered the intervention. Understanding the implementation experiences of the intervention is beneficial for any innovation developer who wishes to grow and sustain an intervention. The chapters in this book were originally published as articles in the Journal of Education for Students Placed At Risk.

Scaling and Sustaining an Intervention: The Case of Reading Recovery

Emily M. Rodgers

ABSTRACT

In every school district across the country, every year, initiatives are adopted with the goal of improving the literacy performance of young students, and, just as frequently, these initiatives fail or quickly become passing fads. In this article, Rodgers reviews literature related to scaling educational innovations and describes challenges and barriers to implementing and maintaining evidence-based reform. Using Reading Recovery as a case example, she describes features of the intervention that are thought to be linked to its longevity in terms of scalability and sustainability. She also shares lessons learned from the most recent period of its expansion with the 5-year grant to scale up Reading Recovery across the county. Implications from this article include the importance of adopting an initiative that has a well-articulated design, collecting data on the progress of the students served, and having a person in the district who acts as a redirecting agent, maintaining the design of the initiative and guarding it against tendencies to pare down the design.

Six national reading reports over the last 3 decades and the ongoing review work of the U.S. Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse have yielded an abundance of evidence about effective instructional practices, particularly for young students having great difficulty learning to read and write. Despite this growing body of knowledge, however, a persistent problem remains: how to bring evidence-based practices to scale (Denton, Vaughn, & Fletcher, 2003).

In this article, I review literature related to scaling educational innovations and describe challenges and barriers to implementing and sustaining evidence-based reform. Using Reading Recovery as a case example, I describe features of the intervention that seem to be linked to its longevity in terms of scalability and sustainability. Implications from this article include the importance of adopting an initiative that has a well-articulated design, collecting data on the progress of the students served, and having a person in the district who acts as a redirecting agent (Clay, 1994), maintaining the design of the initiative and guarding the design against tendencies to pare it down for something inferior.

What does it mean to scale an innovation in education?

Coburn (2003) maintained that the concept of scaling an innovation is much more nuanced than simply increasing the number of schools in which an innovation is implemented. Stringfield and Datnow (1998) made the same point 15 years earlier when they described what was at the time a new trend in educational policy and research: finding ways to bring school-improvement designs to scale. There had been an increase in federal funding to support comprehensive school-reform models, and, according to Stringfield and Datnow, attention had shifted to finding ways to bring these successful designs to scale. It was within that context of whole school improvement that Stringfield and Datnow defined scaling up as “the deliberate expansion to many settings of an externally developed school-restructuring design that previously has been used successfully in one or a small number of school settings” (p. 271).

Schneider and MacDonald’s (2007) definition of scaling goes beyond the idea of increasing the number of schools taking up an innovation. They emphasize two features in their definition: enacting an already proven intervention in a different context (one that is larger and more diverse than its original context) and maintaining positive impact as it is enacted in these new contexts. From this perspective, then, replicating an innovation in more and more schools that are no different from the original context would not be regarded as scaling an innovation. Further, if results cannot be maintained in the new contexts, the innovation has not scaled.

Coburn (2003) conceptualized scale as having four dimensions: depth, sustainability, spread, and shift in ownership. By depth, Coburn meant that to be at scale, the innovation must have created deep change, going beyond simple surface changes (such as changing materials or how the school day is organized) to changing teachers’ beliefs and the pedagogical principles embodied in the curriculum. Sustainability, which Coburn identified as perhaps the fundamental element of scale, refers to whether an innovation is maintained over time in the schools in which it is implemented or dropped after a short period of use. Spread, the third feature of Coburn’s conceptualization of scale, refers not only to an innovation spreading to other schools (breadth of scale) but, also, to whether and how the innovation (in terms of its norms, practices, and beliefs) spreads within schools to other classrooms (depth of scale). Finally, Coburn described an innovation as having scaled if the reform shifts to becoming regarded as an internal reform, no longer as an external one brought in by someone outside the school; at this point, the innovation is regarded as belonging to the school or system.

Taken together, these definitions of scaling, and of what it means to be at scale, present a challenge to developers of new educational initiatives who want to take their innovation to scale. The definitions suggest that, to scale, an innovation must not only expand to more schools, but to different kinds of schools, all the while maintaining its effectiveness; that the impact of the innovation should be wide and deep across the settings where it is implemented; and that the ultimate goal of the innovation is that it shifts from being viewed as an external initiative to one that is locally owned.

Perspectives on the success and failure of innovations to scale

In every school district across the country, each year, new initiatives are adopted with the goal of improving the literacy performance of young students. Just as frequently, these initiatives fail or quickly become passing fads. Elmore (1996) summed up this problem of scale with the statement: “Innovations that require large changes in the core of educational practice seldom penetrate more than a fraction of US schools and classrooms, and seldom last long when they do” (p. 2). Various perspectives exist as to why educational innovations scale or fail.

Why innovations succeed and scale

Datnow and Stringfield’s (2000) review of data from 16 school-reform-focused studies provides a helpful framework to understand better what it takes to bring lasting change to a school. A key feature, they concluded, in implementing and sustaining a reform initiative is that groups of stakeholders, at the state, district, and local levels, work together in an integrated way, rather than a few individuals working in isolation from others who also are involved in the setting.

Slavin and Madden (2007) also underscored the importance of a network, but their approach differs in terms of its composition. Drawing on lessons learned from their scaling-up of Success for All (SFA), Slavin and Madden advocate creating two networks of stakeholders that go beyond the school setting and are created principally to provide support to the other members in the network: a network of other schools prepared to help new schools implement the innovation, and a network of a core group of trainers who coordinate between the project’s headquarters and the regional training sites. Members in the network all share the same goal, implementing and sustaining the SFA model in schools; they do not have competing agendas or other stakeholders lobbying for their resources, time, or funding in the way that state legislators or district administrators do. The advantage of a network beyond the local context is that the innovation can be somewhat sheltered against the policy changes that invariably accompany changes of school and district administrators.

Slavin and Madden (2007) identified several other features necessary for an innovation to scale, features that match well with the definitions of scaling discussed in the previous section. They noted that the quality of the innovation must be maintainable as the innovation spreads, it should have a strong research base to continually investigate and demonstrate the innovation’s effectiveness, and it should provide specified procedures and materials to the school to ease the uptake of the new instructional approach.

Gersten, Chard, and Baker (2000), focusing on factors that affect the sustained use of evidence-based core teaching practices, noted the importance of teachers becoming skilled with the teaching order for an innovation to be scaled. When teachers have a deeper conceptual understanding of the instructional practice, there is a greater likelihood, they argued, that teachers will continue to implement the instructional practice, even after incentives are removed or disappear. This idea of working toward a deeper conceptual understanding of the new practice also fits with Fullan’s (1993) observation that change cannot be mandated, not when the nature of change requires skillful thinking and decision-making.

Guskey’s (1986) finding, that changes in teacher beliefs and motivation only come after changes in practice, suggests that, to achieve the deeper conceptual change that Gersten and colleagues (2000) and Fullan (1993) argued for, the teacher should be engaged in the new practice from the outset of adopting the innovation. In other words, the way to deep change is not through discussion, but through taking on the new instruction. Beliefs will change after the teacher sees the effects of the new program on student learning and not as a result of prolonged discussions about theory.

Why innovations fail and disappear

Stringfield and Datnow (1998) proposed that programs fail to expand because of flaws with the program’s design. On the one hand, they argued, programs may fail to scale simply because th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Reading Recovery as an Epistemic Communit
• 1 Scaling and Sustaining an Intervention: The Case of Reading Recovery
• 2 An International Meta-Analysis of Reading Recovery
• 3 Reading Recovery: Exploring the Effects on First-Graders’ Reading Motivation and Achievement
• 4 Getting to Scale: Evidence, Professionalism, and Community
• 5 Examining the Sustained Effects of Reading Recovery
• 6 Differences in the Early Writing Development of Struggling Children Who Beat the Odds and Those Who Did Not
• Index