Tight but Loose: Scaling up Teacher Professional Development in Diverse Contexts. Research Report. ETS RR-08-29

This series of papers was originally presented as a symposium at the annual meetings of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) held between April 9, 2007, and April 13, 2007, in Chicago, IL. The authors represent school districts and departments of education across the United States, as well as researchers at Cleveland State University, Educational Testing Service (ETS), the Institute for Education in London, and the University of Wyoming at Laramie. All of the current ETS staff, along with Dylan Wiliam and Marnie Thompson, worked at ETS for several years on an iterative research and development program, out of which grew the Keeping Learning on Track® (KLT) program. These papers represents the thinking about the theory behind the KLT program, describes the range of contexts used to implement the program, and illustrates the inherent tensions between the desire to maintain fidelity to a theory of action and the need to demonstrate flexibility in order to accommodate local situations. Papers 2 through 6 present descriptions of five implementations in chronological order. The papers included here are as follows: (1) Tight but Loose: A Conceptual Framework for Scaling Up School Reforms (Marnie Thompson and Dylan Wiliam); (2) A Teacher-Driven Implementation of Assessment "for" Learning in New Jersey (Laura Goe and Diane Mardy); (3) The "Keeping Learning on Track"® Program in New Teacher Induction (Jeff Maher and Dylan Wiliam); (4) Letting Go of the Reins: Learning About Scalability in the Context of One District-Wide Implementation (Christine J. Lyon, Donna Cleland, and Maureen Gannon); (5) "Keeping Learning on Track"® in an Urban District's Low Performing Schools (E. Caroline Wylie, Marnie Thompson, Christine J. Lyon, and Donna Snodgrass); (6) A State-Sponsored Pilot Project in Selected Schools in Vermont (Cynthia Tocci and Gayle Taylor); (7) Scaling Up Across Diverse Contexts: Lessons Learned From Five Implementations of the "Keeping Learning on Trac"k® Program (Dawn Marie Leusner, Judith Ellsworth, and Laura Goe); and (8) Tight but Loose: Through the Looking Glass (Margaret Heritage and W. James Popham).