Rebecca A. Huggins

Rebecca A. Huggins

I had the pleasure recently of presenting to a school district on the topic of implementation science, and how we can move systems forward in utilizing high-impact instructional practices. One of the interesting things about this session was that I had anticipated quite a lot of administrators, coaches, and system leaders to attend. Who I found in front of me, however, were a great many teachers and a much smaller sprinkling of system leaders in the audience. I think often about this session, largely because it exemplified most educators I come across in my profession: a great many are eager to talk about shifting from “knowing-what” to “knowing-how” to make schools better. 

Yet despite this reality, educators still get a bad rap for being “unwilling” to embrace change. This has rarely been my experience in working with schools and systems. I have been involved in school improvement for the better part of a decade—first at the school and then district level. Across nearly every system I’ve worked in, I’ve seen two recurring mistakes: 1) mistaking compliance with a process for evidence of improvement, and 2) assuming that what worked in one school can simply be replicated in another.

At the risk of sounding a little cliché, school improvement is half science, and half art. Improvement science is a bit of an artform in-and-of-itself. Science involves hypothesis and experimentation; it involves testing out ideas to see their broader impact. Perhaps most importantly, the literature on improvement science comes with an important caveat that replication itself is not enough to improve outcomes; adaptation is an essential part of improvement (Lewis, 2015; Tichnor-Wagner et al., 2018). The “art” of improvement is that it can be a little bit messy. It doesn’t fit neatly in a box that can be transferred directly to new schools and systems, without first a clear understanding of the instructional problems therein.

This is one of the biggest challenges facing many schools: we see one school, system or state obtain success, and we are tempted to replicate parts of those practices in another. In her 2026 report, Inside the Mississippi Marathon, Rachel Canter makes this point precisely. She warns against states attempting to copy only the surface-level pieces of their improvement—and instead points to the other factors that led to their broader reform efforts which ultimately have become paramount to the improvement the state has seen in reading outcomes for children. 

And while systems can change broader policies—like standards, assessments, and curriculum—any improvement effort that doesn’t impact the interactions between teachers, students, and the instructional content they are teaching—are unlikely to be worth their time. Canter (2026) makes this very point when she talks about Mississippi only “pretending to embrace reforms” prior to legislative changes in her state in 2012. There is convincing evidence that professional learning focused on improving teachers’ knowledge of content, has sizeable effects on student’ performance (Lynch et al., 2025). And while professional learning communities (PLCs) have often become places where “unpacking standards” appears to be the be-all-end-all to instructional practice, Smith and colleagues’ (2024) two-year, randomized controlled trial across 56 elementary schools illustrates why greater standards alignment can’t be confused with greater student learning. Their intervention, which included spending grade-level team meetings and coaching on aligning instruction to state standards, may have improved teachers’ instructional alignment to standards—but did not improve student achievement. In fact, in this case, the practice had negative effects on student achievement in both math and ELA.  

Often, systems are quick to demand compliance with a process or procedure, losing sight of the outcome the process was meant to produce: improved student outcomes. Instead, adherence to a process becomes the outcome itself. Bryk and colleagues (2015) remind us that improvement should start with facing the actual problem in front of us, the people experiencing it, and the specific conditions in which it is happening, before deciding how to fix it. Compliance makes for systems that treat school improvement planning as a “check in the box” and another bureaucratic hurdle, rather than embracing an innovative practice to improve outcomes (Aaron et al., 2024). 

If we are serious about improving outcomes for students, then we must be willing to get a little out of our comfort zone. We have to be willing to experiment; to strategize. To implement instructional practices that might push our skill-set—but with the careful guidance of a trusted partner (whether that be a coach or a peer teacher) and spend PLCs talking about whether or not the thing we tried actually worked. This is what teachers want to be doing in their professional learning communities. Spending time working with fellow teachers on developing a deep, content expertise, so that they are better equipped to respond to student needs.

We must always be willing to admit when a practice we are promoting is not working. Above all else, school improvement must be an honest venture; if we are unwilling to look critically at our results, then we are not really seeking improvement at all. We ask teachers to reflect on their practice and adjust when students are not learning. Systems must be willing to do the same.

I have yet to meet a teacher who won’t falter in a belief system when they see student outcomes are suffering. Most teachers want what’s best for students. Many are eagerly waiting to learn the “how” of improvement science, so they can impact student outcomes. In fact, Rodgers and colleagues (2022) demonstrate that teachers are more likely to change their beliefs and sustain new practices when they see that those practices are producing better outcomes for kids. When teachers connect changes in student learning to their own instructional moves, they are more likely to adopt new instructional practices. How else can we explain grassroot, teacher-led education- improvement movements, like researchED? 

The harder part of school improvement is convincing systems that experimentation is part of improvement. This is not to say that all instruction is gravy, and that evidence doesn’t matter. Viano and colleagues (2024) have shown us that problem, context, people, implementation barriers and useful change ideas vary from school to school. But that doesn’t mean anything goes. We know a great deal about the conditions and instructional practices that support learning. Systems ought to be tight around evidence and relentless about monitoring outcomes, while giving schools enough space to determine what is getting in the way of good instruction and what needs to change.  

Improvement science should help a system answer the following: What is preventing good outcomes from happening here—and did the change we make actually improve learning? That is a very different question from asking whether everyone is doing the same thing. 

References

Aaron, T. S., Meyers, C. V., Hitt, D. H., & VanGronigen, B. A. (2024). Principals’ perspectives on the shift to short-cycle school improvement planning. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 52(6), 1519-1537. https://doi.org/10.1177/17411432221137462

Bennett, T. (2018, July 6). Message from the EDitor. researchED. https://researched.org.uk/2018/07/06/from-the-editor-4/

Bryk, A. S., Gomez, L. M., Grunow, A., & LeMahieu, P. G. (2015). Learning to improve: How America’s schools can get better at getting better. Harvard Education Press.

Canter, R. (2026, April 9). Inside the Mississippi marathon. Progressive Policy Institute. https://www.progressivepolicy.org/inside-the-mississippi-marathon

Lewis, C. (2015). What Is Improvement Science? Do We Need It in Education? Educational Researcher, 44(1), 54-61. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X15570388

Lynch, K., Gonzalez, K., Hill, H., & Merritt, R. (2025). A Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence Linking Mathematics and Science Professional Development Interventions to Teacher Knowledge, Classroom Instruction, and Student Achievement. AERA Open, 11. https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584251335302

Rodgers, E., D’Agostino, J., Berenbon, R., Mikita, C., Winkler, C., & Wright, M. E. (2022). Teachers’ Beliefs and Their Students’ Progress in Professional Development. Journal of Teacher Education, 73(4), 381-396. https://doi.org/10.1177/00224871221075275

Smith, T. M., Garet, M. S., Song, M., Atchison, D., & Porter, A. (2024). The Impact of a Virtual Coaching Program to Improve Instructional Alignment to State Standards. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 17(1), 19–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/19345747.2022.2150729

Tichnor-Wagner, A., Allen, D., Socol, A. R., Cohen-Vogel, L., Rutledge, S., & Xing, Q. W. (2018). Studying Implementation within a Continuous-Improvement Process: What Happens When We Design with Adaptations in Mind? Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education, 120(5), 1-52. https://doi.org/10.1177/016146811812000506

Viano S, Shahrokhi F and Hunter SB (2024) Improvement science and school leadership: the precarious path to dynamic school improvement. Front. Educ. 9:1371664. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2024.1371664