Throughout his career in educational research, Louis Gomez, professor of education and chair of the department, has sought to improve the life chances of students with a focus on improving educational innovations. In his latest book, “Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better” (Harvard Education Press, 2015), Gomez and his co-authors A. S. Bryk, A. Grunow and P. G. LeMahieu, examine how the process of disciplined inquiry — borrowed from the field of improvement science — can help educators create, identify, adapt and reliably use promising educational innovations.
Organized around six core principles, “Learning to Improve” shows how educational improvement communities can bring together researchers and practitioners to accelerate learning. Examples include efforts to address the high rate of failure among students in community college remedial math courses, and strategies for improving feedback to beginning teachers.
Gomez said that while educational research has for decades zeroed in on academic theory and accountability, there is still more work to be done at the level of improving actual practice.
“In education today we say, ‘I’m engaged in reform to improve policy and practice,’ as though improving policy is the same as improving practice,” he said. “It is not. Working on practice improvement is a thing unto itself. Reformers might correctly say, ‘We’d like to see the world be different in these ways,’ but their reform goals are often silent on the details of the actual practices to make the change happen reliably.”
