Scaling in Education: Maximizing the impact of Research and Development Interventions

Linear models of scaling as informed by the medical sciences should not be adopted wholesale for education. Education is a contextually nuanced social science. The replication of “gold standards” is possible when context variation is minimal; and as learning and instruction move towards a more student-centered, non-didactic model, student variation and teacher autonomy are key. 21^st century educational innovations emphasize inquiry- and process- based dialogic learning designs in authentic and embodied contexts. This implies that such “best practices” (gold standards) cannot be scaled up by replicating their established learning designs; but instead, each context would need to cultivate their own nuanced enactment of innovative practices. From a systems’ perspective, each context needs to establish a sufficing standard as far as 21^st century learning designs are concerned.

Singapore’s education system positions itself as one which is able to coordinate the tripartite relationship between policy makers (Ministry of Education), researchers (National Institute of Education), and practitioners (schools). In this presentation, we depict the journey undertaken by these three entities in terms of the evolving understandings in scaling as a system. Appropriating from the experiences of research projects undertaken in schools both by NIE and the EduLab (a teacher- and school- led initiative of the MOE and NIE), we describe case studies of different educational innovations along a scaling-and-diffusion continuum. Projects that focus largely on explicit knowledge and reified into products lie on the mechanistic end of the continuum, whereas 21^st century learning designs and innovations are situated on the organic end. From the organic diffusion of innovations’ perspective, the embodiment of tacit understandings of the desired practice is fundamental. In this vein, scaling is fundamentally reconstituted from a linear to non-linear alternative. We attempt to describe the respective roles played by the NIE and MOE, namely: 1) identify, make visible, and understand bottom-up innovations and diffusions, and 2) from a systems’ perspective, create structures which can initiate and support teacher-, school-, and system- led innovations.