Connection: Practice to Research

“When high schools were created in the 1930s and ’40s,” says superintendent Roger Woehl of the West Linn-Wilsonville School District, “the concept was based on an agrarian and industrial model. All the foundational assumptions around this culture we call high school are about sixty to seventy years old. So it’s more than time to rethink the structure and use systems thinking and data to drive decisions.

“To transform our educational outcomes in the district,” says Woehl, “we’ve asked ourselves: ‘How can we get to a significantly different place in our instructional practices, curriculum development, content, or programmatic offerings?’ And secondly: ‘Who are our exemplars? Where are the world-class examples of the best practices in education—and, when we say world class, what does that mean?’ Beyond high quality, it means, literally, the best practices in the world, second to none. So we said, let’s look at what’s happening around the world to find the highly successful practices producing high student learning that is second-to-none, and let’s begin to understand what are the elements that make it work.”

:: Research to Expertise
:: Access Through Technology