School Processes That Can Drive Scaling-Up of an Innovation, or Contribute to Its Abandonment. Conference Paper

This paper reports findings from a multi-year study of the scale-up of Reading Apprenticeship (RA), an approach to improve academic literacy by helping teachers provide the support students need to be successful readers in the content areas. WestEd's Strategic Literacy Initiative (SLI), began developing the program in 1995 and has since reached over 100,000 teachers in schools across the country, at the middle school, high school and college levels. In 2010, WestEd received a "Validation" grant from the Department of Education's Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) competition to scale-up and study the "Reading Apprenticeship Improving Secondary Education" (RAISE) project. For this five-year project, SLI focused on three secondary school content areas: English Language Arts, History, and Biology. From the grant, SLI not only funded an independent randomized control trial, but also a parallel effort to study the schools outside of the RCT that were to receive the same professional development and other supports in implementing RA. This scale-up study was intended to provide formative feedback to the SLI developers to help them achieve their goal to build local education agency capacity to disseminate, support, and sustain academic literacy improvement in high school subject areas within their regions. Whereas, the i3 and similar funding can "prime the pump," the project must build the capacity to disseminate, support, and sustain the innovation. Ultimately, adoption at the state-level, driven by local adoption and evidence of success, will keep it going. Appended to the report are: (1) Detailed Data Collection Activities; and (2) Results From GL Analysis.