How Research Partnership Is Improving Early Learning Alignment, From the Ground Up
Dr. Marina Merrill knows that if you want systems change in education, you need to put practitioners in the driver’s seat.
Dr. Merrill directs research and strategy at Children’s Institute. For the past 20 years, the organization has worked across multiple avenues—research, practice, policy, and advocacy—to improve opportunity for children across Oregon. Their recent initiative, Early School Success (ESS), focuses on improving instructional and relational alignment between early learning and elementary education—all part of their campaign to ensure that every child is Great by Age 8. At the heart of ESS are practitioners: educators who have the power to make sustainable change in classrooms.
When Dr. Merrill and her team partnered with Education Northwest to evaluate ESS, they knew they needed a rigorous, creative study design to prioritize practitioner voice. Together, the evaluation team is leveraging data from educators to make meaningful systems change, from the ground up.
Document and Measure
Children’s Institute launched ESS in 2019 with the goal of helping school districts across Oregon improve alignment from preschool through grade 5. Too often, early childhood and K–12 education systems operate independently. When preschools and kindergartens play by different (often unwritten) rules, kids and families are left to navigate the transition on their own. By contrast, improving alignment across the systems can improve transitions, sense of belonging, and quality of instructional experiences for every child.
From the outset of ESS, Children’s Institute knew that a strong research partner would be critical, not only for continuous improvement but also sustainability and scaling.
“We've been so busy facilitating meetings and getting everything up and running that it's been hard to take the time to document all the pieces of this initiative,” said Dr. Merrill. “It is incredibly valuable to have Education Northwest document everything in a way that we can go back and share it with other communities and schools that are interested in this doing this kind of meaningful systems change work and transforming their district’s culture into learning organizations.”
Early on, Children’s Institute and Education Northwest developed a shared understanding of ESS activities and goals. Later, Education Northwest evaluators proposed different measures to capture what Children’s Institute wanted to learn: for example, how teachers experience ESS, or complex multilevel outcomes that unfold across the early learning-to-elementary experience, such as embedding playful, content-based inquiry across grade levels.
“We have the deep relationships and the experience working on the ground, and Education Northwest helps us think about how we might creatively measure what we're trying to do, which includes a lot of complex components,” said Dr. Merrill.
The Children’s Institute’s deep understanding of district context has been critical to effectively evaluate what’s happening on the ground. Because ESS partners with diverse districts across Oregon—in terms of geography, size, curriculum, data capacity, and student demographics—the evaluation had to be responsive to each community.
“We knew that context would matter from the get-go,” said Dr. Merrill. “We didn't have existing measures that we could use across all districts. Districts aren't collecting the same data. No one district has the same curriculum approach, literacy or numeracy approach, or set of progress monitoring tools. You have to know each district very well, learn what their priorities are and what tools they're using. And that takes a lot of time. It just does. We had to work and build trust with these communities at multiple levels: the teachers, the administrators, even families, in some cases.”
Prioritize Practitioner Experience and Expertise
At its core, ESS is about shifting and improving what happens in the classrooms every day.
“ESS is grounded in improvement science, and we know from the research that in order for sustainable change to happen in systems, it has to come from the people that are closest to the work,” said Dr. Merrill. “Teachers are the ones that will make these shifts, and they understand better than anyone what their context is. They know what supports children's learning and they understand what's getting in the way.”
In order for sustainable change to happen in systems, it has to come from the people that are closest to the work … teachers.
From the beginning, ESS treated educators as professionals and co-designers—not just recipients or end users of innovation.
“We see that when teachers are engaged, participate in defining their aims and their change practices, and have the opportunity in real time to test those changes and interpret their own data, the work feels more relevant. It feels respectful to their time and to their expertise, and it's genuinely much more useful when they are in the driver's seats,” said Dr. Merrill.
Following the initiative’s approach, Education Northwest prioritized educator voice throughout the evaluation. Each year, the team built in surveys and focus groups to ask teachers, principals, and district leadership how ESS implementation was going and how they perceived impact.
Use Real-Time Data for Real-Time Improvements
After data collection each year, Education Northwest evaluators reconnected with the Children’s Institute team, who leveraged their deep knowledge of district context to help make sense of the data. Their insights not only informed the evaluation findings, but also shaped the future of the initiative.
With regular opportunities to interpret and discuss the evaluation data, Children’s Institute has been able to make meaningful adjustments in real time.
“Through the evaluation, our partners are honestly reflecting back what's working well and what's not,” said Dr. Merrill, “and our team has been incredibly responsive to the data and pivoting our practice in real time: pretty much immediately taking the feedback and shifting how meetings are run, how data is collected, putting together new tools and resources to be responsive.”
Our team has been incredibly responsive to the data and pivoting our practice in real time … immediately taking the feedback and shifting how meetings are run, how data is collected, putting together new tools and resources to be responsive.
Build Evaluation Capacity
Looking ahead, Children’s Institute aims to use what they learned from the ESS evaluation to plan the organization’s future work and prioritize opportunities for high impact. An immediate goal is to bring multiple initiatives under the umbrella of ESS and begin measuring them.
To this end, Education Northwest will collaborate with Dr. Merrill and her team to develop toolkits for measuring each program. The effort will follow a similar process to the ESS evaluation: first develop an understanding of the program and its intended outcomes, then develop measures specific to each program. Ultimately, these toolkits will strengthen the Children’s Institute’s capacity to evaluate their own programs.
Building on what worked well in the ESS study, Education Northwest plans to continue providing rapid feedback memos on the data collection.
“Our goal is to continue to build out and use our work on the ground, as well as the evaluation findings, to build on Oregon's evidence base around what supports young children in the earliest years of their schooling,” said Dr. Merrill. “We continue to try to move the needle and remove on-the-ground barriers for practitioners. We’re excited to get these new toolkits from Education Northwest to keep advancing our learning and supporting educators in their work.”
