Chance to hear global leader in education share his views

Dr Anthony (Tony) S. Bryk, a global leader in education research and one of America’s most noted educational researchers, will give a public lecture at the University of Auckland’s Faculty of Education next week.

Dr Bryk is the ninth president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, where he has introduced and is leading work to create a new research and development infrastructure to support educational improvement in the United States.

In his lecture, Learning to Improve, Dr Bryk will discuss how education has largely failed to learn from experience. Time after time, promising education reforms fall short of their goals and are abandoned as other promising ideas take their place.
 He will argue that rather than “implementing fast and learning slow,” educators should adopt a more rigorous approach to improvement that allows the field to “learn fast to implement well”.

Using ideas borrowed from improvement science, Dr Bryk will show how a process of disciplined inquiry can be combined with the use of networks to identify, adapt and successfully scale up promising interventions in education.

Dr Bryk will also discuss how, organised around six core principles, “networked improvement communities” can bring together researchers and practitioners to accelerate learning in key areas of education.

The lecture title is from his latest book, Learning to Improve, in which Dr Bryk and his colleagues present an informative guide for identifying, adapting and scaling up promising interventions in education.

Dr Bryk holds a B.S. from Boston College and an Ed.D. from Harvard University. He is the author of ten other books and hundreds of education articles. He has been president of the Carnegie Foundation since September 2008.

From 2004 until 2008 he held the Spencer Chair in Organizational Studies in the School of Education and the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He came to Stanford from the University of Chicago, where he was the Marshall Field IV Professor of Urban Education in the sociology department, and where he helped found the Center for Urban School Improvement, which supports reform efforts in the Chicago Public Schools.

He also created the Consortium on Chicago School Research, a federation of research groups that have produced a range of studies to advance and assess urban school reform.

Dr Bryk is a member of the National Academy of Education and was appointed by President Obama to the National Board for Education Sciences in 2010. In 2011, he was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dr Bryk’s lecture is on Tuesday, March 17, 2015, 4.30pm-6pm, J1 Lecture Theatre, Gate2, 74 Epsom Ave.

Register here: www.bryklecture.eventbrite.co.nz