The Approach

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Design-Educational Engineering-Development (DEED)

At the core of the Carnegie Foundation’s work is a new vision of educational research and development, which we call Design-Educational Engineering-Development (DEED), that has the capacity to bring real improvement at scale to critical, high-leverage problems of teaching and learning.  
 
The Foundation’s commitment to catalyzing centers of engineering-like work on high-leverage problems of practice in education entails two key elements. First, we engage in this work ourselves; we “learn by doing” how DEED can be effectively undertaken. Second, we build principled accounts of how to conduct DEED that others can learn from and use. Together, these two elements frame the Foundation as a “double-loop” learning organization, one that can both do the work and learn how we and others can do it better in the future. 

DEED Principles

1. 1. R&D should be organized around high-leverage problems embedded in the day-to-day work of teaching and learning and the institutions in which these activities occur. Successful problem-solving R&D begins with a working map of the elements that comprise the problem, the multiple pathways toward solutions, and an integrating framework for forming a coherent field of improvement activity.
2. 2. Designers, developers, and researchers need to work in close collaboration with educational practitioners from the beginning. We cannot achieve the improvements needed so long as R&D operates in accord with an if-we-design-it-they-will-come principle. The full range of stakeholders must be at the “design table.”
3. 3. Openness is fundamental. We seek a participatory culture that both enables innovation development and stimulates broad uptake and use. This means building communities of designers, researchers, practitioners and institutional leaders around specific improvement problems. It also means tapping into the capacity of Open Educational Resources for promoting the exchange and development of powerful practices.
4. 4. Activity should be driven by an engineering orientation where the adaptability of innovations to local contexts is a primary consideration. It is not sufficient to know that a program or innovation can work. We need to know how to make it work reliably over many diverse contexts and situations.
5. 5. An evidence-based practice must discipline the enterprise. Continuous improvements at scale require measuring the key components that contribute to student outcomes. This system of measures must be guided by a working theory about how various instructional processes, organizing routines and cultural norms interact to affect desired outcomes. This cause and effect logic must, in turn, be constantly tested against evidence of actual efficacy in action.

Learn more about the first problem of practice: Developmental Mathematics.

Resources

Support a Science of Performance Improvement
In the April issue of the Phi Delta Kappan (Vol. 90, No. 08 ), Carnegie President Anthony S. Bryk writes, “Both how we carry out educational R&D and the institutional environs in which this work occurs must be reengineered toward more productive ends.” Bryk argues that a Design, Educational Engineering and Development (DEED) infrastructure “must emerge if we are to confront successfully the educational challenges that lie ahead.”
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Ruminations on Reinventing an R&D Capacity for Educational Improvement
This paper, by Carnegie President Anthony S. Bryk and Louis Gomez of the Northwestern University School of Education, was drawn from a presentation given by Bryk at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research on Oct. 25, 2007.
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The Future of Education Research
Carnegie President Anthony S. Bryk’s speech at a Nov. 19th American Enterprise Institute event in Washington, D.C. is now available online. He discusses his vision for research and development in American schooling, the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for the Foundation, and the lessons they hold for the future of school reform.
Visit the AEI site »