Robert E. Shoenberg

"Disseminating Proven Reforms" is devoted exclusively to multiplying the effect of successful innovations. FIPSE has for many years made dissemination grants through the Comprehensive Program, with the grantee institutions using a variety of processes for broadcasting their successes. "Disseminating Proven Reforms" differs from those earlier efforts in that it is devoted exclusively to dissemination and employs a single mentoring model as the means of propagating programs.

The Format

The purpose of dissemination is to "grow" new programs, similar but not identical to the original, in places where they did not exist before. Disseminators often use agricultural analogies and terms like "growing," "broadcasting," and "propagating" to describe different approaches to their work. Making conference presentations and publishing materials, for example, might be compared to scattering seeds randomly over unprepared ground, where few, if any, will germinate, take root and thrive.

"Disseminating Proven Reforms," on the other hand, uses what could be described as a grafting strategy, attaching buds and branches to strong rootstock. While this method affects only a few plants, if the soil is right and the plants are well fed and watered they will grow and continue to propagate. Here the graft represents the innovation that has proven successful at the college or university where it was developed, and the rootstock symbolizes the institution committed to adapting the innovation. The soil represents the circumstances at the adapting institution; the water, the tutelage and encouragement of the mentor institution; and the fertilizer, sufficient funding to encourage the efforts of both mentor and adapters.

Dissemination has the fullest and most lasting results when the creators of demonstrably strong programs are brought into a one-on-one working relationship with those who are willing and ready to adapt their innovations. The association between mentor and adapter needs to be sustained (as opposed to a single consulting visit) and personal, with each party acknowledging its obligations to the other for the success of the process.

"Disseminating Proven Reforms" was designed to embody these principles. The 13 mentor programs were chosen on the basis of their efficacy as evidenced by appropriate outcome measures. Sometimes these were statistical measures, but not all programs lent themselves to such assessments, and those that did not were judged on the basis of more qualitative evidence. The applications to the competition came from mentor institutions who had already chosen and secured commitments from their adapters. The likelihood that the adapting institutions would prove fertile soil for dissemination was an important consideration in the selection process.

The grants were for two years. The "Disseminating Proven Reforms" model called for conferences of mentors and adapters on the former's campus at the beginning of the project and in the second year. FIPSE wanted the adapters to have a sense that they were involved in a larger project than the one at their own institution, and to see the program they were adapting in action on the mentor campus.

Funding was also provided for the mentor to visit each of the adapting campuses once a year. Primarily intended to provide advice and encouragement, these visits also served to allow mentor interaction with a wide group of faculty and administrators on the adapting campus. In addition to providing opportunities to display the expertise of the mentors, the visits also allowed the mentor to run interference with administrators on behalf of the project, and for the adapters to publicize their efforts internally (and occasionally externally as well). All but one of the mentor-adapter clusters of institutions followed this model. The exception, the Stanford University-led service learning group, is discussed below.

Each cluster was committed to using a common assessment strategy to measure the success of the project. In some cases (e.g., the Anne Arundel Community College and Moravian College clusters) adapters simply used the instruments that the mentor institution had employed. Others, such as the Stanford cluster, designed an entirely new assessment strategy.

The visits and the assessments provided numerous occasions for mentor and adapters to be in touch, and the mentors agreed to make themselves available by telephone or mail to answer questions as they arose, thus ensuring frequent, personal contact. However, contact among adapters between conferences was infrequent, although several clusters established automated Internet mailing lists or listservs for the purpose.

Compared to FIPSE's Comprehensive Program grants, those for "Disseminating Proven Reforms" were modest: $30,000 per year for the mentor and $10,000 per year for each adapter. Mentor funding was intended to cover costs for travel to the adapting institutions, the on-site costs of the conference, communication and materials costs and some release time. For the adapters, funding covered travel to the conference site for teams of three. The remaining funds were to be used at the adapter's discretion in direct support of the program.

Some Specific Examples

The clusters described in the following vignettes are highlighted because of the overall success of their work and because they represent a range of the processes and outcomes that result from disseminating different types of innovations. Though these are singled out, others were equally successful. Indeed, no cluster was unsuccessful, and nearly all achieved what FIPSE had hoped.

The range that these programs represent may be described by a simple typology that has proven useful for analyzing a variety of aspects of "Disseminating Proven Reforms." The typology is based on the nature of the reform being disseminated, which affects the way that mentors and adapters interact, the nature of their cluster meetings and the mentors' visits, the pace and manner of adaptation, and the assessment strategies.

This rough but useful typology of reform "products" that are being "distributed" places them on a continuum of particularity, ranging from a fully defined package (Type 1) to a general concept (Type 4). At the more specific end are reforms like the California State University, Chico, introductory accounting sequence or Moravian College's mathematics program, which consist of fully developed curriculum materials that adapters modified to suit their programs. By contrast, at the general end one finds Eckerd College's strategies for using retired professionals or Stanford's experience with community service programs, which served merely as prompts to inform the work of the adapting institutions.

The mentors disseminating the more "packaged" reforms generally proceeded by instructing the adapters in the content and uses of the strategies and materials that they had developed. Thus the City College of New York (CCNY) "Fluency First" mentors conducted 20-hour training sessions on each of their six adapting campuses. Similarly, the staff of the Anne Arundel Community College tutorial program devoted their opening workshop to a detailed exposition of their procedures and training materials. At the other end of the spectrum, Stanford's mentors acted more as catalysts, arranging for institutions that were developing quite different community service models to share ideas with each other.

To elaborate this description, we might place the 13 dissemination projects at four points on the continuum from particularity to generality of the product being disseminated, as follows:

Type 1. A set program: the disseminator had a fully developed package of materials to pass on to the adapters. Because the audiences of the adapters were the same as those of the mentors (e.g., students in an introductory math course or medical residents), the package could be taken over with only limited modifications.

• Anne Arundel Community College ("Supplemental Instruction")
• California State University, Chico (introductory accounting)
• Moravian College (integration of precalculus topics into introductory calculus)
• University of Illinois College of Medicine (using patients as instructors for medical residents)

Type 2. A set strategy: the disseminator had a very specific way of going about the activities in which it was instructing the adapters, who then used that strategy to meet local needs. Adapters applied the strategy to audiences that were often different from those of the mentors.

• CCNY "Fluency First" (teaching reading and writing to ESL students)
• CCNY PASS Program (a school-to-college "bridge" program for students in science)
• Dickinson College (workshop physics)
• Pace University (case method in education courses)

Type 3. A general strategy: the disseminator had developed an innovative strategy to meet certain goals which adapters modified freely to suit local conditions.

• Binghamton University (languages across the curriculum)
• Central Missouri State University (continuous quality improvement [CQI] strategies for academic programs)
• Eckerd College (senior professionals as student mentors)
• University of Missouri (teaching alternative dispute resolution in law schools)

Type 4. A broad concept: the disseminator's general approach to educational practice had wide latitude for applications, often in ways far removed from those of the mentor campus.

• Stanford University (service learning)

As part of a continuum, these four discrete "positions" are not sharp divisions, and they tend to blend into each other. The projects highlighted in the following descriptions represent each of the four types. The Anne Arundel Community College project leads off not only because of its uniform success but because it comes closest to following the pattern that FIPSE had in mind in laying out program guidelines. Moravian College's "just in time" approach to teaching precalculus topics in the context of the introductory calculus course is the kind of tightly focused, department-specific innovation typical of Type 1. The California State University, Chico, introductory accounting model (Type 1) illustrates how the institutional culture, particularly the faculty culture, into which the innovation is introduced can produce widely differing outcomes.

The "Workshop Physics" group (Type 2), led by Dickinson College, demonstrates that institutions with quite different students and resources can all adapt a strong model with demonstrably beneficial results. This group's assessment process was especially strong. Another Type 2 project, City College of CUNY's program for supporting at-risk students in the sciences, shows institutions adapting a basic idea to a wide range of administrative structures.

The University of Missouri Law School and its adapters (Type 3) illustrate the possibilities of using a formal dissemination process for introducing a paradigm-shifting change, alternative dispute resolution, into standard curriculum and teaching structures. The service learning cluster (Type 4), organized by Stanford University, exemplifies a successful approach to dissemination and assessment that is quite different from the rest.

Lessons Learned

The results of this first cycle of Disseminating Proven Reforms demonstrate the strength of the model. By a conservative estimate, 55 percent (39) of the 71 adapting institutions fully institutionalized the activity they set out to adapt, and another 25 percent (18) appeared likely to do so. For only five of the adapters did the innovation fail to take hold, for reasons ranging from outright rejection after a trial period to inaction.

The effects produced by the model are not uniform across types. The more discrete and bounded the innovation, the better the model worked. Whereas 67 percent of the Type 1 adapters institutionalized the innovation, only 57 percent of the Type 2s and 42 percent of the Type 3s have done so to date. Seventy percent of the adapting institutions where the innovation continues only in a weak form are of Type 3. (The single Type 4 group is omitted from this discussion because its dissemination approach was so different.)

The Type 3 innovations, being less particular, broader and more complex, simply take longer to implement. CQI programs like Central Missouri's, particularly when instituted in the context of academic programs, generally require far more than two years to take hold. Similarly, Eckerd's successful efforts to bring retired professionals into the classroom in support roles required a substantial investment and administrative effort, not to mention faculty commitment, that may take a few years to put in place.

On the other hand, a mathematics department willing to try integrating precalculus topics into calculus courses using a "just in time" approach, rather than teaching the courses separately, has only to train itself to do so. No one outside the department, other than perhaps the campus curriculum committee, needs to be consulted. Thus the Type 1 and 2 innovations, which tend to be confined to particular departments and to require the consent of fewer people at lower administrative levels, seem most amenable to this kind of dissemination, at least in the short run.

The Type 1 and 2 innovations, particularly the former, are less transformative, require less of a change in thinking and pose less of a challenge to the culture of the unit adapting them. Type 3 innovations, on the other hand, particularly those resembling the CQI and alternative dispute resolution programs, are truly revolutionary and thus harder to institute under any model.

Much of the success of this model appears to lie in the skill of the mentors and the frequent contact of mentors and adapters. Apart from the personal qualities of the mentors, the regular schedule of meetings and visits provides incentive for the adapters to keep moving. The expert external to the institution is both a source of support and a reason to avoid the embarrassment of non-performance.

Adapters rated personal contact with the mentor as most helpful. With few exceptions, telephone and e-mail contacts with the mentor were not initiated by the adapters, however, and tended to be used mostly for project logistics and administration. Most found the two group conferences useful as a source of mutual encouragement and a convenient means of conveying basic information about the details of an innovation and strategies for implementing it. Communication among the adapters outside of these meetings was virtually non-existent.

FIPSE's financial contribution, small though it was, appears to have been enough to generate the necessary effort. In fact, simply participating in a national project sponsored by a well-known funder is a powerful incentive. The formal recognition that selection implies moves a project to the top of the list of things to do.

Assessment tends to be the most difficult where the programs are the least defined, and where student outcomes lie beyond the grant period. Mentor institutions for most of the Type 1 and 2 innovations adapted the assessment models of the original projects, but others had to devise new protocols, an effort that was particularly successful with the Dickinson, Stanford, and University of Illinois, Chicago Medical School clusters. Some clusters simply could not find a suitable process for project-wide assessment.

The examples that follow represent all four project types and illustrate the successes and some of the disappointments that even strong programs must accept.

SUCCESS OF ADAPTATION BY DISSEMINATION TYPE

[IX. Disseminating Proven Reforms] [ Table of Contents] [Anne Arundel Community College]

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