An Ecological Perspective on Scaling: Balancing Structural and Individual Adaptivities

Abstract

This chapter proposes an organic, ecological perspective on scaling that uses the ‘tight but loose’ framing to maximise the ‘spread’ and ‘growth’ of educational innovations. Unlike the medical field where translating and scaling research into practice adopts a linear staged process (Woolf, 2009), the educational sciences is more complicated with overlapping social dimensions and evolving teaching and learning contexts. In the natural sciences, the dominant model of translation and scaling is towards a ‘gold standard’. Once this is achieved, replication of this product (typically) is rolled out after clinical or laboratory trials have been satisfied across population groups. We argue that in education context matters. Hence, the natural sciences’ model of translation and scaling may not suffice. Our alternative proposed model suggests a synergy between the top–down (‘tight’) and bottom–up (‘loose’) structures to diffuse education innovations across different contexts and create the sociality that sustains change. In order to understand how this synergy and ecological model of scaling can be designed, secondary analysis was conducted by studying the developmental trajectories of three projects at teacher, school, and system levels. Through this analysis, preliminary insights on the ecological model of scaling are surfaced in terms of the need for different levels of structures as scaffolds to enable different levels of teacher-oriented, school-oriented, and system-oriented innovations to be scalable and sustainable. We argue that these three forms of innovations fostered in the Singapore education system enables it to be adaptive. The ecological model of scaling is about designing social interactions and communities with varying levels of top–down support for different innovations to spread, grow, and sustain over time.