Chapter 18: Reflections on the MTE-Partnership: The Power of Networked Improvement Communities to Solve Complex Problems of Practice

Networked Improvement Communities (NICs) provide a social structure for organizing inter-organizational collaboration to address a specific problem of practice (Dolle et al., 2013; Russell et al., 2017). The concept was introduced to the educational field by Tony Bryk, Louis Gomez, and Alicia Grunow from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (Bryk, Gomez, & Grunow, 2011), and subsequently, there has been incredible interest in this way of organizing systems for improvement in the field of education. A community of educators, reformers, researchers, and policymakers has gravitated to the NIC concept as a model for solving complex educational problems, and the Mathematics Teacher Education Partnership (MTE-Partnership) has been at the vanguard of this movement providing a strong case for the power of this idea.