Principal Investigator
Deborah Leong – Tools of the Mind
Project Description
This paper describes and reflects upon the experience of leaders of Tools of the Mind as they took their curriculum to scale. They aim to share lessons on how to maintain fidelity and quality without being overly rigid and maintaining teacher agency, develop teachers’ capacities, and use technology to support implementation fidelity and teacher development. The authors use the Active Implementation Frameworks (AIF) to analyze scaling strategies adopted by Tools as they evolved during implementation at scale.
Research Questions
- Can large-scale implementation of a curriculum guide teachers when they need to know what specifically to do, without thereby leading to rigid, routinized delivery?
- Can teachers’ capacities be developed through implementing a set of activities in classroom settings in accordance with a curriculum?
- Can technology support both implementation fidelity and teacher development in a way that both responds to specific needs and avoids stifling initiative and creativity?
Key Findings
The authors review strategies to energize and motivate teachers when implementing Tools, leading to improvements in children’s outcomes. The organization transitioned from scripted manuals and checklist-based fidelity monitoring to a model that builds teacher knowledge, reflective practice, and collaborative professional learning, supported by custom technology tools. Early evidence from pilot studies and recent randomized controlled trials suggests that this approach has successfully maintained curriculum fidelity at scale while strengthening teacher capacity and improving children’s self-regulation and learning outcomes. The authors urge the field to move away from considering curricula and teacher capacity separately and instead towards integrating the two to support teacher capacity, as well as consider the benefits of using tailored technology to support implementation at scale.
Study Citation
Lam, J., Leong, D. J., Bodrova, E., Wilder-Smith, B., Mathur, A., & Radner, J. (2025). Scaling up a kindergarten and pre-k curriculum with a focus on teacher agency. Global Implementation Research and Applications, 1-14.
The Key Findings above were reproduced from the published report and do not necessarily reflect interpretation of Overdeck Family Foundation staff.
