SCHOOL REFORM AND THE ARTS OF RE-ENCHANTMENT

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE SCHOOL OF

EDUCATION AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES

OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

David Kalim Diehl August 2011

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/

This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/gq951qz3348

© 2011 by David Kalim Diehl. All Rights Reserved.

Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

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I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequatein scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Daniel McFarland, Primary Adviser

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequatein scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

David Labaree

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequatein scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Mitchell Stevens

Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies.

Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost Graduate Education

This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file inUniversity Archives.

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ABSTRACT

‘Disenchantment’ has been a consistent trope in sociology since Weber’s appropriation of

the term nearly a century ago. In this work I argue that, in contrast to the standard

modernization story, organizations have long been subject to countervailing forces other

than that that of rationalization. This has been especially true in schools, institutions that

exist at the intersection of the logics of bureaucracy, democracy and expressive youth

cultures. In this dissertation I identify a uniquely contemporary organizational response to

these tensions, one I associate with the notion of ‘re-enchantment.’ I use this term to refer

to reforms that identify emotional and intellectual alienation as the primary institutional

problems to be overcome and find a solution in the reinvigoration of organizational

practices with imagination, creativity, and collaboration. The result is a genre of reform

that accepts the logic of standardized and rationalized outcomes but attempts to transform

the process of achieving these goals by ‘re-enchanting’ organizational experience with a

sense of connectedness and creativity.

In this dissertation I discuss small school reform generally, and a particular

instance of it at Mill Town high specifically, as examples of organizational re-

enchantment. More than just introducing new practices or structures, small school reform

entails an effort to reshape the tactic and practical modes of coordination, what I call ways of

being. These are social conventions that allow actors to coordinate with each other and

their environment in a way that is grounded in a shared practical understanding of the

proper ordering of people and things. In contrast to standard account that locate the

barrier to change in the minds of organizational actors, utilizing a mixed-methods

approach I show that much of the failure of the reform at Mill Town was not the result of

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beliefs, attitudes or values of teachers, but rather concerned the complexity of changing

culturally disposed, and intersubjectively sustained, modes of coordination in the

organization

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Table of Contents

Prologue: Changing Modes, Not Minds ..............................................................................1!

Chapter One: Theorizing Re-enchantment ........................................................................12!

Chapter Two: Data and Methods .......................................................................................48!

Chapter Three: Origins of the Reform...............................................................................67!

Chapter Four: Theoretical Framework...............................................................................87

Chapter Five: Major Practices and Ways of Being..........................................................115!

Chapter Six: Tensions and Compositions Between Ways of Being ................................146!

Chapter Seven: School as Field .......................................................................................178!

Conclusion .......................................................................................................................202!

Appendix: Teacher Survey ..............................................................................................211

References........................................................................................................................225

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Tables, Pictures and Figures

Table 1: Description of Sample .........................................................................................57!

Table 2: Descriptive Statistics of Variables Used in Analysis ..........................................62!

Table 3: Network Ties Summary.......................................................................................63!

Picture 1: Downtown Mill Town .......................................................................................67!

Picture 2: Mill Town High School.....................................................................................69

Figure 1: Six Day Class Schedule......................................................................................80!

Table 4: Significant Changes in Survey Variables ............................................................83!

Figure 2: Changes in Personal Conversation Network ......................................................85!

Table 5: Summary of Major Ways of Being....................................................................110!

Table 6: Tensions Between Ways of Being.....................................................................147

Table 7: Comparisons Between Schools 1 and 2.............................................................177

Figure 3: Different Orders in the School .........................................................................179!

Figure 4: Relationship Between Networks and Attitudes in SIENA models ..................192!

Table 8: Means of Variables of Longitudinal Network Analysis ....................................193

Table 9: Results of SIENA Co-Evolution Models...........................................................196

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Prologue: Changing Modes, Not Minds

Contemporary work on school reform increasingly sees the major barriers to change as

being located in the minds of teachers and administrators. Housed there are the tacit and

taken-for-granted beliefs and attitudes that prevent desired change. In this increasingly

standard account, changing organizations amounts to changing the minds of the

organizational actors within them. Here the primary mechanism for creating effective

schools can be seen as liberated teachers from their own detrimental thought processes,

be they conservative, individualistic or presentist (Lortie 1975). Such accounts are,

however, based on problematic assumptions about the relationship between beliefs and

practices, namely that mental structures of knowledge are ‘inward’ causes or conditions

of ‘outward’ human behavior.

In contrast to this account, I will present here an alternative practice theoretical

model that locates the social within the activities of the school and the practical

intelligence of actors used to carry them out. This is a view of culture not as individual

beliefs or public texts, but rather as tacit habits, skills and repertories of action (Swidler

1986). But current practice theories have difficulty explaining organizational change

because they tend not to account for the ongoing adjustments actors make toward each

other and toward shared tasks at the micro-level (Thevenot 2001) as well as the

embedding of practices in larger socio-historical and institutional contexts at the macro-

level (Bailey and Barley 2011).

In order to overcome these problems, I develop a framework of school culture as

shaped by what I call organizational ways of being. These ways of being are akin to an

organizational modus operandi, but organizations house multiple ways of being and

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actors must navigate between them compose joint action across them. Such composition

occurs not at the level of conscious deliberation, but instead through ongoing practical

coping in the face of situational problems. Such ways of being are more than individual

dispositions, however. They are social devices that allow actors to coordinate with each

other and their environment that is grounded in a shared practical understanding of the

proper ordering of people and things. Comprehensive school reform is best thought of,

then, not as an effort to change the minds of actors by altering their beliefs or attitudes,

but rather to change the modes of action through which school members jointly engage

with each other and their shared tasks.

Re-enchantment As Changing Organizational Modes

We live in an era deeply interested in (and perhaps even enchanted by) the idea of

organizational ‘re-enchantment’, the label I have given to efforts to marry imagination

and creativity with rationality and systematic thinking in contemporary organizational

life. In school reform, organizational re-enchantment promises to simultaneously solve

two significant problems in contemporary schooling: the here-and-now feelings of

emotional and intellectual alienation of the modern bureaucracy as well as the more long-

term need to prepare students for a future requiring reflexive and creative workers. Rather

than seeing small school reform as just one in a long line of fleeting educational fads,

viewing them in terms of organizational re-enchantment sensitized us to their place in

larger cultural and social trends. Even as the creation of small schools is being displaced

in the policy toolbox, efforts with the same re-enchanted ends continue to emerge.

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More than just introducing new practices or structures, re-enchantment entails

fostering within teachers and students new ‘habits of mind’ or subjectivities, ones

associated with flexibility, openness and creative collaboration. In the small school

theory the two major mechanisms for this change are the so-called ‘twin pillars‘ of

reform: teacher collaboration and student personalization (Quint 2006). And yet, like so

many idealistic visions of organizational change, re-enchantment turns out to be very

difficult to engender. In terms of small schools, there is evidence of affective

improvement for both teachers (Rhodes et al 2005) and students (Shear et al 2008), but

this has rarely been found to translate into academic gains (Mitchell et al 2005). The

marriage between emotion and rationality fails to produce creative innovations to

educational problems. The relationship, in the end, seems to be a platonic one. Existing

work has extensively documented these outcomes, but had a great deal of difficulty

explaining them. I argue below that this is because extant frameworks mis-specify the

major mechanism of change, placing it in minds rather than modes.

Cultural Theories of Organizations

Popular approaches for studying small school reform, as well as the motivating ideas of

many of the designers of school reform themselves, have been heavily influenced by the

so-called cultural turn in social theory (Friedland and Mohr 2004). Cultural theories

contrast themselves to both traditional social theoretical views of social order as

generated either by the subjective intentionality and interest of individual actors (e.g.,

rational choice and utilitarianism) or by the following of collective norms and values

(e.g., Parsons and Weber). Diverse cultural theories are united in arguing that both of

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these traditional approaches gloss the centrality of shared, and typically tacit, knowledge

of the world that enables an intersubjective way of ascribing common meaning to the

world (Reckwitz 2002). The goal of research then is, broadly, to document such shared or

collective symbolic structures of knowledge in order to grasp the nature of social order.

There are two types of cultural theories that can be seen as especially central in

informing contemporary theory and research on school change. First are culture-mentalist

perspectives that locate the social in the mind of the individual. This view is reflected in

the large body of educational literature that makes teacher cognition and knowledge

central to explanations of change (e.g., Spillane 2000). The aim of this work is to

understand the subjective experience of teachers and to describe how their actions and

beliefs are the result of their schemes of interpretation. Scholars who work within this

frame tend to treat teacher interpretation as the product of idiosyncratic histories and

biographies, through hints of a more structuralist brand of mentalism can often be seen in

which subjective cognitive frameworks are somehow related to macro-structural

worldviews or ideologies. This intuition is almost never pursued in any systematic

fashion, however. Instead, it is typically left as an unexamined residual category.

A highly related, and growing, strand of culture inspired work argues that there is

also a social, intersubjective component to how reform messages are filtered through

teachers’ mental frameworks (e.g., Coburn 2001). In this perspective interactions ‘bring

about’ certain contents or frameworks within individual minds, which in turn can bring

about corresponding (inter)actions. This work adds an interactional gloss to the cultural-

mentalism perspective described above by adding that policy messages are not only

refracted by the minds of individuals, but also by the social processes of negotiation and

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discourse, especially the types of communication that foster reflexivity and reflection.

Failure to change from this second perspective, then, is not only the result of undesired

individual mental frameworks, but also features of the organizational environment that

prevented the level of reflection necessary to change them. These organizational barriers

include lack of time or resources, lack of social support, or conflicting and burdensome

time demands (Horn and Little 2010).

The dependent variable of interest is this both strands of the culture inspired work is

a policy or reform messages as it travels through the minds of local actors regardless of

whether the specific focus is individual frameworks or shared discourses. The question of

interest becomes how the message is altered and refracted in this process. From this

vantage point, failures of implementation are articulated as failures in understanding.

Following the Practice Turn

What this focus on individual cognition amounts to, I argue, is a serious mis-specification

of the problem of school reform by equating changing organizations with changing the

minds of the actors within them. Accounts of teaching that place primary emphasis on

intention, purposefulness, goal-orientation and causal action overlook and underplay the

influence of habits and dispositions (Camic 1986). This is where following the ‘practice

turn’ in social theory can be highly fruitful for studies of school reform (Knorr-Cetina,

Schatzki and von Savigny 2001). As I will describe in greater detail in coming chapters,

the thrust of the practice perspective is to locate organizational culture, and thus the

central unit of change, not in minds (nor in texts or discourses) but instead in the social

practices that weave together the lives of organizational actors (Reckwitz 2002). From a

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practice perspective, then, the central mechanism of organizational change is altering the

ways in which actors co-exist through shared practices.

The central idea of practice perspectives is that action is best conceptualized (a la

pragmatists) as largely practical or non-strategic conduct driven by ‘active dispositions’

that have formed through past experience (Emirbayer & Johnson 2008: 19). One of the

most important implications of taking this view is in seeing consistency in social action

as being the results of dispositions and habits rather than the deliberate intent of actors or

their individually possessed mental structures. While this framework has been very useful

for explaining social reproduction, its difficulty in fully accounting for the context of

practices and the interaction within them has made it a far weaker perspective for

theorizing change (Schatzki 2005).

To rectify this situation, there are two interrelated problems that need to be

addressed. The first is that practice theory needs to pay more attention to trans-situational

meanings and logics (Lounsbury and Crumley 2007). In focusing on the immanent

demands of pragmatic coping, most practice theories have neglected the larger

institutional and historical forces that shape social situations and therefore the logic of

action that occurs within them. Without this perspective, practice theory has missed out

on two major mechanisms for change: the presence of multiple, competing practical

logics within the same organization and the connection of change in practical logic to

change at the institutional level. Here I will argue for the fruitfulness of a conversation

between practice and institutional theories.

Second, most practice theory sees practices as stable and regular, and in doing so

glosses the dynamic adjustments actors must make in ongoing action (Thevenot 2001). It

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is not a coincidence that the difficulty of explaining change is also a common critique of

institutionalism. This is because both theories tend to a similar view of individuals as the

carriers of unitary practices, drawing on Weber’s notion of the Trager, or carrier (1930).

The theories differ in so far as institutional theory sees actors as carrying practices

through taken-for-granted schemas (Scott 1995) while practice theories see the

mechanism as embodied dispositions. In both cases, however, the process through which

practices are manifest in concrete reality pays little attention to the role of co-ordination

and mutual orientation by actors (Barnes 2001). In standard institutional and practice

accounts, actors are able to jointly carry out practices only because each has carried into

the situation the same appropriate mental script or disposition.

Toward the Conceptualization of Organizational Ways of Being

What is needed, then, is a framework that addresses each of these issues by developing a

practical theory that is sensitive to the socio-historical and institutional systems that shape

pragmatic action, as well as its interactive, adaptive and mutually orienting nature. To

that end I introduce the idea of organizational ways of being. The motivating reason for

this concept is that coordination with others presupposes agents make use of models of

activity that call for engaging in different ways with the situation and with other actors

(Thevenot 2001). The intuition is that within groups and organizations there are

frequently shared understandings expressed in the manner in which people jointly carry

out projects or tasks. This manner is only instantiated within the shared practices it

animates, but is nonetheless analytically distinct from them.

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The idea that there are particular manners through which the same practices can be

enacted can found in wide range of literature, though it is not described in the way I do

here. In her work on congregations, for example, Becker found that churches from the

same denomination had different ethos depending on whether they interacted with a

family or community style of organizing (1999). Similarly, Zilber documented how

therapists and feminists in the same organization enacted the same practice very

differently depending on their sense of the practical problems they were trying to solve

with it (2002). And Blau’s study of social workers found that there was only a loose

connection between reported personal ideology and actual behavior as shaped by the

group styles of professional colleagues (1960).

This dimension of social action has also shown up in the practice literature under

different guises, including institutional habitus (Bourdieu 2000), ‘spirit’ and ‘style’

(Schatzki 2002) and ‘regime of engagement’ (Thevenot 2009). Perhaps most important

theoretically is Heidegger’s distinction (1962) between the world being organized

through, on the one hand, an array of uses, activities, purposes, and identities

(Verweisungsganze), and the way that the self is situated in that world in terms of the

attitudes it takes toward action and others (Befindlichkeit). Part of what all these

conceptions share is the view that there is an underlying ethical and normative way in

which actors attune themselves to their practices. But even more importantly, they all

alert us to the fact that joint action is feasible not (only) because actors share particular

beliefs or dispositions but also mutually adjusted ways of engaging with the world (Diehl

and McFarland 2010).

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The multiplicity of ways of being in schools is an ongoing challenge for teachers.

This is because the practice of teaching inherently entails shifting across different modes

of coordination, ways of orchestrating and coordinating interaction with students. These

tensions include: making school feel safe and familiar for students while at the same time

maintaining authority and distance; being responsive to the personal needs and problems

of students while enforcing universal standards and regulations; and specifically in

professional teaching communities, supporting and helping other teachers emotionally

while at the same time pushing, critiquing, and challenging their practices. One of the

most difficult aspects of teaching is in what Thevenot calls ‘the art of composition’

(2008), the integration of different ways of being in ongoing organizational life.

The motivating idea of this manuscript is that these types of dilemmas and

compositions reflect tensions between different ways of being, and rather than being

idiosyncratic such modes can be systematically linked to larger cultural logics. The

challenge of research on school reform, then, is to identify the major ways of being that

actors must deal with and how they deal with tensions between them. Doing so, I will

show, helps us better understand small school reform (or any attempt at organizational re-

enchantment) by reframing it not as attempt to change teacher beliefs but rather to adopt

a new organizational way of being, to change, in Bourdieu’s language, their ‘sense of the

game’ of schooling (1977). This new way of being is one that engenders constant

innovation by re-orienting actors toward each other and toward their organizational

situation.

The general idea is that ways of being are very difficult to change and so rather

than reshaping the ends of practical action, reforms result in reshaping practices in terms

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of teachers’ existing practical intelligence (Swidler 1986). That is, what has generally

been described as teacher conservatism in other literature is reframed here in terms of

teachers’ ongoing dynamic adjustments to changing practices and structures in terms of

what is practical and ‘sensible’ in light of their dominant ways of being.

Organization of the Manuscript

To study these issues, I draw on a case study of a large urban high-school, Mill Town

High, during its first year of conversion to semi-autonomous small schools. At the core of

the dissertation is an attempt to understand the interrelation of different organizational

ways of being and the new practices and structures of the reform. It is in this interrelation,

I argue, that most clearly see the barriers to organizational ‘re-enchantment’ even as

teachers and administrators actively sought it. The first chapter provides a historical

argument about re-enchantment as a modern organizational phenomenon and why this

particular vision for school has shown up in the current social-historical context. The

second chapter provides a description of the data collection and analytical methods used

in the study. The third chapter offers an extensive narrative history of the reform at Mill

Town High as well as a description of the data collection and analysis strategies. Chapter

4 lays out a theoretical and analytical framework for the empirical study of the

interrelation of ways of being.

Chapters 5 through 7 use this framework for an empirical examination of perhaps

the major mechanisms for change in small school theory: the creation of teacher

professional communities. In Chapter 5 I examine the major new practices adopted at

Mill Town in relation to creating teacher professional community as well as how they

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interrelated with different ways of being. In Chapter Six I examine how teachers dealt

with tensions between these different styles of organizing and the different ways the

design of the reform, and teachers themselves attempt to reconcile these tensions by

composing together aspects of different ways of being. In Chapter 7 I present longitudinal

network data to show how the different practices of teacher professional community did

(and frequently did not) evolve along with changes in classroom practices. In the

conclusion I will return to theme of changing modes rather than minds and argue for the

importance of this reframing in understanding barriers to school change.

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Chapter 1: Theorizing Re-Enchantment

…high schools need to become places that combine rigor in the academic program for every student…with relevance to their real lives and potential career opportunities, supported by positive relationships that can inspire students both academically and personally ~Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (emphasis added)1

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the “disenchantment of the world” ~Max Weber2

Dr. Spade, the principal of Mill Town High, decided something had to change. Arriving

in 2000 he inherited an underperforming school in a town undergoing rapid economic

and demographic changes. Half a century earlier Mill Town had been a thriving blue-

collar city composed of the descendents of Italian and Irish immigrants. Manufacturing

jobs were abundant and college was seen as a luxury few students needed to indulge in.

The past few decades, however, had brought difficulties as the town’s industrial base was

rapidly diminishing. The metropolitan area surrounding Mill Town was becoming home

to one of the country’s centers of biotechnology and there was a growing feeling that the

school was not preparing student to compete with it wealthier suburban neighbors for

these new high-skill jobs. At the same time the city was attracting a booming Latino

community. For many parochial residents this created a sense of anxiety. Even for the

long-time Mill Towners, including most teachers at the high school, who welcomed their

new community members there was a great deal of uncertainty about how or whether

they would assimilate into the culture of the tight-knit city.

Beginning only with a diffuse sense that Mill Town High (MHS) needed to

reform in order to keep up with the changing world around it, Dr. Spade set the school on

1 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation 2005 2 Weber 1958: 133

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a long-term course for major restructuring. It took five years, until the fall of 2005, before

MHS re-opened as four semi-autonomous small schools instead of a single large

comprehensive one. There were many reform approaches that MHS could have taken

instead, and indeed much of those intervening years were spent by the staff exploring

different models, debating their relative merits and, eventually, voting for one to

implement. The adoption of small schools reform was more than just a pragmatic and

rational decision, however, and with it MHS took on far more than just a particular set of

curriculum, pedagogy and school structures. With its choice MHS also located its efforts

within a morally laden narrative about the need for schools to reform in order to confront

the social, moral and epistemic fragmentation brought by the conditions of the modern

world.

And so like all reforms small schools is grounded in a particular normative

construction of the problems of contemporary schools and the necessary solutions to

solve them. It was only over the course of implementation, however, that the vague sense

that Mill Town High was under-serving and ill preparing its students congealed around

the particular narrative proposed by small schools reform. The general thrust of the story

is that the American education system is failing to prepare its students for a changing

world that is marked by the rise of the knowledge economy and the spread of

globalization. The source of this failure is the bureaucratic nature of the contemporary

high school that stifles meaning and relevance for student and teacher alike. Creating

effective schools that can foster the kind of imagination, communication, and teamwork

skills necessary to confront an ever-changing environment requires a dual approach:

combating intellectual alienation by marrying rationality with creativity and imagination

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on the one hand and fighting relational alienation by augmenting instrumental

relationships with affective and meaningful ones on the other. Five years from when Dr.

Spade took over, when this dissertation begins, it was accepted wisdom by the staff of

MHS that the issues faced by the school were an obsolete structure, an irrelevant

curriculum, and impersonal relationships and that solutions to those problems could be

found in the form of collaboration, relevance and personalization. Even if the reform

effort succeeded at nothing else it provided MHS staff with a very sticky and highly

resonant story.

What is especially striking about this narrative, though, is how easily it can be

seen in relation to the concerns laid out by Max Weber in his thesis about the

‘disenchantment ‘ of modern life (1958). In short, and in contrast to the conditions of

today, Weber thought life in pre-modern times was ‘enchanted’ by both a sense of

mystery and magic in the workings of the universe and through the coherence and unity

of meaning provided by religious and traditional orders. According to Weber the

secularization and rationalization processes that define modernity are unstoppable

juggernauts that will eventually force all emotional, aesthetic and imaginative experience

out of the public realm and into the personal sphere where meaning and value would

become fully privatized. The result would be a disenchanted modern world characterized

by effective bureaucracies run by professional technocrats on the one hand and the

danger (though not guarantee) of anomie, social fragmentation and alienation on the

other. For Weber this amounted to a Faustian bargain. The modern actor comes to

possess a historically unparallel degree of freedom but does so at the cost of losing shared

meaning and unified purpose.

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This is, anyway, the story of disenchantment that has long dominated Western

social science and become one of its most important tropes.3 While continuing to take

seriously many of its central premises (e.g., the significant social impact of the loss of

traditional meaning and the effects of the spread of instrumental rationality) scholars in

recent years have begun to question the overall trajectory of the narrative. There is

undoubtedly truth to Weber’s concerns about modernity, but bureaucracy and

rationalization were resisted and defied from the very beginning and Romanticism has

held firm as a powerful countervailing force. Modern actors have acclimated and adjusted

and continually seek out new ways to enchant provisional and contingent meanings.

Symbols, myths, and rituals remain central parts of public life in the realms of both

politics and organizations.

Schools have been, and continue to be, on the frontline of resistance to

disenchantment. While they have been subject to the same bureaucratizing and

rationalizing processes as other organizations, schools exist at the intersection of several

divergent cultural discourses. Schools are deeply implicated in our conceptualization of

civil society and are seen as central institutions for maintaining vital democratic life. By

virtue of the interests of students they are also important cites for the cultural forces of

self-expression and self-construction that have permeated modern organizational life

(Bell 1977). The tensions play out across many types of organizations but they are

3 Saler calls the version of disenchantment in which the power of instrumental reason slowly subordinates and eventually eliminates the irrationality of magic and art the ‘binary’ narrative (2006). During most of the 20th century its main competition was the neo-Marxist ‘dialectic’ perspective. In the dialectic narrative modernity remains enchanted, but these enchantments are emotional manipulations and manufactured illusions that amount to little more than new and updated methods for the control of the masses by elites. I’ll have a little more to say about this later.

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perhaps nowhere more pronounced than in education because schools exist as an uneasy

confluence of our cultural beliefs about community, economy and individuality.

The philosophy of small schools can best be understood as a unique response to

the above concerns about the conditions of modernity and disenchantment. Through this

frame we can see the solutions offered by small school reform as an effort to ‘re-enchant’

the school with imagination and creativity by re-infusing it with personal relevance and

meaning as well as authentic and affective relationships. For this reason my

understanding of what happened at MHS, how the small school reform played out there,

requires placing it in its larger historical context. Ultimately we are able to tell narratives

about large-scale and long-term social transformations because millions of people in

thousands of organizations did things in concrete situations. They engaged in practices

that maintained and transformed larger institutional forces even if they rarely knew this is

what they were doing.

Historical accounts of changes in schooling are often told in terms of political

struggles. Less frequent is work that highlights the role of culture: how change occurs

through ongoing attempts by teachers and students to make schools meaningful and to

invest them “with sentiment and significance (Alexander et al 1993: 10).” The

transformation of collective emotions and ideas is more than incidental to small schools

reform, however. Changing the subjective experience of schools is a central goal and

needs to be studied on its own terms. And so while teachers at Mill Town High struggled

to translate the broad ideals of small schools reform into practice they were unwittingly

implicated in long-standing debates about not only what organizations and school should

be like and how they should operate, but about the very meaning and purpose of work

17

and life itself. For this reason the local struggles of MHS need to be situated in the larger

story of the malaise of modernity (Taylor 1989) and the re-enchantment of bureaucracy

as its organizational antidote.

Banishing Bureaucracy: Changing Nature of Sacred and Profane in School Reform

Dr. Spade and his staff could have adopted a different reform model and come to

radically different conclusions about the problems faced by Mill Town High students but

undoubtedly any alternative would have also implicated school bureaucracy as the

culprit. Different solutions to the modern crisis of schooling are offered by a diverse

range of political and educational ideologies but the common thread that runs throughout

almost all of them is that failure can be linked directly to the slow, inflexible and

misaligned bureaucratic nature of contemporary schools (cf: Chubb & Moe 1990;

Darling-Hammond 1997). The collapse of bureaucracy has been eagerly anticipated for

decades across the ideological spectrum buttressed by a belief that the dynamics of

history would soon unleash a torrent of interrelated cultural, social and technological

changes that would render it an obsolete form (Reed 2005).

In organizational theory discussions about changes in institutional forms often

occurs in terms of new and changing organizational logics. Organizational logics are

defined, somewhat broadly, as material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs and rules

that people use to organize and provide meaning (Friedland & Alford 1991; Thornton &

Ocasio 1999). More specifically, changes in the bureaucratic nature of contemporary

organizations are frequently posited as resulting from the introduction of managerial

logics into a field previously characterized by professional ones (cf: Scott et al 2000;

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Thornton 2002). Organizational change occurs because a new logic provides different

categories of identities and practices that are adopted or adapted by organizational actors

when old identities and practices no longer achieve the desired results.

In providing categories organizational logics do more, however, than supply a

stock of symbolic and material resources from which actors can strategically draw.

Categorization is also a profoundly moral process that establishes normative boundaries

around ideas and practices. Here we can see important connections to Durkheim’s view

of social reality as having a moral core, as held together by feelings of right and wrong,

the sacred and the profane ([1912] 1995). Organizational logics also contain binary codes

of good and evil that make them more than rational means for organizing. Unlike Weber,

Durkheim was not concerned that the meaningful and sacred would be lost from social

life but posited instead that they would be subject to constant cultural transformations

over time. Alexander has taken this idea and discussed in terms of how political discourse

even the modern secular world can be read in terms of its binary rendering of the sacred

and profane in democratic life (2003). Utilizing this insight we can reconstruct modern

discourse about bureaucracy in schools in terms of larger cultural tussles over the sacred

and profane in public life. The idealized image argued for in reforms is always of the

‘good’ school over the ‘evil’ forces that would serve to profane or pollute it.

What is remarkable is that while different reform efforts over the past 50 years

have offered very different normative visions of the ‘good school’ they hope to create,

the polluting ‘other’ to be banished is almost always the same – bureaucracy. It is the

polysemous nature of the concept of bureaucracy that allows it to serve as the profane foil

to such a variegated collection of adversaries. Across ideologically diverse reform efforts

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bureaucracy has come to be synonymous with entrenched self-interest, be it of

politicians, unions or corporations. In the normative narrative of modern reform

bureaucracy it is cast as an inertial structure that suffocates some creative sacred ‘force’

that, if unleashed, would fix schools and lead to increased learning and satisfaction. What

that force is varies across reforms. Sometimes it is local democracy, other times the

market, but in either case it is bureaucracy that stands in its way.

Conventional wisdom in educational history lays the blame for the

bureaucratization of schools squarely at the feet of the administrative progressives (Tyack

& Cuban 1995). In a context of mass immigration and the proliferation of public

schooling, progressive reforms of the early 20th century sought to centralize a previously

decentralized educational system. The administrative progressives were roughly

contemporaries with Weber and so it should not be surprising that their story fits nicely

into the standard disenchantment narrative. The logic of the administrative progressives

was deeply modern as they “sought to reorganize schooling systematically on principles

of business efficiency and educational science (Tyack 1991: 11).” The story of the

administrative progressives is one of rationalization and disenchantment par excellence as

they sought to build a ‘one best system’ that was to be heavily bureaucratized,

professionally administered and state-supported (Tyack 1974).

But even these rational and technical claims of the administrative progressives

were infused with non-instrumental meaning that implied notions of the sacred and

profane. The bureaucratization of schools and its control by a professional cadre of

technocratic elites was both an elevation of scientific reasoning as a sacred good as well

as an attempt to banish the polluting forces of self-serving ideologies from education. The

20

bureaucratic nature of the school was partly a blockade to keep out the parochial and

profane interests of politicians, corporations and even families.

What Weber could not have anticipated, however, were the unforeseeable cultural

transformations that would eventually threaten to undermine his predictions about the

trajectory of modernization. His view of the process of disenchantment is predicated on a

rigid differentiation between realms of life (e.g., corporation, family, politics) each with

its own organizing logic. Disenchantment occurs because meaning and sentiment come to

be located solely in the private sphere of the home and family and completely abolished

from a public realm defined by instrumental rationality. The past half-century has seen,

however, a distinct and unanticipated blurring of the boundaries between life spheres.

First has been the increasingly porous line between work and private life that has more

and more made the workplace a site where people expect affective and aesthetic

experiences. Second, the rise of neo-liberalism since the 1980s has blurred many of the

traditional antipathies between the logics of the market and civil society. Both of these

trends have had tremendous impact on the status of the professions in generally and

teaching more specifically.

The Changing Meaning of the Meaning of Work

An important place to start with the blurring of private and public life is with the cultural

revolution of the late 1960s. This period marked a major turning point in modern Western

culture with the rise of a new form of neo-Romanticism that sought shared meaning not

through a return to an organic unity of the past but instead through celebration of

diversity, variation and fragmentation as sources of personal freedom and liberation

21

(Jenkins 2000). This shift manifested itself in numerous ways including the development

of a leisure culture, the expansion of play and illusion, and, importantly, the decoupling

of work with personal identity and fulfillment that defined Weber’s Protestant ethic

(Bohme 2003: 78). Members of affluent societies increasingly embraced instead a ‘post-

materialist’ ethic of self-expression and self-realization (Roberts 2003).

These social transformations had two profound impacts on the bureaucratic nature

of American organizations. First, they directly gave rise to an explosion in the culture

industries including entertainment, design, advertising, and leisure. More than just

meeting new need the emerging culture industries arose that focused on satisfying (and

creating) desires and intensifying and heightening the experience of life (Ritzer 1999). At

the same time there was a growing sense that bureaucracies were simply not designed for

this new type of production. First, they were too static and rigid to support the creative

and imaginative thinking necessary for an economy increasingly based on service and

cultural industries. As predications grew of a coming post-industrial knowledge economy

rooted in the manipulation of theoretical knowledge (Bell 1973) so too did calls to create

post-Fordist and post-bureaucratic organizational forms (Hecksher 1994).

Even more important, though, was the sense that workers themselves had

changed. Rather than being driven by Weber’s Protestant ethic of piety and saving the

average worker had been “re-imagined as [someone] in search of meaning, responsibility,

a sense of personal achievement and a maximized quality of life’ (Rose 1989: 103).”

With this new orientation toward work, traditional forms of employee control and

compliance seemed inadequate and new managerial dilemmas emerged (Hyman 1987).

In the face of the eroding foundation of traditional authority organizations increasingly

22

tried to foster commitment and trust by finding room for employees to express and create

their personal identities at work through variation, exciting risks and new experiences and

sensations (Bauman 1998: 33).

This new cultural emphasis on autonomy and identity played out in the school

beginning it the 1960s as the intellectual Left began to criticize the bureaucratic nature of

schools as a tool of elite-control and a barrier to autonomy and self-determination. The

top-down centralized structure of schools came to be some as a means for maintaining

prevailing and privileging hierarchies of class and race. The response was pressure for lay

participation in educational governance and a growing skepticism about rationally

planned social change by technical-professional elites protected from politics and the

public.

The emerging cultural sense that organizations should respect and cultivate

personal and group identity also had a major impact on school reform. Reflecting the

neo-Romantic embracement of diversity and variation, this period saw a kaleidoscope of

otherwise disconnected school reform efforts aimed at increasing the voice of previously

excluded social groups like women, ethnic and racial minorities, non-English speakers

and the handicapped (Krist & Meister 1985). Together these trends meant that local

control and choice would come to dominate the reform agenda as the next decade

witnessed a proliferation of magnet schools, free schools, open classrooms, flexible

scheduling and other structural changes aimed at personalizing education (Labaree 1997).

The goal of many of these reforms was to, in various ways, restructure the current

educational system in order to free up the creativity of teachers, students and

communities in order to better utilize local democratic knowledge. Importantly, the

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particular nature of the Left’s anti-bureaucratic position accepted and rejected different

aspects of the philosophy of the administrative progressives. Shared was a belief in the

central role of the school in fostering a sacred democratic civil society and of the

polluting role of the self-interest of politicians and corporations. What was different

however was that the left sacralized the previously profane interests of the family and the

community and placed them at the center of the effective school, a position once held by

the now banished technical elites. Professionals and teachers could still find themselves

inside the sacred community, but only to the degree that their interests aligned with and

supported those of families.

Today We Are All Neo-Liberals

Already under scrutiny because of the Left’s growing emphasis on local control, cultural

faith in bureaucracy took a devastating hit in the 1970s. The failure of Keynesian

economics to fight stagflation and underemployment left many previous believers in

doubt about the ability of the state to manage public affairs (Eisenschitz & Gough 1996).

The long held belief that efficiency and professional expertise were coupled was

undermined (Leicht et al 2009). The result was the emergence of the still ascendant

supply-side market ideology that has since (slowly) led both the private and public

sectors away from traditional bureaucratic forms (Clarke 2004). Despite the rhetoric of

privatization and flattening hierarchies what has actually emerged from the 1980s onward

in the public sphere has been a neo-liberal inspired bureaucratic-market hybrid that

attempts to incorporate market incentives and accountability into the professions (Morris

& Farrell 2007).

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The impact that calls for greater accountability and efficiency have had on the

professions is one of the most important implications the rise of neo-liberalism has had

for contemporary bureaucracy (cf: Scott et al 2000). The traditional professions such as

doctors, lawyers, engineers and, arguably, teachers had always faced a tension between

the norms of professional practice (e.g., ethics of client relationships, autonomy,

collegiality) and the demands of their technical environment (e.g., market efficiency,

technical change) but their autonomy to resist market logics has greatly diminished over

time (Malhotra et al 2006). Within public sector organizations this has meant that

professional groups are now subject not only to more administrative oversight but also to

increasingly marketized incentives.4 The goal of bureaucratic restructuring under neo-

liberalism is to link the professional and political interests of employees with the long-

term performance of the organization.

Over the last 30 years these pressures have caused enormous turmoil in education

(Davis & Guppy 1997). Policy-makers and school reformers have increasingly turned to

the strategies and principles of the business world not only for solutions but for new

definitions of the educational problems as well. The result has been a recasting of the

failure of contemporary schooling in terms of a lack of accountability and efficiency and

remedy as a combination of market-based auditing and management systems to increase

performance and productivity (Leicht et al 2009).

The general strategy of neo-liberal inspired school reforms is system

centralization in the form of state and national standards as well as testing systems for

4 In Europe, where the professions were always more embedded in the state than in America, this phenomenon in the public sector typically goes by the name New Public Management, or NPM. NPM is part of a broader strategy of subjecting the state welfare apparatus to market forces through the creation of customer-focused and performance-driven cultures that are responsive to market incentives (Morris & Farrell 2007).

25

auditing and inspection. Simultaneously, there is a decentralization of decision-making

and authority to school sites where pedagogical and curricular innovation occurs led by

administrators armed with managerial logics. While some argue that the decentralizing

aspects of neo-liberal reforms amounts to little more than populist rhetoric (Morris &

Ferrell 2007) the importance partly lies in the idea that in order for reform to be

successful community members, parents and teachers must ‘buy-in’ at the local level,

taking co-ownership of the implementation agenda largely set out elsewhere. The effects

of these neo-liberal shifts can be seen not only in the increased federal role of accounting

set out in the No Child Left Behind act, but also in the new generation of reformers like

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, former Washington D.C. superintendent Michelle

Rhee, and KIPP school founders Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin.

Echoing the social justice aims of earlier progressive reformers, this cohort is

committed to the success of the public school system but sees the road to improvement

running through marketized mechanisms like merit pay for teachers, vouchers and school

choice, and the increased use of accounting measures and performance standards. This

new crop of neo-liberal reformers can easily be seen as the modern day inheritors of the

legacy left by early 20th century administrative progressives. Sharing with their

predecessors not only a belief in the power of technical expertise and elite control, these

young reformers are also deeply suspicious of the ‘profane’ political self-interest of

policy makers, teachers unions and community leaders. This cadre of reformers

ideologically spans Left and Right and generally adopts a pragmatic a-political stance.

They part ways with the administrative progressives, however, in rejecting their

bureaucratizing tendencies. For the administrative progressives the bureaucracy of the

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school protected the sacred nature of disinterested scientific knowledge from polluting

outsiders; for neo-liberals the same bureaucratic structure accomplished the opposite end,

offering shelter for profane self-interest and in the process stifling the creative potential

of the market to align good intentions with desired outcomes. As one administrator of the

World Bank put it, in neo-liberalism "[t]he new gods are the free market and private

enterprise, the new devils are the governments and the planning agencies (cited in

Wouters 1986: 9)."

And so while nurturing democratic civil society is still the sacred goal for the neo-

liberal reformers, the market is no longer the enemy in this endeavor but instead becomes

a vital partner. Theirs is a vision of thriving public sphere that is quite different, however,

when compared to the more communitarian ethos of 1960’s progressivism. Reflecting its

underlying market logic, neo-liberal reform ideology places the needs, interests and

choices of the individual at the center of social justice and progress. This shift is evident

even in the standard neo-liberal narrative of school reform that argues that the most

important (and sometimes only) ingredient for student success is a good teacher, often

one outside of the profession (cf: Kopp 2001). To this end the sacred value of the

educator is no longer determined by the standards of the community or even norms of the

teaching profession. Rather, within this individualized version of the civil society the

value of both the teacher as social change agent and students as successful ‘products’ of

the school are measured by the valuation of the market, frequently as determined by

standardized test scores.

While these two historical trends appear to work in countervailing directions they

share important commonalities. Most significantly both elevate the role of individual

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experience and interests over social unity or functional totality (though they differ in

whether this individual freedom is profaned by capitalism or group and social identities).

This elevation of the individual is rooted in the modern and increasingly universalized

view of the ‘person’ as an autonomous and rational subject possessing an array of rights,

capacities, preferences, interests and tastes (Frank & Meyer 2002). And in both views

detraditionalization has spurned a turn inward such that life choices are increasingly

understood as being the result of personal psychology and self-reflexivity. The

similarities mean that these two seemingly disparate intellectual trends converge on a

rather similar view of civil society as a public and political arena in which in which free

and fragmented individuals and groups work out their differences democratically. This is

also reflected in the image each holds for the place of school in society. Whether a site

for self-actualization or the development of personal capital, schools are meant to serve

the needs and interests of the individual.

The Sacred and the Mundane: Neo-Romantic Reform

The two trends described above have caused deep tension in the discourse of schools. On

the one hand there exists a sense that in order to prepare students for jobs in a changing

economy dominated by knowledge and service industries, that school needs to become a

place that both incorporates and teaches creativity, teamwork and communication

(Sheldon & Biddle 1998). On the other hand is the continued growth of neo-liberalism

and accompanying push for greater efficiency in schools through standards, performance

measures and accounting. Small schools reform is a representative of one of the most

prominent responses to this dilemma. I call reforms like small schools neo-Romantic

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because in one sense they represent a continuation of the neo-liberal push for post-

bureaucratic and incentivized organizations but they also attempt to re-motivate these

efforts with a healthy dose of Romantic meaning, purpose and sociality.

These reforms are ‘neo’ rather than just being Romantic because they take their

inspiration not from backward glances to a mythical pre-rational and communitarian past

but rather look forward to a utopian future of technological advance and aesthetic

innovation (Roberts 2003). The crux of the argument is to see that the aims of neo-

romantic reforms like small schools are not just in the improvement in the instrumental

aspects of education. Instead, like many thoroughly going contemporary social

movements, small school reform aims to change the very fabric and texture of human

relationships themselves with the goal of providing the individual with greater access to

the means of self-actualization (Giddens 1990). What this amounts to in the terms of

organizational change is a rather explicit attempt to combat intellectual and relational

alienation through by ‘re-enchanting’ the school.

By ‘re-enchanting’ I mean here attempts to remake the school into a context for

the development of the individual’s sense of wonder, meaning and purpose (Casey 2004).

This enchantment does not depend, however, on the supernaturalism of the pre-modern

world. Nor does it eschew the hallmarks of modernity like secularism, rationalism,

consumerism or even bureaucracy (Saler 2003). Instead enchantment is seen as the

cultivation of creativity through the marriage of reason and imagination and as the

development of meaningful relationships by infusing instrumental exchanges with affect

and aesthetics. The metaphorical exemplar for this vision of the school is not the

community, factory or the office, but instead the research lab (Knorr-Cetina 1999).

29

Experience and meaning in the laboratory can be purposeful and coherent but always in

provisional and variable manner that must be collectively worked at as new problems and

issues arise.

If re-enchantment is understood in neo-romantic reform as engendering creative

and meaningful experience then the polluting element that needs to be banished for the

school to thrive is the mundane – the monotonous humdrum of routinized everyday

bureaucratic life. By introducing meaning, relevance and emotionally authentic

interaction into the school mundane time is replaced by a new sacred time defined by a

combination of individual self-realization and collective effervescence (Durkheim [1912]

1995). Together these two not only engender greater satisfaction, they also serve as

sources for new ideas and social change, which in turns leads to greater efficiency and

standardizable outcomes. In more concrete terms this attempt to sacralize and re-enchant

the everyday life of the school operates on several levels.

First, and most importantly, the narrative of small schools is itself a re-

enchantment as it radically recasts the standard Weberian epistemic and ontological view

of the unfolding of history. In the small schools narrative, and in contrast to

modernization theory, the world is too complex and fluid to ever be fully captured and

conquered by instrumental reason. Means-ends reasoning alone is not sufficient for

navigating a changing and contingent environment and so creativity and imagination are

required as well. Collaboration and teamwork are necessary in order to harness the

wisdom of the collective. In the vocabulary of small schools, in order to thrive students

must ‘learn how to learn’, a task necessary only in a world were knowledge is always

provisional and unfinished.

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Beyond this overarching narrative there are practical ways the reform attempts to

transform the experience of daily life in the school. Weber thought that, rather than being

eradicated, ultimate and sublime values “retreated from public life either into the

transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human

relations’ (Weber 1958: 133).” The enchantments of neo-romantic reform can be

understood as attempts to lower the walls of the school and to re-invite these two sources

of meaning back inside. They are not allowed in, however, directly or untransformed.

Instead they reappear through acts of bricolage that do not jettison the rationality of

modernity but rather combine it with aesthetics and sociability, thereby adding

autonomous meaning to activities beyond their instrumental utility.

The first kind of re-enchantment entails practices and structures that bring

personal meaning and values back into the bureaucratic institution. While the search for

transcendence that Weber describes certainly still goes on, its most common

manifestations have been radically altered. The spread of science has meant that people

are less likely to believe in external forces that mysteriously act on them from the outside.

Instead, modernity has witnesses a dramatic turn inward through a dual process “in which

the disenchantment of the external world required as a parallel process some

'enchantment' of the psychic inner world (Campbell 1989: 73).” This brought about a

growing belief that primary emotions and impulses were not just negative forces to be

controlled, but rather potential founts of creativity and insight to be cultivated and

understood (Wouters 1986). By connecting this ‘obligatory’ personal project of self-

knowing and self-fashioning (Taylor 1989) to prosaic and routinized activities, the school

becomes enchanted.

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The second kind of re-enchantment involves bringing the kinds of relationships

Weber described as ‘direct and personal’ back into organizational life. Aside from their

own intrinsic value, these relationships are the foci of the personal cultivation of meaning

and self-fashioning described above and it is within social networks that self-identity is

ratified and confirmed (Allan 2001). The construction of a meaningful and multifaceted

self requires, then, meaningful and multifaceted types of interactions and relationships.

Again, this does not mean replacing relations of exchange with non-instrumental ones but

instead marrying them with affect, imagination and aesthetics. The desired result for the

school is something similar to what Goffman called a ‘transformation’ (1974: 83) which

is when the form of interaction remains grounded in a familiar institutional script but its

feel or character is changed into something more playful, light-hearted and less serious.

Interestingly, there was a related belief about the enchanting power of relational

collaboration itself. This went beyond a simple argument for the instrumental superiority

of teamwork and instead posited that somehow “the collective sum of sociability and

belonging is elusively greater than its individual parts (Jenkins 2000: 29).” Importantly,

the efficaciousness of teamwork depends in this understanding on it being emotionally

meaningful and aesthetically satisfying. Only when those conditions are fulfilled will the

mysterious ‘forces’ of collaboration be unleashed. And, as I will discuss in more detail

later, teachers were endlessly frustrated by this vague proposition that collaboration

buttressed by affective connections and trust would, through some sort of alchemy, lead

to increased student outcomes.

Neo-romantic reforms can be seen, then, partly as attempts to catalyze the larger

ongoing cultural process of blurring the boundaries between spheres of life. They do so

32

with the ultimate aim of creating organizations that simultaneously balance a language of

rationality with one of emotion, a discourse of consensus with one of construction (Rorty

1989). Important for the idea of re-enchantment is that the emotional and the aesthetic are

cultivated not only to support the rational. Rather, they have own autonomous value and

serve to intensify and heighten the experience of life rather than the instrumental

satisfaction of needs (Bohme 2003). One of the most important questions for neo-

romantic reforms like small schools is how the partly decoupled consensual and

constructional modes of interaction work with and against each other. And in fact one of

the most consistent findings in research on small schools is that they significantly

improve the emotional climate of the school but that this does not translate into academic

gains (Kahne et al 2008; Shear et al 2008).

School Reform and the Arts of Re-enchantment

“Drawing from the strength and richness of our diverse community, we will establish a personalized school culture which will foster academic growth, as well as social and civic responsibility. Our community is deeply invested in preparing all students to lead thoughtful, meaningful, and productive lives. To achieve this, the supported professional staff will guide students in becoming creative and critical thinkers who will be prepared to take on the responsibilities and challenges of making tomorrow’s decisions in this ever changing world.” ~ Vision statement from one of MHS’ small schools5

I describe the practices and strategies introduced at MHS as the arts of reenchantment

because they were purposely ambiguous and underdetermined precisely so they could be

creatively and locally applied through the imaginations of the teachers. One way this is

clearly reflected is in the language of the reform itself, specifically the ubiquity of the

5 All passages attributed to members of MHS here come from their two major grant proposals to The Gates Foundation and to the Federal Department of Education.

33

term ‘design’ in both MHS and Gates’ documents. In both locations teachers were not

asked to ‘implement’ a new curriculum but rather to ‘design’ a culture of professional

collaboration and student engagement. Moreover, instead of being armed for this difficult

task with new procedures or routines they were instead provided with a set of ‘design

principles’ to guide their work. The idea of ‘design’ implies, in contrast to the

instrumental task of implementation, that that there are also aesthetic and creative aspects

to the realization of the reform effort. Because of this, the concept of ‘design’ also

implies that what eventually comes into being will always be a particular and local

version of the reform. It is for this reason that faithfully implementing or scaling-up neo-

romantic reform has proven to be so difficult - because the logic of the reform dictates

that what constitutes faithfulness will be endogenously constructed across settings.

And so while the arts of reenchantment cannot be standardized into a formal

procedure or routine, schools can make structural changes in order to foster and support

them. The most significant, and immediate, changes at MHS were structural and were

intended to not only improve technical practices but also to indirectly support cultural

changes. MHS consists of five wings that in the past had each been dedicated to a

specific subject area. With the exception of the science wing (which could not be altered

because of its labs), each wing of the building became home to one of the four small

schools. Each of these schools had its own headmaster and support staff. Teachers were

given more control over both curricular and administrative decisions as well as being

assigned to collaborative work teams. As much as was feasible students took classes only

within their assigned small school.

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The structure of teaching time was also altered dramatically. The school’s rotating

schedule was lessened from seven total classes to six. The individual day schedule

changed as well, from a six period day to a five period one. This decrease in the total

number of classes allowed for an increase in class length from 57 to 73 minutes. The

longer class period was meant to support the opportunity for deeper learning by students.

These schedule changes also created space for a dramatic increase in the amount of in-

school professional development time described below. And while class size stayed

approximately the same, the number of students each teacher had in call during a given

semester decreased on average from 125 to 104. Seeing fewer students, decentralization,

the creation of work teams, and group decision-making were each important structural

changes that attempted to harness the power of connections and relationships but they

should not be confused with reenchantment itself.

Within these altered structures teacher design work meant collectively working

through an understanding of what exactly the process and outcome of the reform should

look like. The underdetermined nature of the arts of reenchantment meant that teachers

had to draw on their stock of existing images, descriptions, ideologies, and intermediaries

to makes sense of what was happening. Most organizational change research has focused

on the introduction of a physical or procedural technology and has followed the way it

impacts already existing patterns of relationships and cognitive structures (cf: Barley

1986). In contrast the arts of re-enchantment are more like social technologies that

attempt to alter the shared sense of interactional style and cognitive orientation

understood in terms of the local ‘rules of the game’ (Schotter 1986) or ‘how we do things

around here’ (Nelson & Winter 1982).

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The main point I want to make here is that the challenge for teachers was that it

was never clear if any particular behavior, interaction or activity was a faithful example

of the design principles put into reality. That is something the teachers had to do decide

together, often retrospectively – e.g., what does a personalized lesson look like and does

the lesson I just taught count as one? Through an ongoing conversational process like this

locally institutionalized understanding slowly emerged. This story of an ongoing and

endogenous process of institutionalization is one I will tell in more detail throughout the

rest of the dissertation. For now, though, I want to continue with the current discussion by

going into more detail about the central ‘design principles’ that were meant to guide

reform and the re-enchantment of Mill Town High.

Teacher Arts: Control and Collaboration as Re-Enchantments

“[Many]…come to teaching with an aspiration to use their hearts and their minds in the service of student learning, feel trapped in a system heavy on mindless regulation and layers of bureaucratic supervision…” ~Ayers and Klonsky 2006:462

A major part of the reform philosophy of MHS is that each small school should have, as

much as possible, autonomy to create and refine its own structures. This means that the

school creates not only it own curriculum and assessment strategies, but that it also

sculpts its own vision and mission as well as designs its own governance and decision-

making structures. These are the two ways that small school reform attempted to give

MHS teachers more control over their professional lives – providing the opportunity to

collectively cultivate a school vision and increasing the centrality of shared decision-

making within each of the small schools.

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The process of collective vision setting and collaboratively articulating school

philosophy occurred through several channels. Each small school had what was called a

‘design team’, which was a group of teachers who took on a collaborative leadership

position in helping the administration plan and implemented the conversion to small

schools. The design team effectively operated as an intermediary between the

headmasters of the small schools and their new staff. Beyond this select group, however,

all teachers were involved in a “participatory and reflective” process of collectively

writing vision statements and articulating shared professional norms for their own small

school. This process continued throughout the year as professional development

repeatedly utilized methods like ‘backward planning’ to help teachers articulate ideal

visions for classrooms and graduates and then collaboratively work on practices that

could make those visions a reality.

The second, and related, place that small school reform hands more control to

teachers is in the area of decision-making and collaborative leadership. Each small school

was charged with creating their own formal systems of decision-making as well as

providing new opportunities for teachers to take on leadership roles. There was a good

deal of variation in both how far along each school got in developing their own decision-

making process as well as the nature of those processes themselves. Throughout the

course of the year different small schools articulated decision-making procedures for

practices ranging from schedule-setting, task-delegation and even voting-methods

themselves.

There was a dual purpose in these attempts to bring teachers into the process of

articulating vision and decision-making. On the one hand was an instrumental logic that

37

assumes that participating in these types of activities will increase teachers’ job

commitment and satisfaction by providing a greater sense of ownership over their work.

Consistent with this idea MHS administrators regularly used the terms ‘buy-in’ and

‘ownership’ when discussing teacher reactions to the reform (and, not coincidentally,

teachers often used the same language when talking about their students). Along the same

lines a collaboratively designed mission is intended to align individual teacher interest

with those of the reform in a manner that benefits the institutional. Together these goals

amount to an argument for increased teacher control as a means to improving rational

decision-making.

Beyond instrumental reasons for involving teachers in these activities, however,

there existed the belief that because the tasks faced by the school cannot be reduced to a

series of means-ends statements that creativity is required for creating a shared mission

and imagination is necessary for developing adequate solutions. The visions that the

teachers collaboratively produced were given life through their attempts to creatively

imagine an ideal version of MHS - a place not just of greater efficiency or improved test

scores but also one full of curious and happy students engaged in ongoing cycles of

authentic learning. Moreover, by imagining how their decision would relate to the ideal

school they were trying to create teachers were being asked to reanimate their sense of

vocational purpose as they were constantly reminded (because these conversations were

ongoing) that teaching is more than a technical endeavor but is also an aesthetic, and

perhaps even sacred, act.

Along with increasing teacher control over school vision and decision-making,

the other major change for teachers was charging them with designing a “professional

38

collaborative culture.” This goal echoes much of the rhetoric of the new economy in

which the organizational form of choice is the community of practice or the collaborative

community (Felin et al 2009). Much of the restructuring of the school was done with the

intent of changing the nature of teacher interactions and capturing the latent collaborative

power therein. For teachers, this meant attempts to ‘formalize’ the already existing

informal work culture of the school, something perhaps embodied best in the backstage

conversations in the teachers’ lounge.

One of the central structural transformations aimed at fostering collaboration were

changes to the schedule. After these changes teachers had a period daily called Common

Planning Time (CPT) set aside for collaborative activity. The first major purpose of CPT

was to provide a space for teachers to discuss and collaborate the broad reform strategy

of ‘personalization’ for students (which will be discussed in more detail below). The

second was to foster a “positive collegial culture” among teachers that would result in

increased levels of trust and sharing. Generally five to ten teachers in a given small

school would share the same CPT period. Once a schedule cycle (i.e., every sixth school

day) the full group would meet together, often with an outside reform coach, and be led

through a formal protocol “designed to elicit deep reflection and feedback from peers on

classroom and instructional practice.” On most days in CPT, however, teachers worked

informal in pairs or small groups. They would choose from a menu of collaborative

options (e.g., share resources, discussion problems, co-develop interdisciplinary

curricula) and, in most of the schools, maintain a daily log of their activity. The goals

with both formal protocols and informal interaction were the same. The first was to

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provide teachers with a range of relevant and meaningful professional development

opportunities and the second was to, more broadly, foster a “positive collegial culture.”

From a technical standpoint, MHS adopted the idea that “best practices in

teaching and learning…are supported through reflection, collaboration and collegial

learning.” Collaboration leads to more efficient communication and because of this

information about students and about teaching can be shared more easily. Collaboration

also develops trust and commitment that help teachers undertake the technical aspects of

their jobs with more enthusiasm. Yet emotion, trust, and friendship have traditionally

been seen as antithetical to the reason and rationality of the bureaucratic order but their

invitation back in is really a reflection of a newly ‘enchanted’ understanding of the nature

of knowledge. The creativity necessary to confront the problems of today comes not just

from releasing individual imaginations but also by allowing it to combine in new and

unexpected ways. Only by collaborating imaginatively through multiple types of

thinking, according to this view, can adequate solutions be generated to deal with

incredibly complex problems of the modern school and of modern life.

Student Arts: Relevance and Relations as Re-enchantments

“America’s high schools are neither designed nor equipped to meet the needs of today’s youth…Many students have difficulty seeing the relevance of what they are taught in high school to either their present or their future lives. The impersonal environment of traditional comprehensive high schools provides fertile ground for social cliques, bullying, and disaffection. Teachers who see 150 or more students a day have trouble remembering their students’ names, let alone their individual learning needs (page 1). ~Gates Foundation 6

6 Shkolnik et al 2007: 1

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The vision of reform and re-enchantment works very different for students than for

teachers. While the relational term collaboration had been the central one for teachers it

was the more individualistic personalization that was the organizing term for students.

Certainly teachers were encouraged to utilize small groups in their classrooms and the

relationships between students themselves was important but even these followed a

slightly different logic. Among teachers collaboration unleashed creativity and

imagination; for students the same outcome was supposed to be the result of curricular

and relational personalization. As Hartley points out it is the ambiguity of the notion of

‘personalization’ that makes it popular across a wide spectrum of diverse school reform

efforts (2007). Depending on a person’s orientation they might associate the term

personalization with progressive ‘child-centered’ teaching, an argument for individual

choice in the market or as nod to the language of capitalist consumption.

In small school reform student personalization occurs through two channels –

change in curriculum and pedagogy to make it more ‘relevant’ and fostering personal and

meaningful ‘relationships’ between student and teacher. The cumulative effect is that

personalization makes for “both effective student support and for a healthy school

climate.” Along with ‘rigor’, relevance and relationships make up what The Gates

Foundation calls the new ‘Three R’s’ of schooling (Shkolnik et al 2007). Academic rigor,

which leads to better student academic outcomes, is seen as flowing directly from success

in making school relevant to student interests and a place of authentic and supportive

relationships. According to MHS’ theory of change, when these new 3 R’s are all present

in the school it becomes a place where “students are challenged to meet a common core

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of rigorous learning standards, encouraged to pursue their own interests, gifts, and

aspirations, and fully supported by adults and peers who know them well.”

The central teaching strategy for creating personalization was the rather vague

notion of ‘Differentiated Instruction,’ or DI as it was known. Generally DI was the idea

that curriculum and pedagogy should be constructed to meet the specific needs and levels

of particular students. While the exact nature of how DI would play out in any particular

classroom was left underspecified, the general idea was “to offer opportunities for

independent exploration, student-generated questions, project-based and inquiry-based

learning, deep research, student choice, student reflection, and a connection to students’

lives.” In an implicit rejection of neo-liberal preference for standardized forms of

assessment MHS aimed to use “[m]ultiple forms of assessment…to let students

demonstrate their understanding in various ways and to reflect various facets of

understanding…[especially assessments that] involve authentic performance tasks calling

for students to demonstrate their understanding and apply knowledge and skills.”

MHS laid out their sense of how this vision of differentiated instruction and

authentic assessment around skills and competencies should take place. They say that

teachers should “identify what they want students to know and be able to do–in terms of

big ideas, essential questions, intellectual skills, core competencies, and graduation

requirements–and then plan backwards to curriculum, instruction, and assessment.” This

was the reason that DI was left so open-ended, something many teachers found

frustrating. While many teachers found the vagueness inherent in DI to be frustrating, its

open-endedness was parts of its strategy. It is best understood as a design orientation

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rather than an actual pedagogy; it is a stance for teachers to take towards curriculum

creation, not a formula for it.

There were several rationales for Differentiated Instruction becoming the central

pedagogical strategy of MHS’ reform effort. First, and most simply, DI makes work more

relevant to students and this in turn engenders commitment and satisfaction with school.

The intellectual alienation of the school is meliorated with interesting and personally

relevant work. But even more than that DI is related to the significant epistemological

claims implied in the re-imagining of the world as fluid and contingent. Mill Town

declared that an important part of their (new) philosophy was that “[i]deas and essential

questions – not inert facts – are central to the work of the students, the classroom activity,

and the norms and culture of the classroom.”

Making daily life relevant to students potentially re-enchants in a different way as

well. Writing around the same time as Weber, Simmel argued that there were three ways

people could confront the tensions and contradictions inherent in modernity (1971). The

first was simply to accept the prosaic nature of daily life, but the other two amount to re-

enchanting efforts very similar to those offered students in small school reform. Simmel’s

first enchanting response was the aesthetic act of turning oneself into an ongoing work of

art. If it is in fact the case as implied earlier that students are looking for opportunities to

engage of self-fashioning and styling, then making school ‘relevant’ is equivalent to

providing resources and supports for that project. Relevance may align students with the

institutional aims of the school but only because fulfilling those aims gives students the

ability to engage in the autonomous project of self-construction. Simmel’s second

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response to modernity, which will be discussed below, concerned the nature of

interaction and called for immersion in playful and contingent forms of sociability.

Combating relational alienation by fostering meaningful and authentic interaction

between teachers and students was another major motivation reform at Mill Town. As

with creating academic ‘relevance,’ personalization was the main mechanism for creating

a climate where students feel “valued and integral to the school” and the “the learning

environment is both welcoming and relevant to students.” Many of the structural changes

of the reform where intended to foster these feelings and the division of large school into

small ones was largely predicated on the belief that reducing the number of students seen

by teachers would generate meaningful relations between them. The most significant

strategy to foster meaningful relationships between students and teachers came was the

addition of an ‘advisory’ period to the schedule.

At MHS advisory was a twenty-five minute non-academic ‘class’ that met

Monday and Friday afternoons. All students were assigned to an advisory, the goal being

“to ensure that each student is know well by at least one adult” and to offer “a range of

opportunities for more personalized, supportive and less formal interaction among

students and staff members.” Each school approached the advisory differently and there

was a large amount of variation as to how directly advisories were used to foster

academics. In some schools the advisories were organized by grade level, in other by a

shared interest. Some teachers used advisories as a time for team-building games, others

as a time for students to decompress. No matter how the advisory was structured,

however, the goal remained the same: to increase student connectedness to each other, to

school and, perhaps most importantly, to a teacher.

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From an instrumental perspective fostering relationships with adults helps commit

students to their intellectual tasks and offers them emotional support to help them

overcome academic problems. Creating space for informal interactions, like within

advisories, also aids these goals by allowing students to engage in non-instrumental

behavior that may be more fun and exciting then ‘normal’ school life. Along these lines,

School Two makes engaging in play and other ‘irregular’ forms of interaction the central

functions of advisory. They articulate the two main purposes of advisory as:

Building different kinds of relationships between students and teachers: The advisory program is designed in such a way to allow students and teachers to bring different strengths and talents to the table that they would not normally be able to bring in regular classroom environments.

Recreation: The advisory program is a structured place for teachers and students to have fun and be comfortable. The advisory program provides a place within the school day for students to “blow-off steam” so they can be more productive in their academic classes.

Beyond helping to commit students to school activities, fostering meaningful

relationships also serves the instrumental aim of letting students learn and practice the

kind of multi-dimensional relationships that will be the hallmark of the jobs they will

hold in the future.

Similar to making curriculum more personalized and relevant, creating space for

emotional, playful and aesthetic forms of interaction not only fosters a sense of

commitment to school but also allows students to engage in their personal process of self-

fashioning that may be largely de-coupled from academic undertakings. And while the

advisory period was the most explicit effort to introduce into the relationship between

teacher and student, this more informal ethos was meant to encompass all their

interactions. The goal of engaging students relationally also turns them from passive

receptacles of teacher action into interpretive and evaluative audiences (Alexander 2004).

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This serves to increase their role as legitimate co-constructors of the classroom itself. The

result is that the class becomes more than just a site for instrumental activity – it also

comes to be defined by playful and diverse social practices that make it into a

performative sphere in which adolescent style, character and norms (and thus identities)

can be displayed and evaluated. School becomes enchanted for the student as the line is

blurred between the classroom and the outside world where the self is constructed out of

variegated forms of interaction and networks.

The Dark Arts: Re-Enchantment as Social Control

There is more to these trends than just well intentioned attempts to change organizations

into more meaningful places and to re-enchant schools with creativity, imagination and

authentic relationships. Others see more sinister forces driving them and argue that there

is a dark side to the cultivation of organizational re-enchantment as well. While agreeing

with small school reformers that the world is undergoing rapid change and de-

traditionalization, these skeptics think that reforms like the ones described here amount to

little more than attempts to impose new forms of social control.

More specifically, this view argues we have come to the end of bureaucracy as an

effective control system and that re-enchantments are attempts to create internalized

compliance in places where external force or norms are no longer feasible. As traditional

sources of commitment erode, social control now requires workers to have emotional and

ideational connections to the organization. From this perspective, providing emotional

satisfaction and meaningful relationships are not just done for their own sake or even as a

means for infusing rationality with imagination but instead are a new for of institutional

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coercion. The upshot of this argument is that more flexible and fluid work arrangements

not only do not deliver on their promise to make workers more autonomous they,

ironically, serve to reinforce managerial control and colonize existing informal work

cultures.

In studies of schooling these ideas have been most fully explored in the area of

changes in the nature of school leadership (Deal & Peterson 1994; Hartley 1999). The

main thrust of this work is that lacking the ability to mobilize teachers through rational

authority effective school leaders must engender cooperation with inspiration and affect.

Here the effect administrator and teacher, like the good manager and social worker, “is

the person who can recognize and satisfy the needs of others (Fontana 1990: 41).” This

merging of rational and emotive in contemporary control systems is the reason that

MacIntrye has called the manager and therapist the main characters of modern life (1981:

3). Being a successful manager means being empathic and sympathetic to the viewpoints

of others and using this ability to coordinate the emotional responses and relationships of

subordinates. The concern is that these transformations in the nature of leadership are a

direct realization of one of Weber’s central warnings about the dangers of modernity,

namely that as rational authority undermines itself there would be a reemergence of

charismatic leaders who, through sheer force of their personality, would ‘inspire’ workers

to give their own interests over to the organization.

A warning can be heard from others corners that the infusion of emotion into

organization is not just a sinister means of organizational control but may also serve to

reinforce existing class inequalities (Schwalbe et al 2000). The concern generally turns

on a distinction between the types of new economy jobs students are being prepared for,

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specifically the difference between what Turner calls high-touch and high-tech industries

(2001). High-touch refers to low-skill service industries and high-tech to high-skills jobs

in the technology and culture industries. The concern is that disadvantaged students will

disproportionately become the frontline employees of high-touch industries and that

school re-enchantments serve to inculcate particular middle-class notion of intimacy and

affect necessarily for their future work in service jobs. These students must not only learn

to labor, they must learn to do it with the appropriate expression of affect (Willis 1990).

Middle-class students, in contrast, are being prepared for high-tech and culture industry

jobs that require creativity and worker autonomy.

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Chapter 2: Data and Methods

In the previous chapter I laid out the theoretical and historical context for small school

reform, but my larger aim in this manuscript is in laying out an analytic argument about

what happened at MHS within this larger milieu. In this chapter I relate the research

methods I used in collecting data and carrying out my analysis. In doing so I report on

data collected from teachers, administrators, and other school members.

Study Site and Design

To capture the social processes of the reform, I utilized a mixed-methods case study

approach (Yin 1984). This method is a one of the strongest for documenting processual

aspects of organizational life. Focusing on a single case allowed for the depth of

observation and data collection necessary to capture the subtle and iterative process by

which teachers negotiated and constructed shared ways of coordinating their behavior

within the reform. This approach is especially useful for generating new hypotheses and

theories as it allows for the elucidation of relations and mechanisms that might otherwise

have remained invisible (Hartley 2004). As I will discuss in detail below, the mixed-

methods I employed included: sustained observation, in-depth interviewing, document

analysis, and survey and network data collection.

The specific school site was selected for a variety of reasons. First, because it was

undergoing its first year as a converted school, it offered an excellent opportunity to look

at what was my initial guiding question: ‘how do people collectively make sense of

change?’ Second, this particular small school conversion had been identified as an

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important one by the Coalition of Essential Schools, the school reform network that was

helping guide the conversion. While the enthusiasm for small school reform has certainly

waned over the past few yeas as The Gates Foundation has pulled back most of its

funding, it is worth remembering that at the time of the study there was still a good deal

of hope about the reform’s potential efficacy. And finally, there was an issue of

convenience, as I was able to gain an unusual level of access to the school through

existing connections I made during my time as a teacher.

It is worth briefly noting, then, how I came to be connected with MHS in the first

place. The initial introduction occurred through a contact who was working for an

organization that had been hired by CES to do evaluations of several small school

conversions in the Northeast. I had previously taught in the Boston Public School System

and still knew many people in the Massachusetts education world. Through his work, my

contact had come to know the principal of MHS, Dr. Spade. He knew I was looking for a

research site and arranged an introduction with Spade through email. Hearing of my

interest in spending the first year of implementation at the school in order to study it, Dr.

Spade was immediately enthusiastic. Much of this enthusiasm came from Spade’s sense

that he was doings something very important with the conversion work and wanted to

have it documented (he often spoke himself of writing a book about high school reform).

The fact that I would be coming all the way from the West Coast also seemed to

be a significant selling point. MHS is located about 20 miles from Harvard and over the

years members of the Harvard School of Education has been inside the school working

on various projects. As such, it was not novel to have researchers in the school, but the

fact that I was coming from such a distance seemed to validate for some at MHS their

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sense of the scale of their undertaking. Despite the fact that the choice for me was largely

born out of convenience, this unexpected dynamic continued to work to my benefit

throughout the year. Even (or perhaps especially) for those teachers skeptical of what was

going on around them, the oddity of a doctoral student from the other side of the country

was enough to begin many conversations and open several doors.

At the time of my study MHS was in its first year of full conversion to small

schools. In previous years the school had unsystematically surveyed students and

teachers, but wanted to improve their collection and analysis methods. Some of this

desire came from the fact that Mill Town’s district data supervisor was openly skeptical

about the reform and had frequently dismissed data the school had presented him with.

Through initial conversations with Spade, it was agreed that I could administer surveys to

the entire school population as long as the results were shared with the school. While this

was generally a mutually beneficial arrangement, it did limit me somewhat in my survey

construction, as there were certain questions the school wanted to be included, and

certain non-standard formats repeated from previous surveys. Surveys were administered

during staff meeting and student homerooms three times during the year (which will be

described in more detail below).

For the qualitative portion of the study I decided to concentrate on two of the

small schools. This would allow for both depth and comparison. After consulting with

Spade and members of CES, Schools 1 and 2 were chosen to be the sites for the in-depth

ethnographic portion of the study. These two schools were chosen partly for research

design reasons, and partly out of serendipity. Since part of the goal of this project is to

understand the emergence of teacher understanding and school culture, I decided that it

51

would not make sense to concentrate on School 4 (the Pilot School) since it was entering

its second year as a small school. In my first meeting with the administrative team of

MHS Principal Spade turned to Rachel and Peter, the two closest headmasters to where

he was sitting. He asked if they would allow me to spend time in their schools, and each

said yes. I learned later that in their previous meeting, Rachel had actually expressed

interest in her school being in the study.

Data and Methods

As mentioned above, this study takes a mixed-methods approach, combing several forms

of qualitative data, including observation, interviews and document analysis with

quantitative survey and social network data. In the following section I will describe each

of the major sources of data.

Qualitative Data

Ethnography

Ethnographic observation at MHS took place between August 2005 and June 2006. Over

the course of the school year I spent approximately three days a week at the school

totaling around 400 hours observing interaction in teachers’ lounges, professional

development, staff meeting, classrooms and lunch rooms.

As described earlier, while I spent time in all four schools as well as full school

events and common areas, the focus of the ethnographic portion of the study was in

Schools 1 and 2. On the days I went to MHS I would usually schedule two or three class

visits (described below) and spend the rest of the day splitting time between the School 1

and 2 teachers lounges. The structural changes in the reform meant that teachers had

52

more out-of-class time, and so the lounges were typically busy places with both informal

and formal interactions taking place. Over the course of the year I became a fairly regular

fixture in the lounges.

Because of the nature of my presence in the lounges, I was limited in how I kept

notes. If I was observing a teacher collaborative group I would jot down notes, but during

informal conversations I would typically have to wait until after the period to write

anything down. In both cases, at the end of the day I would go to a coffee shop and write

up my notes in more detail.

The small schools had staff meetings once a month, which I would also attend.

Because the schools were holding their meetings concurrently I would generally get the

schedule ahead of time and decide the best way to allocate my time between the two focal

schools. While less than ideal because it meant that I inevitably missed events in each

school, it did allow for important points of comparison across schools. There were also

four professional development days during the course of the year that were self-contained

within the small schools. I approached these the same as the staff meetings, strategically

splitting time between Schools 1 and 2.

For the classroom portion of the ethnographic aspect of the study I concentrated

on four teachers each in the two focal schools, for a total of eight teachers. I chose 10th

and 12th grade math and English teachers because these are core subjects and are the

major testing grades and subjects for the Massachusetts state standardized test. These

eight teachers were recommended by their headmasters, with the aim of ensuring

representation of experienced and inexperienced teachers. None of the teachers

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recommended objected to my observing them and without exception I felt welcomed in

all of their classrooms.

I visited each teacher approximately twice a month, observing the same class

period each time in order to get a sense of development in the reform. I would generally

sit at either the teacher’s desk or a student desk at the edge of the classroom. While

observing I would generate a running, timed, narrative of classroom activity, including

the nature and pacing of academic activities, informal interactions with students, and as

much non-technical dialogue as possible. As with the other notes discussed above, I

would type these up in detail at the end of the school day. Over time the students became

used to my presence. Especially important was that once they realized that if, from my

unusual vantage point, I would not report it to the teacher any misbehavior that I

witnessed, there seemed to be no impact from my being in the class.

In addition to the ongoing observation of teachers and classroom, there were

several other non-regular events I observed. I attended two school board and one PTA

meetings that pertained to the reform. I also went to several meetings with the outside

grant evaluators and CES employees to get a sense of their perception of the progress of

the reform. Finally, I went to the Fall Forum, a conference of CES affiliated schools that

was held in Boston the year I was doing research. Several of the MHS teachers and

students attended the conference, and Spade and three teachers gave a presentation on the

progress of the conversion to that point. All of these helped contextualize what was

happening at MHS in both the larger small school reform movement and the local

political environment.

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Interviews

I also conducted interviews with teachers, the principal, and all four small school

headmasters. Throughout the course of the year, approximately every other month, I

would sit down separately with Peter and Rachel, the headmasters of Schools 1 and 2,

and Principal Spade to have an informal conversation about how they felt the reform was

going, major issues they were dealing with, as well a school-specific questions I had from

my observations. I did not use a protocol for these informal interviews, but generally had

developed questions beforehand related to specific developments in the different schools.

At the end of the study period I conducted semi-structured interviews with 16

teachers, all four of the small school administrators and the whole school principal. The

16 teachers included the 8 I had spent the year observing, plus ‘matching’ teachers in

Schools 3 and 4 (i.e., same grades and subjects). These other eight teachers were each

recommended by their respective headmasters. This amounted to 21 interviews, each of

which lasted approximately one class period (73 minutes). The teacher interviews were

generally conducted in their own classroom during one of their free period. These

interviews were taped and transcribed.

As mentioned above, the teacher end of the year interviews were semi-structured

and designed to capture attitudes and experiences around what had emerged from my

initial data analysis as the major areas of change in the school conversion. Specifically,

teachers were asked to summarize their experience with four aspects of the reform: (1)

staff meetings; (2) teacher groups; (3) advisory; and (4) changes in their teaching. While

the protocol was designed to be flexible enough to allow discussion to veer into other

55

areas the teachers felt important, I tried to ensure that these four were areas were always

included.

Documents

Finally, I collected and analyzed a variety of primary documents related to the reform.

First, I obtained copies of all formal documents created by each of the four small schools

over the course of the year (and some from previous years as well). The headmaster of

each school compiled a folder of their internal documents as part of a requirement of one

of their grant evaluations, and provided me with copies. These documents include staff

meeting minutes and agendas; mission statements; professional development plans;

memos and newsletters; and district goals. These documents were incredibly useful in

helping both reconstruct the process leading up to the study year, as well as looking at

differences in those processes across schools.

Second, I analyzed all the articles about the reform that had appeared in the two

local newspapers both during the implementation year and the previous year. The

newspaper accounts I looked at included not only articles about the reform, but several

op-eds and letters to the editor. This proved to very helpful in contextualizing the reform

in the politics and history of the local community.

Third, from the evaluators I was given copies of the school’s three grant

applications and previous evaluations (including draft versions of both). These provide a

very useful sense of how the reform and its planning evolved over time, especially how

the justifications and concerns related to it changed and the stated targets and goals

changed along with them.

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Quantitative Data

Surveys

Data for the quantitative portion of this study were gathered from surveys that included

both likert-like questions concerning attitudes and behaviors as well as social network

measures. While both teachers and students were surveyed, because of the focus of this

manuscript only the teacher results will be discussed.

Surveys were administered at three time points during the school year – 1) in the

fall before the opening of school; 2) in winter shortly after the holiday break, and 3) in

the spring during the final week of school. The first two waves of the surveys were

administered during staff meetings, while scheduling confusion prevented this from

happening during the spring when teachers were given the survey to fill out on their own

time. The result is that the response rate for the third wave is lower than the first two.

Overall, the average response rate across all three waves was approximately 80% for both

teachers and students (with a total of 957 teachers and approximately 1700 students8). For

teachers the survey consisted of twenty pages of attitudinal and behavioral questions as

well as network measures. A description of the sample can be seen Table 1 below.

7 This number also includes counselors and other non-administrative members of the small school 8 The third wave of student data does not, however, contain seniors. Seniors had approximately one month less school than other grades and had already graduated by the time the third wave of surveys was administered.

57

58

The survey consisted of four general categories: participant information, attitudes,

behaviors, and relationships. Survey questions were adopted largely from research done

by the Chicago Consortium for School Research (CCSR). Previously validated scales

were taken from CCSR for use in both teacher and student surveys. In both surveys there

were also questions created by the administration of MHS in conjunction with outside

coaches and evaluators. Several items were included in this research because they had

been asked in surveys the previous year and MHS wanted to track changes in response.

The final surveys were, in other words, combinations of questions adopted for the

purpose of this research as well as questions carried-over from previous surveys. These

latter items will sometimes be used in this research, but frequently they were not able to

generate internally reliable scales and so were discarded from analysis. The full survey

can be seen in the appendix.

Participant Information

Teachers were asked to provide 11 pieces of personal information, their: (1) position, (2)

gender, (3) race, (4) subject taught if classroom teachers, (5) age, (6) years experience,

(7) years at MHS, (8) small school assigned to, (9) highest degree earned, (10) current

teaching credentials, and (11) primary grade levels taught.

Attitudes

Here I describe the six variables related to teacher attitudes about pedagogy, curriculum

and the reform. Created seven variables. Efficacy: First is a variable for teacher efficacy.

This variable was constructed from a scale of ten items (alpha = .73). Items were rated on

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a scale from 1 to 6, where one represents ‘strongly disagree’ and 6 represents ‘strongly

agree.’9 Sample items include: “By trying a different teaching method, I can significantly

affect a student’s achievement,” and “If I try really hard, I can get through to even the

most difficult or unmotivated students.” The full list of items composing this variable,

12a through 12k, can be seen in survey in the appendix.

The next attitudinal variable related to teacher perception of the need to change

their practice to meet the needs of low-performing students (e.g., “I need to learn more in

order to meet the needs of students of color”). The five-item scale has an alpha of .73 and

consists of 12li through 12lv. The third attitudinal variable is a five-item scale (alpha =

.77) pertaining to teacher perception of whether they have opportunities to learn and

grow in their job. Items include “I feel I have many opportunities to learn new things in

my present job” and “I feel I am improving as a teacher every year.” The full scale

consists of survey items 15a through 15e.

The next two variables pertain to teacher sense of control over 1) their classroom

practice and 2) small school policy and administration. The first is a three-item scale

(alpha = .67) asking teachers how much control they feel over: selecting instructional

materials; selecting content, topics and skills to be taught; and selecting pedagogical

techniques. Items were rated from ‘none’ (1) to ‘complete control’ (6). The same rating

scale was used for teachers’ sense of control over small school policy. Items pertained to

sense of control over: hiring new staff, budgeting, establishing curriculum and

professional development, and setting standards for student behavior. This variable had

an alpha=.74 and is composed of survey items 19a through 19e.

9 This is the structure of all questions unless noted otherwise

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The final attitudinal variable is five-item scale related to teacher perception of the

nature of disciplinary knowledge (alpha = .83). Items in the scale include: “There is a

well defined body of knowledge and skills to be taught in my subject area”, “Thinking

creativity is an important part of the subject matter I teach,” and “Knowledge is my

subject area is always changing.” Some items were reverse coded to ensure proper

directionality of responses. All five items, 14a through 14e, can be seen in the index.

Practices

The next eight variables attempt to capture various dimensions of teacher practices. First

are two three-item scales concerning the number of hours per week spent on teaching

related activities (alpha = .75) and the number of hours spent per week with students out

of class (alpha = .75). The six items are rated on a scale from 1 (none) to 6 (eleven or

more hours). Together, these two variables give a sense of teachers’ weekly time use, as

well as its change (or lack of) over the course of the year.

Next are five individual items pertaining to teacher use of particular pedagogical

practices. Teachers were first asked to identify their target class, which was the first

period in the six-day schedule that they taught in their primary subject area. Thinking

about this class, they were asked ‘how often do you use the following instructional

strategies in you target class?’: have students memorize facts or procedures; relate subject

matters to students’ experiences and interests; lecture the class for more than half a

period; have students complete workbook or textbook exercises; and work together in

pairs or small groups on an assignment. The scale was from 1 (never) to 5 (daily or

almost daily).

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Relationships

The final set of variables pertains to teacher perceptions, broadly, of relationships with

administrators, students and other teachers. The first four variables pertain to trust: 1)

other teachers in own small school (alpha = .94); 2) teachers across in the whole school

(alpha = .92); 3) headmaster in own small school (alpha = .90); and 4) principal of the

whole school (alpha = .81). The 10-point scales used for both teacher trust variables are

composed the same survey questions asked about different groups. These include “We

share idea about teaching openly,” “We often seek each other’s advice about professional

issues and problems,” and “Most of my colleagues share my beliefs and values about

what the central mission of the school should be.” All items can be seen in questions 16

and 17 in the index.

Next is a similar construct for two variables about trust and administrators. There

are two parallel six-item scales pertaining, respectively, to small school headmaster and

whole school principal. Items include “This school’s administration knows the problems

faced by its staff,” “The headmaster/principal usually consults with staff members before

she/he makes decisions that affect us,” and “The school administration’s behavior toward

the staff is supportive and encouraging.” All items can be seen in questions 22 and 23.

The final attitudinal variable is a scale concerning teachers’ sense of the

importance of knowing about students’ personal lives. This five-item scale had an alpha

of .81 and included the items “It is important for me to know something about my

students’ families” and “Students talk to me about their personal lives.” The full

complement of items is 20a through 20e.

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The mean and standard deviation for each of these items at all three time points

can be seen in Table 2. below.

Network Data

Finally, at the end of the survey was a section to elicit teacher social networks. As much

of the focus of the study is on social aspects of teacher practices and understanding, this

was a key portion of the research. Specifically, I looked at four different communication

networks: personal, teaching, reform, and advice from administrators. The network

portion of the survey can be seen in the appendix, but the four question used to elicit

social networks were:

1) Thinking about [a particular time frame], who are the teachers with whom you most often talk about your personal life?

2) Thinking about [a particular time frame], who are the teachers with whom you have most often discussed a more general question or topic connected to the goals of MHS, especially concerning the new small schools?

3) Thinking about [a particular time frame], with whom did you most often discuss a problem or question connected with a course you are teaching (e.g., problems getting students motivated, which materials to use)?

Table 2. Descriptive Statistics of Variables Used in AnalysisWave 1 Wave 2 Wave 3 1 to 2 2 to 3 1 to 3Mean SD Mean SD Mean SD

Efficacy 41.00 (4.71) 39.68 (5.20) 39.20 (5.10) ** ***Need 26.73 (4.96) 25.60 (4.88) 25.21 (4.54) * **Assess 20.32 (2.89) 20.25 (3.82) 20.49 (3.14)Learning 20.88 (2.54) 21.05 (2.55) 21.19 (2.01)Whole Trust 37.82 (7.96) 39.40 (11.01) 37.96 (9.94)Small Trust 43.82 (9.14) 47.64 (9.54) 47.26 (7.75) *** ***Control 12.93 (3.00) 13.19 (3.01) 12.96 (2.81)Control B 10.54 (3.37) 11.15 (3.98) 10.87 (3.23)Personal 25.03 (3.52) 23.86 (4.56) 24.19 (3.72) *** **Time Work 10.10 (2.31) 10.00 (2.32) 10.06 (1.98)Time Students 7.65 (2.59) 6.93 (2.54) 7.28 (2.37) ** *Trust Whole Admin 21.41 (5.12) 21.30 (5.96) 20.51 (4.79)Trust Small Admin 30.01 (4.72) 29.07 (5.90) 28.66 (5.71) *Class Problems 7.19 (2.16) 6.75 (2.54) 6.69 (2.05) *Memorize facts 3.21 (1.10) 3.12 (1.20) 3.07 (0.93)Relate to Interests 4.48 (0.57) 4.45 (0.62) 4.38 (0.56)Lecture 2.82 (1.03) 2.46 (1.17) 2.65 (0.94)Workbook 3.67 (1.11) 3.36 (1.27) 3.38 (0.98) ** **Small Groups 3.11 (0.83) 3.09 (0.82) 3.06 (0.71)

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4) This question asks about your interaction with administrators at MHS. [In this particular time frame], to which administrators did you go to for professional advice?

The survey was accompanied by a roster listing the names of all MHS staff members.

Respondents were given ten lines to list contacts, though a few teachers wrote more

names than that. Along with the name of conversation partners, teachers were also asked

to report the frequency of interaction on a scale of 1 to 3 to give a weighting to the

relationship. One represented talking ‘less than once a week‘; two represented ‘once or

twice a week‘; and three was ‘daily, almost daily.’ For teachers the response to the

network portion of the survey was slightly less then the overall response rate –

approximately 75% across all three waves.10 As soon as I had the surveys, I would put an

id number on both the likert and network aspects of the study and separate them to ensure

as much confidentiality as possible. A summary of the network data can be seen in Table

3. below.

Analyses

10 This percentage does not include new teachers who were unable to report network relations during the first wave of data collection

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The quantitative data collected were statistically analyzed through descriptive, univariate

and network procedures. These procedures will be described in detail in the text.”

The overall data analysis for qualitative analysis followed an iterative

approach of traveling back and forth between (a) the qualitative data, (b) the quantitative

data, (3) the emerging theory, and (4) extant literature. I began my analysis of field notes

and primary documents while still in the field, combining the strategies of reviewing

observational notes, discussing preliminary findings with participants, memo-writing and

exploratory readings of documents. I began to generate a list of possible codes during this

stage of the data analysis, though very few of these survived the many iterations of

analysis that took place after leaving the research site.

After all the data were collected and interviews transcribed, I entered it all in

the Atlas.ti qualitative data analysis software for coding (Muhr 2004). While somewhat

eclectic, I took a grounded theory approach to my analyses (Glaser & Strauss 1967). As

mentioned above, I began generating potential codes while still in the field, but it was not

until after entering all the data into Atlas.ti that the process became systematic. Following

the Grounded Theory framework, I began with a very general open coding scheme,

identifying general instances of what seemed to be the major constructs of the reform

(e.g., teacher meetings, informal conversations, collaborative groups). Within each of

these categories, a series of subcodes was generated inductively. These subcodes

pertained to major reoccurring themes and patterns within the general categories.

During this coding process I was also concurrently writing analytic memos and

revisiting pertinent literature in an effort to pull the pieces together into a larger

theoretical narrative. Through this process I became increasingly interested in the

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institutional logics through teachers were collectively making sense of the changes they

were in the middle of. Through an iterative process with the literature and data I arrived

at several categories (i.e., professional bureaucratic; communitarian; re-enchanted) that

seemed to best, and most concisely, capture the major variation in logics I was seeing in

the data. I tested the appropriateness of these new categories by looking at 1) my different

forms of data from MHS; 2) their relation to my theoretical framework and guiding

questions; and 3) their relevance and connection to extant organizational and reform

literature.

Through ongoing analysis my focus changed and I became more interested in

investigating the tacit nature through which teachers coordinated their behavior, rather

than the more deliberative discursive nature of the institutional logics literature. Over

time it became clear to me that this was an important, and understudied, idea. I came to

develop the construct of organizational ways of being in order to address this new

emerging set of questions. Over the course of data analysis, the category of ways of being

was refined greatly, and more detailed sets of codes pertaining to dimensions were

developed. I began a new round of inductive coding to more systematically develop the

important dimensions of the construct in order be able to compare across them. This

coding scheme is the central one for my analysis.

Limitations

As with any study, there are important limitations to the data and methodology that are

worth noting. I entered the research site with only a very broad sense of what the final

report would look like. The main themes of the dissertation emerged long after leaving

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MHS, and so the match between theory and data is less than ideal. I cast a very wide net

at the school, and the result was a very broad and diverse collection of data. The problem,

though, is that none of it is quite as deep as I, looking back in retrospect, would like. One

result is that field notes are not as focused and honed as might have been useful and I end

up relying on them more impressionistically than reporting verbatim from my notes. It

also means that the quantitative data I collected does not allow me to as directly address

my central concerns as I would like. That being said, I have nonetheless found this to be a

very useful process for theory building and am left with a great deal of excitement for

how the foundation here can be built up in future work.

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Chapter 3: The Origins of the Reform

Mill Town High School (MHS) is located in a working class city of 41,000 people

approximately 50 miles northwest of Boston. With a median household income of

45,000, Mill Town has traditionally been a working-class city primarily composed of

Irish and Italian-Americans. Like many of the former manufacturing towns that make up

the industrial urban belt around Boston, Mill Town has undergone significant economic

and demographic changes over the past several decades. The loss of its manufacturing

base has meant a rise in unemployment and underemployment. At the time of the study,

13% of school-age children in Mill Town lived in poverty. At the time of the study

twenty-four percent of adults in Mill Town did not have high-school diplomas, and the

four-year drop out rate for MHS was estimated to be 19%. A picture of the central square

in Mill Town can be seen below.

Picture 1. Downtown Mill Town

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Mill Town had never competed academically with the wealthy cities in suburban

Boston that were only 15 to 20 miles away. In recent years, however, its relative

performance had been becoming progressively worse. Much of this was perceived by the

school staff to be related to the rapid changes that were occurring in the demographics of

the community. The student body of MHS had been, just 10 years before, almost entirely

white and from blue-collar families. In 2005, the first full year of the reform, nearly 20%

of the students spoke Spanish as a first language. These students did significantly worse

academically than their white classmates, though academic problems at the school was

not limited to any particular student group.

In fact, in the years leading up to the reform MHS had an increasingly

problematic relationship with the state. In 2000 the school had a significant accreditation

crisis, barely meeting state standards. MHS students were consistently scoring in the

bottom third on state English and math tests. In 2005, the year the conversion to small

schools culminated, the district failed to make ‘adequate’ progress on the state

standardized test for the fourth straight year and was declared a district ‘in need of

correction,’ a designation that comes with a set of corrective measures imposed by the

state. Members of the school community came to associate these problems with student

alienation and a lack of motivation and engagement. These, in turn, were leading to the

low aspirations and test scores and the behavioral problems being seen at the school. The

general levels of academic underachievement, as well as the acuteness of the problem

among Latino students, became issues that the school felt needed to be addressed in

significant and potentially radial ways. A picture of MHS can be seen below.

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Picture 2. Mill Town High School

Developing A Vision

The process of small school conversion at MHS began when Bill Spade was hired as the

principle in 2000. Upon beginning the job, Spade reported being surprised at the lack of a

strategic long-term view for the school, especially given the large ongoing changes in the

surrounding community. Spade said when he arrived at MHS his goal was to make it “a

national model urban high school.” That year, the school began what would be a five-

year process that ultimately culminated in the school conversion in 2005.

Spade, along with teachers, parents and community members, began by

undertaking a self-assessment of MHS. The group looked at past evaluation and

accreditation reports, school practices, and assessments of need. From this the study

group came a report on the specific gaps and weaknesses to be addressed by any major

undertaking. The group next talked to educators and reformers associated with several

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different reform models (e.g., Assertive Discipline, Outward Bound, Franklin/Covey

Group) in order to decide which might make the most sense for MHS’ situation and

needs. This eventually led to the creation of what was called the ‘Three-to-Five Year

Strategic Plan’, which was adopted by the School Council in December 2001.

The centerpiece of the ‘Three-to-Five Year Strategic Plan‘ was for the school to

adopt a comprehensive reform model. In 2002 and 2003 teachers and administrators

visited model schools all along the eastern seaboard. After each trip a presentation would

be prepared for the rest of the staff. In total, twelve potential models were investigated in

this way with the search committee eventually narrowing down the list to three finalists:

Atlas, Paideia, and the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES).

In spring 2003, the faculty voted on which these three models to adopt. Dr. Spade

was a public advocate of the Atlas model, and many teachers feared he would push it

through regardless of the outcome of the vote. In the end, however, CES received the

most votes and was chosen by the staff as the comprehensive model to adopt. There was

a sense among many of the administrators and staff members, however, that CES won the

vote because it was the least proscriptive program in terms of what it asked teachers to

do, and therefore become the favorite of those least enthusiastic about reform.

To be clear, CES is not itself a small school model though small schools have

long been an important part of the organization’s overall strategy. CES describes it

mission as working:

with school districts and other entities to shape the policy conditions that support and promote schools characterized by personalization, democracy and equity, intellectual vitality and excellence, and graduates who experience success in all aspects of their lives: educational, professional, civic, and personal.

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At the time MHS began working with them, though, CES was also acting as a major

funding intermediary for The Gates Foundation’s small school initiative. That would turn

out to be an important connection. Initially, however, the faculty and administrators

decided to adopt a Smaller Learning Communities (SLCs) approach. While the general

logics and rationale is the same as with small schools, SLCs more closely resemble the

middle schools block system than independent, autonomous small schools.

Even before securing any external funding, the majority of the staff committed to

going ahead with SLCs as its comprehensive reform program. Through the planning

process, however, the administration realized that it needed to take a more comprehensive

approach and secure outside money and help. MHS began a partnership with the New

Essential Small Schools Network (NESSN), a CES affiliated center that, with funding

from The Gates Foundation, was heading The Coalition’s small school work. With

NESSN as a partner, MHS applied for, and received a Small Learning Community

implementation grant from the U.S. Department of Education in October 2003. This DOE

grant was primarily used to create four Freshman Academies. The goal was to improve

the difficult transition that many students were experiencing from middle school to MHS.

Simultaneously, MHS applied for a grant from the CES Small Schools Project to

support the school’s full conversion into semi-autonomous small schools. The Small

Schools Project was at this time the national intermediary between The Bill and Melinda

Gates Foundation and school districts. With CES’ help MHS began planning for a full

conversion into small schools.

During the 2003 school year Spade appointed a Coalition Implementation Team

made up of teachers, guidance counselors and members of the community. Members of

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this team visited CES small schools in Boston and New York with the goal of bringing

best practices back to MHS.

In November 2003, after receiving the small school grant, Spade made a

presentation to the staff about two possible ways forward. The first would be a full

implementation in the fall of 2004, with the entire school being converted to small

schools. The second was the creation of a single ‘pilot’ school, with the full conversion

occurring the fall of 2005. The staff vote did not occur until March of 2004, at which

time they narrowly voted not to move ahead with a full school conversion, opting for the

creation of the pilot school instead. Many teachers expressed frustration that while the

vote succeeded in putting off full implementation for a year, Spade seemed determined to

go ahead the next year regardless of the results of the pilot school experiment or teacher

sentiments.

That spring one of MHS’ most respected veteran teachers was hired to be the

headmaster. Spade had hoped that the pilot school would be composed of teachers and

students who had volunteered for the experiment, but in neither case did this happen.

Many teachers did volunteer, but it was not enough to fully staff the school and so several

teachers had to be assigned. In April of 2004 the school sent home information about the

school with the aim of securing parent volunteers to sent their children to the pilot school

but received little response. At end of May, when it had become clear that there were not

going to be enough volunteers, the parents of randomly selected students were sent

implied consent forms and given a week to reply.

The Pilot School was implemented during the 2004-2005 school year. At the

same time, the rest of the teachers were first assigned to, and began in a limited capacity

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working with their own small school. This occurred in spite of the fact that it remained

unclear if a full conversion would even eventually come about. By the spring of 2005

headmasters for the three new small schools had been brought on, all of who were

external hires. Around the time the student population was informed of which of the

small schools they had been assigned to. As with teachers, assignment occurred through a

process designed to ensure that there was roughly equal demographic representation

across schools.

In December 2004 an evaluation report was given to the School Committee and

the school staff. The evaluation, done by an outside consulting group, purported to show

the success of the Freshman Academies and Pilot School (specifically, the surveys

showed more teacher enthusiasm and student engagement). The results of the evaluation

proved to be central to the decision to move forward with full conversion in Fall 2005. A

Small School Transition Plan was adopted by the end of December. The plan laid out the

Small Schools Planning Criteria to be used, information about the design teams to be

created for each school, and a general timeline for the remainder of the 2004-05 school

year.

The new small school staff continued to meet periodically through the spring of

2005, but it was not until the summer that the work really began. For the first time

working together for a sustained period, teachers spent a week during the summer of

2005 as part of a ‘Summer Academy‘ at MHS. The academy was co-planned by Spade,

the small school headmasters, and the teachers on the various design teams. They also

received a good deal of assistance from people at the Small School Network and from

Francis Parker School, a CES affiliated high-school that took on the role of a mentor

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school for MHS. This was the first time full small school staffs had worked together in a

sustained manner. Much of the week was spent beginning to lay out small school specific

mission and vision statements, as well as engaging in community and team building

activities. While participation in the academy was voluntary, 2/3 of the staff nonetheless

attended. Later in the summer CES sponsored a Design Team Institute in a neighboring

state. The majority of the design team members attended this from all fours schools.

Then, in September 2005, MHS opened the school year as four small schools. The

Pilot School was renamed School 4 and the other schools were School 1, 2 and 3. While

the hope was that each small school would eventually develop its own unique identity,

the generic names were a purposeful and strategic decision by the administration. The

fear was that, as happens in many small school conversions in economically and

ethnically diverse communities, different small schools would come to be associated with

different groups of students.

On a rainy Thursday afternoon two weeks into the start of the school year, MHS

held a press conference in the restaurant attached to its vocational wing. Members of the

media, as well as district administrators, teachers, students and representatives of The

Coalition of Essential Schools (CES), the national reform network of which MHS was

now a member, milled about the room waiting for the presentation to begin. The

principal, Dr. Spade, started things off, speaking first of the virtues of small schools and

how MHS “is proud to be playing a role in this very important movement.” Spade praised

his staff for the way they had come together to implement the reform and the risk-taking

and courage it involved. The national director of CES came from the west coast just for

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the opening, telling the audience “I want to make sure the community understands just

how special a thing is happening here.”

He said that CES saw Mill Town High as the next generation of small schools and

that they hoped it would be a beacon for other large urban high school looking for

conversion models. The regional director of CES spoke next and echoed the same

sentiment, that MHS was on the “vanguard” of small school conversion and that the

many people were banking on them because there were not many successful examples of

conversions to follow. Fourth up was one of the reform coaches who said that what was

happening at MHS was more than just “moving deck chairs on the Titanic,” but was

instead about making fundamental changes in order to create excellent schools. This was,

all parties seemed to agree, a courageous experiment in small schools conversion and an

important test for the movement. But what exactly was entailed in this experiment?

History of Small Schools

Post World War II educational research touted the benefits of large schools as a means to

cope with economies of scale, provide diverse and differentiated curriculum, and, by

reducing the ratio of administrators to teachers, to create more efficient and centralized

administrations. As the sizable baby boom generation moved through the public school

system and began to tax its resources, the creation of larger schools become practical as

well as ideological.

The second half of the twentieth century thus witnessed a major consolidation in

the number of schools and school districts in America. While the student population

increased over 500% in those fifty years, the total number of schools decreased by 70%

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(Casey Foundation 2001). In 1950 the average American public school contained 150

students. By 2000 the average size had tripled to approximately 450 (Berry 2004). The

push for school consolidation was made most famously by then Harvard president James

Byrant Conant in his 1959 study, The American High School Today. Conant, among

others, argued for the importance of large high schools because of their ability to provide

a diverse curriculum at low cost.

The push for smaller schools in urban areas began as one of many alternative

education strategies utilized by reformers in the 1970s. These reformers saw small

schools as a means to create more democratic environments and to return to local

communities the control that had been lost in the consolidation of previous decades.

These early small schools were linked with progressive and liberal politics, and seen as

part of a larger effort of democratizing schools.

Advocates for small schools remained largely peripheral to the education

mainstream until the early 1980s when the federal report, ‘A Nation at Risk,’ catalyzed a

new wave of education reform to reverse the decline of American public schools. Among

these advocates was Theodore Sizer who in 1984 founded the Coalition of Essential

Schools, an umbrella organization for progressive (and almost always small) schools.

Among the early Coalition schools was Central Park East in Manhattan. Deborah Meier,

widely considered one of the founding members of the modern Small School Movement,

founded Central Park.

Meier’s book ‘The Power of Their Ideas’ became an educational bestseller, and

the idea of small schools became increasingly popular among progressive minded

educators. The argument for small schools was firmly grounded in rhetoric of democracy,

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community, and equity. It was with the tragedy of Columbine in 1990, however, that

small schools movement moved into the mainstream of education reform debates and

only because it took on a new meaning.

While progressive advocates of small schools had built their arguments on a

foundation of democracy and equity, new advocates for small schools in the 1990s spoke

more of safety and student alienation. Widespread concern about school safety, and its

perceived cause in the anonymous and uncaring nature of large high-schools, served as a

catalyst for an increased focus on small schools. While these two rationales for smallness

– size as a facilitating factor in democratic education, and size as a factor in school

alienation and violence – had different focuses they shared a common concern with the

relational side of schools, especially the importance of adult-student relationships.

And while Columbine and other late 1990s instances of school violence thrust the

idea of small schools into the national spotlight, it was not until the Bill and Melinda

Gates Foundation made the creation of small high schools and the breakup of existing

large schools the cornerstone of its domestic philanthropical giving that the number of

small schools exploded. Since 2000 The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has given

over one billion dollars to the public school sector. While this number pales in

comparison to overall annual government spending, around 435 billion dollars annually,

most local, state and federal money is tied up in specific predetermined costs. The

roughly 250 million The Gates Foundation has been giving yearly is approximately 10

times what the Department of Education has in discretionary funds. And while compared

to the educational spending of other foundations Gates gives by far the most money,

other major philanthropies like The Ford, Walton, and Annenberg Foundations also

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donate tens of millions of dollars annually to public schools and associated organizations.

This means that foundations have become the primary funders of major school reform

efforts.

The increasingly large role that foundations are playing in American education is

a growing concern for many people. Some critics sight what they see as the largely

undemocratic nature of foundations pushing their own chosen reform efforts. Early

pioneers of small schools, the area most Gates education money has gone into, often see a

corporate co-option of their movement. One critic referred to Bill Gates as America’s

new unelected superintendent of schools. All these criticisms, however, share a common

concern that The Gates Foundation now, or will soon, hold an unhealthy level of sway

over public schooling.

The Gates Foundation’s choice of emphasizing small schools can be at least

partially traced to what was at the time an emerging body of research suggesting the

efficacy of reducing the size of high-schools. A substantial body of research evidence

indicates that small schools are more engaging work environments for both students and

adults. This work argued that small schools are more likely to have: positive and caring

school climate (Kahne et al 2008); high parental and community involvement (Kellaghan

et al., 1993); high student involvement and fewer behavioral problems (Wasley and Lear

2001); have collaborative professional teacher communities (Grossman and Stodolsky

1994; Louis and Kruse 1995); and have clearly defined shared vision and goals

(Chrispeels 1992).

Changes at MHS

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Changes in the Organization of Teaching

The most significant, and immediate, changes at MHS were structural. The school

consists of five wings that in the past had each been dedicated to a specific subject area.

With the exception of the science wing (which because of its labs could not be altered),

each wing of the building became home to one of the small schools. Several of the

schools painted and decorated the doorways leading into their wing. Each small school

had its own staff lounge, and these were often located next to the departmental lounges

that signaled the subject area the wing once housed. During lunch period some teachers

would eat in the small school lounge, some in the subject area lounge, and others in the

full-school teachers’ cafeteria. Many staff members saw this choice as representative of a

teacher’s orientation toward the reform.

The structure of teaching time changed dramatically after the conversion to small

schools. The school’s rotating schedule changed from a seven-class schedule to a six

class one. The individual day schedule changed as well, from a six period day to a five

period one (see Fig. 1 below). This decrease in the total number of classes allowed for an

increase in class length from 57 to 73 minutes. It also meant that, while class size stayed

approximately the same, the number of students a teacher saw per semester decreased on

average from 125 to 104.

The nature and amount of teacher professional development also changed

dramatically. In the past, professional development (PD) time was limited to four in-

service days per school year. After the conversion, the number of PD hours per year

increased from 28 to 100. Most of this increase came in the form of Common Planning

Time (CPT) when groups of teachers would meet to share teaching practices once per

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Figure 1. Six-Day Class Schedule

Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday

Class 1 Class 2 Class 1 Class 1 Class 1

Class 2 Class 3 Class 3 Class 2 Class 2

Class 3 Class 4 Class 4 Class 4 Class 3

Class 4 Class 5 Class 5 Class 5 Class 5

Class 5 Class 6 Class 6 Class 6 Class 6

schedule cycle. These groups were assigned by the school’s headmaster and were

typically led by an outside coach or a teacher trained in CES protocols. However, there

was little consistency in the kind of work done by each CPT group and in how frequently

they actually met. Teachers generally reported enjoying their CPT group because of the

opportunity to work with other teachers, but did not find them useful in terms of

improving practice. The major exceptions to this were groups led by veteran teachers (as

opposed to outside coaches) that concentrated almost exclusively on trading teaching tips.

Curricular Changes

MHS traditionally had a tracked curriculum, and much of the reform work attempted to

move away from that. The lowest level track, known as ‘E-level’, was essentially

eliminated in math and English and folded into the middle track. This left an honors and a

non-honors track. Several of the schools began to experiment with ways to incorporate

honors and non-honors students into the same classroom. One small school, for example,

began piloting an ‘Open Honors’ program in the 2006-07 school year. This program

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allows non-honors students to be in honors level classes, but be given non-honors level

work. The elimination of the E-level classes remained, throughout the year, one of the

most controversial aspects of the reform. Teachers frequently complained that students

who would previously have been in E-level classes were not prepared for the regular

track they now found themselves in, and many parents saw the elimination of classes

(both low and high) as a major harm to their children.

This attempt to incorporate honors and non-honors students into the same

classroom is emblematic of the larger attempt to create a more personalized and equitable

learning environment for students. MHS converted to small schools in order to improve

the teaching and learning that happens there. To this end all the small schools, in slightly

different ways, have focused on how to personalize learning and move away from

didactic forms of teaching. As will be discussed later, many teachers felt that they did not

receive adequate training, however, to put these abstract ideas into classroom practices.

Community Reaction

Much of the early concern from the community centered on questions about whether the

beloved football team would be divided up and if, come spring, there would be four

different proms. When it became clear that all of the traditional extra-curricular

accoutrements would remain largely untouched, the noise abated. Despite increased

parental involvement being one of the central goals of the reform, parents remained

largely absent during the course of the school year. Open houses and PTA meetings

continued to draw the same small substratum of parents concerned with AP classes and

college applications that they always had. Important school board meetings on the state of

the small schools conversion were almost entirely unattended by parents and community

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members. Teachers, most already used to the difficulty of drawing the community’s

working class parents to the school, still were surprised at the lack of parental voice being

heard given just how sweeping the academic and structural changes were.

This silence, however, unexpectedly erupted into a full-force roar during the final

month of school. The cause of the firestorm was the printing of the yearbook with several

errors. The pictures of 10 seniors were missing, as was the biographical information of

around 110 more. The school was completely unprepared for the community reaction. By

the time things had mostly settled down a few weeks later there had been two packed

school board meetings (one called by emergency), numerous articles and editorials in the

local papers as well as letters-to-the-editor. The school had fielded calls from dozens of

angry parents and one day I witnessed the yearbook advisor, an inexperienced first-year

teacher, leave the school in tears mid-day after an angry exchange with a parent. The

school staff - teachers but especially administrators - discussed among themselves the

perceived absurdity of the situation as well as the irony of their inability to generate

parental interest in the reform until this, a simple yearbook error, turned on a faucet of

community anger that proved surprisingly difficult to turn off. Eventually the yearbooks

were reprinted, but ill feelings seemed to linger.

Looking at Data Trends

Most of the major trends among MHS teachers were consistent with the findings of

research on other small schools. A summary of the major trends can be seen in Table 4

below. Affectively, there was a large change for teachers. Over the course of the year,

they came to feel more positively about their colleagues. But, like other research

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indicates, this increase in job satisfaction and sense of community did not consistently

translate into changes in teaching practice. At the end of the year, teachers were no more

likely than at the beginning to say they related their subject matter more to student

interest or use small groups in their teaching. They also reported using memorization and

lectures just as frequently as before. There was, however, a reported decrease in the use

of workbooks exercises.

This lack of change is certainly related to teachers’ declining sense over the

course of the year both of their need to change practice as well as the efficacy if they did

make such attempts. Perhaps most interesting, though, is that at the end of the year

teachers were significantly less likely to think students’ personal lives and interests were

important as well as the reporting spending less time with students outside of class. This

is an important issue I will return to later in the dissertation.

The reform was seemingly more successful at rewiring teachers’ social network

than at changing their practices. Figure 2 below shows changes in the network of

personal conversations between teachers over the course of the year. The colored nodes

each represent one of the four small schools. As can be seen by eyeballing the diagram,

before the school year began in August, the personal network was largely unrelated to

small school membership. By June, the diagram can be seen to be clustering into four

quadrants, each associated with one of the small schools. To paint a less impressionistic

picture, the results form ERGM network models are presented. The numbers represent

the statistical odds that a given tie between two teachers is more likely than random based

on some individual or shared attribute.

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Here we see that in the fall, teachers were 2.8 times more likely than random to

choose a friend who was in their same small school compared to outside their school. For

same disciplinary subject, however, the odds were 6.8 times random, more than twice as

high. By spring, the trend had reversed, with same school ties being 5.8 times more likely

than random (2.8 controlling for previous ties) and same subject 4.8 times (1.7

controlling for previous ties). Similar results were found for the other networks measured.

Overall, these numbers are not surprising given that the structural changes in the school

changed the pool of colleagues teachers were in proximate contract with. At the same

time, this change has rarely been empirically demonstrated.

Figure 2. Changes in Personal Conversation Network

The Reform as Short-Lived

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By the start of school two years later the reform had been largely abandoned. Spade and

the superintendent who had been instrumental in pushing for conversion had both moved

on to jobs in different school districts. The vice-principal, Mr. Green, took over as

principal after Spade’s departure and reengineered the four small schools into two large

‘houses’ that had little of the autonomy and authority of the small schools. Each of these

houses was composed of two of the previous small schools. Two of the original

headmasters had moved on to other jobs, with a third to follow that spring. There

remained, then, vestiges of the small schools but the heart of the reform was gone and its

logic largely forgotten.

In many respects, then, what happened at MHS was a microcosm of the larger

small school reform movement, which in turn was representative of general trends that

have been reported in numerous different reform models. The typical story begins with a

group of reformers who, through a combination of enthusiasm and influence, develop and

promote a novel template for school reform. Policy makers and education reformers then

pick up the template and act as advocates who aid in the diffusion of the model. The

template is next taken up by schools in search of change models, especially when, as was

the case with Gates and small schools, there is grant and foundation money to be had.

Inevitably it turns out that implementation is much more difficult than adoption and

evidence that the reform leads to desired academic effects becomes hard to come by

(Borman et. al., 2003). Enthusiasm wanes, policy makers move their attention and money

elsewhere, and the reform that that promised to change education is abandoned for the

next magic bullet.

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Chapter 4: Theoretical Framework

In the first chapter I made a historical argument about organizational re-enchantment

being a response to an ongoing tension between rationality and creativity in

contemporary society. I further argued that organizational re-enchantment is an important

if mostly overlooked area of study because it represents a growing phenomenon that cuts

across diverse social spheres. Through the lens of re-enchantment we can reframe small

schools as more than just another in a long line of faddish reforms. We can see it, instead,

as a particular manifestation of an ongoing response to larger socio-historical forces, even

if small school reform itself is quickly diminishing in importance.

The goal of this manuscript, however, is more than to just recast what happened at

Mill Town High School in terms of a different historical narrative. As I began to lay out

in the prologue, the larger analytical aim is to understand how actors experience and

negotiated attempts to change the ethos of the school, a term here used to describe the

shared dispositions and character of the school. While the notion of ethos is not widely

used in the school reform literature, there is a long history, going back to Aristotle’s own

writing, of relating it to issues of education (Kristjansson 2007). This is because

education, as a process of socialization, involves “the wide ranging shaping of persons in

many ways, in the development by teachers and schools of persons of a certain sort

(McLaughlin 2005: 317 emphasis included).” This is a process of socialization that

includes not just gaining particular bits of knowledge and understanding, but also

developing various dispositions, virtues, skills and capacities. Because these things are

taught and learned tacitly, they necessitate that schools have a proper ethos for

inculcating in students.

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And it is precisely for this reason that small school reform places such a strong

emphasis on the transformation of organizational ethos (Codd et al 2002). The design

logic of the reform posits that, first, inculcating desired intellectual and communal

dispositions in students is best achieved when are they are manifest in the adults with

which they interact (Meier 1995). And second, that the type of innovation and creativity

required for creating personalized and responsive curriculum and pedagogy entails

teachers developing habits of mind and skills that most do not currently possess. The

result is a school ethos defined by a community of learners engaged in ongoing creative

projects.

Not all reforms aim to transform school ethos, however. Many change efforts are

concerned only with the diffusion of new technologies or structures that can be

successfully adopted without a fundamental transformation in the nature of coexistence in

the school.11 For those that do aim for such a change, however, the real challenge is that

altering school ethos involves reshaping not only teacher and student beliefs and

attitudes, but also more centrally the style of practical intelligence that shapes what

makes ‘sense‘ for an actor to do or not do in a given moment. That is, transforming ethos

ultimately concerns changing the dominant styles of practical action in the organization,

the actors‘ Bourdieausian ‘feel for the game’ (1977).

Specifically, my argument is that actors’ sense of appropriate lines of action are

shaped not only by the practices of the organization or individual dispositions and habits,

but also by trans-situational social conventions that shape the nature of actor engagement

within the organizational. I call these conventions organizational ways of being. The goal

11 There is existing work that suggests that changes in actors subjectivities may occur as unintended consequences of intentional changes to structures and practices (e.g., Barley 1986). Rarely, however, has research looked at efforts to directly shape new actor ways of being.

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of introducing this concept of organizational ways of being is to combine the institutional

focus on trans-situational cultural meanings and how they shape interaction with the

practice theoretical conception of these interactions as being situated and culturally

disposed modes of ongoing mutual adaptation and orientation. My goal with this is not

simply to argue for or against the efficaciousness of this small school reform. Rather, by

examining in depth life in MHS, I shall try to untangle the dynamics of organizational

attempts to transform the very nature of coexistence in the school.

Practice Theory

The central claim of the practice perspective is that understanding social phenomenon

requires analyzing the socio-historical and structural context within which it transpires.

Through a practice lens social life is conceptualized in terms of a shared environment that

is a lived context for human action and consciousness. This environment is not itself,

however, an object of attention or reflection and operates as pre-reflective background for

human behavior (Gallagher 2009). Action, in practice theory, is conceptualized as

“practical or non-strategic conduct driven by ‘active dispositions’ that have formed

through past experience (Emirbayer & Johnson 2008:19).” As such, practice approaches

to organizational research stress the means (dispositions/toolkits) through which people

formulate their lines of action.

Practice theory is a strand of strand of cultural theory, a loose affiliation of

approaches that challenge traditional social theoretical views of social order as generated

either by the subjective intentionality and interest of individual actors (e.g., rational

choice and utilitarianism) or by the following of collective norms and values (e.g.,

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Parsons and Weber). What these traditional approaches gloss, according to cultural

theories, is the centrality of shared (typically tacit) knowledge in enabling actors an

intersubjective way of ascribing common meaning to the world (Reckwitz 2002). The

goal of research from a culture theory perspective is, broadly, to document such shared or

collective symbolic structures of knowledge in order to grasp the nature of social order.

Practice perspectives diverge in important ways from other major cultural theories,

however (Reckwitz 2002). Specifically, the practice perspective locates the cultural

phenomenon of interest not in human minds (e.g., Berger and Luckmann 1966), public

texts (e.g., Geertz 1973) or intersubjective discourses (e.g., Schegloff 1991) but instead

within social practices (Schatzki 1996).

It is important at this point to differentiate between two definitions of the word

practice that are often used interchangeably in the academic literature. When used in the

plural (Praktiks), the term refers to the colloquial understanding of practices as routinized

bodily and mental activities along with the background knowledge needed to carry them

out (Reckwtiz 2002: 250). When used in the singular (Praxis), practice refers to the

whole of human action, frequently employed as half of a dichotomy with ‘theory,’ or as

the opposite of mere thinking. It is in this latter sense that the word ‘practice‘ is used

when scholars talk about practice theory, which generally takes as it study the nature of

actor engagement with the social world. In research the two often go together, but need

not. As I will discuss below, much institutionally focused organizational work studies the

adoption and diffusion of practices, but does not take a practice theoretical view of the

world (Feldman and Orlikowski 2011).

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Moreover, the rationale for writing about practice ‘theories’ in the plural is that no

unified framework exists. While there is a great deal of diversity among practice

perspectives, Heidegger’s notion of a clearing (Lichtung) or opening (Offene) is an

especially important touchstone for much of this work (1962).12 The clearing is the space

of intelligibility, which gives meaning and interpretability to whatever shows up within it

(Dreyfus 1991). It is only within some clearing, for example, that this person is a teacher

and those people are students; that this walled off space is a classroom; and that this piece

of chalk is a pedagogical tool. The important point for practice theories is that these

spaces of intelligibility are not a property of the individuals within it, nor can it be

described as a non-individual phenomenon such as a Parsonian system or Marxist mode

of production.

And within such a clearing it is an actor’s practical intelligence that governs action

by specifying what to do next in the continuous flow of activity. And in doing so,

practical intelligence generally orients action toward specific pragmatic and normative

ends. Importantly, though, practical intelligence is not the same as conscious normativity

(Rouse 2007). What makes sense for an actor to do is not the same as what is, or seems to

be, appropriate, right or correct in deliberation or reflection. For Wittgenstein practical

behavior is described in terms of reaction (Reaktion) as spontaneous behavior (Schatzki

1996). But to say that a behavior is spontaneous in Wittgenstein’s sense is not to say that

it is random, uncaused, or without reason. Rather, it refers to the fact that the majority of

12 Most work labeled as practice theory does, however, have a common theoretical lineage that can be traced back to late Wittgenstein’s work on rule-following (1953) and early Heidegger’s work on understanding and interpretation (1962). In common, both authors call attention to the situated and habitual nature of human action, arguing that human experience and action can never be explained nor experienced in terms of third-person detached views (Taylor 1995).

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human behavior is unconsidered in that it is not preceded by conscious deliberation or

reflection.

To say that most behavior is unreflective is not, however, to reduce it to a

mechanistic response in some sort of stimulus-response scheme. Rather, most practice

theory adopts a pragmatist stance that sees habit not as repeated taken-for-granted

behavior, but as a sense-enhancing structure of experience. Here we can fruitfully draw

on Dreyfus’ distinction between purposive behavior on the one hand and behavior with

purpose-in-mind on the other (1991). The former term refers to non-intentional actions

that are tacit and directed toward overcoming immediate impediments. That is, action that

is purposive but habitual. The latter category, in contrast, refers to intentional actions that

are guided by predefined goals. The key point of this distinction for Dreyfus is that

purposive behavior, a bodily orientation toward a task, is part of what becomes embodied

when we acquire a new skill. In contrast, explicit and conscious rule-following is a

characteristic of novice rather than expert learners. The point being, the more skilled we

become at a particular practice, the less likely we are to operate intentionally and

consciously with purpose-in-mind.

This distinction between experts and novices also has implications for thinking

about the nature of habitual action for the members of different professions. Specifically,

there is evidence that particular occupations have their own dominant style(s) of practical

action (Delmestri 2006). That is, aside from being socialized into particular beliefs and

attitudes, members of an occupational group also come to be socialized into ways of

coping with particular situations and of carrying out projects and tasks (Lave and Wenger

1991). Late in his life, Bourdieu even began writing about the idea of profession specific

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habitus (2000).13 If we look at teaching in these terms, we see it as a routinized set of

bodily performances shaped by practical know-how concerning things like: ways of

interpreting (e.g., students’ level of understanding or engagement); certain aims (e.g.,

transmission of a lesson content, coordination of student bodies); emotional level (e.g.,

what motivates students to complete activities). What is important is that once an actor

becomes skilled at a job such that their purposive behavior is no longer conscious,

unreflective practical know-how becomes the background against which reform efforts

are experienced as being sensible or not.

The difference between novice and expert practitioners also points to a larger, and

largely overlooked issue, namely that actors can participate in the same practice in

variable and differentiated ways. In contrast, philosophical descriptions of practice tend

to assume an unrealistic degree of shared understanding and common conventions

(Warde 2005: 136). Full agreement cannot, however, be a requisite for participation in a

shared practice because actors engage in the same activity with different degrees of skill,

investment, and understanding. The fact that people can coordinate despite such

differences means we need to appeal to something more than just the internal logic of

particular practices and instead also account for the way people orient and adjust to each

other and to the environment during the ongoing stream of interaction.

What a good deal of classical practice theory misses, ironically, is that practices

are inherently social because participation in them entails entering a complex state of

13 “The specific logic of a field is established in the incorporated state in the form of a specific habitus, or, more precisely, a sense of the game, ordinarily described as a “spirit” or “sense” (“philosophical”, “literary”, “artistic”, etc.), which is practically never set out or imposed in an explicit way. (Bourdieu 2000:11).” Wacquant supports this reading: “… our categories of judgment and action, coming from society, are shared by all those who were subjected to similar social conditions and conditionings (thus one can speak of a masculine habitus, a national hiatus, a bourgeois habitus, etc.) (2005:316).”

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coexistence with others. In contradistinction to practice theorists like Bourdieu, to operate

within the ‘rules of the game‘ does not simply mean acting upon embedded social

instinct. It also depends upon the active alignment and coordination of practical actions

among interdependent social agents “who profoundly affect each other as they interact’

(Barnes 2001: 64).” This means seeing practices not as individual habits (as in classical

practice theory) or as unitary objects (as in institutional theory), but rather as a collective

accomplishments, one that entail an ongoing process of taking the actions and

expectations of others into account. To say, then, that teaching is a kind of practice is not

simply to describe a set of dispositions or activities, but rather to see it as a particular

kind of configuration of people, activities and physical arrangements within which certain

actions and discourses are made meaningful.

Within this perspective we can see the school itself as a bundle of practices and

material arrangements. Practices include: grading, lesson planning, advising, governance,

administrative, meeting, community-building, and consultation practices. Material

arrangements include: layout and material connections among classrooms, lounges,

hallways, front offices, and cafeterias. Teaching, as well as other practical activities in the

school, is always established and consummated within specific practice-arrangement

bundles (e.g., teaching math through routinized lessons in the classroom). It is also

important to note that the school is composed of different practices, some of which have

their own orders and lines of action (e.g., practices with students in the classroom have a

very different logic than collaborative practices that take place in the teachers’ lounge).

Despite such differences, the wide variety of orders and practices that take place in a

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school are connected through shared general ends and being part of the same larger

project of 'schooling'.

One important implication of this view of the school as a network of practice-

arrangements is that what makes for a ‘good’ teacher may be different in the classroom

than in a staff meeting or even in the teachers’ lounge outside of the sight of

administrators. Each of these is a different type of social context, and the practices that

take place within them entail their own practical understandings, mental activities, and

artifacts (Schatzki 2002). To be skillful in one order does not mean that the actor will also

be skillful in others, especially as the necessary capacities diverge. It should not be

assumed, then, as is often the case in educational reform, that facility in the practice of

collaborative reflection on teaching has a straightforward connection to the practice of

classroom teaching. Being a good colleague is not necessarily the same as being a good

classroom teacher; nor does the capacity of reflecting on one’s own practice necessarily

translate in the practical know-how to improve it.

While practice theory has proven itself very useful for describing the nature of

social contexts in terms of such practice-arrangement bundles, it has had difficulty

providing theoretical accounts for change within them (Feldman and Pentland 2003). The

primary challenge is that most accounts have described the teleology toward which an

activity finds fulfillment as being immanent in a given practice itself (MacIntyre 1981).

In other words, that the logic of practices, their means and ends, are self-contained. If this

were the case, however, then we would expect to see 1) little variation in the performance

of practices and 2) more discontinuous change when new practices are introduced into a

setting. In contrast to this standard perspective, I argue that in order to account for the

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difference in practice enactments across groups, and the stability of those groups even as

their particular practices change, we need to also account for differences in the styles of

engagement through which actor orient to each other and to their shared situation.

The idea that there are particular manners through which the same practices can be

enacted is found in a good deal of literature, though it is not described in the way I am

here. In her work on congregations, for example, Becker found that churches from the

same denomination could have very a different ethos depending on whether they

interacted with a family or community style of organizing (1999). Zilber documented

how therapists and feminists in the same organization enacted the same practice very

differently depending on their sense of the practical problems they were trying to solve

with it (2002). And moreover, Blau showed how there might only be a loose connection

for social workers between their reported personal ideology and their actual behavior as

guided by group styles of work (1960).

The challenge is that, as argued above, extant practice theory has difficulty

linking practical action with trans-situational meanings that would help us make sense of

this type of work (Lounsbury and Crumply 2007). In focusing on the immanent demands

of pragmatic coping, most practice theories have neglected the larger institutional and

historical forces that shape social situations and therefore the logic of action that occurs

within them. Without this perspective, practice theory has missed out on two major

mechanisms for change: the presence of multiple, competing practical logics within the

same organization and the connection of change in practical logic to change at the

institutional level. Here I will argue for the fruitfulness of a conversation between

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practice and institutionalism, specifically work on institutional logics (Friedland and

Alford 1991).

Institutional Logics

An institutional logic is “the way a particular social world works” (Jackall, 1988: 112)

and is embodied in the practices sustained by and reproduced through cultural rules,

norms, and beliefs (Thornton & Ocasio, 2008) and is legitimated through theorization

(Greenwood et al., 2002). While there are numerous definitions of institutional logics,

each emphasizing different features and aspects (e.g., Friedland and Alford 1991; Scott

1995), they all share a core meta-theory: to understand the behavior of individuals and

organizations they must be embedded in their institutional context. At first glance this

claim bears a striking similarity to the practice theoretical imperative that social action

can only be understood as situated practice.

The theories differ, however, in that institutional theory sees practices as unitary

constructs that actors bring across social settings in the form of taken-for-granted

schemas (Scott 1995). In doing so, this work (usually implicitly) draws on Weber’s

notion of the Trager, or the individual as the carrier of practices (1930). One result is that

institutional theory has generally paid little attention to the processes through which

practices are manifest in concrete reality through the co-ordination and mutual orientation

of actors (Barnes 2001). By relying on a Bourdieusian view of habitus as individual

disposition (DiMaggio and Powell 1991), institutional theory unintentionally proposed a

view of action in which individuals are able to jointly carry out practices only because

each has brought into the situation the proper mental script or disposition for doing so. If

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there appears to be coordination between actors, it is only an illusion created by each

individual having the correct habitus for the given situation.

In post-classical practice theory, in contrast, individuals do not carry practices

around in their heads as mental representations. Instead, practices are ‘out there’ in the

ongoing mutual adjustment of actors to each other. Moreover, in practice theory

institutions are social not because people hold cognitive views in common (or follow

some shared script), but rather because institutions configure coexistence among

individuals. Practice theory has its own challenges, however, as discussed above. Perhaps

most importantly, it has difficulty theoretically accounting for the embedding of practices

in larger socio-historical and institutional contexts (Bailey and Barley 2011).

Part of my argument here is that the challenges faced by institutional and practice

theories discussed above actually come from the same source. What both theories share

in common is a view that human action is embedded within a social context that is

somehow composed of a matrix of social ontology (a view of the what the world is like)

and material practice (set of skills and capacities), but given theoretical supremacy to one

over the other. Both perspectives, in their own way, make the same mistake, however, of

assuming that this ontological-material matrix is always tightly coupled and self-

reinforcing (e.g., Mohr and White 2008; Schatzki 2005). For institutional theory, the

“interdependent duality of category and practice is the core of an institutional logic

(Friedland 2009: 906).” For practice theory, ontological understanding is always

dependent on the practice the actor finds him or herself in the middle of.

The downside of this for institutional theory is that a good deal of research

appears to uncritically accept the view that changes in institutional logics can explain

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changes in institutional practices (Kitchener 2002; Ruef 1999; Scott et al 2000; Thornton

and Ocasio 1999). The implication of this that is rarely challenged is that identification

with a logic is tantamount to accepting or even internalizing it. And yet, new institutional

research suggests that this coupling ought to be an empirical question rather than a

definitional assumption. Recent work has demonstrated, for example, that actors can

subscribe to logics without adopting their practices (Fiss and Zajac 2004) and, inversely,

can adopt new practices without accepting the logic that brought them brought them into

the organizational field (Lok 2010). What this amounts to, I argue, is a need to

problematize the relationship between the material and symbolic aspects of logics. What

both institutional and practice theories need, then, is a way to conceptualize the variable

relationship between ontological meaning and practical action and the processes through

which they become coupled (and perhaps uncoupled).

In a generally overlooked section of her seminal paper ‘Culture in Action’ (1986),

Swidler proposed just a scheme in which culture moves over time from explicit ideology

to tacit cultural dispositions. She argued that in moments of organization maintenance

and stasis there is a tight-coupling between actor capacities and organizational practices,

that the two exist in a co-constitute relationship with each other. In ”unsettled” times

marked by organizational change, in contrast, this relationship becomes more variable.

During these latter periods organizations may alter structures, introduce new practices

and even attempt to adopt new ideologies and rhetorics, but these alone are insufficient to

transform actors’ existing habits, skills and capacities, all of which are embodied in

practical rather than deliberative knowledge. Similarly to Bourdieu’s notion of hysteresis

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(1984: 142), this gap between actor skills and institutional structures can lead to

significant social change.

Despite her useful start, and the fact that we still do not know much about the

movement from abstract ideology to tacit background of daily practice (Calhoun 1991

also makes this point), no research agenda congealed around Swidler’s sketch. Within

organizational theory, Scott has perhaps come the closest to conceptualizing a framework

to help us understand this movement, though it requires a bit of repurposing (2008). Scott

differentiates between three kinds of professional institutional actors: developers and

academics who work at a more symbolic level, developing frameworks; carriers like

consultants and educators who spread the institution; and practitioners who implement it

in daily practice.

There is an aspect of creativity, albeit of a different form, inherent in the central

task of each type of institutional agent. Scott’s theory, however, is primarily diachronic

and sketches out the relationship of these different agents at a given point of time within a

mature field. A more fleshed out micro-foundation for institutional theory would push

this type of typology in a more synchronic direction and into a temporal framework. With

such a framework we could begin to flesh out Swidler’s observations and study how

logics are first developed and articulated in the abstract; spread around at the meso-level

through policy and institution building; and then eventually make their way into the

dispositions of practitioners. From such a perspective, the key issue becomes not the

diffusion of institutional logics as tightly-coupled ontological-practical matrices, but

rather the complex and non-linear process through which abstract ideologies, new

practices and existing actor styles, skills and capacities interrelate.

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For this reason I argue that we can imagine placing institutional logics on a

continuum of ‘form-ness’ or ‘completeness’. Those aspects of logics that we now think of

as being taken-for-granted aspect of the social background did not start that way. Rather,

they moved across the continuum over time (as ubiquitous as it is now, for example, for

most of human history the logic of the market was anything but taken-for-granted). Many

logics stall and never make it down the line, being relegated to intellectual fads and

fashions. There is a danger, then, of institutional theory selecting on the dependent

variable when researchers theorize about the emergence and spread of logics, only

studying those for which the ontology-practice matrix has already become tightly

coupled. Inchoate logics, in contrast, can be thought of as an ontology in search of

practices and actors capacities to instantiate them and. This is very much the case, I

would argue, with organizational re-enchantment.

Not only, in contrast, does existing empirical work in institutional theory focus

almost exclusively on the diffusion of mature logics across institutional or organizational

contexts, it does so working within an evolutionary theory that largely mirrors Weber’s

own historical narrative. In many respects neo-institutionalism’s origins can be read as a

macro-level theory about the spread of disenchantment (i.e., rationalization) through the

process of institutional isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). This is evident in the

fact that most of the studies on the diffusion of institutional logics have focused on the

introduction of a managerial logic into a field previously dominated by a professional or

cultural logic (e.g., Scott, Ruef, & Caronna, 2000; Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005;

Thornton, 2002; Townley, 2002).

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It is exactly this approach, however, that has led to the persistent critique of

institutional theory as being unable to explain change or variation. One of the ways

institutional scholars have attempted to rectify this is through work on multiple logics.

This works argues that organizational fields are full of different, contesting, institutional

logics and that particular organizations can be seen as mechanisms for social cooperation

and problem solving in the face of this environment (Mohr and White 2008). This has

opened up a large, and growing, new literature on the strategic reaction of organizations

to multiple logics (Thornton and Ocasio 2008), including the advantages accrued from

the strategic manipulation of logic heterogeneity and multiplicity (Stark 2009; Fligstein

1997). It is within this conflict between logics that change can occur, either through the

purposeful actions of individuals or through non-intentional evolutionary processes

(Thornton, Jones and Kury 2005).

One problem with the literature on multiple logics, however, is that it relies on

altering the original understanding of institutional logics as mutually exclusive and taken-

for-granted systems. This original view of logics was highly compatible with Bourdieu’s

practice-based view of each field having its own unique habitus and ‘feel for the game’

(1990). It is not surprising, therefore, that Bourdieu is so frequently referenced in relation

to developing a micro-foundation for institutional theory (e.g., DiMaggio and Powell

1983; Powell and Colyvas 2008). As institutional theory increasingly embraced issues of

heterogeneity, however, Bourdieu’s particular version of practice theory becomes less

useful. The promise of practice theory as a micro-foundation for institutional theory will

be fulfilled only if we shift attention to the so-called ‘post-classical’ practice theories

(e.g., Rouse 2007, Schatzki 2002, Reiznick 2002). It is within this newer work that we

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are able to see variation and variety within organizations and their situations themselves

because pluralism can be located in the very nature of shared practice. In contrast, for

Bourdieu there is only pluralism if people with different habitus happen to find

themselves in the same situation.

The need, then, is for a way to conceptualize variation and variety within

organizations and their situations. Drawing on the discussions of practice and institutional

theories above, such a conceptualization must take into account three things: 1) it must

help sort out our problematization of the relationship between ontology and practice; 2) it

must help explain the nature of coexistence in organizations in terms of coordinating

practical lines of action and not just shared beliefs or dispositions; and 3) link this

coordination to trans-situational conventions. To this end, I introduce the concept of

organizational way of being below.

Organizational Ways of Being

The aim of this section is to introduce the idea of organizational ways of being as a way

of explicating the nature of co-existence in the school. I conceptualize ways of being as

social conventions that compose differently disposed actors into a common form of

engagement with each other and with their social environment. Such composition are

located not at the level of conscious deliberation, but instead through ongoing practical

coping in the face of shared situations. More than individual dispositions or habitus,

however, ways of being are models of activity that provide actors with some shared

practical understanding of the proper ordering of people and things. Ways of being

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represent, in other words, a level of practical coordination that cannot be explained solely

in terms of either particular practices or individual dispositions.

In this way the concept of ways of being can be related to the shift from the social

movement theory use of ‘frame’ as conscious ideology to a more Goffmanian notion of

‘frame’ as a tacit convention that shaped the nature of being together in a particular social

situation (Diehl and McFarland 2010). In the first perspective, frames are tools of

communicative persuasion, symbolic structures that can be deliberatively manipulated

(McLean 1998; Snow et al 1986). In the second view, in contrast, frames are what

structure the background of action through actors developing a shared sense of being in

the organization in the same way. These alternative perspectives describe the nature of

culture in two different ways – as communicative strategies and as background

conditions. The two views are intimately interrelated, however, in a feedback loop.

Communicative strategies are understandable only in reference to the shared background

conditions. The second moment of communication cannot be understood absent the

‘givenness’ of the first (Luckmann 2008).

And it is with this first moment that I associate the concept of ways of being. Part of

this entails the way in which what might appear at first blush as the idiosyncratic habits

and dispositions of the individual are actually manifestations of the socio-historical

conditions in which they were forged.14 While habit has in recent years come to be

associated with unreflective and repetitive behavior, this has not always been the case

(Camic 1986). For pragmatists like Dewey and phenomenologists like Merleu-Ponty, the

term habit is used in terms of the derivation of its Latin root habere, which means ‘to

14 And it precisely for the confusion of the term that Mauss first began using the term ‘habitus’, preferring it over ‘habit’ because while the latter invokes the individual/idiosyncratic, the former does the same for social/historical (1935/73: 73).

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hold’ or ‘to have.’ That is, in the classical sense habit is a prereflective ability or capacity

to engage with the environment such that it becomes known how to proceed with the task

at hand.

The nature of this coexistence arises, then, not through sharing free-floating

mental frameworks or individual dispositions, but rather the active and ongoing

orchestration of forms of practicality within shared practices. Despite the analytical

distinction, when examining concrete behavior ways of being cannot be separated from

the practices and activities through which they are manifest. They also cannot, however,

be explained by them either. The difference can be seen in the fact that there is no

uniform way of performing a particular practice. By way of example, we can look at

Dorner et al’s study of differences in organizing between Catholic, public and charter

schools (2011). The overall argument of their paper is that depending on the kind of

school they work in, teachers tend to see themselves as either a family with organic ties

or as professionals with mechanistic ties.

The issue is, how do we explain such differences between schools? The answer

cannot be only in terms of practices, because the same practices were generally used

across schools. And it also cannot be explained entirely in terms of individual habitus,

unless we think that the schools have somehow managed to successfully pre-sort teachers

based on dispositions. This is where I argue that the idea of ways of being can be

fruitfully employed. The idea is that part of what gives these schools their particular

identity is the shared manner in which they perform the practices common to them all.

And it is by coordinating interaction through various ways of being that different styles in

organizing in the schools became recognizable not only the teachers, but also to the

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researchers. And moreover, the fact that the researchers could classify these modes of

engagement across schools is further suggestion of the trans-situational nature of ways of

being.

While the Dorner et al work was of course not concerned with ways of being as I

have articulated them here, they do nonetheless seem to suggest that schools have

different styles of engagement (i.e., either organic or mechanistic relations). Like recent

work on institutional logics, however, my supposition here is that within a given social

setting there can be multiple, alternative ways of being that actors can use to orient and

motivate collective behavior. For this reason, actors in modern organizations must

constantly shift between ways of being, both across and within situations. This view

challenges the standard practice perspective that successful behavior in organizations is

made possible by actors possessing a particular kind of undifferentiated individual-level

capacity (e.g., Bourdieu’s habitus and Giddens’ practical consciousness). Instead, I argue

here that organizations are composed through different ways of being, and that as actors

move across them they must constantly shift the nature of their practical intelligence.

The Art of Composition

This idea that there are multiple ways of being in the school around which action can be

oriented means moving past standard descriptive account of social action in practice

theory. Rather than practices being carried out in uniform ways, this perspective suggests

that there can be tensions between actors if they utilize different ways of being to carry

out the same activity (e.g., I think this lunch is a business meeting, you think it is for

pleasure). Such divergences between ways of being often do not reach the consciousness

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of those involved and instead are felt as tensions that might be articulated as frustrations

or action impediments. Such unarticulated tensions are almost always present in

institutional settings, especially in those like schools that exist at the intersection of many

different institutional logics (Scott 1987).

An important implication of this multiplicity is that a significant aspect of the job

of the teacher is to delicately and skillfully engage in what Thevenot calls the “art of

composition (2010: 25).” This term refers here to the integration of different ways of

being into common practices without letting any one particular one dominate. This can be

seen in the fine line many teachers try to walk with students in being friendly, but not too

friendly. More small school reform specific, there is a fundamental tension in the reform

between the effort to change the ways that teachers and students are in the school such

that they engage with the environment as a place of uncertainty and incompleteness in

order to foster innovation and creativity while at the same time making it familiar,

welcoming and safe in order to create community and personalization.

This ‘art of composition’ is fundamental not only for the success of teaching and

of school reform, it is also a key skill for living together in a democratic community. A

good deal of work has described the central task of modern institutions as the weaving of

diversely attached actors and variably disposed actors into shared projects (which might

just be mutual support of individual projects) (Calhoun 1991; Laclau and Mouff 1985;

Taylor 1995; Touraine 2002). We often think about this in terms of the composition of

different beliefs or cultural systems, but just as, if not more important, is the composition

of variable disposition, skill, habits and repertoires of action into shared ways of being.

And this is precisely the great challenge of teaching in the modern cosmopolitan world.

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That challenge is not the composition of students in terms of various thought systems, but

rather in terms of the different practical stances and orientations they bring with them into

the school.

Dimensions of Ways of Being

To make modes of co-ordination easier to operationalize for research, I highlight two

dimensions that I use in the context of my study of small school reform at Mill Town

High. These two dimensions (and their sub-components) were derived from an iterative

process that involved ongoing discourse between extant literature, theory, and iterative

grounded coding of my own research.

Dimension 1: Ways of Being at Work - Styles of Engagement

The first dimension of organizational ways of being that I look at entails the way that

actors grasp and respond to their organizational environment. These styles of engagement

shape the way that actors experience their social situation and the nature of the activities

performed within it. There are three aspects of framings that styles of engagement entail.

1) Framing social environment/situation: This is what the environment is conceived of

being like (e.g., a rational order; a familiar commonplace); 2) Model of practical

intelligence: The is entails the ends toward which the teleology of practices point (e.g.,

fulfilling plans; fostering excitement; engendering bonds); 3) Model of ideal actor: This

pertains to what sort of personal qualities are experienced as appropriate and legitimate

within a given context.

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Dimension 2: Ways of Being Together - Styles of Coordination

The second major dimension of organizational ways of being relates to the different

modes of coordination, or conventional stances around which people forge their sense of

commonality or common focus. People live in social relationships, and this dimension

pertains to how actors adjust to the world in light of particular styles of communality.

There are three different components of this dimension of styles of coordination: 1)

Common focus: The nature of the shared project of the organization or group; what is the

problem trying to be solved, the overarching project that is to be accomplished; 2)

Composition: Practical sense of how people fit together in moment-to-moment

interaction. Roles and responsibilities and how they dictate flow of ongoing adaptations

and adjustments; 3) Relational models: This entails the range of legitimate and

appropriate interpersonal interaction (e.g., the amount of warmth shown another depends

on the style of coordination through which actors orient toward each other).

Major Ways of Being

Based on the same iterative process discussed above, I also derived a typology of the

three ways of being that most shaped action within the reform. Throughout the

dissertation I will look at three major ways of being and how teachers dealt with them,

experienced the tension between them, and attempted to compose action across them.

By way of brief introduction, the major ways of being I will look at are: 1) The

professional-bureaucratic way of being, which is the dominant one within most schools

and is the closest to what we might call a Bourdieusian professional habitus (2000). The

nature of engagement is shaped by the fulfillment of obligations and duties associated

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with roles and coordination is shaped through shared membership in profession of

teaching. 2) Second is what I call the communitarian way of being. In terms of orienting

toward practice, the nature of engagement seeks the comfort (confidence) and “sense of

ease” found in being in familiar settings (Boltanski and Thevenot 1991). The

organization or school is like a community, where relationships are personalized,

idiosyncratic and based on caring – a state which allows the individual a sense of ease to

be their unique and true self. And finally, 3) is the re-enchanted way of being, where the

primary stance toward the environment is one of exploration. Coordination is shaped

through shared experience of playful and aestheticized interaction and is carefully

guarded from become routinized and stagnant. It is this mode of practical action that the

reform design aims to inculcate in the school. A concise summary of these three

categories can be seen in Table 1. below.

Table 5. Summary of Major Ways of Being Professional-Bureaucratic Communitarian Re-enchantment

Style of Engagement School as site of methods and civic association

School as familiar and shared surroundings

School as site of exploration and risk

Style of Coordination Shared membership in profession

Shared loyalty to commonplace of the school

Interdependent collaboration in pursuit of shared vision

This typology is not meant to be an exhaustive one, but rather represents what I found to

be the most important styles of engagement at MHS. The professional-bureaucratic way

of being is, as argued above, the one most closely associated with what we might call a

professional habitus and therefore had to be included as the dominant style through which

others are experienced. Conversely, the re-enchanted way of being represents the ideal

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style of engagement that the reform attempts to foster. Finally, while the communitarian

way of being represents neither the actual nor ideal style of action, it is associated with

most people’s general practical sense of what it means to be in a community. That is,

once the structures of MHS opened up and allowed for more varying kinds of interaction,

this way of being shaped a good deal of teachers’ practical sense of community-building.

Revisiting Organizational Ethos

Having explicated issues of organizational practices and ways of being, we can now

return to our initial discussion of small school reform as an attempt to transform school

ethos. I posited earlier that changes in organizational practices do not directly lead to a

transformation of organizational ethos. We know that actors can adopt new beliefs (Fiss

and Zajac 2004), take up new practices (Lok 2010), and be subject to new regulations

(Meyer and Rowan 1977) without substantial change to their practical lines of action.

What is needed, I argue, is an account that conceptualizes how the dispositions of actors

(via social conventions in terms of ways of being) and dispositions of situations (via

social practices) interrelate to give rise to organizational ethos.

Changing organizational ethos can now be seen not just as changing beliefs or

introducing new structures or practices, but also as reorganizing actors’ relationship with

reality by shifting the axes around which they interact with the world and with each other.

Before moving forward, however, an important distinction needs to be made first. In

cultural sociology a difference is drawn between the organically developed culture of a

group, community or organization on the one hand, and its ideology as an abstractly

constructed, and often publicly codified, system of beliefs and practices on the other. In

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these terms, cultural change is often conceptualized as an effort by outside actors to

replace a local culture with a different ideology (which, if successful eventually itself

becomes taken-for-granted culture). A similar distinction needs to be made here.

As mentioned above, I see Small School Reform as primarily and effort to change

organizational ethos, and so we need to differentiate between ethos as the sub-cognitive,

experiential ways in which actors collectively inhabit an organization versus ethos as an

aspirational identity laid out in formal documents and plans. Some research takes as its

focus the tensions created by differences in experienced and aspirational ethos (e.g.,

Donnelly 2000).

The problem with such work, however, is that it locates the primary tensions of

reform at the cognitive level between aspirational ideas and experiential practices. In

contrast, tensions can also be located at a sub-cognitive level within different styles of

practical action. I argue here that the tensions that impact moment-to-moment

organizational life in reform are best defined not as ideal or theoretical versus practical,

but rather between different models of practical action, different conventions about what

the sensible/practical thing to do is at a given moment.

Once we make this conceptual move and see the school culture to be in terms of

its ethos, as its experiential character being grounded interrelation of its practices and

ways of being, we start to see why it is so hard to purposefully change. New ways of

being are not just adopted or internalized; they are only manifest in concrete practices and

must be compromised with other, existing, ways of doing things. Reform adds new

practices and structures to the organization, both of which come equipped with new

interactional affordances as well as expectations and ideologies concerning their use.

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They are meant to foster new ways of being, but they are inevitably enacted and

understood through the existing pool of practical action. Changing school ethos means

not just changing teachers‘ minds about what they should be doing, but somehow getting

them to consistently act in ways perceived as non-sensible.

Change as New Expressions of Existing Ways of Being

Contrary to the framework presented above, contemporary work on school reform

increasingly sees the major barriers to change as being located in the minds of teachers

and administrators. Housed there are the tacit and taken-for-granted beliefs and attitudes

that prevent desired change. In this increasingly standard account, changing organizations

amounts to changing the minds of the organizational actors within them. Here the

primary mechanism for creating effective schools can be seen as liberated teachers from

their own detrimental thought processes, be they conservative, individualistic or

presentist (Lortie 1975). Such accounts are, however, based on problematic assumptions

about the relationship between beliefs and practices, namely that mental structures of

knowledge are ‘inward’ causes or conditions of ‘outward’ human behavior.

This standard work that sees the mind is seen as a unique ontological realm that

houses a range of activities and attributes that stand in some causal relation with

behaviors in the world (Schatzki 1996: 22). The implication is that if the ‘deep’, tacit

beliefs of teachers (located in the place of the mind) can be changed, it will lead to

concomitant changes in their behaviors. In other words, actors are equivalent to their

minds, and their minds are causally connected to their bodily doings. The goal of reform,

then, is to place new (generally less conservative) activities and attributes into that space.

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Here cultural categories of the mind become the primary unit of analysis, and from a

reform perspective become the thing that needs to change in order for reform to occur.

Research questions about this process are generally undergirded by assumption that the

goal of reform(ers) is fidelity to the intention of policy designers. The project becomes

framed in terms of understanding and to convey messages to targets clearly and without

bias (e.g., Desimone 2002).

In contrast, I will try and show throughout this dissertation that part of the failure

of the conversion at MHS was not about failing to convince teachers of the reforms

validity, but rather about the complexity of changing culturally disposed, and

intersubjectively sustained, ways of being in the organization. Only by adopting such a

framework, I will show, can we more satisfactorily answer the question of ‘‘why is it so

hard to change organization even when people agree the status quo is not working?’

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Chapter 5: Major Practices and Ways of Being

As already discussed, the creation of Teacher Professional Community (TPC) is

considered one of the ‘twin pillars’ of small schools reform (Quint 2006). Advocating the

importance of teacher collegiality is unique to neither small schools nor efforts at re-

enchantment. The past thirty years have witnessed a sustained effort by practitioners and

scholars to promote staff collaboration as a primary vehicle for improving teaching and

student learning. In fact, the promotion of collaboration has become such a ubiquitous

aspect of school improvement efforts that it seems to have secured a place in reform

orthodoxy (Hargreaves 1994).

And indeed it is the case that an impressive body of research literature exists

demonstrating positive links between teacher collaboration and a whole host of desirable

school outcomes, including: higher expectations for student achievement (Bryk and

Driscoll 1988); fostering a positive sense of teacher self-efficacy (Shachar and

Schmuelevitz 1997); pedagogical risk taking (Bryk and Schneider 2002); shared

commitment to organizational goals (Kruse 2001); lessening educational inequalities

(Bryk et al 1999); and higher achievement in core content areas (Newmann and Wehlage

1995).

While there are numerous conceptualizations of TPCs, most definitions include a

combination of formal-structural and informal-normative features (Bryk et al 1999). The

reason for this is that work on TPCs had its genesis in an effort to marry together two

previously distinct streams of educational literature (Kruse, Louis and Bryk 1995). The

first was work on formal-structural aspects of schools that identified teacher isolation as a

major barrier to school improvement (Lortie 1975). This, literature focused on structures,

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processes and practices that might better facilitate collective and continuous learning

among teachers (Marks and Louis 1999). In relation to the specifics of this manuscript,

re-enchantment efforts are tied to the belief that the skills necessary for dealing with the

growing complexity of teaching can only be achieved through structural changes that de-

privatize practice in order to facilitate the sharing and observation of practice (Little

1990) and to foster reflective and reflexive dialogue that allows for collective

examination of the assumptions of their practice (Newmann 1991).

The second stream of literature tied together by TPC theory is related, yet distinct,

work on teacher interaction that looks at the informal-normative aspects of professional

community and highlights the school as a social-psychological setting. Drawing on

philosophical and sociological theories of communities (Tonnies 2002; Dewey 2001)

work here focuses on the role of shared norms and beliefs (McLaughlin and Talbert

2001) as well as the psychological affects of support, caring and collegiality (Goddard,

Hoy and Woolfolk 2001). Within the current literature on TPCs the relationship between

the formal-structural and the informal-normative features of schools has become a

primary area of theory and research (Bryk et al 1999)

But this new synthetic strand of work has problematically left day-to-day staff

interactions as a black-box. The result is that, even for all the ink spilled on the subject,

we still do not know much about the actual inner-dynamics of TPCs. In terms of the

vocabulary being used here, there is some sense that collegiality and shared values

somehow transforms the ethos of the staff such that innovation, creativity and new

practices result. And yet there is little we can say about the interactional mechanisms that

bring about or hinder this vision (Horn and Little 2009). To understand the interactional

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implications of TPC means shifting focus away from mental representations and toward

the different ways of being, the cognitive social conventions, through which teachers

experience reform and coordinate and act within it.

Re-Enchantment and Teacher Professional Community

Creativity and innovation is at the core of recent scholarship on organizational learning

and community. This work argues that fostering creativity is a requisite for coping with

an increasingly unpredictable social environment (DiFillipo et al 2007). Traditionally, the

term has been associated with a Romantic ideal of creativity as the product of the

irrational, ineffable internal wellspring of the individual genius (Gibson 2005). The

contemporary discourse on creativity, in contrast, draws upon a different conception. This

work sees creativity not only as ubiquitous and open to all actors, but also as something

that can be purposefully cultivated through proper structures and networks (Perry-Smith

and Shalley 2003; Rhoten et al 2009). Unlike earlier Romantic notions of creativity, the,

many contemporary theorists argue that a marriage of imagination and reason can be

facilitated by creating the right kind of environment, by systematically bringing together

the right ingredients. This conceptualization is one that I equated earlier with modern

organizational re-enchantment.

The issue of how organizations structure interaction in order to facilitate creativity

and innovation is becoming a central one to the study of creative and knowledge

industries (Zhou and Shalley 2003). Much work in this area examines the relationship

between managers and ‘creatives’, and how they negotiate their potentially divergent

interests and values (Drazin et al 1999). Another way to put this would be that, as the

sense that innovation is key for organizational success grows, so too does work about

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how to institutionalize it. In contrast to this growing body of literature, however,

educational theory about TPCs has tended to be less sophisticated in trying to document

and understand the actual collaborative mechanisms that lead to team innovation. Rather,

educational design work seems to assume that if given the proper time and space that

teachers will know how to innovate. Such an approach glosses the importance of

acquiring and possessing particular skills and dispositions related to team creativity

(Pirola-Merlo and Mann 2004).

There is another paradox when, as is the case with small schools and TPCs,

creativity is tied to some notion of community. Westheimer notes that many of the

reformers seek to turn schools into communities through restructuring, but that their

definition of community remains vague and murky (1998). He further points out that

much of the organizational reform literature rests on the assumptions that teachers and

administrators know how to turn organizational potential into communal relationships,

and that teachers seek such communities. This view parallels the one described above in

relation to creativity, in which proper skills and dispositions are assumed if only given

the opportunity to exercise them.

The argument, in both cases then, is that limited resources (e.g., time, money,

people) make both innovation and community difficult in traditional high-schools. By

providing autonomy to small schools, common planning time for teachers, and

democratic governance structures, schools can leverage local professional knowledge for

significant change (French et al 2007). The problem, as I will show below, is that this

view does not account for the interrelation of organizational practices and ways of being,

which together shape the nature of teacher practical intelligence.

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Major Practices of Teacher Professional Communities

In this section I identity three broad classes of collegial practices that together constitute

this re-enchanted vision of TPCs at Mill Town High: informal interaction; formal team

collaboration; and small school based professional development and governance. All

three of these practices are part of an integrated effort to provide teachers with more time

to collaborate, a condition seen in the reform literature as a key requisite for improved

teaching (Miles and Darling-Hammond 1998). Collectively, they are seen as potentially

fostering improvement through the creation of a common vision, ongoing discourse about

teaching, collective decision making and collaborative goal setting.

The importance of creating a TPC was a central, and codified, part of MHS’ plan

for change. This can be seen in the general vision laid out in MHS‘ application for a

Department of Education grant for Small Learning Communities (emphasis included):

Likewise, a Professional Culture that is highly collaborative, embedded, and researched based, and that is supported by sufficient time, structures and practices, is very much emerging to promote and sustain new teaching and learning practices over the longer term. Supporting and focusing individual and group professional development are also Assessment systems at the school and teacher level. These assessment systems are tracking performance against goals and ensuring alignment between school goals and individual teacher goals. A process of Research and Renewal, whereby school-level, teacher team, and individual teacher goals and strategies are data driven, is now beginning to be emphasized, as data becomes available at the school level… But as each school is in effect serving as a laboratory for new practices, there is increasing recognition of the value in sharing different strategies and experiences (e.g. around CPT, advisories, differentiated instruction, assessment, classroom visitations, etc.) that are emerging across the schools.

Important is that laid out here, as throughout all the official MHS documents, is a very

specific vision of the kind of professional community the school aimed to create (a vision

largely adopted from CES). Central to this vision is the idea of building a culture of adult

learners (French et al 2007). To that end the TPCs are described as ‘laboratories’ in

which teachers experiment with new practices that can be later shared with other schools.

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Each of the particular practices I will discuss below where ideally both tools for, and

objects of, that experimentation. And as I will argue, how these practices-as-tools were

used and for what ends was partly dependent on the way of being that shaped interaction.

I turn now to a brief description of each of those three major practices.

Practice 1: Informal Interaction

First, a significant rationale for the particular structural changes at MHS was to provide

more opportunity for informal interaction between teachers. Increase in both the volume

and quality of informal interaction is seen as key mechanism of change in the small

school reform literature, but the path through which this occurs remains unclear. More

specifically, there are four different mechanisms that have been suggested in the literature

linking informal interaction and improved outcomes. The first is that informal interaction

helps generate trust among teachers, which in turns engenders better teaching through

increased commitment, risk-taking and sense of efficacy (Goddard, Hoy and Hoy 2000).

The second mechanism is that informal interaction improves the flow of

information, thus aiding the diffusion of best practices and new technologies (Frank,

Zhao and Borman 2004). Third, some literature sees the benefit in terms of the fostering

and enforcement of a common vision and shared agenda through informal social control

(Shapiro 1987). Finally, there is research that suggests that collaboration enables teachers

to pool talents and resources such that the sum is greater than its parts (French et al

2007). Despite the rhetorical significance of increased informality among the teaching

staff, far less research has been done here compared to the two other major TPC practices

(i.e., collaborative teams and small school meetings).

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The strategy for increasing informal interaction at MHS was two-fold: first, by

increasing out-of-classroom time for teachers and second, by creating new teacher

lounges to serve as a locus of small school community. Together, these two changes were

undertaken in order to create more time and space for informal interaction. The goal was

to create the conditions for discussions about students, curriculum and small school

governance. While not formally counted as professional development time, the logic of

the reform did nonetheless see the fostering of such informal conversation as a form of

embedded learning for teachers.

One aspect of informal interaction in reform in which research has been done deals

with the nature and impact of teacher-coach relations. There is evidence that informal

relations with outside reform coaches are more effective than formal ones. That is, reform

implementation is more successful when teachers can call for support as problems arise,

rather than at prescheduled times. Elmore and McLaughlin refer to this as the difference

between ‘user-oriented’ or ‘innovation-oriented’ strategies (1988: 76). This type of

preference for user-oriented styles has typically been described in terms of teacher

conservatism and individualism (Lortie 1975), but I will I argue later that this preference

can also be understood as sensible and practical given the nature of the dominant way of

being through which teachers inhabit the school.

Practice 2: Formal Teacher Groups

And so while some changes were designed to broadly increase informal interaction, there

were also formal structures put into place in order to develop more formal forms of

teacher collaboration. The two major components of formal collaboration were Common

Planning Time and Critical Friends Groups. First, Common Planning Time (CPT)

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referred to the small teacher groups who shared common preparation time in the

schedule. CPT was the more informal of the two and there was little administrative

oversight of what actually transpired within it, though teachers did have to choose from a

very broad menu of activities and log their time together. Overall, during the six-day

rotating schedule, teachers met for four 73 minute periods with their CPT groups.

Critical Friends Groups (CFGs), in contrast, were more formalized study groups

that examined teacher and students work and that met twice a month. The aim of CFGs is

to foster teachers’ engagement in instructional improvement and whole school reform. In

this model, student achievement is raised through the efforts of ongoing collegial

conversations about teaching and learning (French et al 2007). A handful of teachers

were trained to lead CFG groups, but the school largely had to rely on headmasters (three

of whom were trained) and the outside coaches to play this role. Interaction in the CFGs

was shaped by the use of ‘protocols,’ which were highly formalized conventions that

dictated the topic and structure of discourse. The rationale was that protocols could

facilitate deep reflection by strategically dictating the topic and nature of conversation.

One of the guiding assumptions of the CFG model is that school cannot become an

intellectually engaging place for students until it is the same for teachers. This view

resonates with re-enchantment because it sees teachers not as technicians implementing

an external reform, but rather scientists engaging in an ongoing and collective process of

inquiry, action and reflection. In such a process it is not only the means, but also the ends

of teaching that are under constant reformation. The use of Critical Friends, an especially

popular in practice in the Coalition of Essential Schools network, reflects this

understanding:

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In their efforts to surface…questions and concerns, to help teachers expose their classroom practice to other teachers and educators, and to enable teachers to learn from constructive criticism…the point is to ask increasingly more powerful and revealing questions (Lord 1994).

While CFGs are popular in certain progressive educational reform models, they can be

found in only 2% of American schools (Curry 2008). As Wilson and Berne (1999) point

out, we know as little about what teachers learn in forums like CFGs as we do about what

they learn in traditional staff-development and in-service. In addition, we also do not

know much about the particular set of skills and dispositions related to effective

participation in teacher collaborative teams that are required to make CFG groups a

success. The challenge with CFGs is that, like any practice, how it is performed is highly

dependent on how the participants experience their environment, including their framing

of the nature of the practical problems to be solved in the school. Later in this chapter I

will look at the different ways teachers experienced their CFG and CPT groups as a way

of understanding not only their conscious attitudes and beliefs about the reform, but also

their underlying practical orientations toward it.

Practice 3:Small School Professional Development and Governance

Finally, formal professional development and administrative governance was largely

pushed into the small schools. The result was that decision-making about both curriculum

and instruction as well as administration was decentralized to the small school staff. Both

were part of the effort to localize development and give teachers more autonomy and

control over both their personal professional development as well as the direction of their

small school.

The rationale for moving professional development to the small schools was that it

gave teachers more control over deciding its direction. In collaborative consultation

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teachers could decide in which areas they wanted, as a staff, to receive professional

development. Moving this to the small schools also allowed form more collaboration

among teachers, and more ongoing conversations and assistance among small school

staff. Ideally, all this would aid in professional development being woven through the

school and not treated, as it so often is, as a series of one-off experiences. There was

some dissatisfaction with professional development happening mostly in small schools,

especially for those teachers with the strongest disciplinary identities. Katherine, a School

2 math teacher, had a view that was representative of this.

All of our professional development days have been in small schools, which I guess the professional development we had there was useful in terms of classroom practices, but to me math is a whole other animal than all the other subjects. I need someone specifically for math to teach me how to teach in the longer block. Cause you know in English, you can say ‘read this section and then we’ll go over it,’ and that takes some time, but in math I can’t say ‘read this chapter and then we’ll go over it.’ The kids won’t know what they’re reading (Interview, June 9 2006).

Overall, the view of the benefits of professional community presented by reformers was

not generally reflected in the views of teachers. Generally, the aspects of TPCs the

teachers most frequently reported enjoying where those that gave them room or ability to

deploy existing dispositions. That is, allowed them to most effectively fulfill their job as

they presently understood it. For instance, when asked about positive professional

development experiences in the past, several teachers very enthusiastically mentioned the

same speaker, someone who had come to the schools several years earlier. Sheila,

describing the training:

We had this lady that came in from Harvard one time who was amazing, and we wanted her back. We begged to have her back. Because you kinda stop and go, “Wow, she’s giving us so much”...There are people in our department who shall remain nameless who hate everything and they were like, “Wow,” I mean wanted her back. Like you’ve never seen it. You’re like, “Wow, this is great.” But she just gave you stuff that you could use in your classroom (Interview, June 14 2006).

Along with being given more control over professional development, teachers were also

given more authority over the administration of their school. Each small school created

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its own governance structures such that teachers (along with other stakeholders and

students) could collaboratively consult on major plans and projects. In the theory of the

reform such shared leadership has two major benefits. First, it benefits students because it

brings teachers’ local knowledge of students into school decision making, and second

because it increases teacher (and other stakeholder) commitment and investment to the

school. As with all the TPC practices discussed here, successful collaborative governance

entails a set of skills and capacities that differ from those a teacher needs to run a

classroom. For this reason, the small schools spent a good amount of time during the year

struggling to figure out how to make decisions together.

Major Ways of Being

These collaborative practices were the main contexts within which teachers experienced

and enacted professional communities in the small schools. Their purpose was to

establish opportunities for teachers to discuss their practice and the reform on a sustained

basis as part of a systematic endeavor of continuous learning. But as social contexts,

these collaborative practices were polysemous in that each could be experienced and

framed in different ways. As argued earlier, the way different practices and structures

were experienced was not, however, idiosyncratic. Rather they were grounded in trans-

situational social conventions or ways of being. Below I will briefly look at the three

major ways of being that shaped teacher experience and action in relation the major

practices of TPCs already discussed.

Professional-Bureaucratic Way of Being

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With this way of being professional community is experienced as a gathering place for

independent professionals to come together to support each other in their own,

specialized, endeavors. Roles are central to this organizational style and it is through the

fulfillment of their obligations and duties that organizational activity is propelled forward

through time. Importantly, this is the most standard way of being in schools, the one that

fosters the ethos that makes a particular institution recognizable as a ‘real school’ (Metz

1978). A major part of the argument I am putting forward in this manuscript is that not

only is this way of being the one the reform is attempting to supplant, it is also through

this way of being that teachers practically coped with such efforts at change.

Style of Engagement

The first dimension of the professional-bureaucratic way of being I will discuss is its style

of engagement. Here the environment is experienced as a social space within which

rational plans are formulated and executed. As such, this style of engagement is

connected to situated coping with problems and plans in the here-and-now. Teachers

experience themselves as planning agents whose job it is to form and carry out academic

activities (i.e., to deliver disciplinary content to students). School is thus a place where

professionals carry out their work and support each other doing so. In general, this is the

default tacit framing of the organizational situation, and as such attempts to frame in

other ways may result in mismatches with teacher practical intelligence.

This is a very structured style of engagement, one that renders insensible or

impractical any action that lacks rational consistency or fails to obey objective rules. For

many teachers there was a direct link between unstructured processes and unproductive

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outcomes. Below, Helen, a 12th grade English teacher in School 1, describes why she felt

like her Common Planning Time group was successful:

We had a purpose. And if you don’t, I mean it’s very nice to have common planning time, and it was beginning of the year I was talking to Charles DePhillip and he was explaining his course to me, and what they cover, which was nice because when I’m in here with the seniors I can say ‘now I know in Mr. DePhillip’s class you talked about this.’ But I think if you don’t really have stuff in common, then it’s of limited value. I think people used it as another prep, which is invaluable, that’s invaluable. I have more time to prep to teach, so that was helpful (Interview, June 11).

The important thing to note here is that Helen links the success of collaboration with

having a concrete purpose that teachers can aid each other in achieving. Short of that, she

finds virtue in the fact that her group was flexible enough that it would allow her extra

preparation time. In both cases, the measure of success is how directly collaboration (or

related structures) can be transformed into improved planning and execution of her

classroom lessons.

As I will discuss in sections below, administrators and coaches pushed throughout

the year for a different type of engagement with collaboration, but teachers generally

found alternatives to be impractical. For example, in a workshop in School 2 during the

summer before implementation, reform coaches solicited teacher feedback by asking:

‘What can/should we as facilitators consider as we consider the agenda for tomorrow and

beyond that will help maximize the learning and growth you do here this week?’ The

responses were generally about ensuring that the work stayed practical, but I especially

want to point out that lack of practicality seemed to elicit feelings of unease.

‘Need to have more focus/direction to getting our ducks in a row. Telling us that we will be getting to an issue does not make it suddenly go away for many – it also increases the tension and anxiety surrounding it.’ ‘Continue to allow us time to work on topics and issues that are affecting us now as we try to organize our small school.’ ‘Looks like we’re moving it in the right direction – keep it practical to what we use and show us how to apply it.’ ‘Can we have some more specific ideas as to how our common planning time should be spend (aside from CFGs).

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When the teachers explicitly request that professional development be practical, they are

contrasting it with an abstract or theoretical type of engagement that they want to avoid.

My point here, however, is that real contrast is with a different style of practicality: the

practical teleology of the professional-bureaucratic way of being concerns improving

effectiveness. From within other styles discussions about shared ends could meet criteria

of practical activity, but here only discussions about shared means fits that criteria. When

teachers experience particular lines of action as being impractical from within this mode

of engagement it does not necessarily mean they are conservative in their beliefs, but are

behaving sensibly from a particular way of being.

Moreover, while the concept of ‘trust’ has received a good deal of interest in the

reform literature (Tschannen-Moran, Hoy and Hoy 1998), its meaning can be

problematized from this perspective. Here I posit that trust can be understood differently

depending on the way of being coordinating activity. Trust facilitates interaction, but in

the tone of whatever style is being engaged with. Here it is not personal, but rather

professional trust that is important. That is, the sense that teachers are all professionals

and the meaning of trust is in knowing that others will fulfill the duties and obligations of

their formal role. From this perspective Hellen, reports feeling as if the reform’s focus on

team-building and the creation of personal trust was at odds with her sense of herself as a

professional.

Yeah, I think so much of our professional development was devoted to this transition to small schools and team-building, team-building, team-building. I won’t say there wasn’t value in it because there was. I mean even after working here for ten years I got put in a group with people I did not know well. So it did, it increased your amiability with them, your comfort level, but we’re all professionals, enough, we adapt, we can work together, now lets do something. There was too much team-building, there was too much protocol, protocol, protocol (Interview, June 11 2006).

And in fact, a good deal of the time when teachers reported feeling insulted or

disrespected it was not because of anything directed at them personally. Rather it came

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from what was perceived by the teachers as a questioning of their integrity, competence,

and conscientiousness, all of which are central aspects of their professional identity.

Shelley, a social studies teacher in School 4, discussed professional trust in just this way:

I have not heard anyone say, “Well,” you know, “Let’s set up this time when we’re supposed to have a meeting, and we’ll really just go to Dunkin’ Donuts.” You know…whatever. (Laughs) I don’t know anyone who would do that. I think there’s a certain point where you have to trust in people’s professionalism (Interview, June 14 2006).

This style of engagement is also deeply grounded in teachers’ disciplinary identities. As

such, positive experiences with TPCs were typically reported when they aided in the

fulfillment of teachers’ already ongoing practical lines of action, and when they presented

opportunities to deploy existing dispositions and skills. The value of TPCs, in other

words, was most clearly felt when teachers experienced it as facilitating what they

perceived to be, from within this way of being, the sensible actions of a professional.

Style of Coordination

The common focus that coordinates action here is shared membership in the profession of

teaching. This membership entails expectations about the duties and obligations of being

a teacher. Included here is a practical sense of the appropriate way to help out other

teachers, namely through the sharing of materials and tips while being sure to maintain

and respect the professional autonomy of the other. At MHS teachers generally reported

enjoying increased interaction with other teachers, but not all types of interaction lead to

desired outcomes. This depends partly on the way of being that coordinates interaction,

and here beneficial interaction occurred when it was grounded in shared membership in a

discipline. Katherine alluded to this in telling a story about a new teacher:

…one of the new teachers, Melony, who works in School A…doesn’t really know a lot of people in the department. I sought her out because she was teaching the same subject as me, and so I sought her out, we have two subjects together, to work together. But she doesn’t know a lot of people in the department and that never happened before, because the department used to meet so

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much and those are really the people you need to know, those are the people who are going to pass things along to you. I mean, the English department isn’t going to give her stuff or her classes (Interview June 9, 2006).

Katherine developed several close friendships with non-math teachers in her small school

so it is not the case that she only saw intra-disciplinary relationships worthwhile. But she

was not alone in feeling like that intra-disciplinary relations were the ones that formed the

proper basis for professional community. Here community primarily becomes a

pragmatic meeting point between people in the same structural position in the school

(that is, teaching the same classes in same discipline). Here is Katherine again, discussing

the problem with inter-disciplinary groups:

I would much rather meet with teachers who are teaching the same subject as me, because that way I can really improve my teaching in those classes because I have more people to bounce things off who know what I’m talking about. I know when Sheila told me, we did this project in advanced math last year, and we’ve been doing the past couple of years, and during her CPT she brought it and nobody knew what she was talking about. She was like ‘they can’t help me,’ because the project just bombed in both of our classes and we’re like, okay how can we improve it, so she brought it to her CPT and they were like ‘okay, we have no idea what you’re talking about’ [laughs] (Interview, June 9 2006).

A major undertaking throughout the year for administrators and coaches was convincing

teachers that productive collaboration could be inter-disciplinary. The following excerpt

is from a memo Patricia, the headmaster of School 4, sent to her staff at the end of their

first year as a small school. After hearing a good deal of concern from her teachers,

Patricia changed course with the composition of her CFGs:

Many of you have spoken to me about your need to collaborate next year with members of your own discipline. I agree. I take responsibility for the schedule as it was designed this year. It was done so in the knowledge that we can all learn from each other. From some of the feedback that you have given me on what happened in your CFGs, I still believe this to be true. However, I also understand that collaborating with members of your own discipline will yield richer lessons, assignments, and assessments. Working with [the VP], I will make every effort to group each person with others who teach the same or similar classes.

It was not completely the case, however, that teachers were unable to use this style of

commonality to coordinate across disciplines. Successfully doing so entailed not seeing

the common focus as the individual student (as with communitarian style), or

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interdisciplinary skills or dispositions (as with the re-enchantment style), but instead the

overlaps in disciplinary projects. This meant teachers maintaining their specialist identity

and look for ways to interlock them in shared projects. Such collaboration might mean,

for example, collaborating on the use of English skills across disciplines or the presence

of math in some science classes. Teachers often looked for linkages across disciplines in

ways that seemed practical from within the professional-bureaucratic way of being. The

following excerpt is from a School 2 staff meeting where they had broken into

disciplinary groups to discuss aligning small school curriculum.

Carry then spoke for the science group and reported that they had spoken about standardizing a lab format so that students would see the same from throughout the whole school. They also spoke about scaffolding the lab so ‘exceeds expectations’ at one grade would then become ‘meets expectations’ at the next. The teachers seem to like this...Katherine says that she’d like a copy of the lab when they finish, since her senior math class does a science lab in one of their write-ups. David tries, but never quite articulates, that this kind of scaffolding could be done in math as well. Rachel says that as the work goes on the school will begin to construct its own verbiage, which is very powerful. The group claps and clearly has liked what the science group has done (Field notes, Professional Development Day, March 22 2006).

There are two important aspects of the primary relational model between teachers in the

professional-bureaucratic style of organizing. First, as alluded to above, they are

purposeful. That is, proper relations among adults are to aid in the purposive enactment

of tasks and projects. There is no harm in teachers engaging in personal and informal

relations, but these are always supplementary rather than primary for the professional

community. This means clear boundaries between personal and professional identities.

One implication of this is that there is often a tacit agreement among teachers as to what

sort of sharing is permissible.

Reform literature has generally discussed this in terms of conservatism and teacher

efforts to maintain individualistic approaches to teaching. Barbour, for instance, describes

the tendency for discussion to be more pragmatic than personal as a way for teachers “to

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comply with the requirement [of collaboration] whilst retaining some measure of self-

protection (1985: 512).” My point here, in contrast, is that when operating within this

organizational way of being avoiding personal aspects of conversation is the sensible and

practical thing to do because personal discussions will not help bring the fulfillment of

shared or individual plans.

The second important feature of relational models is that interaction is grounded in

the formal roles of the organization, including the rules of hierarchy and seniority built

both formally and informally into the teaching profession. In normal circumstances early

career teachers would be expected to pay their dues before questioning veteran teachers.

The following is an excerpt from a conversation two veteran School 2 teachers had in

their small school lounge about their feelings concerning the behavior of several of the

school’s first year teachers:

Sally and Alberto both expressed frustration about the vocal-ness of the first year teachers. They both said (but Alberto much more forcefully) that when they were rookie teachers they would just listen and learn and not presume to tell the veteran teachers what to do. Alberto tells me that there are some cocky first year teachers in the school, and says I must have seen some of them, that I must know who he was talking about. (Field notes, School 2 Office, February 8, 2006)

As we will see below, this type of hierarchical relational model is challenged by both of

the other significant ways of being. The communitarian way of being challenges hierarchy

by asserting that everyone is a unique member of the community and should be treated

with equal deference. The re-enchanted way of being challenges from another direction,

positing that hierarchy blocks the free-flow of ideas that is central to creativity and

innovation. In either case, the result for some teachers and administrators was a feeling

that the taken-for-granted relational order that valued seniority and hierarchy was out of

balance.

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Communitarian Way of Being

Within the communitarian frame professional community is experienced as a gathering

place where meanings, identities and purposes are collectively forged. In its ideal form,

we see an attempt to blur the boundaries between professional and personal life such that

teachers can be present as full human beings and not just role incumbents. This is the

view of community rooted in a culture of care (Noddings 1992). Teachers did not

generally switch to this way of being - organizational action continued to be largely shape

by professional-bureaucratic dispositions - but they did embrace aspects of it as an

augmentation to the enactment of existing organizational modus operandi.

Style of Engagement

Here we see a shift in the framing of environment toward experiencing the school as a

familiar and friendly commonplace. In traditional forms of community, various

institutions (e.g., church, school) supported, socialized and reflected the values of the

larger community within which they were embedded. In contemporary society, however,

the school no longer reflects the now fragmented city within which is located in, but

instead is itself the fragmented city that reform seeks to heal and bring together. The

professional community becomes a shared space in which teachers can find common

support and goals. In this way, part of the aim of reform is an ethos of the school that

strongly resembles the ethos of the community or the home.

Teachers generally liked this effort, but nonetheless did not fundamentally

transform their experience of the organizational environment. The adoption of the

communitarian framing generally happened to the degree that it was compatible with the

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style of engagement of the professional dispositions and ways of being. For instance, the

benefit of emotional relationships was still largely seen to be their ability to aid in

professional-bureaucratic task. Nate, a 10th grade English teacher in School 2, for

example, talked about the benefits of TPCs especially for new teachers:

Or you have new teachers who are in survival mode and who want suggestions and help and you give them suggestions and you talk because that’s what you’re there for. So its almost like instead CPT or professional development its like ‘let’s help each other out’ and we do bring dilemmas and suggestions and talk to each other and that’s all positive and its something we’ve never had before. I’ve been teaching 10 years, that’s not a long time, but when I started teaching it was ‘hey, that file cabinet over there, that’s mine, I wrote those lesson plans and you can’t have them, go make your own, I’m not going to talk to you about my practice because I’m going to be evaluated on my practice’ so that a big shift, and a good one (Interview, June 9 2006).

The nature of composition shifts in this way of being such that it is based on solidarity

and a shared sense of place. This is why, from this perspective, the style through which

autonomous professional are composed into a professional community is through the

development of shared culture, rituals, and stories. Social control is rooted in the creation

of strong (and ideally positive) school cultures. Collaboration in such a professional

community is made possible by a shared familiarity with the features and history of the

school and its inhabitants, teachers and students alike.

This difference was evident in how teachers engaged with certain professional

community practices. In contrast to the professional-bureaucratic way of being where

practical reflection concerns plans and their achievement, within this style of engagement

practical reflection is about investigating the feelings and psychological states of

individuals. Similarly, sharing in this style is not simply materials or tips, or visions and

vocations, but rather feelings, hopes, and frustrations. This type of sharing is possible

only because participating in activities entails bringing the full self behind the role into

interaction (a self that is given deference here in a way not evident re-enchantment). The

style of discussion shifts along a similar axis as well. The nature of discussion among

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teachers is about giving emotional support and being a sounding board for problems. This

can be disruptive, but the disruption is done in pursuit of ultimately making the school

more familiar and comfortable. This is the exact opposite of the reason for disruption

within the re-enchanted way of being. As Sarah, a School 2 English teacher, says below,

the benefit of professional interaction is in feeling like you are part of a larger

community:

So, I think that…if you don’t have that communication and time with other teachers, what happens is you kind of get stuck in – and this is what they’re trying to get away from – is you being stuck in your own little world, like, “Here I am, isolated in my room, and I don’t know what anybody else is doing, I don’t know what else is going on in the school, I don’t know what new things maybe I could maybe try in my room,” or maybe new assignments, or…And I think that it gets you out of the room and with other teachers, so that to me is beneficial. So, whether I’m talking with a science teacher or an English teacher, it’s beneficial (Interview, June 12 2006).

Part-and-parcel of the effort to get teachers to feel as if they were part of a larger

community was a shift in their identity from disciplinary specialist to teaching generalist.

This is much more than just an identity change, however. It also represents a fundamental

shift in the nature of teacher engagement. With this shift, practical action is not just that

which brings about the completion of academic activities, it also pertains to the socio-

emotional facets of students’ lives as well. At an informal level, this would mean teachers

recognizing all the students in their own small school, and knowing something about their

personal lives. The picture often drawn by the reform coaches was of a situation in which

students could not ‘slip through the cracks’ because they would be known by many

adults. Melissa, a School 4 social studies teacher, articulates the benefit of this:

Sharing the same students is such a benefit because…you feel like you have more control over…how their general life goes. You know. And you can talk…you know, kid talk. It’s just so important. And when you have the Spanish teacher, and the history teacher, and the English teacher, and the math teacher sitting there having lunch, and you can talk about the kid, you know, it’s immensely beneficial, and you don’t have to run all over the place to, you know, find the history teacher who’s in A Wing and, you know, that kind of thing. And I think it benefits the kids (Interview, June 14 2006).

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Important for my argument here is that in coming to engage with TPCs as generalists,

where discussions were arranged around shared students, teachers experienced a shift in

emphasis in the perceived locus of student problems. Specifically, problems come to be

seen as located in the student’s particular relationships, motivations, interests or some

other psychological state rather than in broad principles about teaching and learning.

Solutions, then, are emotional adjustments that can only be deduced through familiarity

with the student. And for those teachers who saw the benefit of TPC being in the ability

to talk about students, the examples given almost always concerned such collective

diagnosis of problems. The ability to share positive information was never mentioned as a

benefit of TPC, though teachers did often do this in informal interaction, most generally

when a ‘problem’ student had done something positive or had what was perceived as

breakthrough of some kind.

Style of Coordination

The communitarian way of being resonated with teachers’ sense that there were benefits

to be had from ‘being known’ by other adults in the school. In this style, teachers come

together not to trade information or engage in collective projects, but rather to share

aspects of their self that exists behind their formal role. The benefit of relationships

between teachers is seen much the same as it with students, in making life in the school

more home-like and less isolated or alienating. Reese, a math teacher in School 2,

discussed how the teachers in her small school would share about personal milestone or

other significant out-of-school events:

And that feels good ‘cause you never really get to share all the time. So, that feels good. And everyone wants to hear what’s going on with ever…Like I remember when Edward bought his house, everyone was so excited for him, like, “Oh…” Or Sarah’s kids: I think they dance or

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something and like...and everyone wants to see the pictures and, that kind of thing, which is cool. And Hilda’s son just graduated from college, and everyone, you know. That kind of thing. Like everyone’s really, they really care about what’s going on with each other outside of school (Interview, June 13 2006).

Each of the small schools undertook its own efforts to make itself feel more warm and

welcoming for teachers. In School 4, for example, the teachers began a project where

they all brought in baby pictures of themselves. Shelley described it this way:

Otherwise, you just become a bunch of annoying habits, you know, in the same general location. So, some things you do have to be a little bit of fun. We had that photo thing that Brenda started – I don’t know if you’ve seen the baby pictures. Brenda started with, “Hey, bring in some baby pictures, so we can see what we all looked like.” So, we did…That was a cute, little, fun thing; it was very fun for us to share, as a faculty, you know, other people’s pictures – and everybody has some picture that they can share – and so that’s really fun; not expensive; didn’t take long; not hard. You gotta do those kinds of things, and stuff (Interview, June 14 2006).

The self as baby is perhaps the most extreme non-organizational state that one could be

in. Importantly, Shelley posits that doing fun things together is vital because it allows

people to work together more effectively. Sharing aspects of the self is not done for its

own sake, in other words, but rather to grease the wheels of the TPC.

In the communitarian way of being trust can be thought of as that which facilitates

feelings of safety that allow for the revelation of the true self and that supports personal

growth and expression. In general, however, while teachers did find benefit in being

known by other members of the staff, the benefit of community was still often tied back

to whether or not it aided in professional-bureaucratic lines of action. Because teacher

practical intelligence remained primarily grounded in actions associated with classroom

coping, trust of a personal nature was experienced as being important largely in so far as

it helped facilitate the pragmatic transfer of assistance, tips or materials. Reese describes

the benefit of the community she described above in this way:

I feel like…like at the beginning, I think Katherine was unapproachable. But now, with all the sharing, you know, finding out about what’s going on with us, it’s so much easier to talk about, like, “Oh, well, do you have anything for me,” or she’s so willing to give it to me now. So, I think

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it does help. I think it does help. Getting to know each other on a personal level makes it easier, you know, to share ideas and that kind of thing (Interview, June 13 2006).

And so while the notion of TPC as facilitating personal bonds and support was widely

endorsed by teachers, there remained disagreement about exactly what the relationship, if

any, there was between the growing sense of collegiality in the small schools and the

bureaucratic logic of individual practice that teachers continued to endorse. For the most

part, the relationship was articulated as trust facilitating or making smoother the

bureaucratic functioning of the teacher role. The reason for this, I would argue, is that

teachers’ practical sense of how they together constitute a community is through the

professional-bureaucratic way of being. There, it is common membership in the teaching

profession that binds people together. And so while the reform may be successful in

cultivating a feeling that the school has become a more hospitable place to be, the

ultimate value of professional collaboration continued to reside in the teachers’ sense of

how it aids in the fulfillment of their professional habitus.

And so despite appreciating the ability to interact with others more frequently,

teachers nonetheless engaged in only certain types of sharing. Stories about personal

failings where rarely shared, for example. In contrast, sharing generally concerned either

personal aspects of out-of-school home life (e.g., family, hobbies) or problems with

students (where the issue was generally located in the student). The coaches did try

throughout the year to engage teachers in more reflective and critical types of sharing, for

instance through discussions of why they started teaching or about the anxieties they had

when they were students. In general, however, teachers resisted such attempts, as either

being inappropriate for a professional style of coordination or irrelevant to a their mode

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of engagement in the classroom. For teachers, bringing in aspects of the personal self was

an augmentation to, not replacement for, professional style of coordination.

Re-Enchanted Way of Being

Within this frame, the professional community is experienced as a site of collaborative

discussion, experimentation, and reflection. The vision is of skilled and motivated

professional teachers coming together in self-managing groups to work on shared

projects. An effective group here is experienced not as the one that accomplishes tasks or

forms warm bonds, but rather as improvisational, creative and innovative (Scribner et al

2007). And as I will discuss below, this organizational way of being, the one the reform

design aimed to foster in the school, differs from the other two in significant ways. This

is true in terms of both the style of engagement with the organizational environment and

the style of coordination with other teachers.

Style of Engagement

As mentioned above, the experience of the organizational environment in this way of

being is as a site of exploration, where the familiar is systematically made unfamiliar

through an ongoing mode of questioning, study, and reflection. It is through such a style

of engagement that teachers can engender creativity and innovation. While teachers

generally did not orient themselves to the organization in this manner, there was evidence

that it did occur in limited ways. This was most evident at School 4, certainly by virtue of

the fact that they were the only teachers who selecting into their school based on an

affinity to a common vision of the reform. Melissa described her experience this way:

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I think…we’re just in a very unique and very beneficial situation, because for the most part, it was a decision that we had some choice in making…which made the community-building a lot easier, ‘cause at least to some extent, we all had a common goal (Interview, June 14 2006).

Even when teachers spoke about the importance of having a shared vision,there was little

mention, however, of how collaboration with other teachers related to fostering

innovation or creativity. Instead, the practical importance of having a shared vision was

generally articulated using a more communitarian vocabulary. That is, that a common

vision provided a normative foundation for the TPC. The notion of TPC as laboratory, as

site of experimentation never arose in interviews or discussions, nor did the notion that

part of a TPC was pushing others in their practice. This particular relational dynamic was,

however, reported between certain headmasters and their teachers. Nate discussed how he

felt supported to experiment by Rachel, his headmaster:

So I decided to take a risk, and you know what I also knew that with my headmaster I knew I was supported on a risk-taking practice...through informal conversations, I got the distinct feeling from that I was encouraged by my headmaster to take educated, calculable risks and that I would be supported and we had several conversations about what learning and teaching should look like and when I have these, these were all informal conversations, I’d essentially hear from her ‘go for it!’ (laughs) in that Rachel-esque manner (Interview, June 9 2006).

While the goal of exploratory engagement is ultimately to improve organizational

outcomes, a central part of re-enchantment is also a focus on the here-and-now within

liminal activities where playfulness is meant to foster creativity and innovation. The

rational of such activities is that through immersion in a collaborative situation, some

kind of communal flow can be achieved that results in creative ideas and solutions. This

is the essential idea behind activities like brainstorming and free-writing. Part of the goal

of such activities is in fostering a sort of pragmatic ‘third way’ between instrumental and

purely ludic styles of action. There is play and exploration, but it always occurs with the

pursuit of some shared vision in mind.

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The ideal mode of engagement here is essentially two-fold: first, creating a sense of

disorientation that will prevent habit and routine from creating stasis and second,

fostering a sense of work as an ongoing process of improvement and progress. This is

very much counter to the style of engagement in the professional-bureaucratic way of

being and teachers frequently had trouble with it. Numerous times I saw confusion and

resistance when teachers were asked to engage in activities that had no clear outcomes or

were not linked to future lines of action. In contrast, teachers often articulated vision

setting as a bounded activity that, once completed, would allow a return to a more

effective professional bureaucratic style of engagement. I asked Shelley how she thought

curriculum should be linked school vision.

and it’s something that needs to be done, but we would need to spend a half a day, or a day, or however long it takes deciding what we, as a school, want to focus on as our vision: mastery of all levels… – whatever it is, that’s what we’re going to do. Then, once we have that, we need to look at our practice and say, “Okay, this is our vision; this is what we say we’re going to do; every decision we make should be based or reflective on the vision. What are we doing now that meets the vision, and what do we need to do to make our stuff meet the vision?” (Interview, June 14 2006).

From an ideal-type perspective, this mode of engagement entails a different experience of

trust than the other styles. Trust here is not the assurance that people will play their

proper roles and operate within standard operating procedures as it is in the professional-

bureaucratic mode. Nor is it about creating personal bonds, feelings of community, or

emotional support as it is in the communitarian way of being. Instead, trust here is

experienced as the encouragement and normalization of probing, critiquing and exploring

practices, at both the individual and collective levels. This was almost never, however,

the way teachers discussed the trust they had with each other. In contrast, trust was

almost entirely described in terms of either being able to count on others to behave like

professionals or being able count on others to provide emotional support.

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In this style of engagement the nature of participation within group activities also

takes on a very different flavor. Ideal participation in collaborative activities entails

spontaneity and playfulness. Talk is effusive and energetic and listening is active and

engaged. Discussion aims to create a liminal space in which action is transformed into the

type of shared experience out of which innovation emerges. Critiquing is neither offered

nor experienced as personal affront, but externalized as one part of an ongoing group

process that, once in flow, generates collective energy and excitement. The practice of

reflecting is not primarily about achieving goals or the psychological states of actors.

Instead, here it is much closer to notions of second-order or meta-reflection that have

been prominent in organizational literature of the past few decades (Schon 1987).

Style of Coordination

In the re-enchanted mode of commonality common experience is experienced not in roles

obligations or personal familiarity, but rather within an ongoing and shared process of

collective dialogue and questioning. This experience is articulated with a language of

collective vision, ideals, ideas and vocations. Importantly, and in contrast with the

communitarian way of being, a common vision need not be rooted in shared history or

personal affections. The successful professional community, then, is not just as a set of

contact points where information, knowledge or emotional capital flow between teachers,

but rather entails a mutual fatefulness wrapped up in a shared vision for students and

school. And some teachers did indeed report feeling such a change in their orientation

toward other teachers. Sheila spoke to this phenomenon in saying:

It felt different, absolutely. You no longer just thought for yourself. You actually had to kind of think of how it would affect other people. Like you were going to be in this team of teachers, and I’d never team-taught, I was never a junior high-type teacher that were on teams, and you no

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longer just thought for yourself; you had to think about the whole school and that was a new thing. We had to kind of constantly think, “Well, what are we doing here,” and, “Why are we doing this,” and, you know, “What kind of kids are we going to have?” (Interview, June 14 2006).

And, as has been alluded to several times already, organizational composition grounded

in shared experience is deeply threatened by both the professional-bureaucratic and

communitarian ways of being, each of which tries to crystallize relations into routine and

predictable forms. This is one of the major compositional challenges of the re-enchanted

style of organizing. It aims a striking a highly difficult balance where people are tied

together in common pursuit of a never-ending critical examination of, paradoxically, the

very thing that ties them together.

One of the primary difficulties with this vision, as has already been articulated in

the literature on post-bureaucratic organizing, is that its success essentially requires a

different kind of actor, with different subjectivity and character, than those that now

populate organizations. These new actors must be self-managing and have deeply

internalized the vision of the organization (Elias 1978). In contrast, in the professional-

bureaucratic way of being control comes from organizational authority and subscription

to professional norms. In the communitarian way of being it comes through the cultural

control of the group. For re-enchantment, however, both authority and existing culture

are limiting. Composition comes from self-motivated actors coming together through to

contribute to shared projects. And this did happen often. The following is from an

informal discussion I had with Peter, the School 1 headmaster:

I asked what he thought were the major accomplishments of the school so far. He said that the teachers were starting to rely on each other. He told a story about how he had walked into the school one office and seen the English teachers meeting on their own volition to discuss what the basic skills they expected each grade to cover. Peter said (as he has before) that he tries not to push the teachers to hard, to scaffold them, and this was an example of the teachers coming to something on their own (Interview, March 9 2006).

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Such groups work because they are ground in an egalitarian way of composing where all

group members are viewed as potential sources of innovation and creativity. From within

this frame non-egalitarian styles (i.e., the hierarchical nature of professional-bureaucratic

and communitarian styles) run the risk of being experienced as limiting innovation by a

priori defining who has the potential to contribute. Attempts to get teachers to interact

with each other through this relational model were generally resisted, however. The

notion of teacher collaborative groups as sites of play and imagination was not at all

popular. Sheila articulated a common feeling about it this way:

…it might not be a bad idea to get us together at some point in time, as opposed to, “I can sit in CPT and talk about abstract ideas and talk about other people’s work and student work,” and yes, they’re all educational issues that are very helpful, and you do take away stuff from it, but sometimes, you just want to sit down with somebody who’s teaching the same courses and say, “What are you doing in your class,” and, “Can you swap some ideas about projects or…” (Interview, June 14).

And like Sheila, many of the teachers explicitly framed the primary challenge of the

conversion in terms of the abstract nature of the reform and the pragmatic nature of

classroom practice. And much of the education literature takes a similar stance, arguing

for a stronger connection between theory and practice. As I have arguing throughout,

however, I think this is an important mis-specification of the problem. The re-enchanted

way of being has its own practical intelligence, skills, habits and dispositions. The

challenge for teachers was not mediating between the abstract versus the practical, but

rather between different (sub-cognitive) styles of practicality.

Discussion

A significant part of what I am attempting to explain here is the seeming paradox of the

fact that indeed, at MHS as in much of the rest of the literature, the ethos of the teacher

community did shift in a more communitarian direction but that this did not have the

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desired effect in terms of changing practices. The reason for this, as I will discuss in the

next chapter, is that the new practices adopted for TPC created a series of interactional

tensions for teachers, the relief from which was achieved through the composition of

different ways of being into new lines of action. But this happened in ways that

augmented existing styles of engagement and coordination rather than supplant them. The

result was teachers feeling more support and trust in carrying out their existing lines of

action.

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Chapter 6: Tensions and Compositions Between Ways of Being

In the previous chapter I laid out the major practices associated with creating Teacher

Professional Communities at Mill Town High. I also described how these practices were

ideally and practically enacted via the three major ways of being under study here. In this

chapter I examine how differences in ways of being led to tensions in teachers’ practical

engagements within reform practices, and the efforts to overcome them. The thrust of this

chapter is to show how attempts to shift to a re-enchanted way of being surfaced serious

tensions in practical orientations, not just conscious attitudes and beliefs, and how actors

sought to compose action across them.

This description of the dilemma of change in terms of modes rather than minds

challenges the prevailing explanations from both researchers and school members

themselves. First, one explanation found in the literature and one adopted by the teachers

was that practices did not change because there was too big of a gap between the abstract

theory of the reform and the actual classroom practices of teachers (Desimone 2002). In

fact, I found that teachers frequently voiced their desire to change and improve their

practices but feeling as though they were not being provided the infrastructure and

support necessary for fostering deep it. One of the teachers in a School 3 focus group

expressed it this way:

I think one of the things that’s been a little bit frustrating for me is that I don’t feel like we’ve had a lot of time to talk about student-centered learning, yet that’s one of our goals. And that its such a great group of people in the school 3 faculty that everybody seems to want to know how to make changes or know how to do things differently in their classrooms, but until we have a chance to have those kinds of conversations its kind of hard to do (Focus group, January 17 2006).

A second explanation in the literature, and the one adopted by administrators and reform

coaches, was that the change did not occur because of the conservatism of teachers and

their unwillingness to dig into their own tacit beliefs (Pajares 1992). Fred, the CES coach

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working with Schools 2 and 4, expressed his frustration with the slow pace of change in

teacher practices:

Fred tell me that he thinks new teachers will look more CES teachers – veteran teachers, in contrast, are a different issue. He felt like things now are at a very polite, surface level and is wondering how push teacher conversation to a deeper level? He feels teachers are not connecting work in CFGs with their classroom practice. The reason, he speculates, is that the teachers’ conversations are too ‘self-absorbed.’ (Discussion, March 16 2006).

In contrast, I will show here that both of these explanations are two sides of the same

coin, a coin that assumes a direct relationship between thinking and practice. Teachers

endorse such a connection by assuming that there exists some potential model of

professional development that would provide detailed blueprints for enacting the reform.

Administrators and coaches, on the other hand, endorse a direct connection by assuming

that if teachers would only surface, examine, and discard certain beliefs it would remove

the blockage that prevents them from practicing in new an innovative ways. My own

argument here is that both views were incomplete in so far as they treat changes in

thinking and understanding as being the same as changes in practical styles of organizing.

The real challenge, rather, is in trying to trade one model of practical understanding for

another.

Table 6. Tensions Between Ways of Being Pro-Bureaucratic Communitarian Re-Enchantment

Pro-Bureaucratic Pragmatic Capricious Impractical

Communal Impersonal Supportive Uncertain

Re-enchantment Stagnant Too safe Innovative

In order to understand this in terms of changing modes, not minds, we need to understand

not just the ideal types laid out in the last chapter, but also the tensions that exist between

modes in real situations as well as the different ways that both teachers and the logic of

the reform attempt to alleviate them. In Table 1. above I summarize the tensions between

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ways of being in terms of the major critiques they level at each other. This chapter is

divided into three parts. First, I will look at three major tensions between ways of being in

the enactment of reform practices. Second, I look at the compositions between styles that

were part of the design of the reform as well as those used by teachers in their situated

coping. Finally, I discuss the development of TPCs in Schools 1 and 2, paying especial

attention to how headmaster style shaped small school ethos. I end this final section by

offering an explanation for why, despite important differences in school styles, there was

little evidence of differences in several important outcomes.

Tensions

First, I discuss three major tensions between ways of being that arose at MHS. The

central argument here is that these tensions are experienced by teachers as feelings and

anxieties as they went about their jobs rather than deliberative disagreements about

philosophical principles. Specifically, I will look at the tension between 1) systematic

versus unstructured modes of engagement; 2) organizing collaboration around local

versus expert knowledge; and 3) styles of coordination that foster familiarity versus

uncertainty.

Tension 1: Systematic versus Unstructured

The first significant tension is perhaps the most important one for the reform, namely that

between the professional-bureaucratic style that coordinates around plans and formal

systems and the mode of re-enchantment that aims to foster change through disorderly

play, uncertainty, and risk. The result is a fundamental tension here between rational

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planning on the one hand and the embracement of spontaneity, open-endedness, and

freedom on the other. This tension is a far more central aspect of small school reform

than is generally acknowledged in the literature. Part of my aim here is to reframe this

pull between routine and creativity as an interactional, not deliberative, dilemma for

actors.

Many of the structural changes at MHS were intended to create space and

opportunities for teachers to discuss their practices, their students and their shared vision

for the school. Teachers generally appreciated these opportunities for increased

collaboration and conversation, but as discussed in this previous chapter operating from

within a bureaucratic way of being such interaction needed to have clear purpose and end-

goal in order to be a sensible use of time. In contrast, the kind of open-ended,

spontaneous, and sometimes ludic, type of discourse that is a central feature of re-

enchantment left teachers feeling like collaboration was pointless, inefficient, and a poor

use of their time. Sarah expressed this feeling in relation to her CFG group.

[We discussed] what would be good to kind of set the precedence for the rest of the year. Well, I had said, “Okay, we need to be a little more structured and organized,” and I kind of laid out some things I thought would work well. And it was kind of an agreement that we need an agenda, I don’t want there to be like this, “Let’s discuss this,” and it’s kind of open-ended and nothing ever actually gets produced. I like to have a goal, I like to feel like we accomplished something and to be able to produce something by the end of maybe not today’s meeting, but maybe by the end of next meeting or something like that (Interview, June 12 2006).

Part of what is telling here is that when operating within other ways of being, there are

other interactional features that could have be considered measures of successful

collaboration. The forming of personal bonds, the investigation of tacit beliefs, or the

development of shared visions might all be viewed as practical accomplishments from

within another orientation. The design of the reform was to shift teachers away from

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purely practical conversations and focus on shared visions, on an altered organizational

ethos. Yet this is precisely the kind of conversation found impractical.

And when experiencing collaboration from within a professional-bureaucratic way

of being, it could be argued that this is a sensible feeling. When the primary shared

orientation of teachers is creating and carrying out plans in their classrooms, then

spending time taking about visions and vocations can feel like an erratic, inefficient, or

simply impulsive way of spending valuable and limited time. Melissa expresses this

tension when arguing that the re-enchanted work of collectively developing a shared

vision would be time better spent planning and executing pedagogy.

But I think that in our pursuit of our small school, and what we want to do, and our vision, and all that kind of stuff, we can’t forget that at the bottom line, it’s what I’m doing with my kids everyday; it’s the curriculum, and, you know, we have to have time to make sense of that, and figure out what we’re doing with that, and be reflective, and all that kind of stuff. Now, I don’t know about other disciplines, but I easily spend eight hours a weekend just grading papers, and scoring, and stuff. And then, I’m here after school at least an hour most days; I’m here at six-thirty in the morning, doing prep work and stuff. So, there isn’t a lot of time in my life to spend doing, “Hmm: curriculum. Well, let’s see. Let’s reflect on what I did this year and…” You know, over the summer maybe, but I have to have a summer job, and there’s design team, and there’s summer academy on both ends of the summer…– and you know what? I kind of like to have a life (Interview, June 14 2006).

What Melissa expressed here is not a belief that shared visions do not matter or that time

should not be spent developing them, but rather that doing so must fit in with practical

sense of daily activity in the classroom. Otherwise, as Reese describes below, attempts to

engage teachers in open-ended, unstructured discourse may end up feeling like a strain.

I’m going to be honest. I really didn’t find it helpful. I really didn’t find it helpful at all. It felt more like a burden…And they’re asking these open-ended questions that are vague and just the language…very ambiguous (Interview, June 13).

The result is that trying to get teachers to operate in re-enchanted mode leaves them

feeling like collaborative practices are actually barriers to effective teamwork, rather

than facilitators of it. They are experienced as barriers because they do not engender

teachers becoming more effective with their own practices, as they understand what

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effective practice is and how to foster it. Later in the same conversation as above, Reese

remarked:

But I feel like we need to work on specific things, and less ambiguous things. Just it’s so broad…I can’t even grab anything out of that. It’s like trying to stick your hand in a pool full of fish and trying to grab one. Like, it’s not going to happen. You know what I mean? It’s a whole lot easier when there’s one fish, and you can just focus on that. You know what I mean? And that’s what I feel like CPT should feel like (Interview, June 13).

What the reform calls ‘text-based discussions’ was one of the primary ways that

conversation would be organized in order to elicit taken-for-granted, or deep beliefs. In

this practice teachers would read a particular text together (generally a quasi-scholarly

education article) and have a discussion based on a codified protocol that shaped the style

and structure of allowable discourse. The intent of these discussions was generally to

engender discussions of ‘deep’ issues of the reform. For instance, before the beginning of

the school year School 4 had text-based discussion about issues of equity and

multiculturalism. Below are some of the teachers’ reactions collected in an evaluation

conducted by the reform coaches:

“I would like to have had a longer conversation about issues of equity” “The articles about ethnic issues were too truncated so the discussions were very superficial.”

“I did not care for the reading selection on diversity…I understand CFGs are our groups but when you work in multidisciplinary groups sometimes I can get lost on their small details.” “Discussion on stereotypes and race seemed misplaced. More focus on practical application of design techniques. Perhaps a demonstration by one of the facilitators – ‘this is how I plan a lesson/unit/course.’

“Not a big fan of text-based discussions – lets just use the info and do less talk about it.” Two distinct types of responses can be distinguished. In the first, talking about issues like

multiculturalism was important for coming to a collective and shared vision among small

schoolteachers. The other response was that the topic was important but that the

discussion should have been more pragmatic, and focused on lesson-planning and

evaluation.

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A great deal of educational research accuses teachers of being conservative in how

they perceive these types of practices, but I want to argue that depending on the style of

engagement, what is generally described as conservative can frequently be better

understood as pragmatically sensible. Specifically, from within a professional-

bureaucratic way of being, what it makes sense to share in collaboration is tips,

information, materials and other things that will help other teachers in coping with the

situations they confront in their classrooms. Put another way, given teachers’ practical

sense of what their job is in the classroom, there is not benefit in sharing things other than

that which will help them with their job. The divergence between what teachers thought

was useful in collaboration compared to administrators and coaches was an ongoing

issue. Melissa describes her frustration with feeling that coaches often pushed

collaboration in less than useful directions:

Sometimes, the protocols in CFGs, in design team meetings, in full faculty meetings, in “whatever,” really help us focus on…staying on the issue – which is something Fred really likes to do. But sometimes, if you watch the different group dynamics…The first year we had a design team, our design team had an interesting way of working through problems and such, and we would go back and forth from issue to issue, and different ideas, but we were all, you know, in synch and knew what we were talking about and flowing; we lost Fred, who kept stopping us and saying, “No, but we’re only talking about this”; we’re like, “No, no, no, but it goes on to…”; “No, but we’re only talking about this.” So, in that case, it got a little frustrating (Interview, June 14 2006).

One of the important dynamics reflected here is that it is perhaps more accurate to say

that teachers were not so much conservative about not wanting to try new things as not

seeing (in a nonreflective way) the sense of changing styles of practical action. My

experience at MHS was that there was actually a remarkable amount of openness to

change in terms of improving existing ways of doing things. That is, teachers wanted to

become better at doing the dominant way of being in the school.

Tension 2: Expert versus Local Knowledge

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The next tension occurs between aspects of the communitarian style on the one hand and

the professional-bureaucratic and re-enchantment styles on the other. Within the

communitarian way of being a premium is placed on local and personal knowledge, and

great weight is given to shared history. Within the professional-bureaucratic and re-

enchantment ways of being, in contrast, such a premium does not exist. In the

professional-bureaucratic style it is expert knowledge, and the importance of system

hierarchy, that is highlighted. Re-enchantment, contrast avoids valuing any form of

knowledge over any other. Any barrier to free and open discourse, and any a priori

valuing of knowledge, risks preventing a group’s full creative capacity from being

unleashed. As discussed, the theory of TPCs puts forward different understandings of the

kind of community it aims to foster, and each mode entails its own way of organizing

people into a group, defining how they relate to each other, what their common focus is,

and what the boundaries are that exclude others.

The important point here is that each of these models makes sense from within a

particular interactional engagement. In the communitarian way of being teachers are

meant to reconceptualize themselves not as specialists in charge of delivering disciplinary

content, but generalists collectively engaged in meeting the full range of students’ needs.

And from this perspective, local knowledge is especially valuable. That this attempted

shift from specialist to generalist has psychological implications for individual teacher

identity has been explored in the literature (Phillippo 2009). Here, however, the issue I

want to explore deals with social conventions rather than psychological states.

As posited earlier, the shift from specialist to generalist is also a shift from

organizing around shared disciplines to shared students. It is, in other words, part of an

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attempt to shift the dominant style of coordination. But discussion of shared students

continued to be done, generally, from with professional-bureaucratic way of being. In this

way local knowledge was valuable to the degree that it could be translated into

knowledge to aid disciplinary efforts in classroom practice. As Sarah discussed below,

the value of discussing shared students was largely in pinpointing the cause of problems

in the disciplinary classroom:

[I]t’s nice to talk to other teachers about the same students, so I can kind of like the kid-talk thing. We did that, and I thought that was helpful, not just to gossip about kids, but to talk about their habits, and like what’s going on with them and, “Oh, you’ve talked to the mother? What’s the deal,” and, “Do you have the e-mail?” You know, we’ve had good conversations about same children, and that’s good. Other ones have been good just to talk about teaching practices (Interview, June 12 2006).

This leads to another tension around the role and nature of knowledge, this between

organizational outsider and insider. As discussed above, teachers largely felt that

personalized knowledge about students was beneficial if it augmented their professional

knowledge concerning content delivery. At the same time, they also elevated the value of

their ability to use their local knowledge to effectively convey disciplinary knowledge. In

this view, knowledge about specific students and shared institutional history provided

teachers an advantage over outside coaches and headmasters.

In fact this tension was sometimes articulated in terms of the outside coaches being

so focused on the abstract aspects of the reform simply because they were unfamiliar with

the concrete, local ones. Shelley held such a view saying:

I think in start-up mode, they would allow the abstractions, because we had a lot of outside consultants that didn’t know our concrete issues, so the only thing that they could do was focus on these, you know, core habits…stuff like that, because that’s what they would bring to the table, and…you know…the everyday problems that we had: I mean, that’s just not their venue. So, I think that we, in School 4, are having less of that, because most of the consultants are now someplace else (laughs). So, we’re basically kind of running our school a little bit more…I think it may have been a harder thing to do if we’d had some outside consultant there with his flip chart, ‘cause he’d be so into the process, he would think we would be racing ahead and, you know…(Interview, June 14 2006).

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The idea here is that the tacit knowledge of local practitioners is the superior knowledge,

and good reform is that which provides structural support that allows them to do what

they know should be done. In contrast, the outside coaches wanted, though they would

not articulate it in this way, to reshape the sensibilities of teachers. Sheila expressed this

sentiment this way:

Sometimes, you just want to sit down and do it yourselves. We already have people who have really good talent in our school that, just given the time and the opportunity, we can get a lot of stuff done (Interview, June 14 2006).

Other teachers, however, had more skepticism about the idea that was needed was just for

the teachers to be given sufficient time and space to work together. Nate articulated this

feeling that in terms of sharing practices, outside help might be needed to provide them

with information that no one in the group possesses.

But you what else is interesting is there’s this sense in education that if you put a bunch of qualified professionals together and say ‘share your ideas’ that they’ll figure something out. I disagree with that, I actually think that we need someone who’s an expert in differentiated instruction to say ‘here’s what it looks like’ or we need to know where to go to get that information. So, a CPT were we share stuff is going to be great about improving our instruction but if we want to make a jump to another plateau of quality instruction, we need to know what that quality instruction looks like (Interview, June 9 2006).

This elevation of the local knowledge of teachers over administrators and coaches, and

other representatives of the school as bureaucracy, has to do with where the problem of

teaching is located, and thus where change needs to occur. While the re-enchanted way of

being sees the problem to solved in terms of the fluid and changing nature of knowledge,

teachers tended to identify the problem to be fixed instead in terms of their students. That

is, subjects and disciplines do not change, but the students they teach them to do. And so

collaboration with other teachers is useful in terms of understanding things about how to

convey unchanging and unproblematic disciplinary content to specific students. For this

reason, within the profession-bureaucratic style, local knowledge of students combined

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with expert knowledge of disciplines would be the most practical and sensible

combination. Camilla articulates just such a dichotomy:

One of the problematic things is – a lot of the times – the classroom management issues. You know, “All of a sudden, I have this class that doesn’t respond to anything,” you know, “What kind of things can you try,” “How far can you,” you know, “go in discipline?” And that’s the part of teaching that always changes, ‘cause you’re always changing the group of students you have. So, your body of knowledge, of what you teach, is always the easiest part for a teacher. I mean, you’re not going to be teaching this subject if you don’t know this subject (laughs). But how you finally get that knowledge over to the students changes every year, ‘cause you have a different group of students who’s receiving it (Interview, June 14 2006).

This tension between ways of being was often most visible when outside coaches (and

sometimes headmasters) lead teacher groups through their collaborative practices. The

excerpt below is from a CFG meeting in March. In the excerpt Fred is leading the

meeting and tells the teachers that they are going to be writing about a (non-honors)

student they are having difficulty with in class. He further tells them that they are not

going to use student’s names because the point of the exercise is to reflexively examine

how they talk about kids. Dan is the third teacher to share:

Dan talks about an athlete in his class who has a strong sense of privilege, coming in late to class, wearing his iPod, not really doing his work. Dan says he’s tried being nice, tried being strict, tried being mad, but can’t figure out an approach that works. Tara wonders out loud if it’s the same student she had identified. Fred says that they don’t want to name names yet because of all the associations and reputations with the students. The teachers want to know, claiming that if they have the same students they might be able to help each other. Fred says that they’ll get there eventually, but for now it should be anonymous (Field notes, March 14 2006).

As the discussion moves along the teachers continue guessing which student is being

discussed. In doing so they are actively resisting Fred’s efforts at engaging them in a

meta-conversation about how they talk about students. Even though he insists on not

using names, the teachers first challenge him and then eventually ignore his requests.

From within the teachers’ style of coordinating here, the goal of collaboration is aiding

each other in solving immediate problems. From within this perspective, then, Fred’s

request is not a sensible one.

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This elevation of local knowledge in the pursuit of solving immediate and practical

problems extended to teachers’ views of some of the headmasters as well. Melissa

discussed below what she felt was the value of School 4 having made an inside hire for

their first headmaster:

You need to really know that your head master…is on your side. I think that’s so important. I think Pauline has been a really good leader in that respect and…I know that when she was brought on board, everybody just breathed a sigh of relief, because we were all really comfortable with her, she was from within the school. I think that you have to – I don’t know how it’s going to be in the future, but I think that in the beginning, having someone from within the school community was incredibly beneficial. I get a sense – and I don’t know this, and, you know, I’ve talked to maybe some teachers, but I think that the headmasters that were brought in had a hard time, because they were outsiders and their visions were very different from the, you know, shared vision of the teachers here (Interview, June 14 2006).

Tension 3: Familiarity versus Uncertainty

The next tension I discuss is between the elevation of familiarity in the communitarian

style and of uncertainty in the re-enchanted one. Prominent in the literature on small

school reform is the idea that by making schools more communal and personal, that trust

will develop and make teachers more willing to take risks and experiment with their

practice. But the security of experiencing the professional community as some place safe

and familiar can be quite antithetical to experiencing it as a place where people are

constantly generating uncertainty and risk as part of a process of experimentation and

learning.

This tension has been most clearly articulated in the relationship between students

and teachers in the study of ‘academic press (Lee and Smith 1999).’ The concept of

academic press was developed to help understand why research on comprehensive school

reform frequently found improved relationships between students and teachers did not

lead to improved academic performance. The theory of academic press is that, having

developed positive personal relationships with students, teachers are cautious about

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pushing them academically in fear of endangering these potentially fragile new bonds. It

is not hard to imagine that just such a phenomenon might occur in TPCs as well.

One bit of evidence for this tension between familiarity and experimentation is that

MHS teachers frequently reported that change and efforts at creativity left them feeling

disorientated and discomforted. This was sometimes articulated as existential critiques

concerning diffuse feelings of unease and anxiety associated with their new

organizational environment. At the end of the school year preceding the full roll out of

the reform, for example, teachers in School 2 completed an end of the year exercise about

their feeling concerning the reform. While there was some reported excitement, there was

also a good deal of unease. Responses included:

‘Things keep changing. Will it ever get stable?’ ‘The unknown. There is so much we just don’t know.’

Another common source of unease discussed by several teachers was a new sense of

unfamiliarity with their own school, as they felt increasingly segregated in their small

school. This was, for example, a point Laurel made several times throughout the year.

She reported feeling uncomfortable when she ventured through the halls of the other

small schools and experienced a mutual sense of unfamiliarity.

I have to walk through B wing, sometimes, and A wing, and it’s foreign, almost. I mean, I don’t mind [not] knowing the students as much, ‘cause it’s just a large school; you’re not going to know everyone, but not being able to say hi to the teacher, not knowing their name, or the fact that they’re even a teacher? (Interview, June 12 2006).

One way teachers dealt with these feelings of anxiety and unease was to turn their

collaborative groups into commonplaces of support and empathy, a harbor in the stormy

sea of uncertainty surrounding the changes in the school. And yet this is, in many

respects, the opposite of what reform designers intended. Teacher groups were designed

to be a place where organizational change was engendered, not a respite from it. The

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result was, for some teachers, a sense that teacher groups were helpful in terms of

providing support and helping cope with problems, but unclear in their impacts on

classroom practice. A teacher from the focus group:

…I see a lot more staff participation, whether its cross-discipline or whatever, it doesn’t matter, and certainly within staff meetings more voices are heard. I think that’s an accomplishment of sorts, it leads to a little more trust than there used to be, perhaps. Certainly more knowledgeable of each other. I’ve got to say though, that within my classroom and what goes on with me teaching face-to-face with my students I don’t know that small schools makes any difference… (Focus group, January 17 2006).

This sense of the group as place of safety where problems could be shared and teachers

could find empathy was a common one. Maggy, one of the external coaches who worked

with Schools 1 and 4, told me in a conversation that she worried that this sense of

comfort teachers were developing in their small schools meant that CPTs were not

becoming places where teachers pushed each other about their practice.

My personal experience was that Maggy was largely right that teachers did not

push each other, but I think her framing of why this was the case potentially misses the

bigger story. At issue here are two very different ways of experiencing CPTs and teacher

groups - as a place of familiarity and safety on the one hand versus a place of exploration

and risk on the other. Maggy saw teachers taking the first option as them choosing the

path of least resistance. I think this is true in so far as we understand the path of least

resistance not as the one which is least scary or demanding, but rather as the one the

makes the most sense given the existing mode of practical understanding teachers are

operating with. One way to see this is in how teachers framed their critiques of different

ways of doing CPT. Over and over again teachers articulated their frustration in terms of

their being asked not to do hard things but rather being asked to do unprofessional things.

Here is Shelley on this issue:

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And I don’t know what the other people did, but we all had to write this thing: “What we would do;” we had to sign it; she posted it all on the bulletin board in B151 – a little humiliating, quite frankly, but…I’m not real pleased about having those things up where the kids can see, ‘cause then it looks like…I don’t know anyone who really appreciates being treated like the kids…and sometimes, these protocols and activities treat us like the kids, instead of like professionals, and…honestly, I don’t know anyone who likes that. So, “Yeah, fine,”…but posting it? (Interview, June 14 2006).

And so for Jennifer the problem with this new practice is that it creates a sense of

conspicuousness, one that does not respect either professional standards or communal

decency. Part of the challenge is that, from within the re-enchanted way of being, tensions

like this are seen as productive, as moving action forward. It is precisely this sense of

anxiety, of uncertainty that people should be seeking out and embracing. And some

teachers did find professional virtue in the disruption of the reform. Helen was one of

them:

I think what happens, for me one of the real benefits of the switch this year was it shook up my little world, if you want the truth. It got me, and I hate using trite phrases, but it got me completely out of my comfort zone. I was very complacent over where I was and you tend to be in the same little small circle of people and you use them and their ideas all the time, which is great. This year all of a sudden I’m thrown over here, taken away from everybody that I knew and I was comfortable with. It forced me to do things differently and make new connections (Interview, June 11 2006).

It is worth noting that Ellen is not describing a constant state of disorientation. Her

experience is more like a snow globe that is shaken up only to soon resettle in a new

pattern. It is only within the re-enchanted way of being, however, that there is virtue in a

constant and unceasing sense of uncertainty. In other modes actors try to ease any sense

of disquiet, either by regaining a sense of familiarity and comfort in the social

environment (communitarian style) or by creating new routines and standards

(professional-bureaucratic style). Only the re-enchantment style of engagement welcomes

disquiet and tells it to stay as long as it wants.

Compositions Within Practices

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Next I look at some of the important interactional and structural compositions that were

employed to deal with tensions between the different organizational ways of being.

Successful compositions were those that allowed teachers to go on about their business of

engaging with the school in a way that felt practical and sensible. This entails both the

informal ways that teachers cobbled together lines of action in order to get by within the

changing context of the reform as well as the formal attempts at compositions that were

found in the structural logic of the reform itself.

First is should be noted, however, that TPC’s are themselves attempts to

institutionalize compromises between different organizational ways of being. The focus

on teacher learning through the creation of professional community is itself an attempt to

synthesize very different styles of practicality as leverage for improved teaching. To be

more specific, it is an attempt to reconcile the tension between 1) professional norms and

standards, 2) local and personalized relations, and 3) exploratory and value-rational styles

of interaction. Here, however, I will discuss three more specific compositions that were

reoccurring themes at MHS: the formalization of informality; the operationalization of

vision; and the systematization of habits and dispositions. Moreover, I will show that the

design strategies largely failed to alleviate the tensions they aimed to compose across.

Composition 1: Formalizing Informality

As discussed above, a central part of the logic of reform is that structures that inhibit free

expression and informal interaction stifle creativity and innovation. At the same time,

schools have goals to accomplish, plans to carry out and standards to meet. This means

that there needs to be some sort of compromise that creates a composition between the

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freedoms of informality on the one hand and the structure of routines and accountability

on the other. The solution embedded in the reform model is what I call here ‘the

formalization of informality.’

This impetus to formalize informality comes from the paradox that habit and

routine prevent innovation, but at the same time if people are simply offered an

unstructured social space they will fall back into old ways of doing things. For the reform

model, the way out of this dilemma is to create structures that force people to interact in

new ways, ones that mirror the ideal-type of informal and unstructured interaction of the

re-enchanted style. That is, new routines are created in an attempt to structure what is

ideally an unstructured manner of interaction. The practice of ‘brainstorming’ can be

thought of as a very simple and limited example of this. Brainstorming is a structured and

routinized practice, but those aspects are meant to create the right conditions for free-

form and informal creativity.

The challenge is that teachers, ironically, tended to find such efforts to foster re-

enchanted style of collaboration as stifling. Yet ‘stifling’ could be a critique from many

directions, as teachers could feel new routines blocked practical action from different

ways of being. Too rigid to allow for the full use of the imagination is quite different from

saying that practices are too rigid for using and improving professional knowledge, or too

structured for fostering personalized relationships. This is because while formalizing

informality may help simulate the kind of informality that fosters innovation, it may also

prevents the kind of informality that allows for the sharing of materials and practices or

that fosters warm support rather than detached critique. Becky, an English teacher in

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School 1, describes below her experience as the biggest change with the addition of

teacher groups:

The major difference I’ve found is that this, you know, critical friends group and all this stuff here – the critical friends, I guess more so than the oth…– is very rigid. There are clearly defined, there are established rules and…that makes me crazy because…I mean, sometimes – I know – I can talk too much, but people have no problems around here now saying, you know, “Enough of this,” “Enough of that.” So, that’s fine, that’s fine. That’s how you work together. “Enough…,” you know, but I find that it’s too rigid, that the rules are too…that, you know, “It has to go this way; we will discuss a problem for a minute, and then you’ll have your turn, and then we’ll do ‘this,’ and then we’ll do ‘that,’ and then we’ll do ‘the other’.” I think it’s too formal. I think it’s too formalized (Interview, June 9 2006).

For this reason many teachers reported preferring the more informal CPT in contrast to

the more structured CFGs. Reese was one of those teachers and described what she felt

she was able to do informal common planning time that was more difficult to do within

the formal informalization of her Critical Friends Group.

and we’d all just be talking. And it was because of that laid feeling. It was so much easier to…like, you know, “How do I get to these kids,” you know, “You had ‘em last year,” or “What’s the deal with them,” or some of them knew about their family life and why they act certain ways, and…you know, and, I mean, they’d say there was no home support. I wouldn’t know that normally (Interview, June 13 2006).

For other teachers, however, the nature of informal interaction alone is not enough to

foster learning and productive exchanges of information. Informality is chaotic and based

on personal idiosyncrasies and tangential minutiae. Camilla reports feeling this way:

See, what happens is: if you just totally leave it to informal – and that’s the way it used to be before we had small schools – let’s get serious: teachers are people. So, if you’ve got five, ten, fifteen minutes of lunch, the last thing you’re going to do is talk about class. Okay? You’re going to talk about everything but class, ‘cause that’s your only downtime. So, having built-in time, which is specifically focused, like a Critical Friends Group, or Common-Planning Time, where the whole focus of this time period is to exchange information: that’s the value point. You know. I mean, you always form informal networks, based on personality, or some teachers you talk to more or less, but even when you’re talking to them, it’s, you know, “How is your kids,” you know, “How was your weekend.” (Interview, June 14 2006).

It is worth noting that Sharon’s perception of the rationale for both CFGs and CPT is as a

space to share information. Here she explicitly endorses a professional-bureaucratic style

of engagement. The upshot of all this is that while teachers preferred informal

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opportunities to deploy their professional judgment as they saw fit, they also found

benefit in the formalization of informal interaction to the extent that it led to tangible

outcomes such as sharing of useful information. In contrast, I heard no positive

evaluations of formalized protocols or other ‘technologies’ that were meant to foster

reflexivity, vision making or other process-oriented, self-encapsulated activities. The

reason is that teachers did not feel that these processes connected to what they were doing

or wanted to be doing in a more pragmatic way. In a School 4 evaluation many teachers

expressed special displeasure with a protocol they often used to start staff meetings where

teachers would go around the circle and talk about something new going on in their life:

‘Connections – sorry. I feel it is a forced protocol.’ ‘Connections and reflections – I enjoyed them setting the tone, but they were less useful because they weren’t ‘nuts and bolts’ or ‘nitty gritty’ topics.’

I would argue that part of the challenge here is that educational theory on teacher

innovation lacks the sophistication of work in the organizations literature. Going back to

the distinction between explorations versus exploitation (March 1991) there has been an

understanding in organizational theory that innovative and routine practices are each a

different mode of activity. A large body of literature has been generated studying so

called ‘ambidextrous organizations’, the term for organizations that are successful at both

exploration and exploitation (Gibson and Birkinshaw 2004). Generally ambidexterity

works by segregating between modes, either structurally by locating different styles of

engagements in different departments (e.g., R&D) or by making a clear temporal

delineation between when an employee is engaging in routine versus search behaviors.

This distinction is not generally made in the educational literature, however, and

part of the result is that teachers are left unsure about how or when to switch modes of

engagement or how they connect to one another. It is the case, however, that some

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teachers at MHS attempted to think through this problem for themselves. Nate, in

describing what he thinks is the ideal relationship between staff meetings and teacher

groups, formulates a relationship that could easily be reworked with the language of

organizational ambidexterity:

...it would be great it a faculty meeting to say ‘okay guys, lets have a school-wide discussion about exhibitions’ and then CPT becomes the place for researching potential types of exhibitions, making decisions about what our exhibitions are going to be, what do we want kids to be able to exhibit, and then breaking that down by content area and then possibly trying and testing those exhibition and debriefing them as time goes on. So I guess School 2 becomes like the planning committee, the oversight committee, and CPT becomes the soldier committee, or something (Interview, June 9 2006).

The more typical view among teachers, however, was to see exploration as a

developmental stage the school would have to pass through at which point they could

discard team-building and vision setting activity. At that point they could return to their

focus on the nuts-and-bolts of pedagogy and curriculum. Camilla articulates this view:

See…and like I say – School 4 – we’re a year ahead of a lot of the other people, because a lot of the organizational problems, and how things work, and all this team-building, group bonding – whatever it is (laughs), we’ve already done that. So, now, we’re coming up against more of these harder issues...(Interview, June 14 2006).

The central issue here is that while this tension between formal and informal interaction

is often framed within the education literature (and among MHS teachers) as an issue of

professional autonomy it is also part and parcel of the difficultly of engendering

organizational creativity. The two things dovetail in school reform, but need to be seen as

conceptually separate. Even in industries without norms of professional autonomy, this

tension between routine and informal styles exists.

Composition 2: Operationalizing Vision

Another important aspect of the logic of the reform design is that the coordination and

control of teachers in TPCs occurs through shared allegiance to a new collective vision of

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an ideal school ethos. The practical challenge is that re-enchanted visions have a long-

term focus that can be in tension with both the here-and-now nature of the professional-

bureaucratic way of being as well the growing accountability regime that schools are

embedded in. Overcoming this tension in time-horizons necessitates a compromise that

creates a composition between the fulfillment of professional duties and obligations with

the motivation of fresh action through organizational vision. The coaches and

headmasters attempted just such compositions through attempts to operationalize the

collective vision created by the small schools.

The need for this composition arises from the dilemma that the success of the

reform relies on teachers being motivated to change by the vision of a new ethos, but that

this new vision does not change the nature of teachers’ practical engagement within the

school. The result is that teachers were often left feeling like conversations about shared

vision were abstract and irrelevant to their work, and that they took time away from more

important tasks. The way that headmasters and coaches generally tried to reconcile this

tension was try to explicitly link the new vision to teachers’ existing lines of practical

action. This was often done in TPC exercises where teachers were asked to reflect on the

vision of the desired school ethos and to identify practical steps to get there. The excerpt

below is from an exercise led by Fred in School 2:

Back in the circle Fred tells them that the exercise was to start them off with some personal things, and now they are ‘beginning a conversation about collective vision.’ They are trying to move, he tells them, away from asking ‘why am I here’ to ‘why are we here.’ He tells them to spend two minutes, on their own, creating a list of words they would use to describe their vision for school 2. They staff goes around in a circle saying words as Fred writes them on the board. He tries to create a ‘mind-map’ type structure as he writes the words down. Once finished there are about 80 items. Fred tells them the goal is to connect these lofty goals with current practices. They will break into groups of four and answer two questions – the first, considering these groups of words, where are we now? The second, what words really capture where we are at now? (Field notes, Professional Development day November 8, 2005).

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The other way that some headmasters attempted reconciliation was to treat the creation of

a school vision as a time-bounded processes, one that once completed could be referred

back to during discussions of curriculum and pedagogy as a guidepost of sorts. By

treating vision as a static point of reference, the aim is to connect it to practical action

without teachers feeling like they are wasting time with the actual process of creating it.

Peter describes this relationship during an informal conversation I had with him:

The leadership team is meeting on Wednesday and will begin planning for he summer academy. He says part of the goal is to get back to vision creation, reflecting on where the school is going to go. He says ‘we keep trying to get back to that.’ The leadership team wants to get out into classrooms to really see how things are going. Peter says that while the vision statement is still a draft (‘it still says ‘draft’ on it) it is basically a the point of finalization and probably won’t change much at this point (Field notes, May 15 2006).

Other headmasters saw the process as one where conversations about practice and vision

happened on parallel, and disconnected, tracks until teachers were developmentally ready

to make the connection across them by themselves. This was Rachel’s perspective. The

excerpt below is from a conversation I had with her mid-year after what she thought was

an especially product professional development day with her staff. She told me she felt

like it was the first time that the abstract ‘big picture’ ideas were becoming

operationalized by the teachers:

She said she felt it and it was exciting. She described it as the work up until that point operating in two distinct ways. First, there was the abstract, pig picture stuff (she swoops her hand above her head as she describes this) and second, there is the more ground-level, immediate stuff (she swoops her hands at about waist level) and Friday was when they first came together (Conversation, March 22 2006).

In contrast, for teachers the issue of connecting vision with practice tended concern

making the school a more friendly and civil place for them to carry out their professional

duties. This was a vision of turning the school into someplace welcoming, a place with a

recognizable spirit. The common thread that weaves together the planning orientation of

individual teachers was not a grand vision for the school, but rather in the creation of a

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common spirit grounded in domestic logic of manners and etiquette (Boltanski and

Thevenot 1991).

This alternative style of composition was most evident in School 4. The teachers

and headmaster in school struggled for a very long time to create a concrete and tangible

manifestation of the school vision that had collectively written earlier. After many

months of deliberation, they took one of CES’ Habits of Mind (using a tone of decency

and trust) and came up the idea of designating the school as a ‘curse-free zone.’ The

teachers adopted this, created signs for their room and hallway, and had several

discussions of how to enforce this new rule. There are two important points here. First,

there was a clear sense of unease among the teachers until they felt they had created

something tangible related to the vision. There was a shared sense that this was, in the

grand scheme of the reform, a rather minor thing but was nonetheless a major

accomplishment. Melissa said:

I think I would just say that it’s the people that you work with who are going to make or break it…and having a teacher community that can get behind an issue – even if it’s just a curse-free environment, but who can get behind an issue and work as one, is going to be the difference between a success and a failure (Interview, June 14 2006).

And the second point about this is that the accomplishment they pushed for was more in

line with creating a communitarian ethos grounded in etiquette and politeness and

deference than the reform design’s more re-enchanted ethos. Attempts to operationalize

shared vision, then, turned out quite differently than planned. While headmasters and

coaches tried to comprise as a bridge between old and new ways of being, teachers looked

for compromises that made the school a friendlier and warmer place to continue carrying

out their existing practical style.

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Composition 3: Systematizing New Dispositions and Habits

Finally, there is what I think might be the most important composition in terms of

offering a real possibility for transforming the ethos of the school. The reason is that this

composition is the place where the discussion of school ethos is most explicit and the

reform comes closest to directly attempting to shape it. Specifically, in certain types of

reform like small schools we see efforts to create standards that are not chunks of

knowledge, but rather particular skills or competencies. At MHS that meant attempts to

turn the habits and skills associated with re-enchantment into standards that can be

measured and assessed. This can happen in two ways: 1) through the operationalization

of desirable student habits of mind and 2) the operationalization of desirable teacher

habits of mind.

In terms of operationalizing student habits of mind, this was seen not only as a way

to get a hold of the reform in some tangible way, but also a means of solving two other

problems: the challenge of interdisciplinary conversations among teachers and the lack of

coherent culture for any of the small schools. In identifying and cultivating particular

student dispositions, there was a sense among some involved in the reform that it would

give all teachers a common point of reference in their discourse and a sense of identity.

The following is from a memo Patricia, the headmaster of School 4, sent her staff at the

end of the school year:

For the second piece of work for Summer Academy, Fred and I looked at Habits of Mind because we felt that this would give us exactly what you have been requesting this past year. These habits will be what we, as a faculty commit to in our classes and our encounters with students. This is what can make us different from other schools. This is what can unify all of us. And I believe this is what we have been waiting for a long time. We are ready to identity and adopt these habits now. Once these habits have been identified, we can then move onto defining our criteria for excellence, choosing our school motto, revisiting our Vision statement and even choosing our school name….Some of you have asked me what Habits of Mind are and what they are supposed to

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accomplish. I have several good articles on what other schools have adopted for habits. If you are interested, please see me.

Along the same lines as with desirable student dispositions, there was a sense among

some teachers that a similar composition could be achieved focusing on the kind of

teacher dispositions that were associated with reform teaching. And, as with student

dispositions, this could provide a common reference point for interdisciplinary

conversations. Nate discusses below how interdisciplinary groupings force teachers to

talk about skills and capacities rather than content:

There are certain pedagogical techniques that are used in certain disciplines but learning theory is learning theory and we can have, and have had, interesting and meaningful conversations across disciplines in my CPT, so I don’t think that that’s been a problem. We’ve some very interesting, very engaging conversations and when you talk about differentiated instruction, differentiated instruction might look different in the science classroom, in the math classroom, but its still differentiated instruction. I think if we did the CPT’s by discipline there would be the need to talk just about content rather than how we deliver that content (Interview, June 9 2006).

And along those same lines, Camilla suggests that a focus on shared skills would provide

a sense of identity for the small school staff:

If I envisioned a small school, one of the things that would be a commonality would be methodology, that whenever you walked into a room, there’d always be an essential question on the board – it didn’t matter who was teaching or where it was – and the kids would always know, “Oh: this is the way things are taught in this school.” Or in every class, once in a while, you’d do a Socratic, you know, type of arrangement. Kids would be used to that kind of a thing, and it would be ubiquitous throughout your school. We’re not there yet (Interview, June 14 2006).

So if this makes a lot of sense as a composition that could be useful - to systematize

dispositions and habits and then create plans and goals to cultivate them - why was this

not the dominant line of action in the reform? This is an especially important question

since the focus on developing new skills and habits was, from the design perspective of

the reform, what separates this approach from other, more programmatic ones. I would

argue that there were two general reasons.

The first was that this way of practicing is very different from teachers’ practical

knowledge, their existing sense of what they are doing. The second reason has to do with

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the practical difficulty of composing around a focus on dispositions when there are so

many other competing pulls. Below is an excerpt from field notes of a School 4 group

activity that led by one of the coaches. The activity was to choose one of the CES Ten

Common Principles and discuss how they could use it in their school. Group 1 talked

largely about the many different demands that had to be met in deploying this principle.

Ten Common Principles Activity ‘Select the sentence or phrase from the Ten Common Principles that gets you thinking the most.’ In small groups they worked on question ‘What does this principle suggest about the work of this small school?’

Group 1 choose #1 ‘Using minds well…schools should not be comprehensive.’ Suggests about our work…negotiating this with MCAS [state standardized test] in mind; meeting ‘standards’ while setting up our own skills-based structure; maintain content…where do we draw the line?

The response here describes the difficulty in terms of meeting state standards, but it was

also expressed elsewhere in terms of composing with the teachers’ own sense of the role

of content and disciplines and other such things. Perhaps, then, the best way to

summarize the difficulty here was that attempts to identify and operationalize a new set

of desirable dispositions were always evaluated and performed through existing ones.

New styles of practical action frequently do not seem sensible from within other ones.

Differences in Leadership and School Style

These tensions and compositions played out differently across the four small schools. In

this final section of this chapter I will offer a more in-depth comparison between Schools

1 and 2, paying special attention to role of the headmasters in fostering different school

ethos. And yet, even though the headmasters had different leadership styles, focused on

different aspects of the reform, and fostered different group styles among their staff, it did

not seem to matter much when we look at the data on teacher attitudes and practices.

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Why would that be the case? My answer is two-fold. First, as I discuss below, these

differences in school style allowed existing styles of engagement and coordination to be

expressed differently, but did not fundamentally change them. And second, as discussed

in next chapter, the practices and engagements in the TPCs seem to have operated in a

disconnected manner from what teachers continued to do in their classrooms.

School Style

One way the styles of the headmaster mattered was in helping shape orientation the each

school developed toward their work together. For example Rachel, the headmaster of

School 2, tended to focus on long-term issues and so her staff was more likely to engage

in discussion about school vision and mission. At staff meetings she would sit in the

circle along with her teachers and facilitate their discussions. In comparison to the other

headmasters she also spent the most time at meetings doing relationship building

activities, and her staff gained a reputation in the school as being the most gregarious. For

this reason, teachers tended to interpret staff meetings that were long on administrative

discussion as being failures. Nate discusses his perception that over the course of the year

Rachel improved in her ability to steer staff meetings in desirable directions:

Before small schools staff meetings were frequently places to disseminate mundane information, policy procedures and other stuff that you could have gotten in a memo. Our small school meetings have been a departure but not as much of a departure as I think is productive…because so much time of those meetings is spent like rookies asking questions about policy and procedures. I think Rachel has gotten much better, like yesterday she was very clearly, tabled a conversation for the next time and I turned to Bill and said ‘she’s getting better.’ This is stuff that comes up and you get side-tracked and you need someone to say ‘that’s a conversation for a different venue.’ (Interview, June 9 2006).

Sarah expressed a similar feeling, stating that she liked here School 2 staff meetings

because they allowed for deeper focus on the practice of teaching and not juts the

diffusion of information.

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The positive thing I liked about the staff meetings this year was that because it was more concentrated, fewer faculty members, the good thing was that we could tackle problems and issues that were more professional-development type day issues. You know what I mean? We could talk about practice a little bit more and actually learn some things like that during staff meetings, versus the, “It’s all just general information” (Interview, June 12 2006).

Peter, the headmaster of School 1, had a very different approach and style than Rachel’s.

Meeting in different classrooms, he would leave the desks in rows and lead from the front

of the room, much as a teacher would with his students. This physical arrangement

reflected a tacit endorsement of bureaucratic hierarchy. Discussion would largely be

relegated to nuts-and-bolts issues of administration. When the outside coaches were not

present Peter would rarely spend meeting time on big-picture issues. The teachers in

School 1 did bond and socialize, but this was done independent of their work together.

In contrast to School 2, they got to know each other almost entirely informally and

engaged in very few team-building activities during the school year. And in the same way

that teachers in School 2 appreciated Rachel’s style, the same was true with Peter in

School 1. Lauren also saw, and endorsed, a progression over the course of the year in her

headmaster ability to lead meetings but it moved along a different trajectory than did

Rachel’s. Meetings improved not because they became less about diffusion of

information, but rather because the diffusion became more efficient. Laurel described it

this way:

There were points, I think – even probably Peter agrees that he didn’t know what to do on those meetings. And it’s hard to know when are you going to need to meet, when are you not going to meet, but I think there were just a few too many meetings. They were very efficient, you know, and quick, and Peter always knew that…what we were doing. He always thought of like, “Okay, you have finals, you have midterms,” you know, “You have things to correct. Take this time, come back,” or, “Meet with this teacher, talk about this.” So, they were always efficient; I never felt like, “My God, I’m going to another meeting,” but I just felt like other meetings we needed more of. But, that’s probably not in a small school (Interview, June 12 2006).

One result of these differences in styles was that teachers in different schools developed

divergent senses of what small school staffs, and meetings, were for. And this in turn

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shaped how they understood the success or failure of collective endeavors. School 2 had

a style that reflected more of the re-enchanted ideal. Teachers saw themselves as

attempting to forge a shared identity, even if it was unclear exactly what that meant or

how it was going to be achieved. They talked more about skills, habits and other

mechanism that could potentially unify them across grades and disciplines. There was

much more of a tension here between vision and practice than in School 1, largely

because School 2 spent much more time talking about it.

School 1 saw the boundaries around their small school as arbitrary, as a being just

a small version of the larger bureaucracy. They framed collaboration as autonomous

professionals united around a shared set of students. They saw the benefit of social

support and providing tips and lessons, but not in a way that overly threatened

professional autonomy. They also did not seem to see the need for, or desire, a shared

sense of purpose or vision (even if they were pushed toward one by their coach). They

saw good staff meetings as efficient, purposeful and constructive. They wanted to treat

issues efficiently, deliberatively, with an emphasis on concrete nuts-and-bolts over

abstract visions.

Along these lines, School 1 teachers assumed that problems should be handled

outside of staff meetings. Given the traditional bureaucratic structure of the meetings,

teachers felt like raising concerns in front of the entire staff would be seen as an act of

subordination. My experience was that they generally felt comfortable taking issues to

Peter, but generally did so in private. It was rare to any kind of conflict during School 1

meetings. The teachers in School 2, in contrast, would frequently raise concerns and

issues during staff meetings. While these discussions generally remained civil, raising

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issues was something encouraged by Rachel and became a recognizable part of the style

of School 2 discourse.

Composition and Leadership

As argued above, these differences in school styles can be seen a partly reflective of the

individual styles of their headmasters. What I want to briefly discuss below is how these

different styles also shaped Rachel and Peter’s experience of leadership, and where they

felt frustrations and blocks were located. Rachel, because she saw fostering a shared

vision and connecting it to daily practice, as a central part of her job, felt a good deal of

tension between the different aspects of her job:

Rachel says that Fred compares the changes process to changing tires on a moving bus. She says there are four levels of work – management; instruction; headmaster; and conversion work (which is two levels – whole school and small school). She felt pulled in different directions, hard to manage all these different levels. She sees her strength as an instructional leader, and felt like she didn’t get to do that as much as she wanted (or the school needed – the teachers were demanding more of her time as an instructional leader than she could spare). (Discussion, March 9 2006)

This feeling of being pulled in different directions was not, however, a straightforward

reflection of the demands on headmasters in the reform. Peter, operating with a different

style of engagement, did not report feeling this stress.

I asked Peter if he, like Rachel, felt tension between the differing roles he had to fill. He said no, there was no conflict, and in fact it was easier at LHS than his previous job. At LHS he didn’t need to deal with discipline, and in the past he was never able to get into classrooms as easily as he can at LHS. He thought that the perception of tension between roles was largely a function of past experience (Discussion, March 9 2006).

Such differences in style led to not only differences in experience as headmaster, but also

in where they located the problems that needed to be overcome for more effective TPCs

within their own small school. Since Rachel saw the success of TPC in building a

collaborative culture of experimentation, she identified the major barriers as structural

and interactional features of the school she perceived as preventing that:

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I asked what kinds of things would make this situation easier for her. It was largely the bureaucratic aspects of the school that she identified as being problematic. She said she would like to have more distributive leadership, more teachers stepping up into leadership roles (Discussion, March 9 2006).

Peter, in contrast took a more professional-bureaucratic stance toward TPCs and as such

saw the major barrier as being teacher conservatism. He thought some veteran teachers

would simply never change and could only be waited out. For those teachers who were

capable of change, he saw his role as providing a feeling of safety so they could slowly,

and at their own pace, move toward the reform vision.

One of the key markers of success touted by the administration was the level of

collegiality and administrative support teachers attributed to their own small schools

(especially in contrast to their feelings about the school as a whole). An important aspect

of this was that, across schools, there were high levels of teacher satisfaction with their

headmasters. What is especially interesting, though, is that despite very different

leadership and administrative styles, all the headmasters were rated relatively similarly by

their staff. In fact, not only did many teachers say they liked the style of their particular

headmaster, many also commented that they could not have imagined being happy with a

different headmaster. Katherine, for example, told me:

I really like having Rachel as my headmaster. She’s extremely approachable... I mean, before you couldn’t even really approach administration, no, can’t really talk to them. It was more like I was the student and they were the teacher whereas I don’t feel that way about Rachel which is really, really good about small schools. I really like my headmaster, I wouldn’t want to work for any other…sure, I know some of the other headmasters are nice, but I really would not want to work for anybody but Rachel (Interview, June 9 2006).

And yet, with the exception of some people in School 4, teachers were randomly assigned

to their headmaster. Given this, there is no reason to think that teachers ended up in

schools in which they had a natural affinity with the style of their headmaster.

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Moreover, as can be seen in Table 7. above, these differences across schools did not lead

to significant differences in attitudes or practices. The table reports the average survey

scores of scales for trust between teachers, trust with administrators, sense of job

satisfaction, and self-reported amount of traditional teaching. Based on ANOVA

analyses, none of the differences are significant. In the next chapter I will tackle this

question of why differences in small school styles did not seem to lead to desired changes

in practices.

Table 7. Comparison Between Schools 1 and 2

School 1 School 2Teacher Trust 45.7 46.6Administrative Trust 30.6 30.2Satisfaction 21.0 21.1Traditional Pedagogy 14.1 14.3

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Chapter 7: School-as-Field

The view laid out so far in the dissertation lends itself to a re-conceptualization of the

school as a particular kind of social site composed of a network of interconnected

practices (e.g., lectures, collaborative reflections, informal conversations), each

associated with different physical spaces. This combination of practices and spaces

creates a mesh of orders (e.g., classrooms, staff lounges), each with its own rules, norms

and practical logics. These orders are connected together by virtue of sharing the same

broad ends and by being a part of the same larger project of ‘schooling.’ Teachers and

students implicitly understand how to move across these orders, changing the nature of

their behavior as they do so, without losing track of the fact that the whole time they

continue to be engaged in the encompassing practice of ‘doing school.’

A central theoretical and empirical question thus becomes, how do these different

orders hang together in the school? That is, how does what people do in one setting relate

to what they do in another such that the two are seen as parts of some larger project? And

in relation to the more specific issues of school reform and change, this question

highlights the issue of how change in one area of the school reverberates out and affect

behavior in another. This is especially important for reforms like small schools that are

based on the idea that creating more collaborative and reflective interaction among

teachers in one order (i.e., teacher professional community) will directly affect behavior

in another (i.e., classrooms). The assumption seems to be that the linking mechanism

between orders comes in the form of mental representations that are intellectually or

reflectively ‘learned’ in one social practice (i.e., some collegial activity) that can then be

straightforwardly applied in another (i.e., academic instruction).

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In this chapter I attempt to problematize the relationship between local orders in

different parts of the school. Specifically, I argue that by and large the small school

reform at MHS left unaltered the nature of the classroom and created, in the form of a

professional learning community, what amounted to a separate interactional context, one

with its own set of requisite skills, understandings and dynamics. This conceptualization

is schematized in Figure 3 below, highlighting that the relationship between the

classroom and the professional community as different orders needs to be treated as an

empirical question.

Figure 3. Different Orders in the School

Solving some of the most significant puzzles in the school reform literature will rely, I

argue, on beginning to flesh out the exact nature of the interrelation between these

different orders and practices. Take for example the consistent finding that small school

reform has lead to improvements in the areas of teacher satisfaction and trust but at the

same time has not led to academic improvements (Kahne et al 2008). This becomes

easier to understand if we see trust among teachers developing primarily within a social

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order (i.e., the professional community) that is only loosely coupled with the classroom

order.

In this chapter I take up the issue of how different interactional orders in the school

hang together. I begin by taking the generally meso-level notion of ‘field’ (Bourdieu

1984; Scott et al 2000) and applying it to the intra-organizational level of the school

itself. In doing the school can be conceptualized as a particular kind of field of

interrelating orders and practices. I next take the general contours of this framework and,

using longitudinal network analysis, empirically examine the more specific argument that

teacher conversations networks shape the orders within which they occur, but do not spill

over to other orders or practices.

Elaborating School-as-Field

Fields are local orders within which actors “interact with knowledge of one another under

a set of common understandings about the purposes of the field, the relationships in the

field...and the field’s rules (McAdam and Fligstein 2011:3).” Most work in sociology

pertaining to fields has been concerned with the relationship of multiple institutions in the

same inter-organizational field (e.g., Powell et al 2005). Over the past few years,

however, there has been a growing call among organizational scholars to treat the

organization itself as a field (Vaughan 2008). In this chapter I continue the effort of

bringing together aspects of practice and institutional theories by expanding on the idea

of ‘organization-as-field’ (Emirbayer & Johnson 2008). The goal is a conceptualization

of the school itself as a field composed of a network of practices and local orders.

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While there is a long history of drawing on different field theories in the social

sciences, most contemporary sociological and organizational usage can be traced to

Bourdieu (for overview, see Martin 2003). For Bourdieu, fields are “structured spaces of

positions (or posts) whose properties depend on their position within these spaces and

which can be analyzed independently of the characteristics of their occupants (which are

partly determined by them)” (1993: 72). There are two important parts of this definition.

First, for Bourdieu the field is conceptualized in terms of a pattern of objective forces, the

result being little focus on subjectivity or interaction. Second, the primary motivation of

action is social striving and contestation over field-specific resources or capital (even if

actors may not consciously know that this is what is happening). Identifying what counts

as “social power” is always the key to understanding the structure and logic of a

particular field. Different fields may have their own capital and habitus, but as Friedland

put it, the logic of practice always remains a “generic contest for domination in a plurality

of homogeneously organized field (Friedland 2009: 888).”

The field concept was next taken up by institutional theory and this became the

most common manifestation in sociology (Martin 2003). Institutional theorists have

primarily used ‘field’ as a meso-level construct to describe inter-organizational

relationships within some particular industrial sector or policy domain. And following the

general cultural turn taken by institutional theory, fields have come to be seen more as a

social construction than as Bourdieu’s structure of objective forces. While regulative and

normative forces are central to institutional theory (Scott 1995) the ‘gravity’ of fields is to

be found in the shared cognitive understandings that result in a self-reinforcing ‘taken-

for-granted’ everyday reality. The institutional take on fields does not, however, lose

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Bourdieu’s focus on contestation and power, but rather shifts the stakes from field-

specific forms of capital to control over cultural meanings. There are at least two

significant issues with this conceptualization, however, that have hindered attempts to

apply field thinking to specific organizations like schools.

First, the meso-level focus of institutional and Bourdieu-inspired work on fields

has results in the reification of organizations, leaving them be treated as unitary actors

within a field of other organizations. While this has been a fruitful move for

understanding dynamics at the level of the organizational field, it has also come at the

cost of glossing intra-organizational dynamics. Both Bourdieu (2001) and institutionalists

(Fligstein and McAdam 2011), however, see fields as being embedded in one another like

Russian nesting dolls, and both discuss the possibility of treating organizations as fields

though there has been little work that actually takes up this suggestion (see Vaughan

2002; 2008 as a major exception). Moving down to the intra-organizational level

highlights how little field theories have focused on the actual dynamics of interaction,

specifically “the intersubjective negotiation and coordination of practices, and on the

concrete interpersonal networks of interdependency, obligation and constraint through

which intersubjective negotiation and accountability flow (Bottero 2009: 413).”

Second, the primary emphasis on explaining field dynamics in terms of

contestation has obfuscated the importance of other forms of interaction. What is needed

is a more pragmatic view of fields that focuses on intersubjective mutual coordination in

carrying out shared practices. A more pragmatic perspective highlights the fact that along

with dynamics of contestation, fields may also be held together by cooperative and

democratic interaction. The nature of coordination within a particular field ought to be a

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subject of empirical examination, not an a priori aspect of the definition of the field

itself. Such a reconceptualization is necessary if we are to conceive of co-membership in

a field being constituted not only by subjective perceptions or objective structures of

competition, but also of shared identity, collaboration, collective sentiment and mutual

fatefulness in collective projects and practices.

Viewing intra-organizational fields in terms of dynamic social networks is a move

that helps us address both of these issues. What we ultimately want to know is how social

networks operate as thread that helps weave together disparate practices and orders into

the larger organization-as-field. And because interactions always happen within particular

orders, their meaning and power must be understood in terms of the logic of practical

action of those orders. There are certain puzzles we will not be able to solve until we see

that social networks do not simply connect decontextualized individual nodes, but that

such connections always happen within and across local social orders. For example, there

is little agreement among network analysts about the conditions under which network ties

as social capital give rise to positive effects versus harm or exploitation (Baker and

Faulkner 2004). This is not an issue that can be solved by looking only at the endogenous

logic of the network itself; the nature of the local orders within which social capital is

both accrued and utilized must both be taken into account.

Seen from this perspective, organizational change is not just about the

introduction of new structures or practices, but also how their introduction impacts the

existing configuration of networks and practices across the school-as-field. The changing

nature of this configuration becomes, then, a central empirical question for any study of

organizational reform. Organizational change, no matter how deeply the structures are it

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aims to change, is never matter of completely replacing the existing mesh of practices

with new ones. Rather, reforms introduce a select number of new practices, or modify

existing ones, with the goal of these changes reverberating out to other areas of the

organization. Small school reform, for example, introduces a new bundle of practice-

settings in the form of a dedicated time and space for fostering different forms of teacher

collegiality. The theory of change assumes that the effects of this collegiality will spread

out to other orders including, most importantly, the classroom.

Compared to most existing reform literature this implies a rather different account

of the difficulty of change. Generally, if collaborative reflection and discussion do not

lead to desired changes, it is explained in the literature as a failure of learning. That is,

that the professional community practices were not successful in getting the right things

into the heads of individual teachers. The main impediments to this type of learning

include such structural and cultural factors as: the difficulty of making tacit knowledge

explicit; norms of privacy and non-interference as well as dealing with difference and

disagreement; insufficient social supports; taken-for-granted language and frameworks

that reify assumptions about learners and learning. The argument is that if these

constraints and impediments could be overcome, then teachers could have interaction

with the necessary frequency, specificity and depth to generate new insights into teaching

dilemmas or to foster instructional innovation.

And MHS teachers also seemed to endorse this explanation for the difficulty of

change. One of the teachers in the School 3 focus group, for example, argued that his

school had all the necessary components for significant change in teaching practices, but

lacked the time to properly assemble them:

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I think one of the things that’s been a little bit frustrating for me is that I don’t feel like we’ve had a lot of time to talk about student-centered learning, yet that’s one of our goals. And that its such a great group of people in the school 3 faculty that everybody seems to want to know how to make changes or know how to do things differently in their classrooms, but until we have a chance to have those kinds of conversations its kind of hard to do (Focus group, January 17 2006).

Not only does this teacher endorse the idea that a lack of learning is the issue impeding

change, but also that conversations between teachers are the mechanism that will link

what happens in the collaborative community to what happens in the classroom. The

problem is that conversations between teachers are themselves different types of

practices. Friendly conversations about personal lives, trading pedagogical tips, or

engaging in teams building activities all involve conversations between teachers that have

their own requisite set of skills, shared understandings, and ends. The point is that for

both educational theory and for the practitioners themselves, there remains an unclear

relationship between teacher collaboration as its own ‘order’ and classroom practice, as

well as the diverse types of collegial interaction that make up a the teacher professional

community.

Different Practices, Different Skills

The teachers at MHS encountered a good deal of difficulty in trying to link together the

various things happening at the staff level with each other and with what was happening

in their classrooms. The way the teachers (and some educational theory) might frame this

was that what was happening at the staff level was too abstract to be useful for changing

classroom practice. Thinking of the school as a field composed of a network of practices

lets us see, in contrast, is that what was happening at the staff level was itself a set of

practices. The issue is not necessarily whether staff practices were too abstract, but rather

how they fit together with each other and with classroom practices.

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Importantly, the teachers at MHS themselves frequently wondered about the

nature of the relationship between classroom and staff practices. It was not clear to them

that even if they successfully developed the professional community that this would lead

to change in teacher practices. Another teacher in the School 3 focus group put it this

way:

…I see a lot more staff participation, whether its cross-discipline or whatever, it doesn’t matter, and certainly within staff meetings more voices are heard. I think that’s an accomplishment of sorts, it leads to a little more trust than there used to be, perhaps. Certainly more knowledgeable of each other. I’ve got to say though, that within my classroom and what goes on with me teaching face-to-face with my students I don’t know that small schools makes any difference… (Focus group, January 17 2006).

Both teachers and administrators at MHS seemed to implicitly link this disconnect at

least partly with the fact that the classroom and the professional community were

associated with different skills and dispositions. From the perspective of the

administrators, this was mostly frequently tied to their frustration in identifying potential

teacher-leaders on their staff that possessed pedagogical skills, reform knowledge, and

qualities of leadership. The following is from a conversation I had with Rachel about her

own small school staff:

I asked if CFG was going to eventually become a part of CPT. Rachel said it was, as is the plan with all teachers, but that she didn’t have anyone trained. She said she was struggling to find teachers on her staff who had the vision, the knowledge, and the personality to do it, but it was hard to find folks with all three. When she said this I started thinking about Nate, who it turned out was her example. She says he is someone who ‘gets it’ as far as pedagogy goes. He has trouble, however, working with other teachers...Nate had expressed interest to her about eventually becoming a curriculum coordinator and Rachel told me he’s going to have to learn to deal with people first. At that point Justin [a science teacher] come into the room briefly and after he left Rachel said he was the one most ready for leadership, and that he knew it and wanted to take that on. She said that he still had some conservative teaching practices, but had the knowledge and the personality (Conversations, December 14 2005).

The reform coaches came to express the issue in a very similar way, identifying the three

core skills as: adopting reform pedagogy; knowledge about the reform; and the

personality for working with other adults. The diversity of the reform skill set was also a

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frequent topic of conversation with teachers. Nate (the teacher Rachel discussed above)

joked with me about there being some unarticulated set of skills he needed to acquire, but

being sure that whatever they were the coaches must possess them:

Well I’ve signed up for the training. I’m not sure what’s entailed and I’ve only had Fred lead our CPT and I assume that he knows that the rest of us don’t, whether its protocols for facilitating discussions or whether its interpersonal skills that the rest of us don’t have (laughs) (Interview, June 9 2005).

And so introducing the professional community entailed introducing a new set of

practices, the successful performance of which necessitated acquiring a new set of skills

and dispositions around collegiality and reform knowledge. The problem is that it was

clear neither theoretically, nor in the minds of the teachers themselves, what the

connection was between the various forms of collegiality being developed and changes in

their classroom attitudes and practices. As I will show below, it may be the case that there

in fact is no strong connection, that the development and negotiation of different skills

and meanings may be happening in a largely parallel, rather than interconnected, way.

Co-Evolution of Networks and Practices

The empirical question, then, is how did different forms of collegiality relate to teacher

attitudes and practices. The literature has not teased apart the antecedents and

consequences of different types of collegial networks, much less offered a theoretical

framework for understanding those differences. My argument is that different forms of

collegiality are different practices that tend to transpire within different orders. And as

different practices, with different logics and understandings, we should expect them to

evolve differently, to shape and be shaped by different attitudes and behaviors.

Specifically, the reform aims to foster different forms of collegiality (i.e., different types

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of conversations between teachers), each of which is reflected in the discussion above

concerning the different skills necessary for members of the teacher professional

community: interpersonal, instructional, and reform focused. I will look at how these

three conversation networks variably evolve in concert with four individual level

variables related to beliefs and attitudes that have come to play a central role in

contemporary school reform and theory: trust (Bryk and Schneider 2002), efficacy

(Tschannen-Moran and Hoy 2001), need to change (Turnbull 2002) and self-reported

classroom practices.

Next, I turn to a set of hypotheses derived from the discussion so far. First, as

Bourdieu argues, homophily is a major factor in explaining the structure of fields

(Bourdieu 1984). The nature of what people perceive as making them similar is, however,

highly context dependent (McPherson et al 2001). For example, similar attitudes about,

say, politics will likely be inconsequential to selecting members of a sports team, but may

be more important in forming civics groups. And because the practices and logics of the

professional community are only loosely coupled to the classroom, I posit here that tie

selections for teachers will be unconnected to their classroom related attitudes and

activities.15 Instead, tie selection will be based on homophily in terms of shared

disciplinary identity, experience and propinquity based on small school. That is, for all

three conversation networks teachers will talk most with those teachers who are in the

same school, teach the same subject, and have the same level of experience.

Hypothesis 1: Selection across all three conversation networks will be driven primarily by disciplinary and age homophily and small school propinquity.

It is not only selection, however, that is important in the relationship between networks 15 Selection might, however, be tied to similarity in attitudes and practices more specifically associated with the professional community, but unfortunately I do not have variables related to this.

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and attitudes. We must also account for processes of influence. Trust, as mentioned

above, has become a very important construct in the school reform literature. It remains

unclear, however, whether it shapes interaction by changing the nature of tie selection or

is the outcome of changes in structures and practices. I hypothesize that trust will not be a

significant selection effect (that is, teachers will not seek out other teachers with similar

levels of trust), but that across all three networks teachers’ feelings of trust will converge

with the feelings of their ties. This is because trust is conceptualized in a way that does

not link it to particular practices or orders, but is treated rather as a diffuse sense that

other people can be counted on and that important things are shared with them. The

suggestion here is that any type of ongoing interaction ought to lead to convergence on

levels of trust, regardless of its content.

Hypothesis 2: Teachers’ feelings of trust will converge with the feelings of their alters across all three conversation networks.

I also hypothesize that conversations will shape teachers’ sense of efficacy. Specifically, I

posit that the curricular network will most significantly shape teacher efficacy because it

is within those conversations that new activities, practices and methods are discussed, as

well as evaluations about their effectiveness. In contrast, because the other two networks

do not pertain to classroom practices and whether they work or not, they will not shape

teacher efficacy.

Hypothesis 3: The curricular conversation network will shape changes in teacher efficacy, but the other two networks will not.

The sense that a particular change might be effective is different, however, from the

broader sense that some kind of change in practices is necessary. The need to change can

be thought of like a social movement frame transformation, where some social problem is

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reframed from being inevitable to being alterable. The fourth hypothesis is that changes

in teachers’ sense that they need to change their own practice is shaped through

conversations that more idealistic and big picture – in other words, the reform

conversation network.

Hypothesis 4: The reform network will shape changes in teachers’ sense that they need to change their own practice, but the other two networks will not.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, there is the issue of how these different

conversation networks shaped actual classroom practice as measured by teacher self-

report. The conceptualization of the school as a network of different orders would suggest

that there might not be any straightforward connection between teacher conversations in

the professional community and their practices in the classroom. Moreover, because the

reform actually did little to change the logic of practice in the classroom itself, I

hypothesize that teacher conversations will not have a significant effect on self-reports

classroom practice.

Hypothesis 5: None of the conversation networks will be associated with changes in self-reported classroom practices.

Now I turn to empirical models of longitudinal networks and teacher attitudes and

practices to test the above hypotheses. The main task is to determine which forms of

collegiality are aligned with attitudes and activities related to classroom practice.

Data and Methods

To study the dynamic co-evolution of teacher networks and attitudes I used a longitudinal

network analysis approach. This type of stochastic actor-based modeling is done with the

network software program SIENA, or “Simulation Investigation for Empirical Network

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Analysis” (Ripley and Snijders 2010). Broadly, SIENA uses network data panel to

analyze the transition probabilities from one network state to the next, with each observed

wave being conditioned on the previous one. The underlying assumption is that

relationships are evolving ‘states’ between measurement points, and that network

evolution is directed and under the control of the sender of the tie. With SIENA we can

represent a wide variety of influences on network change and estimate parameters

expressing those influences. This lets us simultaneously study the dynamics of networks

and behavior. The evolution of the network is influenced by both endogenous network

structures (e.g., reciprocity, transitivity) and individual covariates (i.e., attitudes and

behaviors).

This co-evolutionary relationship between networks and individual covariates is

represented in Figure 4. below. SIENA uses a stochastic modeling process, meaning each

observation is conditioned on the previous (and only the previous) observation. As can be

seen in the figure, the network structure or array of individual attitudes can be modeled as

dependent on the network and attitudes at the previous time point. This is the unique

feature of a longitudinal network approach, that networks and attitudes can

simultaneously be treated as both the independent and dependent variables in the same

model. This development of coevolutionary modeling has allowed for significant

progress in what has long been one of the thorniest problems in network science, namely

teasing apart the effects of selection and influence in relationships. For example, much of

the early empirical work that employed SIENA looked at adolescent delinquency in an

effort to figure out if the fact that adolescents tend to have friends with similar levels of

delinquency as themselves is a result of peer influence or of tie selection to similar alters.

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Figure 4. Relationship Between Networks and Attitudes in SIENA models

Coevolution of Teacher Networks and Attitudes

Teachers were asked to identify who, during the previous school semester, they had

conversations with concerning: 1) personal matters; 2) classroom teaching; and 3) issues

related to the reform. A more detailed explanation can be found in Chapter 2. Teachers

further indicated how frequently these conversations occurred: daily, weekly, or monthly.

This was part of the larger survey that was administered three times during the school

year: the week before school started, the first staff meeting after winter break, and the last

week of school. The results for each network (9 total) were coded into 95x95 binary

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adjacency matrices where each cell, Xij, corresponded to i’s relationship to j as reported

by i.

These networks were modeled along with four teacher covariates: feelings of trust

for other teachers in the same small school; sense of efficacy about whether practice

change would lead to desired results; feeling about whether there is a need to change own

practice; and self reported use of traditional pedagogy (i.e., lectures, memorization,

worksheets). Details concerning these variables can also be found in Chapter 2. In other

analysis, variable measurements were derived from the sum of all scale items. Due to the

nature of SIENA, however, the models presented in this chapter use the average of the

scaled items (i.e., the sum divided by number of items in the scale). The summary

statistics for networks and individual covariates can be seen in Table 8 below.

Empirical Model Specification

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SIENA models can broadly be broken down into two parts: selection processes and

influence processes. The former refers to the mechanisms of tie selection, with special

interest paid to issues of homophily. The latter refers to the process by which over time

the attitudes and behaviors of actors become similar to those they are connected to. I will

discuss each of these in turn below.

Modeling the Selection Process

The selection process models how endogenous network effects and individual teachers

covariates influenced the evolution of tie selection across the three conversation networks

(i.e., they are used to predict the patter of network ties). As mentioned above, Hypothesis

1 is that network effects (e.g., reciprocity, transitivity) and similarities in constant

attributes (i.e., school, discipline, experience level) will be significant drivers of the

network. In contrast, changing attributes (i.e., trust, efficacy, need to change, change in

use of traditional pedagogy) are predicted to have an insignificant association with tie

selection. A brief discussion of the included covariates and network effects can be found

below.

Individual Covariates

Constant: I included several covariates that previous network research has

suggested are predicative of tie selection. First, research on propinquity shows that tie

formation is more likely to occur with alters who are physically proximate (McPherson et

al 2001). For that reason I include a variable for small school membership. Further,

research on teacher networks has shown a tendency toward homophily in relation to

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subject matter and experience level (Frank 1995). To capture this potential dynamic,

variables for discipline and years of teaching experience are also included.

Changing: Along with the constant variables described above, the models also

include several changing covariates (i.e., varying measures collected at all three time-

points). The rationale for, and construction of, these four variables have already been

discussed. And, as predicted in Hypothesis 1, none of the teacher attitude variables were

significantly related to the pattern of tie selection in any of the three observed networks.

Network Effects

I also controlled for several of common patterns of tie formation that are known to shape

the evolution of a network: outdegree, reciprocity, and transitivity. Outdegree is a control

measure for the density of the network. Reciprocity captures the tendency of a tie

nomination to be returned. In other words, reciprocity captures the degree to which if i

nominates j in a given network, that j is more likely than random to nominate i in return.

Transitivity is a measure of the tendency of people with the same friends to become

friends with each other (Holland & Leinhardt 1971). When a network is transitive, when i

nominates j, and j nominates k, then i will be more likely to nominate k.

Modeling the Influence Process

Finally, the influence process was defined to model how the network patterns of tie

formation influenced levels of the changing individual covariates: teachers trust, need,

efficacy and use of traditional pedagogy. The influence variable is a measure of ‘average

similarity’ between an individual and his or her ties. In other words, this is a measure of

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the degree to which an individual teacher’s attitudes and behaviors become similar to the

average score of all of their ties. If the parameter for average similarity is positive, it

means that actors tied to each other in the network are becoming more like each other

over time.

Results

To examine the five hypotheses discussed above, I modeled the coevolution of teacher

networks and covariates across all three time points. The results of these models are

reported in Table 9, which contains the coefficients, standard errors and significance

levels for the variables influencing the coevolution of teachers’ communication networks

and individual attitudes and behaviors. In interpreting the table below, I will sequentially

discuss the selection and influence processes.

Table 9. Results of SIENA Co-Evolution Models of Teacher Networks and Attitudes

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The Selection Process

The selection process represents how the network changes as a function of itself (i.e.,

network effects) and the actors’ individual attributes and behaviors. I discuss the results

of both of these parts of the models in turn below. The coefficients in the selection

portion of SIENA models can be interpreted as log-odds, and will be discussed as such.

Hypothesis 1 predicted that network effects and constant covariates would be the primary

mechanisms of tie selection in all three teacher networks. That is, that across

conversation networks teachers would select other teachers who 1) selected them, 2)

selected their friends, 3) were in the same school, 4) taught in the same discipline, and 5)

had a similar level of experience. This hypothesis was generally supported.

Network Effects: I found evidence that structural effects played a significant role

in the evolution of all three conversation networks. While the outdegree, reciprocity and

transitivity effects were highly significant in all three networks, there were differences in

the degree. Reciprocity is most predictive in the personal conversation network where a

given tie is 12.9 times more likely to be returned than random. In the curricular and

reform networks the odds are 8.24 and 8.00 respectively. This is consistent with work

that finds reciprocity to be more prevalent in affective compared to instrumental networks

(Molm et al 2007).

Individual Covariates: For all three networks, teachers were significantly more

likely to select conversations partners who were in the same small school. This result can

be at least partly explained in terms of propinquity, as teachers had the most and easiest

access to other members of their own small school. There are also differences in the level

of same school affiliation. It is strongest in the reform network, perhaps not surprisingly

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since those conversations almost by definition pertained to small schools. School

homophily is weakest, in contrast, in the personal conversation network. This finding is

consistent with the fact that personal ties were the ones most likely to have carried-over

from before the reform.

In the personal and curricular networks teachers were significantly more likely to

choose conversation partners who share the same discipline, though this was not the case

with the reform network. Disciplinary homophily was strongest in the curricular network

(2.4 times random). This finding is consistent with the argument that has been made

throughout the manuscript that MHS teachers continued to view disciplinary talk the

most useful for improving their practice. Same subject homophily is also significant

(though much less so) in the personal network. It is less obvious, however, why

disciplinary homophily would be significant in the personal network but not in the reform

one. Again, this can be largely explained by the fact that pre-reform the structure of the

school was discipline based, which led to same-discipline friendships that carried over to

new school year. As can be seen in the network data in Chapter 3 (page 93), over the

course of the year teachers’ new personal ties became more associated with same school

than same subject. And finally, it is not surprising that the reform network is not

associated with subject homophily as these are mostly new ties that came into existence

after teacher assignment into their small schools.

Finally, while I expected there to be homophily around experience level, only in

the personal conversation network is it a significant driver of tie formation. This reason

for this may be that the curricular and reform networks operate somewhat like an advice

network where less experienced teachers seek out more experienced teachers for help and

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advice. The fact that the coefficient for experience similarity is not negative in these other

two networks means, however, that there is a mix of similarly and differentially

experienced teachers interacting with each other. When it comes to personal

conversations, however, it seems that young teachers seek out other young teachers, and

veteran teachers seek out other veteran teachers.

Finally, and consistent with Hypothesis 1, the dynamic covariates (i.e., trust, need

efficacy, and traditional practice) were not significantly predicative of tie formation.

Teachers do not seem to be seeking out others who share the same beliefs and practices.

The Influence Process

The influence process models how actors’ individual attributes change as a function of

themselves and of the network (Snijders et al 2010). The main coefficient of interest in

this model was the effect of tie nominations on the four main variables: trust; need;

efficacy; and traditional practice. I will discuss each in turn in relation to Hypotheses 2

through 5.

Trust: Hypothesis 2 predicted that evidence would be seen for all three networks

that interaction influenced trust levels. This hypothesis was partially borne out.

Significant influence was seen in both personal and curricular networks, and was very

close for reform network (which was significant at p = .10).

Efficacy: Hypothesis 2 predicted that feelings of efficacy would be shaped within

the curricular network because this is where discussions about actual practices and their

effects (both positive and negative) occurred. And that was indeed the case. Over time

teachers’ feelings of efficacy became increasingly similar to the feelings of those with

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whom they discussed matters of curriculum and practice. This was not the case, however,

for the personal and reform networks.

Need: Hypothesis 3 stated that teachers’ sense that they needed to change their

own practice would be shaped within the reform network because there conversations

pertained to the nature and necessity of the reform (both pro and con). This hypothesis

was partially borne out. It was the case that sense of needing to change practice was

shaped by reform discussions, but the curricular conversation network also played a

significant role. It may be that part of the message received in curricular discussions is

that others are changing practice and those changes are effective, so I should change my

own practices, or, other people are changing practice and its not effective, so I should not

change because that is not the primary problem.

Traditional Pedagogy: Finally, I predicted that because of the loose coupling

between the conversational practices of the professional community and the logic of the

classroom, that none of the observed networks would shape teachers’ self-reported

classroom practices. This hypothesis was found to be correct, and so while the three

conversation networks variably shaped different teacher attitudes, none seemed to shape

what teachers actually did in the classroom.

Discussion

In this chapter I used a longitudinal approach to investigate the coevolutionary

relationship between three types of teacher conversation networks and a set of attitudes

that previous research has identified as important to reform efforts. Grounded in a

reconceputalization of the interconnection of local orders in the school, I argued that the

various forms of collegial conversations being fostered by the reform needs to be

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understood as each being its own practice. As such, they entail different skills,

dispositions, and understandings. For this reason, I hypothesized that the different

conversation networks would shape teacher attitudes only to the degree that the attitudes

and conversations were both part of the same practice. And this was, in fact, the general

finding in the models presented.

There are two important implications of these findings that need to be briefly

discussed. The first is that standard accounts of interactional fields are called to account

by showing the presence of both selection and influence processes in the teacher

conversation networks. For Bourdieu, the structure of intra-field relations is highly

related to homophily in actors’ habitus, but because this habitus is shaped by early

childhood there is very little room for actors to influence each other. In contrast, we see

here a picture of variously disposed actors who come together based on certain

mechanisms of homphily, but not others. Only recent longitudinal network models like

the one used here can start to tease apart these selection and influence processes.

Second, this analysis helps us begin to understand why there are affinities

between certain conversations networks and attitudes. Standard accounts describe the

relationship in terms of conversation networks as pipes through which certain

information or emotion passes. From this perspective we would expect the relationship

between networks and outcomes to be based on the content of what passes through them.

In contrast, I argue that conversation networks should also be understood in terms of the

shared practices they are a part of. Understood this way, we can see how conversations

are mostly likely to shape the attitudes and experiences within the practices they help

constitute.

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Chapter 8: Conclusion

Throughout this manuscript, I have illustrated and discussed organizing processes that

were undertaken by a staff of teachers at a school undergoing a small schools conversion.

The processes, as I demonstrated through the use of ethnography and social network

analysis, involve not just the practices and structures of the reform, but also the trans-

situational forms of organizing that allowed intersubjective coordination and negotiation

to take place. The forms of organizing, which I called ways of being, operate at a pre-

conscious level of engagement, shaping teachers’ practical sense of their actions within

the reform.

The extant literature has focused largely on mental-cognitive and structural

impediments to change. In mental-cognitive based work, the barriers to school reform are

located in the minds of individual teachers. Moreover, the goal of change efforts it to

uncover deep and tacit beliefs and to replace them with more appropriate or desirable

ones. The structural approach may actually endorse this view as well, but the focus is

more on the structures within the school that impede learning processes. This work sees

the barriers to effective reflection and practice improvement as being located structures

that prevent adequate time, resources, or processes of learning to take place. The goal of

change efforts from this perspective is to remove such structural barriers to learning.

In contrast, I have adopted here a practice approach to understanding school

change. In doing I have argued that not only can beliefs and structures operate as barriers

to change, so too can organizational members’ repertoires of practical action that shape

what is felt as sensible ways to engage with each other and with the shared organizational

environment. Because such practical sense is tacit and does not rely on conscious

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intention, it is not terribly amenable to change through detached reflection or discussion.

Moreover, because it is embodied and intersubjectively sustained, simply altering

organizational structures will not cause a sudden shift in organizational modus operandi.

Once they become a part of habitual action, repertories of behavior may continue to be

performed even in the face of structural changes meant to encourage their alteration.

Teachers at MHS, for example, continued to interact with each other in ways grounded in

disciplinary identity and the sharing of practical tips and materials even though structures

all around them had been altered in order to engender different forms of interaction. What

did not change, however, was the teachers’ feel for what were sensible and practical ways

to organize with one another.

With this framework, I argued that small school reform can be thought of as not just

an effort to introduce new practices or structures, but also as an attempt to change the

ethos of the school. While the theory of change of the reform seemed to imply that by

simultaneously changing school structures and teacher minds that the desired change in

ethos would follow. In contrast, I argued that a school’s ethos is derived from the

practical and tacit ways that organizational actors mutually orient their behavior such that

what transpires is experienced as sensible and moral. Further, I argued that such mutual

orientation is not idiosyncratic or random, but rather can be connected to the trans-

situational social conventions I called ways of being. I mapped and explored the dominant

ways of being that shaped, and aimed to shape, shared experience during the reform. I

argued that identifying and analyzing these ways of being helps us understand not only

what teachers thought about the reform efforts, but also why and how they experienced it

as they did.

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I also looked at how structural changes and the introduction of new practices

created tensions between ways of being that brought about frustration, confusion, and

anxiety for teachers. Such conflicts are not intellectual disagreements about values or

principles, but rather are experienced as tensions that arise from being asked to, or

attempting to, behave in ways that are either non-sensible or for which the actor feels

they do not possess the requisite skills. And again, because these tensions are experiential

and related to practical sense, there alleviation does not come from changes in conscious

beliefs, but rather from changes in circumstance or skill.

One such circumstance I looked at extensively were attempts at what I called

‘composition.’ Compositional efforts aimed at alleviating tensions between different

ways of being by bringing together various aspects of different modes into a common

framework. I argued that Teacher Professional Communities can themselves be thought

of as an overarching compositional effort. The ideal Teacher Professional Community

weaves together all three of the dominate ways of being discussed throughout the

manuscript. The ‘professional’ in the term refers to teachers organizing in terms of role

obligations and duties and shared professional norm and commitments. The ‘community’,

in contrast, refers to a more informal and personal style of interaction, though the

polysemy nature of the word has resulted in very different understandings of the ideal

form of teacher community (Scibner et al 2002). And together, a third style of

coordination is meant to emerge, one of constant learning and experimentation, vision

setting and collaborative interaction. It is this latter style I have associated with the notion

of organizational re-enchantment.

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Implications and Contribution

The first area this dissertation makes a contribution to is in highlighting the role of

teachers’ practical orientation to school reform efforts. One of the primary challenges

faced by the reform, I argued, was a problematic set of assumptions about the relationship

between the collaborative reflective practices being developed in the teacher professional

community and the academic practices of the classroom. Specifically, the theory of the

reform assumes that practices are held and carried in the minds of individuals, and so, for

example, a discussion among colleagues about a new way of carrying out some practice

can be straightforwardly applied in the classroom.

The importance of this is that the primary mode through which people, both

teachers and students, engage with the school and with each other is practical. All

members of the school community have a deep, internalized sense of what actions are

appropriate and sensible, how to respond to perturbations in the flow of action, and the

skills needed to carry it all out. While change agents in the cognitive perspective are like

religious missionaries with a priori theory about proper beliefs and values that they try to

impart on the targets of reform, a practice theoretical perspective highlights that change

comes through the reshaping of modes of engagement, not the contents of minds.

Moreover, the setup and theory of the Teacher Professional Community is such that

the impetus and knowledge for changing of classroom practices happens in separate

sphere. The result is a dichotomization where the professional community is seen as the

site of theory and learning and the classroom as the site of action and practice. But, as

Bourdieu himself pointed out, reflection or reflexivity is itself a particular kind of practice

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with its own understandings, rules and ends (1990). This issue generally arises in his

work in the context of discussions about the practice of science, but I think it is

applicable here as well. Below he writes about the illusion that science allows the

practitioner to step outside of the world and to reflect on it in a fully detached way:

Science has a time which is not that of practice. For the analyst, time disappears. . . . Only for someone who withdraws from the game completely, who totally breaks the spell, the illusio, renouncing all the stakes, . . . can the temporal succession [of practice] be seen as a pure discontinuity and the world appear in the absurdity of a future-less, and therefore sense-less, present (1990: 81-82).

Bourdieu wrote this as a warning to the scientific researcher about the illusion of

reflective detachment, but I think it serves as a warning for those engaged in school

change efforts like small school reform as well. The logic of small school reform also

seems to assume that, like scientists, teacher reflection and learning is seen as a process

of stepping back and out of practice and into a detached view of the school. This ignores,

however, both that teachers’ primary engagement with the school is practical and not

reflective, and that when reflection does occur its transpires within its own set of

practices, not within a ‘pure discontinuity.’

There are thus potentially two major problems that can arise in efforts to change

classroom practices by engaging teachers in reflection. First, teacher and student

interaction in the classroom is largely habitual and non-reflective, and so while reflection

and discussion can certainly have an impact on behaviors there is nonetheless a limit to

how much they can do so. Second, by treating collaborative reflection and discussion as

theoretical, and not practical, endeavors the fact that the professional community is itself

composed of different practices is lost. Once we realize that potential disconnects are not

between theory and reflection on the one hand and practice on the other, but rather

between two different practical orders, it opens up a new set of issues. The relationship

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between the skills, understandings and practical logic of the classroom and the

professional community become a central empirical question for understanding reform.

The second major implication of this work is found in the idea that the practical

sense described above is neither purely idiosyncratic nor individual. Much of practice

theory assumes that actors’ practical engagements with the world are corporeal and

embodied in the individual. This is most notably the case with Bourdieu’s habitus. The

upshot of this is that such constructs as dispositions, habits, skills are located in, and

carried by, the individual body. When actors are able to coordinate their behavior it is

because they carry the same set of dispositions with them into a common setting.

In contrast, I have argued here throughout this dissertation that there are significant

aspects of practical sense that are ‘out there’ in the shared experience of the situation. The

ability for actors to engage in coordination and cooperation comes not from having the

same dispositions or mental schemas, but because of the ability to mutually orient to each

other and the shared environment such that the ongoing flow of interactions remain

sensible and appropriate. This type of mutual adjustment is always locally negotiated but

nonetheless is grounded in the trans-situational social conventions I call ways of being.

There are, I argue, two important implications of this. First, this perspective

highlights the need to understand both individual and situational dispositions. That is to

say, the actor’s practical sense of how to proceed is shaped by their own personal

dispositions as well as the structure of shared experience that grounds mutual adjustment.

What a teacher does in the classroom, for example, cannot be explained entirely in terms

of individuals beliefs or dispositions, but must take into account the shared situational

understanding tacitly negotiated with students. If teaching did not require taking the latter

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factor into account, school reform would be much easier.

By emphasizing the mediating, interactional and contingent dimensions of shared

experience and mutual adjustment, I hope to underscore the central point that the

behavior of teachers in schools depends on their individual dispositions and habitus, the

institutional context, and the ways of being that help coordinate and orchestrate the

former in light of the latter. The dynamic, I argue, is important for understanding

organizational change and school reform broadly, but especially with efforts at re-

enchantment like small school reform. This is because organizational re-enchantment

aims precisely at altering this level of behavior. The reform changes structures and

introduces practices, but these are not ends in themselves. Rather, they are means toward

the larger goal of changing the dominant way of being in the school. It is worth noting

that even in the ideal of small school reform the core technology of the school does not

change dramatically. The bulk of the school day still involves teachers leading students

through academic activities in classrooms. What changes, however, is the orientation that

teachers and students take toward those activities and toward each other.

The second important aspect of this was in developing the idea that these

conventions that allow for mutual adjustment are trans-situational. How institutional

logics and ideas shape, and are shaped by, practical action has been one of the core issues

in social theory in the past 20 years. On the one hand, sociologists tend to talk about

social change in either broad macro-historical terms or in terms of individual character

types (Diehl and McFarland 2010). On the other hand, is interactionist and sensemaking

literature has focused on negotiation, agency and improvisation. This creates a

problematic situation, when we are left either leaving interaction as a black-box, or

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treating it in a largely decontextualized way. My contribution has been to begin to sketch

out a framework for how trans-situational meanings shape local practices and interactions

in ways largely unrecognized by the actors themselves.

By focusing on the trans-situational nature of shared practical action, however, we

are able to reconceptualize the barriers to organizational change. Rather than focusing on

differences in meanings and values, or the gap between theory and practice, this approach

turns our attention to the multiple forms of practicality that may be present within the

same organization. Teachers, for example, must negotiate multiple ways of orienting and

interacting with students - as formal roles, as particular individuals; as fair and impartial,

as personalized and emotionally connected. One of the central difficulties of teaching is

negotiating these different styles of coordination. I argue that this is a more cognitively

realist picture because it locates the plurality that actors must negotiate as being located

not in a multiplicity of logics, but instead in the diverse styles of practicality through

which teachers and students coordinate through the different practices of the school.

Final Reflections

While I have tried to remain an objective observer throughout this study, I think it worth

pointing out here what I think is normatively at stake. I adopt neither an advocate’s nor

an adversary’s position toward efforts to re-enchant organizations. On the one hand, I do

not think it provides a miraculous solution to the difficulties of balancing individual

autonomy and creativity with collective projects of rationality or of balancing feelings of

familiarity and safety with uncertainty and experimentation. In this, obviously, I differ

from their most committed proponents and participants. On the other hand, unlike some

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critics, I do not regard attempts at creating post-bureaucratic organizations as mere

rhetoric or ideology. Instead I see it as a highly imperfect attempt to address what will

continue to be some of the most important challenges faced not only by schools, but also

by democratic society more broadly.

There is something very valuable, I think, in attempts like those at MHS to create

communities that are at the same time personalized and diverse, that are simultaneously

rational and planned but also meaningful and aesthetic. Small school reform is correct in

identifying the dual problems of contemporary schools in needing to create a sense of

place and belonging for a diverse student body in the here-and-now while at the same

time preparing them for the changing world of work they will soon enter. The need for

contemporary organizations to coordinate the diversely disposed individuals within it is

not a problem only for schools.

Modern institutions of all kinds are being forced to re-organize in ways that gives

voice to a plurality of subjects that are tied to a multiplicity of logics (Laclua & Mouffe

1985; Taylor 1995). What small schools attempts to do, what others will certainly take up

even after this reform fades as it certainly will, is to find new ways of organizing in a

world where we are increasingly coming to see the heterogeneity and plurality of

contemporary organizations not as a problem to be overcome but rather as a source of

strength to be leveraged; where we come to conceptualize the globalized, interdependent

world not as a threat to traditional economic and moral order but rather as an opportunity

for a thoroughly modern type of re-enchantment.

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Appendix: Teacher Survey

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Remember, your survey will be given an ID number so your name and your answers will not be connected. You total privacy and anonymity will be protected. This survey will in

no way be used in your evaluation by the school.

Teacher and Staff Questionnaire For Leominster High School

1. What is your gender?

_____ Female _____ Male

2. What is your ethnicity?

! African-American " Asian or Pacific Islander

# Hispanic origin $ Native American

% White, non-Hispanic & Other

3. What is your age? ! 24 or younger " 25-34

# 35-44 $ 45-54

% 55-64 & 65 or older

4. Current position: ! Administrator

" Counselor

# Teacher -- Indicate your academic subject area:

$ Other (please specify) ______________________________________________________________

If you are a teacher, please answer the following:

5. What is the highest educational degree you have earned?

6. What is your current teaching certification(s) (What subject areas and for what grade levels? What type?)

7. How many years of teaching experience do you have? ! This is my first year of teaching " One to two years

# Three to five years $ Six to ten years

% Eleven to nineteen years & Twenty or more years

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8. How many years have you been teaching at Leominster High School?

! This is my first year of teaching at LHS " One to two years

# Three to five years $ Six to ten years

% Eleven to nineteen years & Twenty or more years

9. If you have previously taught outside of LHS, please indicate the name and district of the last school you

worked at

____________________________________________________________________________________

10. Which school are you currently working in? (ANSWER ALL THAT APPLY) ! School 1 " School 2

# School 3 $ School 4

% CTE

11. What is the grade level for most of the students you teach? ! 9th grade " 10th grade

# 11th grade $ 12th grade

% Mixed

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Beliefs and Practices in Teaching and Learning.

12. The statements below concern goals both for educational outcomes and for relationships with students. Please indicate how strongly you agree or disagree with each statement as it applies to your own teaching philosophy and practice. One means you strongly disagree, six means you strongly agree

Strongly Strongly Disagree Agree

a. It is important for me that my students enjoy learning and become independent learners. ! " # $ % &

b. No matter how hard they try, some students will not be able to learn aspects of the curriculum I teach.

! " # $ % &

c. If I try really hard, I can get through to even the most difficult or unmotivated students. ! " # $ % &

d. If some students in my class(es) are not doing well, I feel that I should change my approach. ! " # $ % &

e. By trying a different teaching method, I can significantly affect a student’s achievement. ! " # $ % &

f. There is really very little I can do to ensure that most of my students achieve at a high level. ! " # $ % &

g. There is a need for teachers at LHS to substantially change their instructional practice. ! " # $ % &

h. I need to make changes in my own teaching in order to better meet the needs of all students. ! " # $ % &

i. I believe gaps in student achievement can be overcome by changes in teaching practice. ! " # $ % &

j. I believe I am prepared to teach heterogeneous groups of students. ! " # $ % &

k. I believe I have adequately implemented most of the Ten Common Principles in my profession. ! " # $ % &

l. I need to learn more in order to meet the needs of:

i. special education students ! " # $ % &

ii. English language learners ! " # $ % &

iii. students of color ! " # $ % &

iv. students from lower income backgrounds ! " # $ % &

v. high achieving students ! " # $ % &

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13. Indicate the importance you give to each of the following in assessing students in your class(es) (exclude special education students).

Not Very Important Important

a. Individual improvement or progress over past performance. ! " # $ % &

b. Effort. ! " # $ % &

c. Class participation. ! " # $ % &

d. Consistently attending classes. ! " # $ % &

14. For your most frequently taught subject area, please indicate the extent to which you agree or disagree with the following statements.

Strongly Strongly Disagree Agree Aee

a. There is a well-defined body of knowledge and skills to be taught in my subject area. ! " # $ % &

b. Thinking creatively is an important part of the subject matter I teach. ! " # $ % &

c. Knowledge in my subject area is always changing. ! " # $ % &

d. The subject I teach is rather cut and dried. ! " # $ % &

e. There is little disagreement about what should be taught in my subject area. ! " # $ % &

15. Thinking about the year so far, please indicate how strongly you agree or disagree with each of the following statements regarding your feelings about teaching in general and your job.

Strongly Strongly Disagree Agree

a. I feel that I have many opportunities to learn new things in my present job. ! " # $ % &

b. I feel supported by colleagues to try out new ideas. ! " # $ % &

c. I am willing to put in a great deal of effort beyond that usually expected of teachers. ! " # $ % &

d. I feel that I am improving as a teacher every year. ! " # $ % &

e. I am always eager to hear about ways to improve my teaching. ! " # $ % &

216

16. Thinking about the year so far, to what extent did each of the following statements describe relationships among teachers across all of LHS?

Strongly Strongly Disagree Agree

a. We share ideas about teaching openly. ! " # $ % &

b. It is common for us to share samples of work done by our students. ! " # $ % &

c. We regularly meet to discuss particular common problems and challenges we are facing in the classroom. ! " # $ % &

d. We often work together to develop teaching materials or activities for particular classes. ! " # $ % &

e. There is little disagreement about what should be taught in our curriculum. ! " # $ % &

f. We often seek each other’s advice about professional issues and problems. ! " # $ % &

g. We share views of students and how to relate to them. ! " # $ % &

h. You can count on most staff members to help out anywhere, anytime – even though it may not be part of their official assignment.

! " # $ % &

i. Most of my colleagues share my beliefs and values about what the central mission of the school should be. ! " # $ % &

j. Teachers in this school are continually learning and seeking new ideas. ! " # $ % &

17. Thinking about the year so far what extent did each of the following statements describe relationships among teachers in the school you are currently assigned to?

Strongly Strongly Disagree Agree

a. We share ideas about teaching openly. ! " # $ % &

b. It is common for us to share samples of work done by our students. ! " # $ % &

c. We regularly meet to discuss particular common problems and challenges we are facing in the classroom. ! " # $ % &

d. We often work together to develop teaching materials or activities for particular classes. ! " # $ % &

e. There is little disagreement about what should be taught in our curriculum. ! " # $ % &

f. We often seek each other’s advice about professional issues and problems. ! " # $ % &

g. We share views of students and how to relate to them. ! " # $ % &

h. You can count on most staff members to help out anywhere, anytime – even though it may not be part of their official assignment.

! " # $ % &

i. Most of my colleagues share my beliefs and values about what the central mission of the school should be. ! " # $ % &

j. Teachers in this school are continually learning and seeking new ideas. ! " # $ % &

217

18. Using the scale provided and thinking about the year so far, how much control did you feel you had in your classroom over each of the following areas of your planning and teaching?

Complete None Control

a. Selecting textbooks and other instructional materials. ! " # $ % &

b. Selecting content, topics, and skills to be taught. ! " # $ % &

c. Selecting teaching techniques. ! " # $ % &

19. Using the scale provided and thinking about the year so far, how much influence did you feel teachers had over school policy in the following areas?

20. Please indicate how strongly you agree or disagree with each of the following statements about you as a teacher:

Strongly Strongly

Disagree Agree

a. I believe that growth in students’ self esteem is as important as their academic achievement.

! " # $ % &

b. I am certain I am making a difference in the lives of my students

! " # $ % &

c. Students talk to me about their personal lives ! " # $ % &

d. It is important for me to know something about my students’ families. ! " # $ % &

e. I try very hard to show my students that I care about them. ! " # $ % &

Complete None Control

a. Hiring new professional personnel ! " # $ % &

b. Planning how discretionary school funds should be used ! " # $ % &

c. Establishing the curriculum and instructional program ! " # $ % &

d. Determining the content of in-service programs ! " # $ % &

e. Setting standards for student behavior ! " # $ % &

218

21. On the average, this year, how many hours per week, outside of class have you given to each of the following activities (Please check the one most appropriate box)

None One hour Two to Three Four to ten Eleven or

hours hours more hours

a. Tutoring individual students with schoolwork ! " # $ %

b. Advising students about their academic lives ! " # $ %

c. Counseling students about other aspects of their school lives ! " # $ %

d. Discussing matters of a personal nature with students ! " # $ %

e. Grading/assessing student homework and tests ! " # $ % f. Preparing for class ! " # $ %

g. Attending school events other than those you are required to attend ! " # $ %

h. Working on department or school committees ! " # $ % i. Background reading in your subject area ! " # $ %

22. Thinking about the year so far, please indicate how strongly you agree or disagree with each of the

following statements about working conditions across all of LHS

Strongly Strongly

Disagree Agree

a. Staff are involved in making decisions that affect them ! " # $ % &

b. This school’s administration knows the problems faced by staff

! " # $ % &

c. The school administration’s behavior toward the staff is supportive and encouraging

! " # $ % &

d. There is a great deal of cooperative effort among staff members ! " # $ % &

e. The principal is interested in innovation and new ideas ! " # $ % &

f. The principal usually consults with staff members before he makes a decision that affects us

! " # $ % &

219

23. Please indicate how strongly you agree or disagree with each of the following statements about

working conditions in the school you are currently assigned to.

Strongly Strongly

Disagree Agree

a. Staff are involved in making decisions that affect them ! " # $ % &

b. This school’s administration knows the problems faced by staff

! " # $ % &

c. The school administration’s behavior toward the staff is supportive and encouraging

! " # $ % &

d. There is a great deal of cooperative effort among staff members ! " # $ % &

e. The principal is interested in innovation and new ideas ! " # $ % &

f. The principal usually consults with staff members before he makes a decision that affects us

! " # $ % &

24. Please tell us how successfully you believe Leominster High School has put into practice several improvement strategies. For each item listed below, first indicate whether you think it is one of the improvement strategies or elements being implemented at LHS. Then circle the number that best describes how successfully you believe the strategy / element has been put into effect so far this year. Use a scale of 1 to 4, with a 1 meaning that the element was not at all successfully implemented and a 4 meaning that the element was very successfully implemented.

Program Element or Principle

Is this strategy being

implemented at LHS?

(check if ‘yes’)

Not Very Successful Successful

a. Establishment of the Pilot Small School ! " # $

b. Establishment of design teams for small schools ! " # $

c. Common core of academic courses tied to the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks

! " # $

d. LHS has strengthened its working connections with:

i. parents ! " # $

ii. the town ! " # $

iii. the business community

! " # $

iv. community and neighborhood organizations ! " # $

e. LHS has strengthened parent involvement:

i. with their own students ! " # $

220

ii. to support classroom work ! " # $

iii. to support the school in general ! " # $

f. Incorporating Ten Common Principles into LHS ! " # $

g. Incorporating classroom practices associated with CES ! " # $

h. Incorporating school-wide practices associated with CES ! " # $

FOR THE NEXT SECTION OF THE SURVEY PLEASE REPORT ON YOUR TARGET CLASS. Your target class is your first class during the six period schedule in the primary subject area you identified in question 4. For example, if you are a math teacher and your first math class meets period two, that is your TARGET CLASS.

25. In your TARGET CLASS from, about what proportion of your students:

None 1 to 25 26 to 50 51 to 75 76 to 100

percent percent percent percent

a. Have serious reading difficulties ! " # $ %

b. Lack other academic knowledge and skills to learn what you are trying to teach ! " # $ %

c. Are learning to speak English ! " # $ %

d. Create serious behavioral problems in your class ! " # $ %

26. About how often do you use each of the following instructional strategies in your TARGET CLASS?

Never Once or twice Once or twice Once or twice Daily or

a semester a month a week almost

daily

a. Have students memorize facts or procedures ! " # $ %

b. Relate the subject matter to students’ experiences and interests ! " # $ %

c. Lecture to the class for more than half a period ! " # $ %

d. Have students complete workbook or textbook exercises ! " # $ %

221

27. On average, in you TARGET CLASS, how much class time do students spend on the following activities?

None Some About half Most Nearly All

a. Working individually ! " # $ % b. Working together as a class with the teacher teaching the whole class ! " # $ %

c. Working together as a class with teacher-led discussion ! " # $ %

d. Discussing or debating ideas with students responding to one another ! " # $ %

e. Working together in pairs or small groups on an assignment ! " # $ %

28. On a typical day in your TARGET CLASS, how many times is your class:

Never Once Twice 3 to 4 5 to 9 More than

times times 10 times

a. Disrupted by student misbehavior ! " # $ % &

b. Disrupted by announcements, messages from the office and other administrative interruptions

! " # $ % &

c. Disrupted by students coming in tardy, noise in the hallways and other student interruptions ! " # $ % &

29. How often do you assign homework in your target class?

! Never

" Less than once a week

# About once a week

$ Several times a week % Almost every day

30. About how much class time do you spend preparing students for standardized tests such as MCAS?

! Less than 4 hours

" 4 to 12 hours

# 13 to 20 hours

$ more than 20 hours

222

You have almost reached the end! The final section of the survey involves your relationships with other teachers and staff members and will require you to write down specific names. The purpose of this section is to help understand the social networks of teachers because improving your relationships is a major part of LHS’ reform. This portion of the survey will be detached and will not be seen by any school personnel. All names will be given ID numbers and only those will be used for the research. Your answers will be completely confidential and your anonymity will be completely protected. It is, however, vital for the research so thank you for taking the time to fill it out!

223

A sheet with the names of all LHS teachers is attached to the back to help you. You do not need to fill in all the spaces, only as many as you feel are appropriate.

29. Your name _________________________________________________________

30. Thinking about the year so far, with whom did you most often discuss a problem or question connected with a course you are teaching (e.g., problems getting students motivate, which materials to use)?

Name Less than Once or Twice Daily, Almost

once a week a week daily

! " #

! " #

! " #

! " #

! " #

! " #

! " #

! " #

! " #

! " #

31. Thinking about the year so far, who are the teachers with whom you have most often discussed a more general question or topic connected the goals of LHS, especially the concerning the new small schools

Name Less than Once or Twice Daily, Almost

once a week a week daily

! " #

! " #

! " #

! " #

! " #

! " #

! " #

! " #

! " #

! " #

224

32. Thinking about the year so far, who are the teachers with whom you most often talk about your personal life? Name Less than Once or Twice Daily, Almost

once a week a week daily

! " #

! " #

! " #

! " #

! " #

! " #

! " #

! " #

! " #

! " #

33. This question asks about your interaction with administrators at LHS. So far this year, to which administrators did you go to for professional advice?

Name Less than Once or Twice Daily, Almost

once a week a week daily

! " #

! " #

! " #

! " #

! " #

! " #

! " #

! " #

! " #

! " #

225

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