How Shall We Study School District Central Offices? Using Design-Based Research to Advance the Theory and Practice of School District Central Office Leadership

• In Event: Studying School District Central Offices: Examining Issues of Methods, Research, and Context

Abstract

School district central offices face significant and relatively new demands to lead for district-wide teaching and learning improvements, but find few research-based guides to anchor their processes. This research-practice gap stems in part from the limited attention researchers have paid to central offices. But the gap is also apparent within extant research on central offices that generally has relied on methodologies that have produced limited knowledge and poor guides for practice. How shall we study school district central offices to advance research and practice? We address that question with a comprehensive review of research on district central offices and an empirical inquiry into Design-based Leadership Research, a new way of researching them.

First, we show that research on central offices has evolved over three overlapping, ongoing waves in ways that are beginning to produce both rigorous and actionable knowledge. The first wave, initiated in the 1960s, has been largely quantitative and includes studies that aim to isolate district “effects” on various outcomes. This research boils central offices down to a few variables that obscure what central offices actually do that might contribute to such results. A second wave of research, initiated in the 1990s, involves descriptive case studies. Main data sources typically include interviews with principals about central office work and one-time interviews with central office staff, notoriously inadequate data for understanding what central offices do day to day and how that work unfolds over time.

Research from a third wave moves beyond description with rich theoretical frameworks, in-depth interviews overtime, and extensive observations. This wave begins to reveal the different daily work practices of central office staff that matter to school-level improvement processes but that central office staff struggle to engage in them (Daly & Finnigan, 2011; Honig, 2012; Spillane & Thompson, 1997). We found that, absent intensive support for engaging in such practices, central office leaders fall into familiar low-performance traps (Honig et al., in preparation).

We argue that researchers who study central offices could address these challenges with a new methodology, Design-based Leadership Research (DBLR), that builds on the rigor of design methods in the learning sciences adapted to the realities of central office contexts (Honig, Forthcoming). Per DiSessa & Cobb (2004), design studies are “iterative, situated, and theory-based attempts simultaneously to understand and improve educational practices” (p. 80). Through DBLR, central office leaders and researchers work together to: design new central office practices that reflect but experiment beyond the extant knowledge base; collect systematic evidence about the design and implementation process; and feed the new evidence back into the designs and the field. Unlike most other researcher-practitioner partnerships, DBLR focuses on central office not school-level practice. DBLR also moves far beyond most typical partnerships by requiring researchers to use knowledge from the learning sciences to create tools and settings to help central office leaders develop deep knowledge about research-based ideas. We illustrate these methods using examples from two major studies where we have used DBLR. We discuss challenges in using these methods and future directions.

Authors

• Meredith I. Honig, University of Washington

• Daniel Novak, University of Washington - Seattle