Building From Instructional Tools: The Role of Communicative Actions in Negotiating New Knowledge, Values, and Beliefs About Practice

• In Event: 33.065 - Materiality in Educational (Inter)action: Same Concern, Different Approaches

Abstract

Federal, state and district policies have increasingly paid attention to improving the quality of teaching and learning in public schools. To achieve instructional improvement, policies exert pressure to ensure the direction of local initiatives so that they specify requirements, and increase the consistency of and commitment to policies (Levin, 2007; McLaughlin, 1987). Concurrently, a certain level of local flexibility is necessary to build commitment to policy implementation. Policies, thus, employ a range of tools simultaneously for schools, leaving school leaders and teachers to decipher, interpret and act upon their interpretation of tools that use different approaches, theories and purposes (Honig, 2006; McLaughlin, 2006).

This paper explores the complexity of using tools in the instructional improvement process by attending to the relationship between instructional improvement tools and social structures among teachers. Conceptualizing tools as both inhibiters and enablers in producing, reproducing and challenging knowledge, values and beliefs about instruction among teachers (Whittington, 1992), we explore how the tools, which carry different assumptions about teacher learning, shape teachers’ collaborative work. Situating the use of tools within social structures, we also look at how existing patterns of social relations among teachers that can either support or sustain instructional improvement. We examine how some factors such as the extent to which teachers can situate problems of instruction and curriculum among themselves, the extent of individual teams’ expertise, knowledge and skills, the extent to which structured conversations provide conditions for engagement and reflection about the tools (Coburn, 2001; Datnow, Park & Kennedy-Lewis, 2013).

To operationalize these conceptual tools, we draw on organizational discourse to examine the role of language as a constitutive and medium of the the relationship between school leaders’ and teachers’ interactions and instructional improvement tools. Taking into account that instructional improvement tools are designed to build teachers’ capacity and help mobilize them to increase instructional quality, we examine the communicative actions which enables us to gain access to the implicit knowledge, values and beliefs that shapes social interactions around tools (Heracleous, 2013). We use case study approach in one low-performing elementary school during the curriculum reform initiative. Data include 15 interviews and 11 observations of formal meetings conducted over a two-year period (2000-2002), as well 3 administrative documents.

Findings illuminate how the same school actors, who are deemed to be failing their students, are left with the difficult task of self-improving using tools intended for instructional improvement. While policy included tools to support instructional changes, school leaders and teachers struggled to understand how they departed from logics of managerial control to work as professional improvement toward collective consensus, mutual accountability and self-assessment for teaching and learning (Honig, 2006). This implies that the purpose, intent, and theories underlying instructional improvement tools are not self-evident for school actors.In the absence of assistance to guide school leaders and teachers on how to use these tools, the tacit, informal, and individual knowledge, beliefs and values of school actors prevail. We will draw implications for policy and research in regards to conceptual and methodological contributions.

Author

• Eliane Dulude, Université de Montréal