How Teachers Make Sense of Reform: Does Self-Determination Matter?

• In Event: 66.080 - Roundtable Session 26
  In Roundtable Session: 66.080-7 - Implementation: Insights From the National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools

Abstract

Purpose and Theoretical Framework
The history of school reform is beset with examples of attempted reforms leading to little change in teacher practice (Coburn, 2004; Cuban, 1993, 2013) with insufficient teacher buy-in as an oft-cited culprit of school reform not taking hold (Vernez et al., 2006; Berends et al., 2002). This lack of buy-in is typically attributed to the tendency for new programs to come pre-packaged with little room for teachers and school staff to take into account school context during implementation (Peurach & Glazer, 2011). In other words, external programs have inherently less legitimacy compared to what teachers’ and school staff may develop themselves. In this paper, we adopt a sense-making perspective (Coburn, 2005; Spillane, Reiser, & Reimer, 2002) to understand the extent to which greater teacher self-determination in the reform process would alter teachers’ beliefs and build greater buy-in. Our research questions specifically ask:

1. In what ways does self-determination alter individuals’ beliefs of the co-created reform?
2. How does that sense-making differ from their perceptions of other top-down reforms within the district?

Methods and Data Sources
We use a comparative case study design to examine the extent to which teacher belief’s of externally developed interventions differ from one developed by teachers within the same school. Part of a larger project by the Center, this paper draws on multiple data sources collected during the 2013-2014 school year, including data from in-depth case studies of three district high schools and process data from the district innovation development process. School-based data collection included interviews from approximately 15 teachers and administrators and three teacher focus groups at each of the three schools. The process data include field notes and audio recording from 12 innovation design sessions which select school members attended, participant reflection forms, and interviews with these participating teachers and other district personnel. Following the data collection process, all data were analyzed through directed content analysis (Patton, 2002). We assign descriptive codes to understand the sense¬-making of the co-created innovation and indicators of sense-making of other traditional reforms being implemented in the same schools.

Results
Preliminary results indicate that teachers view the co-created reform as being potentially transformative to their school’s culture and student behavior, aspirations, and achievement. For some participants, the process of co-creating reform has led the teachers to focus on building teacher buy-in more than potentially transformative practices. The participants also express frustration with co-creating reform because planning is slow, especially in regards to building consensus on practices to be implemented as part of the design. Of district-mandated programs, teachers perceive many reforms as being “forced” upon them and only temporary.

Scholarly Significance
The Center’s aim is to break down barriers to successful implementation that arise when reform is externally developed. Teacher buy-in is one of the most prevalent barriers to successful implementation of a reform, and this paper examines how a locally developed innovation design could be more successful in building teacher buy-in than traditional reforms.

Authors

• Samantha L Viano, Vanderbilt University - Peabody College

• Christopher Redding, Vanderbilt University - Peabody College