Taking Charge of Change: Understanding Policy Engagement Through Organizational Expectation, Teacher Beliefs, and Motivation

• In Event: Facing the Sustainability Challenge: Making Lasting, School-Wide Changes Through Professional Development

Abstract

Objectives
This study aims at understanding the work of school teachers in implementing a coherent large scale policy change in the USA (i.e., Common Core State Standards, CCSS). We examine relationships between teachers’ engagement around the CCSS, organizational expectation, teacher beliefs and motivation in that process. The key question we ask in this work is: What motivates educators to enact the CCSS?

Framework
We view the work of implementation from a socio-cognitive learning lens while taken into account the organizational factors and as such privilege both individual and organizational perceptions as key to understanding the phenomena. We draw on organizational climates around innovation and expectation, individual beliefs and motivation to ground our study.

Methods
The study was conducted at an urban large public school district in southern California in the USA that serves highly diverse student populations. The data were collected at the time CCSS was in its first year implemented at the district, reflecting 930 classroom teachers and site principals from all the K-12 schools (97% response rate) and include measures from the previously validated instrument on the implementation of CCSS, organizational climates and individual beliefs and motivation. We used structural equation modeling to fit the hypothesized relations among the study constructs.

Results
Results indicate that organizational expectation about CCSS is significantly and positively related to CCSS engagement regarding implementation, and that teachers’ motivation and beliefs related to CCSS are positively associated with their actions around CCSS engagement. Organizational expectation about CCSS has an indirect effect on CCSS engagement when the individual motivation and beliefs were introduced to the model. Overall the study findings suggest that both organization (expectation about CCSS) and personal (motivations and beliefs) factors are important in understanding the implementation of CCSS. Sets of visualization of relationships among study variables are provided in the full paper.

Significance
Our work sheds new light on current understanding of CCSS implementation and further provides insights into the factors that may directly affect teachers’ policy engagement in implementing the CCSS. Our work contributes to the convention theme that highlights the important role of public scholarship to provide research-informed practice in the area of educational leadership. Our findings suggest the potential agentic role of educational leaders in both in/directly influencing the action and practice of teachers. Understanding factors that may significantly contribute to teachers’ engagement with CCSS supports leaders to tailor improvement plans to the needs of teachers and overall organizations. In proactively doing so, educational leaders may be armed with greater adaptability in preparing the teachers to meet the fast-changing reform challenges as we enter into a new era of federal policy—Every Student Succeeds Act. Full discussion and implications are provided in the paper.

Authors

• Yi-Hwa Liou, National Taipei University of Education

• Esther T. Canrinus, University of Agder

• Alan J. Daly, University of California - San Diego