Design-Based School Improvement in German Schools Facing Socially Adverse Circumstances

• In Event: Design-Based School Improvement: Perspectives From Chile, the United States, and Germany

Abstract

The German RPP was in existence for five years and has now come to a close. It worked with 36 schools in a metropolitan region that has been beset with the economic challenges of de-industrialization and restructuring. In the German context, the region is characterized by high unemployment, high poverty rates, and high rates of immigration. The RPP began with a thorough needs assessment that homed in on instruction, climate, and the schools’ professional culture. Out of this needs assessment, clusters of schools were formed that converged on similar identified needs. These clusters became the basis for networks in which select representatives from each school met and received targeted professional development and reflected on professional practices. Furthermore, schools were supported by a school improvement coach. School representatives were to spread the insights from the network to school faculties and were supported by RPP staff who visited schools four times a year. Thorough needs assessment, lively networks, and additional support were to instigate internal change processes in the participating schools (see Author, 2017).
Data from the networks and the schools reveal the following pattern. The majority of networks functioned well. Survey-based needs assessment needed to be augmented by a process of negotiation in which formal and informal school leaders came to own the findings from the surveys and added their own interpretation to the data based on their experiences. The professional development was also well received. While a small number of schools made good progress in their individual school improvement processes, the work in the networks was overall less successful in driving change in the schools as a whole. A variety of factors come into play. Apparently, surveys of needs and subsequent negotiation with chosen school leaders can only serve as a starting point for organizational improvement (e.g. identifying broader goals) but cannot replace an internal communication process in which faculty in situ come to identify their shared problems of practice for which they urgently seek solutions. And it can also not replace the actual design process (careful evaluation of organizations’ assets for change, identification of change drivers, iterations of solutions based on practical measures). This process, for the most part, was not taken up. The route through professional development, pursued by the RPP, seemed intuitive. External initiatives customarily take this route given the prevailing logic of selective individual appropriation in German school improvement. The approach of the RPP could not upstage this entrenched pattern in most schools. As a result, the work of the networks lacked an organizational container at the school level that could spread new insights or motivations beyond individuals that, somewhat accidentally, connected to them on their own individual volition. The challenge for a next iteration for design-based school improvement, currently in preparation, is to deliberately strengthen, perhaps even create, an organizational frame at the school level in which design work can proceed.

Author

• Nina Bremm, University of Teacher Education Zürich