School Structure Responses to the COVID-19 Superstressor: Adaptation to Ambiguity

• In Event: Rethinking Schools in a (Post-?)Pandemic World: Innovative Conceptualizations of Schools as Organizations

Abstract

In their struggle to maintain function and legitimacy as their environment changes, schools adapt their structures to meet new challenges. Shocks, such as the COVID 19 pandemic, generate ambiguity because their strength, longevity, and implications are not known when they first emerge. Structure changes as an initial response to environmental shocks because structure is most amenable to leadership decision making. We propose to address the special issue questions about “school characteristics and structures” and school organizations “address[ing] the COVID crisis” by capturing the ways in which school structure morphed in response to pandemic shocks. Our purpose is to learn how theory informs what changed and what was preserved in the pandemic as a case of extreme environmental change. Our investigation is an opportunity to use structure, human resources, organizational learning, and sensemaking concepts and theories (Bauer & Brazer, 2018; Brazer et al., 2019; Weick, 2001) to illustrate the open systems nature of schools and districts (Scott, 2003). We will explore the predictive nature of this collection of concepts, identify limitations on those predictions, and propose new conceptions of how schools maintain function and legitimacy under stress. We will analyze interviews with principals, their leadership teams, and principal supervisors using our conceptual framework and by identifying emergent themes we did not anticipate. We aspire to explain structural growth and change, actions as learned enactments, and organizational learning as informing actions to provide a theoretical platform for future research.

Authors

• Scott C. Bauer, University of Colorado - Denver
  Presenting Author

• David Brazer, Brazer Education Consulting LLC
  Presenting Author