Elementary Science in Context: How District Leaders Manage Complex Environments (Poster 4)

• In Event: System-Building for Improving Elementary Science Teaching and Learning: From the Classroom to the Central Office

Abstract

Purpose
This study aims to deepen our understanding of the ways school districts work to strengthen elementary science by exploring how leaders make sense of and manage complex environments as they pursue those ambitions.

Theoretical Framework
Managing environmental pressures—including cultural, political, market, and technical influences—is key to building instructionally focused educational systems as those environments can motivate and complicate school districts’ efforts to improve science instruction (Authors, 2019; Authors, 2022). Despite shared national contexts, no single strategy for managing environments will serve the needs of all districts. This is partially because environments are not objective realities but instead are enacted (Weick, 1969; Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978/2003); the environments in which districts operate and to which they respond are created through district interpretation and action. Further, leaders attend to certain elements of their environment and not others partially due to the limitations of human cognition and rationality (Scott & Davis, 2007; March & Simon, 1958).
As school districts move toward becoming educational systems in which central offices embrace the work of guiding and supporting elementary science teaching and learning, responsibility for managing relationships with the environment is shared between the central office and schools (Authors, 2018). Tactics like bridging and buffering have been used to describe how organizations manage those relationships, commonly locating the nexus of that work at the school level (Honig & Hatch, 2004). However, fewer scholars have focused on how central offices engage in this work. Thus, while central offices are likely managing their environments in relation to their work on elementary science, their strategies for this remain under examined.

Modes of Inquiry
Using a comparative case study design, I explore how district leaders in 13 districts across six states understand and manage their complex environments as they work to improve elementary science instruction.

Data/Analysis
This study uses data from district central offices and schools, including interviews with 52 science leaders, observation fieldnotes of district science routines, and artifacts. Analysis consisted of memoing, inductive and deductive coding, and analytic matrices (Miles et al., 2014).

Findings
Study findings indicate substantial commonalities in the pressures district experience. Across districts, shared influences included the curriculum marketplace, the primacy of local and regional policies over federal policies, and the impact of reform efforts in other subject areas on science. How district leaders attended to these and other pressures from their environment varied, in part due to other pressures in their environment. For example, as district leaders decided how to interact with the curriculum market, other environmental factors like state textbook policies, funding challenges, and reforms in other subject areas like reading shaped leaders’ choices. In some districts, leaders created bespoke curriculum by rewriting or blending components of different curriculum to better suit the district’s vision for science instruction.

Significance
This study provides insight into the ways district leaders manage their complex environments as they work to improve elementary science instruction and highlights the complex, unique, and interconnected challenges leaders face in this work.

Author

• Anna Foster, University of Michigan