School leaders’ collaboration with improvement cycles in Chile, Kenya, Uganda and the Philippines. What are they (and we) learning?

• In Event: Communities of practice and their influence on learning

Proposal

School leaders across the globe have been coping with multiple uncertainties and new problems of practice through the Covid-19 pandemic. In many countries, however, school leadership preparation and in-service provision includes little on developing the skills of these key professionals to respond effectively to varied , complex and open-ended local professional problems (Su, Gamage & Mininberg, 2003; Bush, 2013). Much provision is ‘universalised’ rather than context-specific (Eacott & Asuga, 2014) and focuses on management, administration, monitoring and accountability mechanisms. This is despite increasing evidence of the impact of effective instructional school leadership on the quality of students’ learning experiences and ubiquitous policy goals centred on increasing education quality.
Professional collaboration through Networked Improvement Communities (NICs) and structured experimentation based on improvement research methodologies potentially offer an approach to enhance school leaders’ capacity and capabilities to bring about sustained improvement in practices (Milder & Lorr, 2017). NICs are conceptualised as intentionally formed structured collaborations that aim to address practical problems (Bryk, Gomez & Grunow, 2011). Their operation is guided by a focus on a common aim; drawing on participants’ deep contextual understanding with prompts from researchers; systematic approaches to experimentation utilising the rigour and structure of data driven improvement cycles; and coordination to share findings and refine interventions (Russell et al, 2017). This approach has shown promise in high income contexts (Bryk et al, 2015) but to date there has been little exploration of how it might support local innovations for practice improvement in low resource geographies.

Since March 2021, this Covid response research project has been exploring this approach with small groups of school leaders (primary or pre-primary) in marginalised communities in very different contexts: Chile (Santiago), Kenya (Limuru and Mukuru), the Philippines (Mindinao), and Uganda (Kampala). In all these settings, school leaders are playing a key role in managing current and future education challenges. In the Philippines and Uganda, schools have been shut since March 2020 and Chile has recently seen a shift away from a highly centralised approach towards new structures of public education involving Servicios Locales de Educación Pública with responsibility for administration of pre-primary, primary and secondary schools. School closure in Kenya intensified massive vulnerabilities that are being grappled with in the recent phased return to face-to-face learning.

At each site school leaders, district officials and researchers collaborate as a NIC to identify what they want to change, analyse the current condition – the complexities and uniqueness of the ‘here and now’ in their schools - and define their measures and visions for an aspirational end state. Then they identify and enact small changes in multiple experiments based on plan, do, study, act cycles (PDSA), to see if the change brings about improvement in the practice or process for their school community. Through sharing findings they generate collective understandings of what works for whom under what conditions to support incremental quality improvement. The activity focus of all the NICs is pupil participation in learning in the conditions during and after the pandemic through the use of contextually appropriate tools and resources such as a Reading App and 2-way radios.

Our research seeks to understand the extent to which this participant -driven practical methodology sustainably strengthens school leaders’ capabilities to analyse problems of practice and organise action to address these in different contexts. We utilise a multi-modal interdisciplinary research design adapted for the restrictions of the pandemic and prioritising participant and researcher health and safety at all times. Activity includes in-depth interviews with school leaders at three points during the 12 months of the project fieldwork; detailed observational notes from the NICs, regular conversations with the school leaders (Whatsapp or phone) to co-create a set of ongoing reflections (similar to a reflective journal) and data from the improvement cycles. Ethical clearance was through in-country institutions.
Emerging findings from the first period of field work:
• Strong influence of current conditions: Cultures of compliance and performativity for school leaders allow them little space for agency in localised problem-solving. Strong linking of improvement with performance management based approaches to meet set targets deters school leaders from feeling comfortable with the learning from failure integral to PDSA cycles.

• Initially, school leaders found it difficult to move from high-level generic problems (such as poverty or lack of infrastructure) to smaller, specific problems which were receptive to learning through experiments with PDSA cycles for example the degree of interactivity in the teachers’ radio lessons.
• Early resistance to use of evidence and analytical and data tools for decision-making; school leaders perceived the improvement science tools as something to be completed to demonstrate fidelity to implementation of a given initiative rather than a resource which might enable them to be more agentive. However as the project progresses data is indicating examples of changes in school leaders’ behaviour, for example in decision-making within the structural power dynamics of their context.
• Collaboration with peers in the NICs is highly valued in all contexts Previous collaborations were not unknown but had tended to be less regular and structured. But more time was needed to build relational trust with researchers and other NIC members and allow them into their communities. This was particularly noted in the Philippines.

• Change in approach for in-country project teams who found they needed to shift from their default problem-solving mindset to actively facilitating social learning spaces (NICs) which open up conditions for exploring possibilities and exercise of agency.
The presentation will build on these initial findings through comparative case studies of school leaders drawing on additional data generated in the remaining field work period (until February 2022). It will also consider future use of this bottom-up methodology to support school leaders in under-resourced contexts to become more agentive in continuous improvement in teaching and learning, and thereby contribute to more resilient education systems.
The research is being carried out by a multi-disciplinary team drawn from a global consortium of national and international organisations and institutions.

Authors

• Freda Wolfenden, The Open University, UK

• Jennifer Jomafuvwe Agbaire, The Open University, UK