Achieving Educational Innovation Through Instructional Policy: A Paradoxical Tale

• In Event: Recontextualizing post-bureaucratic reforms in different educational systems: private actors, public administration, and schools

Proposal

School improvement and innovation play a central role in contemporary educational policy. Numerous countries and regions have implemented reforms attempting to transform teaching methods, directly or indirectly, across their educational systems, linking innovative practices with better outcomes in terms of both equity and performance. This is the case of Catalonia (Spain), where a recent instructional policy is urging schools and teachers to modify their teaching methods to enhance the quality of the system. This policy, inseparable from previous regulatory governance developments in education and fed by a new interdisciplinary curriculum, is built upon ideas of personalized learning, project-based learning, and competence-based education. The broadness and ambiguity of pedagogical innovation as a policy instrument, as well as the challenge to professional autonomy makes this case an interesting spot for enquiring into the interpretation and implementation of instructional policy.

To address this, the study draws on a combination of recent advancements in enactment and sensemaking theories, which I find particularly useful in addressing material as well as symbolic factors explaining different patterns of instructional practice in different institutional settings. Considering this policy background, I analyze how principals and teachers understand key tenets of instructional reform—that is, the concept of innovation, competence-based approaches, and project-based methods—and enact them differently in their school settings. I consider particular features of schools, such as reputation and demand within their local education markets, staff turnover, and leadership styles, as key mediating variables explaining the different innovation outcomes. Methodologically, I follow a mixed-methods approach that blends data derived from interviews, administrative records, and a survey. First, I qualitatively analyze teachers and leadership teams’ conceptions of key relevant terms of instructional policy—namely, innovation, active pedagogies, project-based methodologies, and competence-based education. The categories coming out of this analysis are tested against survey and administrative data, looking for patterns of policy interpretation, particularly in terms of schools’ characteristics.

The findings suggest that contrary to what the theory of change of the instructional policy expects, school autonomy does not appear as a trigger for new or improved teaching methods and, paradoxically, acts as a constraint on teachers’ individual professional autonomy. Moreover, innovation appears as a middle-class attractor, a trend that better-positioned schools take advantage of, singularizing and differentiating their educational offer even more. In this regard, most reputable and demanded schools—strictly associated with higher SES—tend to show more aligned practices with policy prescriptions and deploy a more elaborated and comprehensive discourse on innovation. Schools that are less favored, and which encounter more challenging students and contexts, show a slight decoupling of this instructional policy, although not a disconnection or opting-out behavior.

Author

• Edgar Quilabert, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, ESQ0818002H