Co-Creating School Innovations: Should Self-Determination be a Component of School Improvement?

Background Research suggests a number of benefits from teacher participation in school improvement—chief among them that it can increase teacher receptivity to innovation and reform adoption. Improvement science has been put forward as a new paradigm for involving local school stakeholders in the improvement process. Purpose We describe the beliefs held by teachers and teacher leaders during the development and implementation of a locally developed innovation. To explain why the beliefs of these two school stakeholder groups would differ, and the implications these differences have on receptivity to the innovation, we merge the sensemaking framework and status risk theory. Setting Three high schools in a large urban school district in the southwestern United States. Research Design The data for this study come from a seven-year study of the process of scaling up effective practices in a large urban district. This qualitative case study is based on transcripts from 260 semistructured interviews and 24 focus groups with development team members and teachers. We analyzed transcripts to understand participants’ attitudes toward and understanding of the innovation design. Findings Allowing for teacher self-determination in the innovation design and implementation helped to garner a high level of teacher buy-in to the innovation. Compared with externally developed reforms, the innovation was less challenging to teacher autonomy and was customized to fit the needs of their students. These conditions led to high levels of teacher ownership over the innovation. Yet, in the process, teacher leaders grounded the innovation in preexisting and easy-to-implement practices that did not require significant investment from teachers to adopt. Conclusions Teacher self-determination in the innovation development process contributed to greater teacher ownership of, and receptivity to, organizational change, but at the cost of adopting more ambitious practices that likely had a greater chance of improving instruction and positive student outcomes.

背景 研究表明教师参与学校改进有诸多益处——其中最主要的是它能提高教师对创新和改革举措的接受度。改进科学已被提出作为一种让当地学校利益相关者参与改进过程的新范式。 目的 我们描述了在一项本地开发的创新的开发和实施过程中教师和教师领导者所秉持的信念。为了解释为什么这两个学校利益相关群体的信念会有所不同，以及这些差异对创新接受度的影响，我们将意义建构框架和地位风险理论相结合。 环境 美国西南部一个大型城市学区的三所高中。 研究设计 本研究的数据来自一项对一个大型城市学区推广有效实践过程的为期七年的研究。这个定性案例研究基于对开发团队成员和教师进行的260次半结构化访谈以及24个焦点小组的文字记录。我们分析这些文字记录以了解参与者对创新设计的态度和理解。 研究结果 在创新设计和实施过程中允许教师自主决定有助于获得教师对创新的高度认同。与外部开发的改革相比，该创新对教师自主性的挑战较小，并且是根据学生需求定制的。这些条件使得教师对创新有高度的自主权。然而，在这个过程中，教师领导者将创新建立在已有的且易于实施的实践基础上，这些实践不需要教师投入大量精力去采用。 结论 教师在创新发展过程中的自主决定有助于提高教师对组织变革的自主权和接受度，但代价是采用了不太有雄心的实践，而那些更有雄心的实践可能更有机会改善教学和学生的积极成果。