School Improvement in the Next Level of Work: Struggling for Collective Agency in a School Facing Adversity

Improving the quality of schools that serve disadvantaged students has been a major focus of reforms for many decades. Overall, the results of these efforts have been disappointing. This may be because school improvement relies upon the development of collective agency, and schools serving disadvantaged students face contexts of adversity that pose challenges for developing collective agency. Collective agency is the capability to use choice and intention to respond to problems in pursuit of desired aims. In an organization, collective agency manifests in beliefs and interaction patterns through which work groups accomplish tasks, address problems, pull together into an affirmed body, and fuel members’ satisfaction. Schools serving communities that experience concentrated poverty and racial segregation typically face chronic resource shortages, a negative reputation, high turnover, and student behaviors that challenge teachers’ in their core competencies. In the face of such adversities, work groups may develop interaction patterns of defensiveness, helplessness, or fragmenting conflict that constrain collective agency./nStudies of school improvement have long documented such destructive tendencies in challenged schools but tend to offer little insight into how such a school might develop collective agency. Prevailing reform models tend to presume substantial external support or an influx of talented leaders and teachers. However, most schools must make do with limited external support and rely primarily on their existing resources to bring about improvement. In this case, developmental efforts may occur at a more foundational level. However, much school improvement research has overlooked or obscured such efforts because the research proceeds from criteria of improvement tied to an ambitious horizon. This study took a different approach. I sought to make visible the fine-grained processes by which educators’ work groups may make any efforts to develop collective agency, even if these efforts do not sustain or add up to criteria of effectiveness often applied in scholarship. For this, I theorized the development of collective agency as a struggle: As groups strive towards desired aims, navigate various developmental challenges, and contend with experiences of adversity, they form interaction patterns that can enable or constrain collective agency. In studying groups’ efforts to develop, I looked to gain insights into how to enable school improvement at “the next level of work”: proximate steps towards desired capabilities that lay within the zone of struggle./nAs part of a research-practice partnership with a Californian district, this study used participant observation over one year with four standing work groups in one challenged middle school. These work groups served various functions that could contribute to school improvement: the instructional leadership team, a subject matter department, the faculty meetings, and staff professional development. Incorporating action research methods, I launched a fifth group formed around an explicit commitment to continuous improvement. From field notes and audio records from over 100 hours of group meetings and 45 hours of reflective conversations with individuals, I traced ebbs and flows in each group’s efforts to exert collective agency, identified salient processes involved when collective agency was most enabled or constrained, and compared these processes across the work groups./nI found that, across all five collegial bodies, there were times when overwhelming problems and experiences of failure pulled the groups into defensiveness, helplessness, or conflict that constrained collective agency. These tendencies manifested when groups avoided their core charge, silenced their problems, and became pulled apart by conflict. However, at other times, members made clear efforts to develop collective agency. When collective agency was most enabled, three processes were salient: someone was willing to take initiative, the group focused on a simple task, and the task emphasized affirmation, rather than critique. However, these processes enabled only a fragile collective agency. When group efforts proved insufficient to face up to and master their problems in their full complexity, renewed experiences of failure and overwhelm pulled them back into destructive tendencies./nThe findings suggest that school development under conditions of adversity entails a constant struggle. Even amid challenging circumstances, educators strive to try to reach their students, experience accomplishment, and connect each other. However, when overwhelmed by problems posed largely by structural inequities beyond their control, their struggle may, at times, collapse. The findings suggest that school improvement at the next level of work entails reform approaches that recognize educators’ positive struggle and find the means to fortify it so as to cultivate a more lasting and expanding collective agency. This is likely to entail incremental development of basic team capabilities and problem solving capacity, providing opportunities for validation and connection, and finding the means to enable authentic affirmation by which a faculty can recognize its worthiness while also recognizing the depth of its struggle.

Advisor: Mintrop, Heinrich