In the last three decades, school districts throughout the country, are littered with school reform initiatives that are announced from auditorium stages on opening day and silently disappear from classrooms when teachers and students return from Thanksgiving break. You could fill a library on books written on why most school reform initiatives fail to gain a foothold in classrooms. The themes in all of these books fall into three categories: too much theory; too little resources; and too little leadership.
Certainly, in all failed reform initiatives, one could point to one or more of these themes present in main offices and classrooms. While each theme is a necessary contributor to a reform failure, it is not sufficient to explain the total collapse of well thought out and well researched changes to how schooling is conducted in this country. The missing theme, which is right in front of the eyes of school personnel and reform advocates, is the role school routines play is success or failure of a school reform initiative.
For over a century, schools in this nation have been designed to achieve institutional goals: standardization, documentation, accountability. These institutional goals were established at the turn of the century by a group of administrative progressives who designed a system that could process large groups of foreign immigrants efficiently. The emphasis in this system was on processing, not educating.
The institutional process reduces the educative function of schooling to a series of school routines and structures—classrooms, periods, subjects, grades, quizzes, tests, credits—that act as the foundation for what Tyack and Cuban have termed: “The Grammar of Schooling.” The entire process is designed for winnowing student populations rather than optimizing the individual abilities, talents, and interest of diverse student populations. Most, if not all, reform initiatives are founded on theories and pedagogical techniques that are in direct opposition to the goals and functions of institutional schooling. There is not a function of the grammar of schooling—time, space, assessment, grouping of students, organizational model, places where students learn, view of knowledge, student choice—that would serve as a welcome home for theories, routines, structures, that would advance the educational goals written into most school mission statements: critical thinking, divergent thinking, evidenced based reasoning, modeling, life-long learning, collaborative learning, meaningful learning experiences.
School administrators confronted with the reality that the routines and structures that govern main offices will marginalize the goals and substance of the any mission driven initriative have three choices: allow the initiative to disappear at the Thanksgiving break; restructure their school routines to accommodate the substance of the initiative; or, what I will term, nibble around the edges. The safest choice for school administrators is looking the other way as the remnants of the change initiative silently disappear from classrooms.
The dangerous choice is to attempt to restructure school routines to accommodate mission driven theories and pedagogical techniques. Despite the large amounts of literature disparaging the grammar of schooling, for the most part, school communities are comfortable with the grammar of schooling, just as it is. Yes, at times, there will be issues with how a routine is being performed, but, never would a parent call for the elimination of grades, or subjects, or classrooms, or periods, or tests, or teachers. Parents, and school community members, have all been socialized into the institutional goals and processes of schooling—what worked for them, will work for their children.
The third choice, while the most difficult and complex to orchestrate, is the sole possibly for new theories and pedagogical regimes to enter and remain in classrooms. In my books on school reform, I have written extensively on strategies administrators can orchestrate to nibble around the edges of institutional norms. Listed below is an abbreviated version of each strategy:
Strategy #1: Author a compelling narrative
- Uses the vocabularies of the change initiative
- Composed of three parts: the situation (what is wrong); the strategy (how will do this); and, capacity (can we do this)
- Tells a compelling story (how do we describe the situation we are in)
Strategy #2: Design a comprehensive training regime
- Educate
- Model
- Practice
- Coach
- Author
- Standardize
Strategy #3: Redesign “Cracks in the System”
- Locate institutional systems that are not working well or would draw little attention from the school community (e.g. personnel, curriculum development)
- Redesign failed systems to accommodate goals and practices of a change initiative
Strategy #4: Develop a continuous learning environment
- Flood the organization with latest research on teaching and learning
- Develop decentralized communication structures—teams, study groups—where groups of administrators and teachers share and discuss information (not meetings)
- Promote, design, and resource experimental approaches to teaching and learning
- Redesign teacher workspaces/working day, in ways that faculty can share their work on a daily basis.
Strategy #5: Protect faculty from external accountably mandates or silver bullet
solutions
- Attempts by external governmental agencies to regulate, disrupt, or colonize a school’s internal instructional worldview should be: modified or ignored
Nibbling around the edges of institutional norms merges two models of schooling. The first model of schooling, what I term the why of schooling, is a marketplace of ideas where administrators and teachers come together to discuss, to interpret, to test, various theories, paradigms, models of learning. The second model of schooling, what I term the how of schooling, are organizational structures and instructional regimes that execute the products of those ideas that the marketplace as determined to be the most effective. The key to nibbling around the edges of institutional norms are school leaders who orchestrate pathways into the how of institutional schooling that will accommodate an agreed upon why of schooling.
Alan C. Jones 