Learning to Work in Fundamentally New Ways: Understanding Dynamics Among Social and Formal Supports for Practice
Year: 2018
Type: dissertation
Abstract: After more than a half century of school reform efforts, perhaps the single most important learning is that there is a need to place laser like focus on effectively defining, shaping and changing teacher practice. The investigation of one educational provider’s attempt at developing capabilities for classroom management increases awareness of how external school partnerships can (more or less) facilitate the development of practice-based capabilities. Understanding how such designs and supports of practice operate within individual schools and across classrooms informs the field about the micro and macro implications of changing teacher practice. This cross-case exploratory study classroom management component of a commercialized middle school social-emotional program examines its supports of practice (both formal, social and the interdependencies among them), the ways in which these supports shaped (or failed to shape) teachers’ practice and the factors that enabled and constrained the development of desired practice capabilities. This study comprises data gathered through program documentation, semi-structured interviews, participant-observation and teacher surveys. Participants included teachers, school leaders, school-based coaches and program leaders. The analysis of these data draws on what is known about the use of formal and social supports of practice in large-scale instructional change involving external partners (e.g., Reading Recovery, Success For All, high-performing charter/educational management companies). Formal supports codify existing knowledge of what to do and how, while social supports leverage practitioners’ expertise and collegial interactions. Whereas formal and social supports have historically been considered in exclusion of the other, this literature supports that they are complimentary, mutually reinforcing supports. While my findings support that formal and social supports of practice, and their interdependent use, are critical to developing capabilities for practice, I identify a number of environmental, school and teacher-level enabling and constraining factors that expand and complicate this narrative. More specifically, these factors expand and complicate understandings regarding the affordances and limitations of formal and social supports and the mutually reinforcing roles schools and external partners have in developing capabilities in support of external designs.
Author: Amina Halim-Rahman Allen
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2891877933