How School Inspectors Negotiate Their Preferred Findings With Each Other

Author(s):

Moritz Sowada(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2014

Network:

23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

23 SES 05 E, (Micro-)Politics and Policy-Making in Education

Paper Session

Time:

2014-09-03

11:00-12:30

Room:

B338 Sala de Aulas

Chair:

Peter Kelly

Contribution

School inspection is a form of external evaluation in many European school systems – with Finland being a notable exception (Webb, Vulliamy, Hakkinen, & Hamalainen, 1998). It is a tool in the context of New Public Management. As such, it is usually intended to provide stakeholders with comparable information about the quality of schools (Broadbent & Laughlin, 1998, p. 415). Although school inspection serves several – sometimes conflicting – functions, the intention that it should contribute to school improvement is often regarded as paramount. Consequently, it comes as no surprise that most research regarding school inspection has concentrated on the impact of inspection and associated school improvement measures (see e.g. Earley, Fidler, & Ouston, 1996). As a result, research efforts have been mainly concerned what happened after an inspection. In comparison, research projects on the actual practices during inspection visits have been few and far between (e.g. Lambrecht, Kotthoff, & Maag Merki, 2008).

The presented research addresses this gap. It looks at judgement and decision making practices by school inspection teams which usually consist of two to three inspectors. It is overwhelmingly common that inspection teams aim to arrive – ideally via a consensus – at joint decisions regarding the rating of inspection criteria. While agreement within a team is a goal, disagreement does occasionally occur and needs to be resolved. After all, inspection teams (are required to) report their findings with a unitary voice. While in law, dissenting opinions of minority judges are made public by certain courts, no such equivalent exists for school inspection teams. This leads to the question of how school inspection teams arrive at team judgements if the inspectors start out from a position of disagreement on an issue.

It is noteworthy, that regulatory documents on the school inspection process tend to lay out prescriptive and procedural elements in some detail but tend to have little or no formal guidance regarding the judgement process. Most inspection regimes have a quality framework that explicates what is considered to be a ‘good school’ or ‘good practice’. Furthermore, documents that specify the data collection part of school inspection are quite common. However, documents that explicitly detail how inspectors are ought to conduct the data analysis and to arrive at judgements about the quality of schools are comparatively rare.

In following assumptions of structuration theory (Giddens, 1984), this research is conceptualised with the premise that inspection regulation structures but does not predetermine the social field of school inspection. From this follows, that even if detailed and prescriptive regulations on how inspectors ought to make their judgements (as well as on how to resolve potential conflicts) would be readily available, the actual judgement practices may differ and are, therefore, worthy of investigation as a phenomenon in their own right.

Therefore, this presentation reports research findings on how school inspectors arrive at shared judgements about the criteria of school quality that as an official template underlies their decision making efforts. The focus will rest in particular on instances of disagreement between inspection team members and how they are resolved. Of further concern are which rhetorical devices inspectors employ to advance the adoption of their preferred judgement outcome. This study therefore contributes to the micropolitics of quality assessment practices. Micropolitical actions are those that further ones interests in interaction with others (cf. Ball, 1987). In the context of this study, advancing ones judgement preference under conditions of disagreement within a team regarding a specific criterion is considered as a form of micropolitical action.

Method

The research has been conducted in the spirit of ethnomethodology insofar as its aim was to identify the ethno-methods that school inspectors apply in their judgement work (see e.g. Pollner & Emerson, 2001). Consequently, the research has been conducted in a naturalistic setting at six on-site school inspections – equally split between two German inspection systems that have been included in this study. The selection of the inspection systems has been based on a classification by Rürup (2008). According to him, the German state Lower Saxony is exemplary for a science-oriented system. Meanwhile the second German state Thuringia represents an appropriateness-oriented system. The researcher has been permitted to shadow inspection teams as they conducted their evaluative work in schools. Intermittently, the researcher was able to tape-record the conversations within the inspection team with the permission of the inspection team members. The resulting voice recording have been selectively indexed and transcribed. Criteria for the selection were the relevance of the sequences to the research questions. Particular analytic attention has been given to sections were inspectors were in disagreement with each other regarding the judgements that they prefer. The data analysis drew on discussion and conversation analysis (Deppermann, 2008). It shares many of its assumptions about natural speech and how it should be analysed. However, the transcripts have not the same depth that is often required for linguistic research. The aim was not to identify constitutive elements about language use but rather to address specific substantive research questions. Therefore, the analysis was characterised by a hermeneutic and iterative process that led from more general tasks such as identifying relevant sequences to describing and analysing these sequences. The descriptive task focussed on who said what, when and what for. This, in turn, then allowed identifying who, for instance, supported for a more positive or negative score regarding a criterion and how they argued in favour of it. After looking at distinct arguments the analytical focus shifted to the interactive structure. Who was ‘successful’ with their judgement preference and – more importantly – how? Next, the focus was broadened to encompass other sequences to establish similarities and differences in order to establish whether certain ways of negotiation occurred repeatedly. The results have been assembled in an overview of the kind of rhetorical devices and tactics used by team members in such negotiations.

Expected Outcomes

Disagreements between inspectors emerged at points where their understanding of what could normally be expected of a school in respect to a specific criterion differed. In such cases, they entered a discussion about what could be reasonably expected of a school. With regards to policy changes, the longer a new has been in place the higher were the expectations of inspectors regarding the extent and quality of its implementation. Some inspectors who favoured lower scores than their colleagues compared the performance of a school to an (imaginary) ideal of how it should be. Another typical way to support a lower score was to highlight that as school has not ensured certain organisational processes are upheld irrespective of those who are currently performing these jobs. One the other hand, some inspectors criticise certain inspection criteria as unrealistic and too demanding to support their push for a more positive grade on a specific criterion. Some inspectors wanted to positively appraise the performance of a specific school member even though their contribution did not fit neatly with the inspection criteria. Consequently, they attempted to integrate an appraisal into one of the pre-specified criteria that was considered most appropriate. Occasionally, inspectors also considered the potential impact of their grading and used this to justify their judgement preference. In doing so, the likeliness of intended and unintended future events featured in their decision making. This comes with the paradoxical effect that higher as well as lower scores can be advocated with similar intended improvement measures in mind. This is due to that different ways (i.e. scoring decisions) may be presumed to lead to the same desired outcome. An inspector, for instance, argued that a lower score would act as a wake-up call. While another inspector warned that a negative score may have a demoralising effect.

References

- Ball, S. J. (1987). The micro-politics of the school: Towards a theory of school organization. London: Routledge. - Broadbent, J., & Laughlin, R. (1998). Resisting the ‘new public management’: Absorption and absorbing groups in schools and GP practices in the UK. Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, 11(4), 403–435. doi:10.1108/09513579810231439 - Deppermann, A. (2008). Gespräche analysieren: Ein Einführung (4th ed.). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. - Earley, P., Fidler, B., & Ouston, J. (Eds.). (1996). Improvement through inspection? Complementary approaches to school development. London: Fulton. - Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press. - Lambrecht, M., Kotthoff, H.-G., & Maag Merki, K. (2008). Taktieren oder Öffnen? Die Pilotphase Fremdevaluation in Baden-Württemberg zwischen Entwicklung und Kontrolle - eine mikrologische Prozess- und Ergebnisanalyse. In W. Böttcher, W. Bos, H. Döbert, & H. G. Holtappels (Eds.), Bildungsmonitoring und Bildungscontrolling aus nationaler und internationaler Perspektive (pp. 279–291). Münster: Waxmann. - Pollner, M., & Emerson, R. M. (2001). Ethnomethodology and Ethnography. In P. Atkinson, A. Coffey, S. Delamont, J. Lofland, & L. Lofland (Eds.), Handbook of Ethnography (pp. 118–135). London: SAGE. Retrieved from http://srmo.sagepub.com/view/handbook-of-ethnography/n8.xml - Rürup, M. (2008). Typen der Schulinspektion in den deutschen Bundesländern. Die Deutsche Schule, 100(4), 467–477. - Webb, R., Vulliamy, G., Hakkinen, K., & Hamalainen, S. (1998). External inspection or school self-evaluation? A comparative analysis of policy and practice in primary schools in England and Finland. British Educational Research Journal, 24(5), 539–556. doi:10.1080/0141192980240504

Author Information

Moritz Sowada (presenting / submitting)

University of Münster, Germany

Search the ECER Programme

Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
Search for authors and in the respective field.
For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.