This paper explores how school leaders and teachers interact around the use of national test results and to investigate whether, to what extent and how student data from national tests is seen as part of managerial accountability or professional accountability. We focus on interactions between school leaders and teachers as they work together with interpretation and formative use of national test results. Such interactions represent what Pentland and Feldman (2005) describe as routines in use, that is, practices that are established within specific contexts (people, time, norms). Using organizational routines as an analytic lens has several advantages since it concentrates on patterns of interaction between members of the organization and takes the fact that organizational routines can represent both mechanisms of preservation and change (ibid.). The data used in this paper is part of a larger, longitudinal research project. Three municipalities were selected to participate in the project, and within these municipalities, three schools were selected. The selection criteria are geographic location (rural or urban areas), size, and type of local quality management system which in the Norwegian context differ largely from municipality to municipality. The analysis draws on data from observations of so-called “result meetings” and interviews with the school leaders. The findings indicate the importance of leadership framing and construction of problems, mainly around low student scores to legitimate decisions and motivate teachers for development work. The school leaders seem to avoid issues of blaming. Instead they emphasize solutions such as opportunities to learn and competence development – coupled with expressing trust in teachers’ work.

Pentland, B. T., & Feldman, M. S. (2005). Organizational routines as a unit of analysis. Industrial and Corporate Change, 14(5), 793-81.