Session Information
32 SES 07 B, Resources and Resistance to Change in Schools
Paper Session
Contribution
Using the example of the networking of schools with award winning schools of the German School Award, this paper presentation examines the programmatic impact assumptions regarding the professionalisation and deprofessionalisation processes of teachers and school administrators who participate in "best-practice school networks". In this temporary school cooperation, two teachers from one school visit one of the winning schools of the German School Award. The German School Award is a school competition in which a jury selects once a year schools on the basis of six self-defined criteria. With its network programme, the German School Award proclaims an implicit understanding of control and steering. Prize-winning schools are presented in the media as role models for orientation in the school development process. The programmatic hope is that the staging of prize-winning schools will encourage other schools to pursue similar processes in their school development. Through networking with prize-winning schools, activities should result in the self-control of the school's own development process. School development is therefore to be promoted via indirect control with the help of orientation variables, which are used to adjust the design of school processes (Dedering 2012).
There is, however, a tension between getting to know the concepts of the prize-winning schools and the conceptual work at one's own school: the individual examination of the working methods of other schools does not necessarily lead directly to collective action steps at one's own school. The study of unawarded schools of the German School Award shows that although teachers participating in networking programmes benefit from the events at an individual level, the transformation of the prize-winning schools' teaching approaches into their own teaching and school organisation work is challenging (Albers 2016). From the perspective of Educational Governance research (Altrichter 2015), the actor constellation between visiting and visited teachers is analysed with regard to the assumptions for professionalisation processes and school development processes. Due to the programmatic framing of the cooperation in the context of a school competition, the concepts of the prize-winning schools as well as the actions of the teachers at these schools are considered exemplary, so that the cooperation is characterised by a hierarchical structure: visiting teachers are to "copy" ideas.
On the basis of the analysis of the programmatic documents of the foundations, which announce the school competition and the school network, as well as the analysis of guideline interviews with school administrators and teachers, who has visitated an award-winning school, the following will be presented from the perspective of documentary organisational research (Amling/Vogd 2017). Finally, based on the theoretical and empirical analysis, it will be examined why the independent investigation of foundation initiatives that organise school competitions and school networks at schools is central to empirical school research. Symptomatic of the current research situation on school competitions and their school networks is the fact that if articles are published in scientific journals, they are mainly written by the initiators or the jury members of the school competitions. If empirical studies exist at all, these are programme evaluations which are, however, only partially published. The project provides a scientific contribution to the investigation of school networks within the framework of school competitions organised by private foundations, with a focus on the participating individual school and its school development. It is devoted to two questions: What do report the participants in the school competition, who were not awarded a prize, say with regard to the observation of a prize-winning school? To what extent do these statements contain aspects that can be interpreted as an expression of school development?
Method
The interest of the findings is to clarify whether there is a connection between the observations of visitors at a prize-winning school of the German School Award and the school development of the participating school. First, the statements of the actors of participating schools about their participation in the school competition will be examined in order to determine which references the participants make to their participation in the school competition. The extent to which these statements contain aspects of school development will then be analysed. The interpretation of the findings is based on a governance-theoretical understanding of school development (Maag Merki 2008). The study shows on a sample of four schools what the actors of schools participating in a network with award winning schools report about the networking with award winning schools and the possibly resulting steps of action at their school. The focus here is on unawarded schools, since in public and scientific discourse in particular the prize-winning schools are in the foreground, while the unawarded schools represent the majority of the schools taking part in the school competition and are those which, according to the programme, should profit from the networking. In a data collection period of four weeks, each school was visited for one week. According to Gläser/Laudel (2010), a total of 37 guideline-based expert interviews were conducted with various actors from the school: with members of the school management and teachers who had been visiting the prize-winning school. The study is based on a qualitative research interest in the perspective of the actors of non-award winning schools on their participation in the school competition and in the networking events with prize-winning schools. The subjective perspectives of the actors were examined with the help of a documentary interview analysis (Nohl 2017, Asbrand 2014). The empirical basis is a documentary interview analysis of guideline interviews conducted with teachers after a one-week internship at a prize-winning school. It will be shown why teachers' involvement with the guest school can be described as primarily cognitive involvement and why knowledge about the alternative course of action at the prize-winning school can therefore be less transferred to "knowledge stocks guiding action" (Bohnsack 2009: 129).
Expected Outcomes
This study shows that the participants in the networking with the prize-winning school particularly report an individual gain in information about the working methods of other schools. Only some of the steps taken at one's own school as a result of the observation are reported. The measures described remain within the sphere of influence and action of the participants at the level of school organisation and extracurricular activities. However, the area of concrete teaching is not reached. The measures are characterised by the fact that they can be implemented through the extra-curricular involvement of individual actors without having to entail collective changes in the actions of teachers in the classroom or in school organisation. The potential field of action therefore appears to be limited to the individual level of the participating persons. After the selective exchange, the participating actors are left to their own devices to shape possible transformation and recontextualisation processes of the explored working methods. Subsequent actions therefore also appear to be dependent on the already established work and communication structures at one's own school. While the individual gain of information about the working method of the other school is rated highly by the teacher, the causal attribution for missing subsequent steps of action is seen in the own school specifics. The interviewees cite the different framework conditions and everyday school life as factors influencing the transformation of the acquired information and insights from observation into their own school. The statements show that the participants benefit from participation in terms of an individual gain in information. However, the reports on subsequent steps of action at one's own school do not contain any aspects that could be interpreted in the sense of Maag Merki (2008) as functional, collective development processes for the educational processes of the pupils.
References
Albers, A. (2016). Schulwettbewerbe als Impuls für Schulentwicklung. Perspektiven von Teilnehmenden des Deutschen Schulpreises. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Asbrand, B. (2014). Die Dokumentarische Methode in der Governance-Forschung. Zur Rekonstruktion von Rekontextualisierungsprozessen. In K. Maag Merki et al. (Hrsg.), Educational Governance als Forschungsperspektive (S. 177-198). Wiesbaden: Springer. Bohnsack, R. (2014). Rekonstruktive Sozialforschung. Einführung in qualitative Methoden. 9., überarbeitete und erweiterte Auflage. Opladen & Toronto: Budrich. Dedering, K. (2012). Steuerung und Schulentwicklung. Bestandsaufnahme und Theorieperspektive. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Gläser, J./Laudel, G. (2010). Experteninterviews und qualitative Inhaltsanalyse als Instrumente rekonstruierender Untersuchungen. 4. Auflage. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Maag Merki, K. (2008). Die Architektur einer Theorie der Schulentwicklung. Voraussetzungen und Strukturen. Journal für Schulentwicklung, 12(2), S. 22–30. Nohl, A.-M. (2017). Interview und Dokumentarische Methode. Wiesbaden: Springer.
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