Session Information
11 ONLINE 00 PS, General Poster Session (online) - NW 11
General Poster Session
Contribution
Questions regarding the controllability of school improvement processes have represented one of the main topics in educational research in Germany, not only since the PISA study. Since the 2000s, the relevant research areas can be subsumed under the term ‘new governance’ in education. Various studies have generated comprehensive knowledge on, for example, the use of data from comparative studies or centralized state-wide examinations (e.g. van Ackeren et al., 2013).
Currently two further desiderata remain, which can be summarised as follows:
How has organizational action changed in conjunction with particular education policy instruments with change in school environment over an extended period of time?
How stable or sustainable are any shifts in action undertaken within the schools?
Essentially, there is an empirical and theoretical deficit about which key assumptions are at all effective regarding school development in the interplay between development in terms of organization, teaching and pupil achievement. In particular, these are questions, which can only be analyzed through observation over an extended period rather than the usual two years in most studies in schools. Relevant areas here are above all those, which concern the reciprocal influence between the requirements of education policy instruments and the changes in the school environment associated with them (e.g. the establishment of central bodies for quality assurance) and practical organizational action.
Theoretically, the study assumes that the implementation of these education policy instruments creates a need to change, which can be described as a need to restructure the organization, i.e. the redesign of organizational structures in schools (Thiel, 2008a). For the analysis of school organizations, we draw on a theoretical tradition in which the relationship between professionalism in the teaching profession and the organization of school is discussed (Lortie, 1969). In this regard, Lortie (1972) was the first to describe the concept of the Autonomy-Parity Pattern. According to this concept, teachers claim autonomy for their professional work, they do not accept external interventions and postulate equal treatment of all teachers. The approach of professional organizations according to Thiel (2008b) lends itself to this analysis in particular. Thiel’s approach distinguishes two ideal types of professional organizations: in an Autonomous Professional Organization, the principal’s leadership is aimed at securing a claim for professional autonomy in the managed school. On the other hand, in a Managed Professional Organization, the leadership of principals refers to an efficiency-oriented school that is functionally differentiated and strategically and operationally linked. While the ideal type of the Autonomous Professional Organization corresponds to Mintzberg’s (1979) idea of school as a professional bureaucracy, the Managed Professional Organization can be traced back to the model of “New Public Management” (Thiel, 2008b; Hood, 1991).
Moreover, we focus in the study on evidence-based school improvement at the interface between the school level of action (meso level) and educational policy and administration (macro level) and explore the influence of institutional regulatory contexts in different federal states – operationalized as external and internal situational aspects in the form of school environments – on evidence-based school improvement. Here, we investigate whether the heterogeneous governance concepts of educational policy result in significant differences in the implementation of evidence-based school improvement within schools. This is linked to the discourse about new strategies and procedures that enable cooperative constellations, transformative processing, and reflexive knowledge processing of existing data and knowledge (e.g. Bieber et al., 2018). Future strategies therefore should focus on finding communicative linkages that promote the flow of information between school practice, educational administration, and research (Manitius et al., 2021).
Method
The primary purpose of this study is to analyze a long-term and systematic reorganization of schools with reference to the changes in school environment. The study aims to systematize organizational school improvement in a qualitative typology (Kelle & Kluge, 2010; Yin, 2009) as a pattern of reorganization for schools, in order to contribute to the further development of existing school improvement research models. Therefore, the analysis focusses on organizational action in schools, which is related to shifts and changes in organizational structure and is associated with the implementation of education policy instruments such as mandatory proficiency tests. This approach allows an insight into sustained and established improvement processes or patterns of reorganization in school improvement. Methodologically, the study is based on a secondary analysis of longitudinal qualitative school case studies comprising 351 problem-based interviews (in 28 schools from six states: Berlin, Brandenburg, Baden-Württemberg, Mecklenburg-Pomerania, North Rhine-Westphalia, Thuringia) with different school representatives (school principal, head of department, subject teacher) resulting from three projects (2005 to 2013). The conducted interview data was assessed according to the qualitative content analysis by using categories (Kuckartz, 2016; Mayring, 2010) which based on the design parameters of professional organizations. The basis for the investigation of how the regulatory contexts of different federal states influence evidence-based school improvement is the analysis and comparison of school patterns of reorganization in the context of evidence-based school improvement. Here, the organizational variables (internal situational aspects) were used to analyze the sample by drawing on the contextual documentation of the primary studies: (1) the size of the school, (2) the composition of the student body, and (3) the type of school. These three aspects were captured for the schools at the time of the surveys in the primary studies and characterize the internal regulatory contexts within which schools improve.
Expected Outcomes
We are going to present final empirical results from our study, which are related to the different ideal types of professional organizations (Autonomous Professional Organization and Managed Professional Organization) according to Thiel (2008b). These types of professional organizations can be identified in the context of new implemented educational governance and reform instruments in Germany. Here, especially the organizational structures and school improvement processes are taken into account. As an extension of these ideal types we gathered additional empirical types of professional organizations, e.g. the Collaborative Professional Organization. Additionally, the findings indicate that the investigated institutional regulatory contexts have a rather small influence on evidence-based school improvement and that rather the inherent logic and rationality of school organizations are crucial for school improvement processes. These results may contribute to the recent scientific discussion about evidence-based school improvement and policy.
References
Bieber, G., Egyptien, E., Klein, G., Oechslein, K., & Pikowsky, B. (2018). Positionspapier der Landesinstitute und Qualitätseinrichtungen der Länder zum Transfer von Forschungswissen. Verfügbar unter: https://www.qua-lis.nrw.de/cms/up load/aktuelles/Positionspapier_Transfer_31.10.18.pdf Hood, C. (1991). A public management for all seasons, Public Administration, Vol. 69 No. 1, pp. 3-19. Kelle, U. & Kluge, S. (2010). Vom Einzelfall zum Typus. Fallvergleich und Fallkontrastierung in der qualitativen Sozialforschung. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. Kuckartz, U. (2016). Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse. Methoden, Praxis, Computerunterstützung. Weinheim: Beltz Juventa. Lortie, D.C. (1969). The balance of control and autonomy in elementary school teaching. In A. Etzioni (Ed.), The Semi-Professions and Their Organization (pp. 1-53). New York: Free Press. Lortie, D.C. (1972). Team-Teaching: Versuch der Beschreibung einer zukünftigen Schule. In H.W. Dechert (Hrsg.), Team Teaching in der Schule (S. 37-76). München: Piper. Manitius, V., Bieber, G. & Bremm, N. (Hrsg.) (2021). Schnittstellenarbeit für die Schulsystementwicklung. Schwerpunktheft: Die Deutsche Schule. 113(1). Mayring, P. (2010). Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse: Grundlagen und Techniken (11., vollständig überarbeitete Aufl.). Weinheim und Basel: Beltz. Mintzberg, H. (1979). The Structuring of Organizations: A Synthesis of the Research, Prentice Hall, New York, NY. Thiel, F. (2008a). Die Organisation der Bildung - eine Zumutung für die Profession? In Y. Ehrenspeck, G. de Haan, F. Thiel & L. Kajetzke (Hrsg.), Bildung: Angebot oder Zumutung? (S. 211–228). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. Thiel, F. (2008b). Organisationssoziologische Vorarbeiten zu einer Theorie der Schulentwicklung, Journal für Schulentwicklung, Vol. 12 No. 1, pp. 31-39. van Ackeren, I., Heinrich, M. & Thiel, F. (Hrsg.). (2013). Evidenzbasierte Steuerung im Bildungssystem? Befunde aus dem BMBF-SteBis-Verbund (Die Deutsche Schule, Beiheft 12). Münster: Waxmann. Yin, R. K. (2009). Case Study Research. Design and methods. Los Angeles: Calif.
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