The uncertainties surrounding advancements in school improvement are closely connected with three primary dimensions: (1) A global aspect that shapes the educational system through disruptive crises such as pandemics, wars, and migrations, along with ongoing digital and social transformations (Kushnir 2021). Educational institutions find themselves contending with and addressing the complexities presented by this global dimension of uncertainty in their daily undertakings. This encompasses challenges such as the integration of refugees, the formulation of homeschooling protocols amidst pandemics, and the integration of digital tools and skills into the realms of learning, and organizational procedures.

In the hope of managing school quality through data and external evaluation, “external evaluation” was introduced as a new actor in the German administration after PISA 2000 - in addition to administrative supervisors and without a common focus between the two institutions (Diedrich 2020). The introduction of external evaluation introduced evidence and standardization as the main paradigms for school development, hence the effectiveness of school evaluation has not been conclusively proven (Malin et al. 2020, Schmidt 2020).

Those significant effectiveness problems describe a (3) third dimension of uncertainty that affects school leaders' decision-making and influences communication and cooperation between school administration, school evaluation, and principals (Kallenbach 2023). These three dimensions of uncertainty describe a real VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity ambiguity) environment especially for principals.

To face these systemic adversities, in the presented project school administration and researchers work within a research-practice partnership (RPP) together with stakeholders involved in school advice and support.

The aim of this multi-stakeholder partnership is to create an experimental field for the coordination of decision-making for a real problem: the design of new frameworks for the discussion and processing of school evaluation results between all relevant stakeholders, including the perspectives of science. 

From an organizational education (OE) perspective, the RPP will help to decide from a wider point of view by sharing perspectives and reflecting structures. On the micro-level (Göhlich et al 2018), we aim to establish new forms of collaboration and communication by elaboration and experience within the project. A main element of the development process are design-thinking workshops to create prototypes for feedback setting to discuss external evaluation results with all stakeholders.

Design-Thinking (Brown 2008, Mintrop 2016) opens a new and not yet established perspective in the field of school improvement. It structures a participative and iterative process, involves all stakeholder perspectives and focuses on creating new ideas, tryouts, and continuous improvement. In contrast, previously dominant strategies of new public management reforms focused on evidence, such as the introduction of school evaluation in the early 2000s, but brought to light systemic contradictions (Hangartner & Svaton 2020) that hinder decision-making, management and control of school development processes.

In our work, we focus on explicit individual sense-making processes, experiences, and tensions in communicative settings and moderated sessions. The design is inspired by principles of network structures and distributed decision-making such as Sociocracy and Holacracy (Robertson 2016, Rau & Koch-Gonzalez 2018). Researchers and school administration establish a participative process that brings new work methods into a hierarchical structure. This approach can be understood as an attempt to disrupt the familiar and established system routines of task distribution, communication and decision-making.

Communication and decision-making are main topics and practices in the RPP. The process focuses on three aspects: clarity about roles and related accountabilities, common rules about cooperation and communication, and shared goals. The project mainly addresses the uncertainties within the organizational structure. Clarifying roles, collaboration rules, and goals opens up the potential for successful leadership actions in the VUCA world, such as "Response-ability," "Judgment," "Decision-making," "Question the taken-for-granted," and "Critical thinking" (Elkjaer 2022).

In the context of our research-practice-partnership (RPP), we work with a mixed method design and have different roles in the development process – as (a) facilitators, advisors and experts, and (b) as researchers. As experts, advisors, and facilitators, we co-design fieldwork with practitioners, supporting them in analyzing, planning, and carrying out the process. In the project's development setting and workshops with stakeholders, we use design thinking (Brown 2008, Mintrop 2016) as a participative and reflexive framework for co-creative problem solving. It helps us to loosen up the atmosphere for collaboration and to promote stakeholder interaction. For supervision, guidance, and moderation, we use techniques to visualize (e.g., system mapping) and to focus on listening (e.g., round speak, Rosenbrand 2017). From the research perspective, we work as ethnographers, observing stakeholders and administrative leaders in their communication, negotiation, and actions throughout the process. In addition to our observation and note-taking in the field, we take audio-documentations in all steps of the process, including planning sessions with the administrative principals. These in-situ documents are interpreted using the documentary method (Bohnsack et al. 2007, Zala-Mezö et al. 2021) with a focus on contextual research (Goldmann 2021). Contextual research can help analyze various institutional norms that are nested within each other and interact with one another (Jansen & Vogd 2017, Goldmann 2021). It primarily focuses on structures and processes, rather than habits, as documentary methods usually do. Since contradictions are constitutive for schools as organizations, valuable practice consists of negotiation and discourse (Rachenbäumer & Bremm 2021). In our research, we will particularly analyze in-situ sequences of decision-making processes. Although decisions are mainly provoked by external uncertainty (global uncertainty and its local consequences or uncertainty concerning the basis for a decision), decision-making processes refer to tensions or uncertainties in the organizational system (uncertainty about goals, roles, and processes of participation and decision-making). As a wider framework for the interpretation of our sources, convention theory (Storper & Salais 1997, Diaz-Bone 2022) serves to enrich our contextual research. We are in the process of setting up the cooperation project between FAU and the federal school administration. Our working sessions with the stakeholders will start in March 2024, and the design-thinking workshop will be in May 2024. So far, we have observed and analyzed decision-making in the planning process between researchers and persons responsible in administration, which might be a side aspect of our organizational research.

In our research project, we aim to identify critical communication and collaboration situations through the observation of collaboration in the field and documentary analysis of in-situ documents. Our goal is to characterize leverage points that contribute to establishing clarity in roles, goals, and collaboration between school administration, school evaluation, and principals. As moderators and facilitators, we employ methods that address co-creativity and participation, sharing of needs and perspectives, and knowledge management 'to deliver actionable knowledge' (Palavicino et al. 2023). Interventions shall help make leverage points visible. We offer tools that support to sharpen focus on system structures, discuss tensions, goals transparency, and self-organization. They refer to practices that promote Transformative Innovation Policy. (Palavicino et al. 2023). In the research-practice-partnership, all actors involved experience how decisions can be made in uncertain and basically contradictory organizational structures. We expect to describe leverage points in cooperation between school administration, school evaluation, and school leaders more precisely by analyzing the in-situ documents. We want to offer knowledge and guidelines to use these leverage points for organizational learning and wayfinding. Within our project, we will design tools that help actors in complex, uncertain, and contradictory organizational structures to negotiate and collaborate in innovation and decision-making processes. Our goal is to create and combine tools that enable leaders and teams to seriously integrate perspective sharing, communication about goals and tensions, co-creation, and open-mindedness into their routines. And to face the wider organizational context and interdependencies. The tools need to be easy to structure and easy to use to foster self-organized and democratic practices in educational organizations. Our tools and guidelines may help establish those basic structures in complex situations in the field of education leaders and administrators and open up the chance to expand horizons and form new purposes and answers (English 2023, Dewey 1916/2008).

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