Beyond Ritualized Rationality: Organizational Dynamics of Instructionally-Focused Continuous Improvement
Item
Title
Beyond Ritualized Rationality: Organizational Dynamics of Instructionally-Focused Continuous Improvement
Abstract/Description
With the following chapter, our purpose is to examine organizational dynamics that support instructionally-focused continuous improvement: that is, improvement activity aimed at increasing effectiveness in the primary educational function of schools – classroom instruction. Our chapter is not a ‘how to’ guide. Rather, it is an embedded analysis of conditions in and among three interdependent levels of organization that enable and complicate instructionally-focused continuous improvement:
-Schools as the locus of classroom instruction.
-Networks as novel resources supporting instructional improvement.
-Educational environments that provide essential resources for schools and networks, that accord them legitimacy, and that establish and enforce expectations for their performance.
Our argument is that history tilts the field more toward ritualized rationality than toward instructionally-focused continuous improvement, and that tipping the field in the other direction will depend as much on dynamics in and among agencies, organizations, and interests in educational environments as on dynamics in and among schools and networks. The argument turns on an analysis of competing logics – modes of thinking and reasoning – at each level of organization that push improvement and instruction toward and away from each other: a ‘logic of confidence’ in schools; an ‘evolutionary logic’ in networks; and a ‘research-development-diffusion-utilization logic’ in environments. It also turns on an analysis of longstanding pulls in education away from cooperation and coordination and toward fragmentation and incoherence.
-Schools as the locus of classroom instruction.
-Networks as novel resources supporting instructional improvement.
-Educational environments that provide essential resources for schools and networks, that accord them legitimacy, and that establish and enforce expectations for their performance.
Our argument is that history tilts the field more toward ritualized rationality than toward instructionally-focused continuous improvement, and that tipping the field in the other direction will depend as much on dynamics in and among agencies, organizations, and interests in educational environments as on dynamics in and among schools and networks. The argument turns on an analysis of competing logics – modes of thinking and reasoning – at each level of organization that push improvement and instruction toward and away from each other: a ‘logic of confidence’ in schools; an ‘evolutionary logic’ in networks; and a ‘research-development-diffusion-utilization logic’ in environments. It also turns on an analysis of longstanding pulls in education away from cooperation and coordination and toward fragmentation and incoherence.
Author/creator
Date
In publication
Pages
465-489
Resource type
Research/Scholarly Media
Resource status/form
Published Text
Scholarship genre
Theoretical
Historical
IRE Approach/Concept
Open access/full-text available
No
Citation
Peurach, D., Penuel, W., & Russell, J. (2018). Beyond Ritualized Rationality: Organizational Dynamics of Instructionally-Focused Continuous Improvement. The Sage Handbook of School Organization, Query date: 2020-06-13 16:13:41, 465–489.
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