Collaborative Institutional Agency: How Peer Learning in Communities of Practice Enables and Inhibits Micro-Institutional Change

Iterational, projective, and practical evaluative elements of agency

As part of Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998, p. 970) exposition on the temporally oriented nature of agency, the authors describe three elements of human agency, which make it possible “to examine forms of action” corresponding with each element. One form of action reiterates past patterns of thought and action; one form of action projects agents’ interests and understandings onto future outcomes; one form of action resolves the presently emerging practice dilemmas of uncertain and ambiguous contexts. Agent action that reiterates past patterns of thought and action is most associated with maintaining institutions. In contrast, I view projective action and practical evaluative action as the more likely bases for institutional change. Indeed, the focus of existing research on the oppositional nature of institutional agency and change privileges the projective element of agency (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998).

Projective agency connotes actors reconfiguring existing understandings and actions in order to generate and project future possible trajectories of action that achieve their desired outcomes. In other words, relatively powerful agents (e.g., given special social traits, positions or spaces) invent, orchestrate, and pursue a desired path for the future, “receiving their driving impetus from the conflicts and challenges of social life” (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 984). This instrumental pursuit of desired outcomes through social conflict and challenge is the basis of politicized accounts of institutional agency and change.

In contrast to institutional agency and change born of social conflict, the practical evaluative element of agency suggests institutional change can emerge from “the capacity of actors to make practical and normative judgments among alternative possible trajectories of action, in response to the emerging demands, dilemmas, and ambiguities of presently evolving situations” (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 971). In the case of practical evaluative agency, the impetus for agency is not necessarily conflict or challenge but the need to interpret and respond to the immediate contingencies and demands of work in uncertain and ambiguous contexts. Whereas projective agents invent, orchestrate, and pursue a desired path for the future, practical evaluative agents “figure things out” in the moment.

The extant literature is replete with examples of how projective forms of agency change institutionalized practices inside organizations (Battilana, 2006; Hallett, 2010; Kellogg, 2009). In contrast, the way practical evaluative agency changes institutionalized practices inside organizations is less understood. Thus, an important question to be answered is how practical evaluative forms of agency change institutionalized practices inside organizations. Consider, for example, one classic study that alludes to the role of practical evaluative agency in micro-institutional change.

Edelman’s (1992) research emphasized the key role of actors’ interpretations in changing institutionalized hiring practices. She argued, in particular, that the “personnel who work with or in those structures [affected by civil rights laws] become prominent actors in the compliance processes: they give meaning to laws as they construct definitions of compliance within their organizations.” In other words, changes in institutionalized practices in Edelman’s (1992) study depended on practitioners making practical and normative judgments about how to resolve the ambiguities and emerging demands of new ways of doing work (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). Of interest is exactly how practitioners go about resolving these ambiguities and emerging demands in order to construct new ways of doing work.

The role of communities of practice

As a starting place, existing research on how frontline workers resolve practice dilemmas suggests individual practitioners do not resolve dilemmas on their own. Instead, practitioners turn to colleagues in their communities of practice. Communities of practice are groups of professionals who share practices, communicate frequently through informal channels, and develop a set of interdependent identities that relate to the work and cultural understandings of their group (Brown & Duguid, 1991; Cox, 2005; Wenger, 1998). For example, in their work on communities of practice, Brown and Duguid (1991) build on Orr’s (1990) investigation of Xerox technicians to describe how frontline workers resolve practice dilemmas by learning from one another in ways that generate alternatives to canonical practice. This kind of peer learning is grounded in an ongoing set of social relationships characterized by values, norms, identity, and distinct boundaries of legitimate participation to which members become socialized (Lave & Wenger, 1991).

One might expect that there is a persistent need to resolve practice dilemmas in organizations because few work routines lack ambiguity (Feldman, 2000). Still the need to resolve practice dilemmas may be particularly acute in contexts where existing practices have been problematized by the introduction of practices that compete with the institutional status quo. If so, then one would expect communities of practice to play a central role in micro-institutional change.

Indeed, some studies of schools have demonstrated that teacher communities play an important role in school responses to the coercive institutional pressures of state reform (Coburn, 2001; Louis, Marks, & Kruse, 1996; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001). However, another pervasive finding in the education literature is that school reform does not often succeed (Payne, 2008; Ravitch, 2000). So, what is it, then, about the nature of agents’ practical evaluative efforts in communities of practice that encourages or undermines micro-institutional change, particularly in the context of external mandates? The current work examines this question in a compliance context similar to Edelman’s (1992), where teachers at two urban US public schools must implement new instructional practices prescribed by state-mandated reform.

Case selection

Schools are often considered archetypal contexts for institutional processes (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Rowan & Miskel, 1999). US public schools are a particularly appropriate setting for studying micro-institutional change instigated by external mandates because of increasing accountability pressures precipitated by the 1983 Nation at Risk report, which intensified under the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act. While No Child Left Behind has become emblematic of accountability-driven school reform in the US, state-level school reform years earlier had actually set the precedent for federal intervention. In 1989, New Jersey became the first state in the nation to take over a local city school; an increasing trend of state takeover, accreditation removal, and the closure of underperforming schools followed thereafter (Education Commission of the States, 2002).

In line with this trend, the Northeastern state in which the two schools in the current research are located requires all schools to obtain what is essentially an operating license tied to schools meeting specific operational and performance goals. Schools furthest from meeting license requirements are mandated to reform within three years or have their license revoked and be closed by the state. The two schools in the study were identified from the publicly available list of 31 such schools in one major city in 2004. Preliminary interviews with state Department of Education officials indicated that all schools undergoing mandated reform were theoretically meaningful cases (Eisenhardt, 1989; Yin, 2008). The two schools were selected randomly from the set of theoretically equivalent field sites. Random selection was not used to make generalizable inferences but to minimize selection bias from the researcher who had previous experience working as a teacher within the empirical context. I refer to the two schools as Turnaround Elementary (Turnaround) and Embark Middle School (Embark).

As described in the state report detailing the requirements of reform at each school, Turnaround and Embark have a number of similarities. First, many of the same grades were taught at both schools, and teachers at both schools were mandated to use a similar set of instructional practices, including having students work in cooperative groups, incorporating multicultural materials into lessons, providing structured time for test preparation, and differentiating instruction to meet diverse student needs. Embark and Turnaround also share the dominant features of most schools undergoing mandated state reform: they serve mostly poor students of color and have a history of underperformance. In 2003, 99% of students at Embark were “non-white”; 97% were eligible for free or reduced price lunch; and 93% of the students were below grade level in English language arts and mathematics. At Turnaround, 93% of students were “non-white”; 93% were eligible for free or reduced price lunch; 75% of students were below grade level in English language arts; and 82% were below grade level in mathematics.

Even with their similarities, there are some differences between the schools. Embark sits two blocks south and east of one of the busiest thoroughfares in one of the city’s most populous neighborhoods. In contrast, Turnaround is located in what might be described as a suburban community. Because Embark is a middle school, it has a greater number of administrators and teachers than Turnaround—four administrators and 68 teachers compared to two administrators and 31 teachers at Turnaround. Unlike Turnaround, Embark contains seventh and eighth grade classrooms. Unlike Embark, Turnaround has pre-kindergarten to fourth grade classrooms. Finally, many Embark teachers have subject specialties, whereas most Turnaround teachers teach a variety of subjects. As described in more detail in the findings, some of these differences have important implications for reform at the two schools.

Data collection

Analytical approach

Emic coding

The interview and observational data were approached with the aim of first describing how organization members’ interpretations and interactions influenced the organizational practices that determined institutional responsiveness. The first phase of the analysis involved integrating field notes from observations and transcripts from interviews into meaningful units of analysis (Krippendorf, 2004). This was accomplished by using the content analysis software NVivo to first identify and categorize teachers’ school activities. For example, I identified and categorized one teacher activity by assigning the code “meeting for morning assembly” to the following field note text:

The principal enters the auditorium [8:02 a.m.], students are coming in with teachers and begin to line up; students enter quietly and take their seats; the principal instructs students and teachers to say the Pledge of Allegiance and sing My Country ’Tis of Thee.

As the coding system evolved, it was refined so that code names and definitions could be consistently applied across interview transcripts, field notes, and school sites. The assignment of text to codes was not mutually exclusive, since a segment of text might refer to multiple dimensions of members’ experiences. Thus, some segments of text were assigned to more than one code. By iterating between the textual content of the data and evolving codes, I assigned all text in the field notes and transcripts to 283 emic codes, representing teachers’ activities as they are relevant to the cultural understandings of the field (Headland, Pike, & Harris, 1990). This assignment of text to emic codes is illustrated in Table 1. The table also illustrates the assignment of emic codes to etic categories, as described below.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Coding Teacher Interpretations and Activities.

Text Segment	Emic Code	Etic Code
Observation in the teachers’ cafeteria: Teacher 1: I start with the calendar. Then I put the months on a pocket chart. Teacher 2 (interjecting): You are also using the sight word books, right? Teacher 1: I found these were really good (referring to the books she pushes across the table). What you should try is… Teacher 2 (interjecting): What I did was have the students stack the months in order in a pile. I don’t get much better than that.	Sharing practices with peers	Social comparison: Determining a standard for attitudes and actions by examining the attitudes and actions of peers
We meet a lot as a grade at a certain times of the week or whatever, but that [is] all business. Sometimes, the best kind of talk you get is informal, and you play around like that. It’s really your friends. Other teachers in your grade or on your floor who show [you] what to do when you feel like you’re going wrong.
Your appearance and what you do give people an idea of your commitment. If you come into school at 8:30 and you leave at 3:00 and you have no (lesson) plans that says something… I make judgments…We always make judgments.	Judging peers’ work
When you’re not doing your job, it’s going to come out. Somebody is going to know one way or the other, because we are working with people, and so when you’re working with people you can see what other people are doing and you take note of that.
Sometimes you have to formulate ideas together. Sometimes saying your problem out loud to someone else, getting advice makes you realize something. Something sparks. Two heads are better than one; three heads are better than that.	Advice from peers	Feedback: Providing information about deviations from a given or desired technical or social standard
I think the best way to learn is to actually, maybe observe, although through observation, I mean, you kind of get some idea, although you may not get the full picture, but, but I think also speaking to other teachers, you know.
Observation near a 3rd floor hallway in front of a bulletin board: Teacher 1: I saw you gave that student bad marks (on a paper posted on the bulletin board). Teacher 2: I might take that down and let him do it again (smoothing down paper’s crumpled edges). Teacher 1 (vocalizing with a questioning tone): mmmm…hmmmm	Getting peers’ opinions
[Teachers change] when they hear it from their colleagues all the time, you know, it’s like, “I’m hearing it from one person, you know, the same thing over and over again.” Then they start reflecting, okay, let’s look at my accomplishments … what needs to improve … you know there is an honest conversation about what you really have to do.	Reflecting on practice	Social influence and adjustments: Urging changes in current attitudes or activities in order to match a given or desired technical or social standard
You know, sometimes you do see what other teachers are doing. You feel bad, you feel humbled because you think, “maybe that’s the kind of work I should be doing with my students.” It makes you want to give a little more.
So, you know when a lot of teachers get on board and you don’t, you’re really going against the grain. Instead of going against the grain, I go with the flow, and that’s worked for some of us… Now, you know, there’s still those people who go against the grain, but just some. Some. Not very many.	Not going against the grain
It’s good when you’re all on the same page but I’m learning you need to be on the same page within the same book… You need to be on the same page, same paragraph, same book, same edition!	Agreeing on practice
Look, I think teachers at [this school] try to help you be better and they try to say “Well, why don’t you try this…” but if somebody resists, continually resists, then maybe they’re not thought of as highly.

Etic coding

The review and constant comparative analysis of the emic codes called my attention to one description of teacher activities that brought immediate coherence to the potentially disjointed set of other teacher activities, and suggested three overarching themes with regard to how teachers were interpreting state-prescribed instructional practice. These themes were (a) social comparisons, (b) peer feedback, and (c) social influence resulting in adjustments to instructional attitudes and practices. A return to the organizations literature confirmed that these three themes represented the fundamental social and cognitive routines that individuals use to learn from peers in uncertain and ambiguous contexts (Carver & Scheier, 1998; Festinger, 1954; Sherif, 1966). A review of the education literature revealed that these themes were also consistent with the dynamics of peer learning in the education context (Fitzpatrick, 1989; Friedkin, 1993; Hattie & Timperley, 2007).

Because these themes were consonant with the empirical phenomena and the existing literature, I used them to define three etic categories and reassigned 197 of the initial 283 emic codes to the three etic categories based on the relevance of their content (Headland et al., 1990). Because incongruous data can tell their own story, I repeatedly reviewed the content of the 86 codes not assigned to the three etic categories (Krippendorf, 2004). I was unable to identify a salient pattern for these data and therefore did not consider them for further analysis. However, the assignment of emic codes to etic categories did reveal three themes in the pattern of teachers’ interactions. These themes were the basis of three additional etic codes: (1) the size of the communities of practice in which teachers interacted; (2) the community composition, meaning the degree of homogeneity within and across communities; and (3) the degree of cohesion and boundary spanning between teacher communities. Table 2 illustrates these patterns and three broad themes.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 2.

Coding Teacher Experiences and Interactions.

Text	Interaction Patterns	Etic Code
Everybody pretty much gets together over lunch. We only have the one lunch period, so we can all meet up. A lot of the time I bring in food to share. Other people bring in food to share. It’s nice to be able to unwind like that with people you know. This is a close staff that does a lot of talking. We even socialize outside the school.	Large mega-clique	Community size: Number of members in a given community
I was one of the six [alternatively certified teachers] last year. I spent all of my time talking to them because they knew what I was going through. We all still hang out a lot.	Small mini-cliques
I was just thrown into the grade midyear. So, thank goodness we have the teachers we have on our grade. They are the ones to show me the way. They’re the ones who helped me, trained me, on their own, on their own time. We really stick together.
Observation in the lounge at lunch: Teachers talk to colleagues seated nearby and at other tables. Three teachers talk about which grocery store has the best bargains. Two teachers talk about their preferences between two artificial sweeteners. Many teachers talk about family dramas. One teacher talking about her daughter says “She said they broke up and the next week he was over at my house for dinner.”	Less diverse female-dominated, white, suburbanized staff	Community composition: Degree of demographic diversity within and across communities
I know you probably can’t use what I’m saying, but here [at Turnaround] it’s mostly middle class white women… this may be their first experience knowing and working with children of color or minorities or poor people.
Observation at the entry way during fifth period: A group of four older male teachers frequently congregates here on breaks to take trips to the nearby corner store. All members of the group appear to be black but two recently emigrated from the Caribbean under a special teacher recruitment effort.	More diverse, gender-balanced, multiracial, urbanized staff
Observation in the guidance area: Ms. Rondel and two other Spanish-speaking female teachers have gathered, as usual, for lunch in the guidance counselor’s office. Today they are celebrating a birthday. When I inquire about the celebration, Ms. Rondel says all four grew up in Embark’s neighborhood.	Low demographic diversity within cliques
Most of the teachers here congregate with the same kinds of people. You know the new teachers hang out with other new teachers. The people who have been teaching here 19 years, they all hang out. There are lots of little cliques.	High demographic diversity across cliques
Sometimes, I spoke to some older teachers because they had been here—they really know what it’s like at the school. Then, there’s the teachers on my floor. When you talk to those people, they say, “Well, last year I tried this, I did this; why don’t you try this?” There’s a lot of different groups, different kinds of people who might help you out—who might tell you different things.
Observation in the teacher center before an afternoon meeting: Teacher 1: Are you going to the meeting Ms. Carlsbad? Teacher 2: Yes. Teacher 1: Sometimes I feel like people have their seats down in the lounge. They have their own group, you know. Teacher 2: You’re right, but you can’t pay attention to that. Sometimes people seem like they are a little impolite about that. It seems immature.	Infrequent interaction across cliques	Community cohesion: Extensiveness of strong, overlapping relationships among members (e.g., degree of social closure)
Observation in third floor hallway: There are so many adults in the school. Many don’t seem to know each other; they pass each in the hall without speaking. The size of the school must make it difficult for everyone to know everyone else.
I’m a cluster teacher. I teach science to different classes in different grades so I know a lot of different teachers in the school. In a middle school you have a lot of cluster teachers for different subjects. I think that helps a lot of people get to know each other, you know, from having the same students.	Frequent interaction across cliques

Cross-code analysis

To analyze how the three themes for teacher interactions intersected with the three themes for teacher interpretation, I created a three-by-three cross-code matrix for each school (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2013). The cells of the matrix represent how each theme for teacher interaction is related to each theme for teacher interpretations. For example, one cell of the matrix indicates how community size is related to comparisons among teachers at Embark and Turnaround. Another cell indicates how community heterogeneity is related to feedback among teachers at Embark and Turnaround. The results of the cross-code analysis, summarized in Table 3, revealed how the three socio-cognitive mechanisms for peer learning varied by the pattern of teachers’ social interactions, and suggested how these variations might explain differences in the way teachers were able to generate shared understandings about reform and effect micro-institutional change at the two schools. This analysis is the basis for the study’s main findings.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 3.

Cross Coding for Teacher Interpretation Routines and Teacher Interaction Patterns.

	Community Number and Size		Community Diversity		Community Cohesion
	Turnaround	Embark	Turnaround	Embark	Turnaround	Embark
	Single large	Many small	Low	High	Strong with outsiders	Weak with boundary spanners
Social Comparison	Comparisons made to numerous others	Comparison made to more limited few	Comparisons made to many similar others	Comparisons made to similar and dissimilar others	Comparisons made mainly within community	Comparison made within and across multiple communities
Feedback	Multiple points of information within community	Limited points of information within community; multiple points of information across communities	Largely consistent information	Frequently discrepant information	Information provided by close, trusted colleagues	Information provided by close colleagues and peripheral community members
Social Influence	Strong social pressure	Weak social pressures	Adjustments made rapidly and diffused widely within community	Adjustments made more gradually within community and less widely diffused	Adjustments to relatively uniform targets	Adjustment to multiple discrepant targets
Result	Widely shared understandings, aims, and practices	Moderately shared understandings, aims, and practices	Widely shared understandings, aims, and practices	Moderately shared understandings, aims, and practices	Widely shared understandings, aims, and practices	Moderately shared understandings, aims, and practices

The findings section below first provides background on the two schools and on the prescriptions of state-mandated reform. Then, in two subsequent sections, the findings respectively describe how teachers at Embark and Turnaround engaged with the reform. The findings for each school are organized into three sub-sections based on (1) the etic codes for teachers’ interpretations, (2) the etic codes for teachers’ interactions, and (3) conclusions about teachers’ shared understandings from the cross-code analysis. The findings are followed by a discussion, which further synthesizes the findings to propose a set of three mechanisms that explain how micro-institutional change, in the context of external mandates, does or does not result from the practical evaluative efforts of frontline workers in their communities of practice.

How social comparison, feedback and influence helped teachers learn the technical and social requirements of reform

As reform got under way at the school, Embark teachers were clear about the requirement to use the workshop model. One Embark teacher explained this by saying, “You have to have the workshop model; everybody is supposed to have it” (EBr031). Still, Embark teachers were uncertain about its efficacy, as noted by one Embark teacher, who illustrated teachers’ sentiments by saying:

With the workshop model there is more assessment. There is more classroom management—that’s the first thing you have to have or there is chaos, you can’t do any teaching. You also have to come up with your own lessons and strategies depending on what the needs of the kids are. Not every teacher can do that kind of thing. I don’t think it’s possible. (EBr023)

Instructional dilemmas, such as figuring out how to manage the classroom and come up with student-specific instructional strategies made peer learning the subtext for ongoing collegial interactions at Embark. These interactions may have had other, more explicit functions, yet teachers took these opportunities to compare their instructional aims, attitudes, and activities with those of their colleagues. These comparisons occurred when Embark teachers congregated during breaks to have coffee, celebrated birthdays, or took short walks to the corner store and had conversations about the lessons they had taught recently (fnEB.11.11.03.04; fnEB.08.11.05.04).

When Embark teachers compared themselves to peers they received important feedback about the technical details for implementing new practices and about how practices might be adapted for students in a teacher’s particular class. Ms. Mason, a sixth grade teacher, explained how teachers relied on peer learning to determine appropriate instructional practices by recalling a recent visit to a colleague’s classroom. She noted that when visiting a colleague’s classroom, “You come back and come away from that room, well you know, [you say,] ‘I should try that in my room’ or ‘Can I try that in my room?’ I don’t think my kids are up to speed yet, but maybe I can tone it down and have them be responsible for something else” (EBr008).

A similar sentiment was expressed by another Embark teacher emphasizing the importance of informal observations among colleagues:

I really believe it’s those informal observations that we do in the classroom [that influences teachers]. It gives us the opportunity to discuss what we saw, privately with each other. It’s not about “I got you!” It’s not about being evaluated as satisfactory or unsatisfactory. It’s about seeing what other teachers are doing. Those private conversations about what we saw; those are very helpful. (EBr019)

When teachers at Embark relied on peer learning to resolve instructional dilemmas, they were not only receiving feedback about the technical requirements of instruction. They were also receiving feedback about and being influenced by the social requirements of instruction. In other words, teachers were learning which practices were appropriate and what the norms for instruction were, given their colleagues’ practices. Ms. Kenny, an eighth grade social studies and reading teacher, explained how interactions with colleagues influenced their perceptions of what instruction should be taking place:

You know, if teachers hear from others what they are doing, if they see what everyone else is doing and it’s different from what they’re doing, then they start to reflect. You know? That makes you look at what your accomplishments are, look back on your goals… [that difference makes you] ask what needs to improve. (EBr023)

Mr. Mackey, a seventh grade social studies teacher, explained how even colleagues’ arrival and departure times from school were used to determine instructional aims, attitudes, and activities: “So I mean, if you come into school at 8:30 and you leave at 3:00, and you have no plans, I think that says something … it says something to me. I make judgments; even if you don’t want, we always make judgments” (EBr018). These judgments to which Mr. Mackey referred are inferences about the apparent norms for instruction, given the implication of teachers not coming in early enough to prepare their classrooms or not staying late enough to work with students who need additional help (fnEB.15.11.14.04).

The utility of collegial interactions for helping teachers learn the technical and social requirements of new practices was not lost on Embark administrators. Indeed, Embark administrators often used formal means to capitalize on teachers’ tendencies to rely on social comparison, feedback and influence to learn new practices. For example, in an after-school training exercise called a learning walkthrough, Embark teachers would visit designated colleagues’ classrooms to observe the artifacts of instruction, such as student work posted on bulletin boards or how supplies and materials were being used. During one such walkthrough, a teacher’s internal comparisons to her colleagues were made public when she muttered in a voice audible only to nearby colleagues: “If this [classroom] is what they think is up to par, then I need to get my game up” (fnEB.16.02.10.05). In other words, this teacher’s comments suggest that she not only felt that the technical details of her classroom practice might be deficient, but that she was also deficient in meeting the social standard set by colleagues.

In addition to designing formal opportunities for teachers to learn from one another, Embark administrators often orchestrated informal interactions that would result in social comparisons, feedback and influence. This was illustrated by Embark’s assistant principal, who explained how she motivated some of her teachers to adopt practices prescribed by reform:

I think that peer, collegial conversation is more important than myself or the other APs going in. We do have teachers that have difficulties, and I’ll say, “Well, Ms. So-and-So, why don’t you go and talk to Mr. So-and-So and see how that goes?” That works best. I believe that the large group is the biggest influence on the small group. (EBr004)

The assistant principal’s reference to the “group” that will influence teachers’ instructional practice is important because it highlights an important feature of peer learning at Embark. In particular, while administrators sometimes attempted to engineer the interactions in which peer learning occurred, peer learning occurred most frequently among teachers who had the most frequent opportunities to interact. At Embark, this meant that most teachers’ interactions and peer learning occurred among a relatively small set of teachers who shared membership in their informal collegial communities.

Learning about reform in numerous, small, substantially diverse, and fragmented communities

With 68 teachers, Embark was a large middle school. The size of the staff and the constraints of the school schedule meant that it was impossible for every teacher to interact with every other teacher, except during formal assemblies or meetings. Embark teachers taught in three different grades and nine subject specialties in classrooms on three floors of hallways that spanned almost a full city block. Teachers had two break periods during any one of the seven 50-minute intervals from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. As a result, teachers had “common preps” with some teachers but little opportunity to interact with other teachers except before and after school. Ms. Frederico, a sixth grade teacher, explained the pattern of interactions among Embark teachers:

You know, some people really don’t get a chance to get together. Their schedules might be different; they don’t have common prep periods. Like me; I’m kind of out of balance—I don’t get to see the same people all the time. I have one or two days where there’s a common prep with two or three other sixth grade teachers. Then, I’ll have a day or two with a different common prep. I don’t ever see everyone on the whole floor. (EBr030)

Embark teachers, like most other individuals, tended to interact with others they considered to be similar to themselves based on one or more professional or personal demographic characteristics (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Cook, 2001). In the library, seven or eight longer-tenured, bilingual staff members often gathered during breaks and conversed in Spanish. A group of five or six older male teachers all appeared to be white, but two having recently emigrated from Ireland and Australia under a special teacher recruitment effort, frequently congregated during breaks to take trips to the nearby corner store. Similarly, there was a group of Black and Latino male teachers who would meet on Fridays to get their favorite fish sandwich from the fritas shop (fnEB.13.04.01.05). At Embark, there were also a number of teachers who gathered based on subject specialties that overlapped with their personal interests. One example was the group of four female language arts teachers who met in the literacy coach’s classroom to discuss not only books for students but also the novels they themselves were reading (fnEB.11.02.03.05).

Teacher interactions being structured by grade, subject, availability, classroom location, and friendship groups resulted in teachers interacting in identifiable four- to eight-member communities based on geographic, temporal, and social proximity. This was emphasized by one Embark teacher who described the existence of cliques of similar teachers at the school:

The interpersonal relationship amongst the staff is much, much better than it’s been years before. But still, you know, people get together in their little groups. Not everybody knows each other. It depends, you know. You can see that this group of people or that group of people likes a certain thing or they have a certain personality. They hang out. (EBr022)

Because Embark teachers interacted most frequently with other members of their small communities, they had more limited opportunities for peer learning. The pattern and impact of teachers interacting in small communities with similar colleagues was emphasized by Embark’s principal:

Most of the teachers here congregate with the same kinds of people. When it comes to changing how you teach, you have to go to other people. You have to look for people who are not just your friends. You have to go to other people in the building who can help you in different ways. If you don’t, you’re not on the right track. (EBr001)

One reason that looking to “the same kinds of people” means teachers are not on the right track is because it means teachers are looking mainly to other members of their small collegial communities who tend to already have similar attitudes and practices. Thus, the greatest opportunity to learn novel practices at Embark depended on interacting with teachers in other communities. However, interactions across communities had their own difficulties in terms of how practices from other communities would be received and reinforced. These difficulties arose mainly because interactions across communities occurred through boundary spanners who were more peripheral members of the communities they connected. For example, Mr. Carter described how his role as a designated science teacher for multiple classes and multiple grades allowed him to span boundaries and get to know many different teachers. He explained this by saying:

I’m a cluster teacher. I teach science to different classes in different grades, so I know a lot of different teachers in the school. In a middle school, you have a lot of cluster teachers for different subjects. I think that helps a lot of people get to know each other, you know, from having the same students. (EBr009)

Another vivid example of boundary spanning at Embark was Mr. Acevedo, who could be observed most often in the teachers’ lounge, engaged in collegial and sometimes off-color conversations with the young teachers in the alternative teacher certification program. These young teachers were often described as among the first to adopt any new practice, even those that were not entirely appropriate for their students (fnEB.09.12.02.04; fnEB12.01.20.05). However, Mr. Acevedo was also often in the school library, where he could be observed conversing in Spanish with a number of the school’s longer-tenured staff members, who were known as being notoriously resistant to change (EBr006; fnEB14.01.18.05).

Boundary spanners such as Mr. Acevedo facilitated peer learning across his two otherwise fragmented communities. When veteran Spanish-speaking teachers compared themselves to Mr. Acevedo, his feedback reflected his membership in the community of young, alternatively certified teachers and suggested more radical adoption of the prescribed state practices. Conversely, when young, alternatively-certified teachers compared themselves to Mr. Acevedo, his feedback reflected his membership in the community of veteran bilingual Spanish speakers and sometimes suggested less impetuous or idealistic instructional attitudes and activities. It is important to note, however, that Mr. Acevedo’s feedback to veterans or to alternatively certified teachers may not have been as influential as the feedback of other community members.

One reason Mr. Acevedo’s feedback may have been less influential is because boundary spanners, belonging to multiple communities, are exposed to different instructional approaches and this can create a sense of dissonance for them. To manage this dissonance, boundary spanners like Mr. Acevedo sometimes remained silent about the alternative practices they were exposed to, or defected from communities with which they seemed to have the least in common. One Embark teacher named Ms. Kravitz described her sense of detachment and exit from a small teacher community by saying

I just do what I have to do. I teach what makes sense to me. I don’t really hang with that pack of people anymore. So, you know, I know people are going to the lounge, and that’s where they hang out and complain. Now, I avoid that place like the plague. Me, Ms. Carter, Ms. Epstein, and Ms. Bennet hang out a lot more now. (EBr010)

Another reason why boundary spanners were less influential was that they tended to be peripheral members of communities, meaning that they interacted less frequently and might have been considered less similar than other members (Lave & Wenger, 1991). As a result, boundary spanners’ feedback was less frequent and may have been considered less reliable. This was illustrated when Ms. Lopez tried to learn a prescribed instructional practice from colleagues in two different communities, whose members both frequented the teachers’ lounge:

Note that even though Ms. Lopez solicited Mr. Fitzpatrick’s advice, she appeared to discount his feedback and later sought advice from Mr. Flores, who, like Ms. Lopez, was young, Latino, and alternatively certified. In contrast, Mr. Fitzpatrick was an older, recent immigrant from Ireland who spent most of his lunch periods taking trips to the corner store with other older male teachers. Note, also, that Ms. Lopez received discrepant feedback from her two colleagues who belonged to two different communities—Mr. Fitzpatrick described author studies as students reading different books by the same author, while Mr. Flores described the practice as students all reading the same book, which was, in fact, less accurate than the feedback provided by Mr. Fitzpatrick.

The tendency to rely on feedback from core community members and to discount feedback from those who are more peripheral members suggests that socialization within communities at Embark could be strong but not necessarily convey the correct technical details about practice. Meanwhile, socialization across communities was weaker even when the technical details conveyed were correct. Thus, even though boundary spanning across Embark communities represented an opportunity for peer learning, the opportunity was not fully realized. These obstacles to peer learning across Embark’s many teacher communities influenced the extent to which teachers at the school could generate widely shared understandings, aims, and practices for classroom instruction.

How moderately shared instructional understandings, aims, and practices fostered institutional persistence at Embark

When asked what it would take for her school to successfully implement state-mandated reform, one Embark teacher spoke fervently to a colleague outside her classroom about the possibility of the school being removed from mandated reform:

You know what we really need? What we really need? A shift in the paradigm! A paradigm shift—that’s what I’m talking about! This isn’t something you or I can do alone. This thing has to be in conjunction, you know? You know?! We have to be a community. We have to come together and discuss, [to say] “these are the real issues.” (fnEB.09.03.08.05)

Similarly, when asked what it takes for a school to change, Embark teachers used phrases such as “everybody joining the bandwagon,” “being on board,” and “being on the same page” to emphasize the importance of shared understandings, aims, and practices (EBr002; EBr007; EBr011). Another teacher stressed this point by saying, “It’s good when you’re all on the same page, but I’m learning you need to be on the same page within the same book … You need to be on the same page, same paragraph, same book, and same edition!” (EB014).

At Embark, it was particularly difficult for everyone to get on the same page because the features of their communities resulted in Embark teachers having more fragmented interactions. This, in turn, restricted their learning to a small number of peers within their own communities and to those with whom they already shared substantial similarities. When Embark teachers did interact across communities it was often formally arranged by administrators or occurred primarily through boundary spanners whose peripheral status in communities undermined their ability to convey lessons from other communities. To the extent that widely shared understandings about new instructional requirements were necessary to implement mandated reforms, then reform was particularly difficult at Embark.

Indeed, four years after reform began at the school, Embark teachers were unable to make sufficient changes in their instructional practices and the school was closed by the state. When asked about the school’s closing in a post-study, follow-up interview, one of Embark’s former assistant principals, who had gone on to work with a charter management organization, described the reasons for Embark’s closing this way:

How could I say this? Changing that school, really being able to change that school had to be something that you believed in full-fledge. It’s not something that you could have picked up at 8:30 and dropped it off at 3:00. See? It was always going to be a lot of work. Everybody had to be willing to change; everybody had to be on board to make that commitment. It couldn’t just be some people. It had to be everybody getting better for the kids—better planning, better instruction. Everybody agreeing “it’s not about you; it’s for these kids.” That just never happened. It’s just something that everybody never came to understand.

How social comparison, feedback and influence helped teachers readily learn the technical and social requirements of reform

As at Embark, Turnaround teachers were instructed to begin using the workshop model in their classes. Turnaround’s fifth grade teacher, Ms. Ford, articulated teachers’ thoughts about the workshop model by saying, “I’ve tried practices like this before. I know what happens. When I’m teaching my heart out … I have to tell Johnny sixteen times to stop tapping the pencil, and Anthony to get up off the floor, or Suzy to stop calling out” (fnTA.11.08.12.04). So, like Embark teachers, Turnaround teachers faced ongoing practice dilemmas about how to execute day-to-day classroom routines with students. And, as at Embark, Turnaround teachers resolved practice dilemmas by comparing their own instruction to their peers and receiving feedback about appropriate practice. However, in contrast to Embark where administrators often needed to formally orchestrate peer learning to prime teachers’ natural tendencies, Turnaround teachers’ peer learning readily increased as part of their ongoing, naturally occurring social interactions. Turnaround’s gym teacher, Ms. Carlsbad, described how the frequency of teachers’ efforts to determine their colleagues’ instructional approaches naturally increased following state-mandated reform:

Once we became [a school under state review] I think that people started talking about the school’s problems a little bit more … even at lunch or in staff meetings, I mean, just the topics of how we felt, the problems that were going on, what we needed to do … became more of a topic of conversation than we had ever talked about before. I mean, have we ever discussed lessons and things like that amongst your grade? Yes, but it never was as much as it has been. (TAr015)

In addition to requiring less formal orchestration, another feature of peer learning at Turnaround was that it not only allowed for social comparison and feedback about colleagues’ existing practices; it also often fostered the generation of novel ideas that helped teachers solve practice problems they might not be able to solve on their own. This was explained by one Turnaround teacher who said,

Sometimes with ideas for your class, you formulate those ideas together. You know? Sometimes saying your problem out loud to someone else makes you realize something and something sparks. You get a new idea. Two heads are better than one. Three heads are even better than that. (TAr018)

The importance of learning new practices from peers was also explained by the fourth grade teacher, Ms. Peters. Commenting to a colleague after lunch, she argued that

[Practices change] when there’s time for teachers and colleagues to come together and say, “This is what I did. Did it work for you? Did it not work for you?” … I think teachers need to share … They just need to know that the same things are happening in other classrooms. (fnTA.11.02.11.05; TAr018)

These comments illustrate that Turnaround teachers’ peer learning was not simply a means for developing and conveying the technical requirements of instruction. The phrase, “They just need to know that the same things are happening in other classrooms” indicates that peer learning at Turnaround, like at Embark, was also important for conveying the social requirements of instruction. Indeed, at Turnaround, mastering the social requirements of instruction was often as important as mastering technical requirements.

One vivid example of Turnaround teachers’ commitment to conforming to the social standard for instruction was provided during an after-school meeting in which teachers were supposed to gather in small groups in their classrooms to discuss instructional strategies. During the meeting time, a science teacher named Ms. Kruger joined one group of teachers in a classroom about 15 minutes after everyone else, having apparently visited another set of teachers beforehand. When Ms. Kruger entered, one of her colleagues immediately asked her, “What are they doing down there?” The answer to the question allowed the assembled teachers to compare not only which practices their colleagues were emphasizing but also how much effort their colleagues were investing in instruction based on whether the meeting time was being used to develop instructional techniques or to socialize. Ms. Kruger’s response about the other teachers’ discussion of instructional materials turned the assembled teachers’ conversation away from a recently read novel to ways to get free student materials on the Internet (fnTA.15.01.12.05).

The often explicit way Turnaround teachers adjusted their instructional approaches because of being influenced by their peers was well understood by Turnaround’s principal, Ms. Thomas. When asked why she thought that some teachers adopted state-prescribed practices and others did not, Ms. Thomas offered the following thoughts:

I always felt that the words of the phrase “peer pressure” pertained only to children. I didn’t know peer pressure was a phrase that you could use with adults. So let’s say you’re in a situation at lunchtime and the conversation is what the kids can’t do and people are giving evidence. [People are saying], “That mother really doesn’t care,” or “That child’s homework is never done.” After a while, you give in to it. You start to say, “Why am I staying up late doing those lesson plans,” and “Let me throw on that old TV. Let them color all day. Why should I spend my energy working with a [difficult] group of children?” I think if you are someone like Elly, subconsciously, you will slip. You will become a part of it or you’re going to leave. (TAr001)

In her comments, Ms. Thomas notes that the pressures of peer influence could lead some teachers to leave the school rather than deal with the strain of resisting colleagues. Recall that at Embark one way teachers dealt with this kind of strain was by defecting to other communities comprised of teachers with whom they shared more similar attitudes. However, as described further below, Turnaround teachers did not have this same option because of the structure of their community interactions. As a result, Turnaround teachers with instructional approaches that were different from their colleagues tended to rely more often on the only other available option—remaining silent about their differences. Mr. Long, a special education teacher, described some teachers’ choice to remain silent about their instructional approaches in the following way:

You know what happened with some of the teachers? There was a small core of teachers, they became silent. They wouldn’t, they couldn’t argue because they got nowhere … They were aware that what people were saying [about student ability and instructional possibilities] was not true but [they thought to themselves], and “I’m not going to fight you on this because the bottom line is we’re part of the same community.” (TAr012)

Another teacher, Ms. Duval, explained expectations of community conformity and the consequences of non-conformity by saying, “Look, I think teachers at [this school] try to help you be better and they try to say ‘Well, why don’t you try this?’ but if somebody resists, continually resists, then maybe they’re not thought of as highly” (TAr004). Not being highly thought of at Turnaround was a tangible threat because it could mean becoming a less integrated member of Turnaround’s main teacher community. Thus, Turnaround teachers relied heavily on their community for technical and social cues about appropriate instruction. This means that teacher communities at Turnaround, as at Embark, had important implications for Turnaround teachers’ peer learning and their ability to resolve the instructional dilemmas of mandated reform.

Learning in a single, large, minimally diverse, and cohesive community

Compared to Embark, Turnaround was a much smaller school with only 31 teachers. Because of the school’s small size, all teachers shared a common lunch period, which provided the opportunity for every teacher to interact with every other teacher in the school’s designated first floor teachers’ cafeteria. In addition to having a designated space and time to facilitate their interactions, Turnaround teachers’ similar demographic characteristics in terms of age, race, gender, and lifestyles increased the probability of teachers’ interactions and resulted in most Turnaround teachers interacting in one large collegial community.

Members of Turnaround’s large dominant community were primarily white, female, and between the ages of 25 and 55, and shared similar lifestyles that might be characterized as stereotypically suburban. During lunch, they gathered in the teachers’ cafeteria to share food, plan social events, and engage in conversations, which ranged from descriptions of classroom incidents to details of the best new diets. Even when these teachers were not physically present in the lounge, handwritten notices about group activities and personalized coffee mugs claimed the space and signaled the mega-clique’s dominance. Ms. Fields succinctly explained the pattern of Turnaround teachers’ interactions in the following way:

Everybody pretty much gets together over lunch. We only have the one lunch period, so we can all meet up. A lot of the time I bring in food to share. Other people bring in food to share. It’s nice to be able to unwind like that with people you know. This is a close staff that does a lot of talking. We even socialize outside the school. (TAr007)

Turnaround teachers who did not share multiple similarities with members of the mega-clique, such as Turnaround’s three black female teachers, two male teachers, and female gym teacher, congregated in groups of two or three outside the cafeteria. There were rarely interactions between the dominant community and these isolates, who sometimes expressed feeling ostracized by members of the mega-clique (TAr008). An exchange between one of Turnaround’s two male teachers and the female gym teacher about attending an after-school meeting helped illustrate this point.

Observation in the teacher center before an afternoon meeting (fnTA.14.12.14.04):

Turnaround’s large cohesive community strongly encouraged conformity to the community’s instructional norms because teachers received abundant reinforcing feedback about appropriate practices and were sometimes sanctioned for non-conformity. This was suggested above by Ms. Duval, who explained that resistant teachers would not be thought of as highly. Before reform, this strong socializing force helped maintain the instructional status quo at Turnaround. The similarities between members of the mega-clique also meant that teachers received minimal exposure to new practices because most teachers’ practices were the same. However, in such a large community, there was bound to be some latent diversity in teachers’ instructional approaches.

For example, one Turnaround teacher named Ms. Garrett explained that many of the practices prescribed by the state were similar to those she had recently learned in graduate school. Unlike her longer-tenured colleagues, she had already been using many prescribed practices in her classroom when reform began. When Turnaround teachers interacted with colleagues like Ms. Garrett, they could have been exposed to alternative instructional attitudes and practices, which had the potential to transform conventional practices. For example, when asked about teachers who change their instruction and those who do not, Turnaround’s resource room teacher, Ms. Tanner, explained:

Everyone here does everything the same; this is the way we’ve done it [for] 20 years, this is the way we’re going to do it [for] 20 more years after that. It’s like a comfort zone … What makes one person change is one other person’s change. I had to have exposure … I mean, as a whole, it’s a whole different teaching world out there.

Before reform, Turnaround teachers had limited exposure to alternative instructional approaches because so many teachers were conforming to the instructional status quo. Thus, teachers may have simply not noticed or may have disregarded alternative instructional approaches, such as those being used by Ms. Garrett. Alternatively, those using alternative instructional approaches tended to remain silent or were censored. Once reform began at Turnaround, it was much more difficult for teachers to discount feedback about alternative instructional approaches because a shift in community composition made those practices more prominent.

When state-mandated reform was announced, six out of 31 Turnaround teachers opted for early retirement. One teacher described the reform-related attrition of teachers by saying, “You know who is going to leave. You can see it; the big difference between people who will get right on board with change versus people who are going to want to leave … you can hear all the bitching” (TAr019). Other teachers noted the attrition of veteran teachers but also empathized with them. Ms. Theodore, the third grade math teacher, noted:

It’s hard, especially for the older teachers, to have somebody like the state come in and critique their lesson, to critique their whole career in five minutes. It’s pretty insulting. I think for a lot of older teachers that makes them just want to leave the school, leave the profession. (TAr003)

The exit of veteran staff made new teachers more prominent in the community both in terms of their proportional representation and in terms of their status, given the state’s validation of their alternative instructional approaches. Equally important, new teachers remained well-integrated and well-liked members of the mega-clique, perhaps because new teachers were similar in age to the daughters of veteran teachers or to veterans’ own ages when they began their teaching careers. New teachers’ community integration and increased prominence helped their alternative instructional approaches become increasingly pervasive in the community. Specifically, the tendency to turn to colleagues to learn technical details meant that post-reform more and more Turnaround teachers were learning technical details of instruction from their younger colleagues, who were now a greater proportion of the teaching staff. The stringent socializing component of peer learning at Turnaround also meant teachers felt strongly influenced to take up the technical details of the new practices in order to conform to the newly emerging social standard for instruction.

Indeed, the important contribution of new instructional approaches and their rapid ascension as a collegial norm was described by a veteran sixth grade teacher, Ms. Tyler, who explained the growing sense among Turnaround teachers that it was a “a problem” when teachers didn’t have new instructional approaches to share with colleagues:

A lot of times teachers meet individually, you know, in little groups … Now the problem is when someone comes to the table and there’s no sharing going on because they’re not invested … Now there are some teachers—a lot of the new teachers—they go out and do research and find materials that will be good for teaching a specific area. It helps when there are lots of new teachers. Now when we all sit down at the table and talk, we ask, “how did it [the lesson] go?” … That’s how teachers learn. Teachers, we learn new things from each other.

At Turnaround, the features of teachers’ communities made it especially easy to learn from each other. As a result, they had an easier time resolving practice dilemmas. Being able to resolve practice dilemmas in a large cohesive and relatively homogeneous community helped Turnaround teachers generate new shared understandings about appropriate instructional practices. In contrast, the features of teacher communities at Embark made it more difficult for teachers to converge on widely shared understandings of appropriate practice.

How widely shared instructional understandings, aims, and practices fostered institutional change at Turnaround

Often when the state mandates reform, schools facing potential state takeover and closure take up to seven years to comply with state mandates, despite strong coercive pressures, additional resources, training, and monitoring. Some schools, like Embark, never achieve adequate compliance and are eventually dismantled. In contrast, teachers at Turnaround rapidly adopted state-prescribed practices and the school was removed from the state’s mandated reform list in an atypically short two-year period.

Turnaround’s atypical response to reform resulted largely from teachers’ shared understandings about reform requirements and the new, more uniform approach to curriculum. For example, when asked to explain how a school like theirs might successfully implement reform, Turnaround teachers responded in much the same way that Embark teachers did, using phrases such as “I think you need to get everybody on board” and “Everyone has to agree that it’s important for that school to recover, and then we all have to work together” (TAr014; TAr017). Ms. Kruger’s explanation of what it would take for Turnaround to reform also emphasized the importance of teachers having a clear understanding and working together:

A school needs a clear direction, it needs continuity for its grades, it needs a clear focus, and it needs everyone in the building to be clear about what that focus is. It’s like taking every constituency and joining them together so we’re all going down this path together. Because when people are flying in different directions, then nothing happens. (TAr009)

At Turnaround, it was easier to get everyone on the same path because of the features of their collegial community. The high degree of cohesion in the single, large, and less diverse community resulted in teachers having many overlapping sets of relationship, which provided redundant information as well as strong socialization pressures to reinforce what teachers were learning from peers. When a number of veteran staff members elected to take early retirement, the features of Turnaround’s teacher community meant that a greater proportion of teachers were using new practices, so these became the peers that teachers learned from. The early effect of Turnaround teachers’ shared understanding about instructional practice was noted by one teacher reflecting on the school’s first year of mandated reform:

I do see more recently in the past year more emphasis on curriculum being taught in a uniform way instead of each teacher doing their own individual thing, based just upon what they thought was supposed to be done, you know, from the past. Now, there seems to be a new, more uniform curriculum. The teachers are really on the same page. (TAr007)

Collaborative institutional agency

Based on the findings from the current work, I argue that practice-based micro-institutional change results from collaborative institutional agency, meaning numerous, diverse, typically non-elite individuals working together to construct shared understandings, aims, and practices to execute new work routines in uncertain, ambiguous, or otherwise problematic institutional contexts. As illustrated in Figure 1, collaborative institutional agency is driven by three mechanisms: (1) peer learning; (2) patterns of interaction in communities of practice; and (3) shared understandings, aims, and practices. Furthermore, each mechanism is moderated by a set of counterbalancing forces that determine whether collaborative institutional agency results in persistence or change. These counterbalancing forces are (1a–b) the degree of innovation and socialization in peer learning, (2a–b) the number, size, cohesion, and diversity of communities’ interaction, and (3a–b) the degree of cognitive and normative convergence in shared understandings, aims and practices. The balance struck between these opposing forces determines whether institutional persistence or change is more likely. Below, I build on the dynamics of collaborative institutional agency at Turnaround and Embark to illustrate each of the mechanisms.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Moderated Mechanisms of Practice-Based Collaborative Institutional Agency.

In summary, the experiences of teachers at Turnaround and Embark suggest that collaborative institutional agency is most likely to lead to micro-institutional change when practitioners are organized into cohesive communities with moderate diversity so that innovation is seeded by trusted peers and reinforced through strong socialization pressures, leading to cognitive and normative convergence in practitioners’ understandings, aims, and practices for work. In contrast, when practitioners are organized into fragmented communities with substantial diversity, innovation is seeded by peripheral peers and there are weak socialization pressures. The result is cognitive and normative divergence in practitioners’ work understandings, aims, and practices so that institutions persist despite practioners’ efforts at collaborative institutional agency.

Mechanism 1—Peer learning: innovation and socialization

One virtue of communities of practice is that they provide the opportunity for innovation, meaning the introduction and adoption of new practices that may be newly created, newly configured, or newly transferred to a given context (Brown & Duguid, 1991). Peer learning provides an opportunity for innovation because when practitioners turn to each other to solve practice dilemmas, they may learn new practices from peers. Practitioners facing shared practice dilemmas may also resolve dilemmas by generating new alternatives to existing practice. At Embark, there were considerable innovation opportunities in the sense that teachers had diverse instructional attitudes, aims, and activities, which would have been novel for the teachers with whom they interacted. Conversely, at Turnaround, most teachers had the same instructional attitudes, aims, and activities prior to reform, and those who did not tended to remain silent about their alternative practices, resulting in less innovation.

In contrast to providing opportunities for innovation, peer learning also generates socializing pressures that may reinforce the status quo. This happens because peer learning occurs in communities of practice, which are not simply work groups. Community members have mutually defined identities and a shared perspective on the world, as well as stories, discourse, and ways of doing things that reflect the community’s shared identity and perspective (Wenger, 1998). At Embark, socialization pressures were relatively weak because teachers tended to interact with a smaller number of colleagues, which meant there was less reinforcement of the technical and social requirements of instruction. When teachers experienced the dissonance or pressure of having attitudes or practices that were different from their colleagues it was easy for teachers to find other colleagues with whom they had something in common and so interacted with these colleagues instead. In contrast, at Turnaround, teachers interacted with many similar colleagues to whom they felt a strong sense of attachment. This created abundant reinforcement of practice requirements and strong social pressure to conform.

Mechanism 2—Patterns of interaction: cohesion and diversity

As suggested above, the differences in patterns of innovation and socialization at Embark and Turnaround were, in large part, the result of the features of the communities of practice at the two schools. At Embark, teachers’ interactions occurred in numerous and relatively small communities, which as a result were diverse and also fragmented except for connections made by boundary spanners or by the formal orchestration of administrators. Diversity and fragmentation across communities created a fertile context for innovation at Embark since teachers in different communities tended to have different instructional approaches (Burt, 2004). However, these two features also weakened the socialization pressures needed to spread alternative practices (Coleman, 1988). In particular, the features of communities of practice mean that practitioners may have different degrees of participation based on conformity to community traits (Lave & Wenger, 1991). At Embark practice innovations were typically seeded by more peripheral community members because interactions across the diverse communities were the most likely source of new ideas if they were not introduced formally by administrators. Peripheral members were less influential as a socializing force to encourage the use of new practices. The size and overlapping similarities across communities was what made it easy for teachers to defect to other communities when they did feel pressure to use alternative practices. Perhaps if Embark teachers relied more on projective rather than practical evaluative forms of agency, the fragmented structure of their communities would have been more likely to foster micro-institutional change (e.g., Battilana & Casciaro, 2012).

In contrast, at Turnaround, most teachers interacted in a single, large, cohesive, and relatively homogeneous community. Limited diversity and a high degree of cohesion suppressed innovation at Turnaround before reform because very few teachers used practices that were different from the ones they had been using for decades. Those who did use alternative practices felt the need to remain silent or were sanctioned in order to preserve community cohesion. However, with the exit of a substantial number of veteran teachers, the latent diversity in the community resulted in new practices being seeded by core community members. The still large size of the community, its cohesion, and the demographic similarities among members upheld the strong socializing pressures encouraging conformity to community practices. As a result, once a new set of practices appeared to become more dominant in the community, given their use by an increased proportion of members, the expectation to use new practices rapidly took hold.

Mechanism 3—Shared understandings: cognitive and normative divergence and convergence

The different dynamics of peer learning and patterns of community interactions at Embark and Turnaround had important implications for the extent to which teachers could generate the shared understandings needed to resolve practice dilemmas and successfully implement reforms (Coburn, 2001; Louis, Febey, & Schroeder, 2005; Spillane, Reiser, & Reimer, 2002). For example, research on the social processes of organizational sensemaking suggests that understandings can be characterized by rich, unitary accounts that generate consistent actions; this occurs when information is widely shared among stakeholders in an organized, systematic fashion (Maitlis, 2005). These kinds of rich, unitary accounts resulting from organized and systematic information sharing is what I refer to in the current work as cognitive and normative convergence, meaning that individuals come to share the same meanings and expectations of practice.

At Embark, even though teachers relied on peer learning, teachers’ numerous, small, diverse, and fragmented communities made it difficult to widely share information about practices. This is one reason why practice sharing among teachers often depended on Embark administrators’ formal efforts to orchestrate peer learning. While some research suggests that a high degree of information control by supervisors can aid sensemaking, formally orchestrated interactions were far less frequent than Embark teachers’ informal interactions and so may not have provided sufficient or sufficiently consistent information to clarify the technical and social requirements of reform (Maitlis, 2005). When practices were shared informally through teachers’ naturally occurring interactions in communities of practice, peer learning occurred in a more disorganized fashion because practice sharing depended on peripheral community members whose information was less frequent and more discrepant than core members and, thus, may have been considered less reliable. In other words, because identity and plausibility are two important properties of sensemaking, the substantial divergence in identity across teacher communities made it difficult to generate shared understandings at Embark (Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005). The result was that cognitive and normative convergence occurred mainly within rather than across teacher communities.

An almost inverse experience at Turnaround led to the opposite result in that the dynamics of peer learning and community features led to teachers’ widely shared understandings of appropriate instructional practice. Indeed, there was a high level of cognitive and normative convergence in instructional understandings at Turnaround prior to state-mandated reform but this was convergence around the institutional status quo. Turnaround teachers’ reliance on peer learning and their cohesive community helped them (re)converge on new instructional understandings once peer learning involved greater innovation, given the increased proportion of teachers using alternative practices.

The distinctive contribution of collaborative institutional agency

Turnaround’s and Embark’s experience with micro-institutional change makes it clear that previous research highlighting mainly the role of political contestation and projective action has obscured other important forms of institutional agency that unfold inside organizations. In particular, the experience of teachers at the two schools demonstrates that practice-based collaborative institutional agency grounded in practical evaluative action also plays a central role in micro-institutional change (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). This is in contrast to other forms of agent action grounded in projective action, such as institutional entrepreneurship or collective action and also in contrast to forms of action in which agents are more independent rather than interdependent, as with distributed agency.

For example, one might argue that, rather than being engaged in collaborative institutional agency, Turnaround and Embark teachers were engaged in collective institutional entrepreneurship (Wijen & Ansari, 2007). This might be the case if a pioneering group of elite teachers led the change at Turnaround, and if such a group was absent at Embark. However, research on collective institutional entrepreneurship, including entrepreneurs operating in small groups, emphasizes how agents’ projective action changes institutions (Dorado, 2013). At Turnaround, new teachers played an important role in reform but they were not necessarily champions of new practices and did not mobilize around their interests in order to achieve reform. In fact, these teachers’ activities changed little before and after reform. Instead, the school changed—more specifically the structure of social relations at the school changed. The increased prominence of new teachers tipped the scale in favor of state prescriptions by increasing the level of diversity in the community and thus the degree of innovation involved in peer learning. In other words, a greater proportion of teachers who were less silent about their alternative practices provided more opportunities to learn about alternative practices and strong socialization pressures among teachers helped reinforce these lessons.

Instead of collective institutional entrepreneurship, one might argue that Turnaround and Embark teachers were engaged in collective action. For example, existing research that examines the role of practitioners in changing institutionalized practices tends to examine different forms of collective action that are characterized mainly by the political contestation of competing interests and understandings. This focus on political contestation holds even for research, which like the current work, privileges the role of meaning and organizational demography along with the role of frontline workers’ practices and interactions in implementing regulation (Covaleski & Dirsmith, 1988; Kellogg, 2009; Zilber, 2002). Had Turnaround and Embark teachers used union meetings or other organizing methods to mobilize resistance to or support for reform, the collective action argument might hold. In fact, there is classic literature on diffusion models of collective action, which presumes cognitive and social mechanisms similar to those observed in the current work (Oliver & Marwell, 2001). However, these models suggest that purposive and typically political aims to influence institutions diffuse among agents. At Turnaround and Embark teachers’ primary aim was to resolve the practice dilemmas of everyday work.

Because Turnaround and Embark teachers’ primary aim was to resolve the practice dilemmas of everyday work one might argue that what led to institutionalized practices to change or persist was the success or failure of distributed agency. Indeed, research on distributed agency well illustrates how individuals operating in the absence of established institutional solutions rely on practical evaluative action to resolve work dilemmas by creating new artifacts, tools, practices, rules, knowledge, and resources (Garud & Karnøe, 2003, 2005). Because these individuals are often geographically, socially, and temporally dispersed their efforts are distributed and relatively independent. Rather than being engaged in independent efforts, Turnaround and Embark teachers were engaged in interdependent efforts to work together to resolve instructional dilemmas and learn the technical and social requirements of new practices from peers. Thus, distributed agency does not best characterize the form of agency that unfolded at the two schools.

The distinctions between the form of agency I observe in the current work and that examined in the extant literature suggest collaborative institutional agency offers a unique explanation for the dynamics of micro-institutional change. There has been previous research which has alluded to such dynamics. This includes Edelman’s (1992) study of how human resource managers interpreted civil rights legislation and Barley’s (1990) study of how the social connections of newcomers facilitated the adoption of technological innovations in a radiology department. In the current work, I extend this previous research to offer three explicit mechanisms by which practice-based collaboration can be a source of institutional change in contrast to the more conventional focus on political contestation. In doing so, I also help clarify the conditions under which this form of agency may result in institutional persistence or change and further specify the concrete social interactions that allow actors to understand institutions and enact them (Friedland & Alford, 1991).