Building coherence for instructional improvement through professional development

Abstract

This study explores how six school leadership teams in a rural district in California responded to professional development (PD) designed to strengthen leadership practices and organizational conditions in schools for improving teaching and learning. Specifically, the PD was intended to address the problem of practice identified by the schools: teachers needed to learn to work in new ways to support students in meeting the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Researchers used design-based implementation research (DBIR) to understand the connection between the design and implementation of the PD model and the impact on participating schools. Findings suggest that in developing PD programs, three challenges need to be addressed in designing experiences for educators that strengthen their capabilities to lead instructional improvement: maintaining the connection between organizational processes and instructional practice; approaching school leadership team collaboration as joint work; and utilizing a developmental approach to improvement. The article concludes by exploring the potential of DBIR for designing and refining models for school leaders’ professional learning.

Keywords

Leadership school improvement professional development organizational learning design-based implementation research rural schools

Introduction

There is growing consensus among researchers about the leadership practices and organizational processes that foster improvement in instruction and student learning (e.g. Bryk et al., 2010; Robinson et al., 2008). What is less clear is how to develop stronger leadership practices and organizational conditions in schools that start with widely varied levels of initial capacity for improving teaching and learning (King and Bouchard, 2011; Newmann et al., 2001). Researchers have called on school leaders to leverage professional development (PD) to enhance schoolwide capacity for improvement (Borko et al., 2002; Newmann et al., 2000). While existing research reinforces the importance of PD for schoolwide improvement in teachers’ pedagogy and content knowledge (e.g. Timperley et al., 2007), these studies do not provide guidance on how to explicitly design PD to assist educators with improving leadership and organizational conditions.

We partnered with six elementary schools in a rural district in California to design a two-year PD experience to address their urgent problem of practice: teachers needed to learn to work in new ways to support students in meeting the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The CCSS presented a significant challenge for teachers and administrators because they called for students to engage with more demanding educational materials with greater independence than previous state standards (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2010; Porter et al., 2011). Many countries have adopted standards-based reforms in an effort to raise the level of performance of all students (Hargreaves et al., 2010); however, many schools, particularly schools serving high concentrations of low-income or low-performing students, do not have the organizational capacity necessary to respond productively to external demands from standards-based accountability policies (Elmore, 2004; Fullan et al., 2015). Furthermore, educational reforms that call for ambitious instructional changes for teachers have frequently been paired with limited support for the professional learning necessary to meet reform goals (Elmore, 2004; Stosich, 2016a). To address these challenges, we designed the Building Coherence for Instructional Improvement (BCII) PD program to enhance the capability of participating educators to lead schoolwide improvement efforts to meet the expectations of the CCSS for student learning. Rather than focus on how teachers could use specific instructional content, pedagogy, or materials to address the CCSS, we supported the schools with setting up structures and routines to help teachers work collectively to tackle these ambitious goals.

The BCII PD program is based on the internal coherence theory for school improvement, which describes the leadership practices, organizational processes, and teacher efficacy beliefs that support schoolwide improvements in instruction and student learning (Elmore et al., 2014; Forman et al., 2017). In the initial design of the PD program, we sought to operationalize research on the leadership practices and collaborative processes associated with schools’ capacity to support teacher learning and instructional improvement. This required administrators and teachers from each of the chosen schools in California to work together as a leadership team, develop a vision and strategy for improving instruction, and organize the work of teacher teams to support educator learning aligned with this vision and strategy.

In this study, we use design-based implementation research (DBIR) to explore the connection between the design and implementation of the PD approach and its impact on educators in participating schools (e.g. Penuel et al., 2011). DBIR is a process that supports practitioners and researchers working iteratively and collaboratively to develop, test, and refine a context-specific intervention (Anderson and Shattuck, 2012; Brown, 1992). Specifically, our study sought to address the following research questions: (1) How do school leadership teams respond to PD efforts designed to enhance leadership and organizational capacity, over time? (2) How, if at all, does the response of school leadership teams influence the design and approach to PD?

As part of this iterative approach, we collected data on how school leadership teams experienced and integrated learning from PD in their schools to inform the design of subsequent PD sessions and learning experiences (Cobb et al., 2003; Collins et al., 2004). Our findings suggest that in developing PD programs, three key challenges need to be addressed in designing experiences for educators that strengthen their capabilities to lead instructional improvement: maintaining the connection between organizational processes and instructional practice; approaching school leadership team collaboration as joint work; and utilizing a developmental approach to improvement.

In what follows, we describe our framework and how it builds on and activates existing research on how principals and their faculties can lead instructional improvement. We review emerging research on PD that is designed to grow leadership and organizational capacity. Then we explain our methodological choice by reviewing the use of DBIR in education and its appropriateness for investigating and modifying our PD efforts. We discuss how the DBIR approach supported and refined our learning process in partnership with district leaders, with special attention given to how DBIR allowed for the design process to be responsive to the needs of the practitioners. Then, using data derived from interviews and observations, we analyze participants’ response to the PD program. Finally, we discuss revisions made to the BCII PD program design based on this learning and conclude by exploring the potential of DBIR for designing and refining PD.

The Internal Coherence Framework and PD approach

The Internal Coherence Framework for school improvement builds on research in the fields of education, management, and organizational learning that illustrates how organizations improve over time (Elmore et al., 2014; Forman et al., 2017; Stosich, 2014). The BCII PD program is designed to support educators in applying this research to their everyday practices. Specifically, the Internal Coherence Framework is founded on research in the fields of organizational learning and school improvement, which suggests that principals’ instructional leadership practices, program coherence, teacher collaboration, and teacher efficacy beliefs are strongly related to improvements in instruction and student achievement (Goddard et al., 2004; Goddard et al., 2007; King and Bouchard, 2011; Marks and Printy, 2003; Newman et al., 2001). The relationship of school capacity to leadership practices, organizational processes, teacher efficacy beliefs, and student achievement is depicted in Figure 1, which is based on a synthesis of prior research on school improvement and informs the design of the BCII PD program. The following section defines the key components of the Internal Coherence Framework.

Figure 1.

Leadership for learning

Researchers find that principals’ instructional leadership practices, including working collaboratively with teachers toward shared improvement goals and fostering opportunities for the professional learning needed to meet these goals, are associated positively with instructional quality and student achievement in schools (Marks and Printy, 2003). However, principals and teachers tend to make individual decisions to engage in PD, and those decisions can result in PD experiences that are disconnected from one another (Darling-Hammond et al., 2009). Principals who connect PD opportunities with schoolwide improvement goals (Newmann et al., 2001) and foster a psychologically safe environment for learning (Edmondson, 2008) may be more likely to foster systematic improvements in instruction and student learning.

Psychological safety

A psychologically safe environment, one that encourages experimentation and public discussions about practice, may be especially important for meaningful learning about the CCSS since these represent a significant departure from previous standards. Scholars argue that teachers are more likely to enact practices aligned with new standards when they engage in sustained inquiry with colleagues that encourages them to question underlying assumptions and current practices (Stosichr, 2016b; Spillane, 2004). This process can harm teachers’ self-concepts (Spillane et al., 2002) because it involves acknowledging that current practices are inadequate for reaching new and higher standards. Thus, it is important for teachers to engage in this learning within a psychologically safe environment, where they feel comfortable making mistakes and reflecting publicly about their learning (Edmondson, 2008). Furthermore, a sense of safety is also required for people to engage in constructive “controversy” (Tjosvold, 1985), or the candid dialog of opposing views that render cooperative settings productive for bringing about organizational change (Achinstein, 2002).

Collaboration around an improvement strategy

Leaders can put organizational processes in place to foster collaborative work focused on instruction and student learning. Researchers in organizational learning argue that people learn primarily through social interactions and that organizational processes, such as teacher collaboration, shape these interactions (Argyris and Schon, 1996; March and Simon, 1958). Ongoing collaboration is important for negotiating beliefs about effective instruction and aligning teachers’ work with schoolwide improvement goals. Nevertheless, Fullan (2000) argues that ongoing school improvement demands both collaborative inquiry and learning from outside expertise when they do not exist in the organization.

Efficacy beliefs

Through collaborative work with their colleagues, teachers may develop shared expectations for practice (Elmore, 2004; Little, 2002; McLaughlin and Talbert, 2001), which can create a normative press that encourages them to implement standards-based practices (Coburn, 2001). Teachers’ individual and collective efficacy beliefs—meaning their perceptions of their ability and the ability of the faculty as a whole to plan and execute effective instruction—are enhanced through individual and collective experiences of mastery, as they try a new instructional strategy and witness improvements in student learning (Bandura, 1997). Teachers who work in schools with opportunities to experiment with standards-based practices and reflect on these experiences with colleagues may have enhanced efficacy beliefs, which make them more likely to attempt new practices, activate effort to improve, and persevere in the face of challenges (Goddard et al., 2004; Stajkovic and Luthans, 1998). When leadership practices, instructional resources, and teacher collaboration cohere with the goals of new standards, educators may be more likely to support meaningful improvements in instruction and student learning to meet these goals (Newmann et al., 2001).

Professional development

PD has been defined broadly to include “all activities that help education professionals develop the skills and knowledge required to achieve their school’s education goals and meet the needs of students” (Chambers et al., 2008: 4). Research suggests that PD opportunities are more meaningful when school leaders use them as part of an organizational strategy for building the instructional capacity of teachers and the school as a whole (Borko et al., 2002; Newmann et al., 2000). Educators in schools with strong leadership from the principal and higher levels of initial school capacity are often better able to leverage PD to enhance overall capacity for supporting student learning (King and Bouchard, 2011; Newmann et al., 2000). Notably, schools that may stand to benefit the most from PD—typically schools that are under-resourced—often have weak leadership from the principal, low levels of teacher collaboration and, consequently, limited capacity to utilize PD opportunities to improve instruction and student learning (Bryk et al., 2010; Stosich, 2016a). This presents a challenge: schools with lower levels of initial capacity are less able to improve student learning and benefit less from traditional PD approaches than schools with higher levels of capacity.

This study contributes to the emerging line of research that explores how PD might help educators create structures and routines for improvement, regardless of the school’s initial capacity (King and Bouchard, 2011; Supovitz and Riggan, 2012). For example, King and Bouchard (2011) analyzed the effects of leadership coaching designed to improve organizational capacity in six low-performing urban schools. In each school, leadership teams of administrators and teachers were established and tasked with leading instructional improvement efforts. Although the authors do not provide a detailed account of the schools’ responses, they describe how one school, where teachers were working mostly independently, chose to focus on increasing teacher collaboration. Although the leadership coaching program was intended to develop leadership and organizational capacity broadly, teachers played a limited role in leading the work of their grade-level teams; instead, direction for teacher teams came from the principal, with support from the coach. In this school the intervention appeared insufficient for developing leadership capacity among teachers. The authors argue that a flexible approach is necessary to match the level of response to the differing levels of capacity in each school (King and Bouchard, 2011). Other evidence suggests that one-on-one coaching may be a promising approach to providing differentiated support to school leaders based on specific needs and contexts (Grissom and Harrington, 2010).

Similarly, Supovitz and Riggan (2012) examined PD opportunities and school-based coaching for school leadership teams in a large urban district. This PD program was designed to encourage effective team practices and support leadership teams in facilitating instructional improvement. It emphasized developing the leadership capabilities of teachers in each school leadership team, and teachers in participating schools played a significant role in contributing to discussions about instructional change. However, participating schools did not demonstrate improvement in student performance and the authors (Supovitz and Riggan, 2012: 48) cite weak instructional infrastructure as limiting the potential influence of leadership teams:

[S]chools, particularly those in turbulent urban districts, do not necessarily contain the instructional infrastructure of curriculum materials, professional development, and resources that are the critical provisions for instructional improvement. School leaders need an instructional system around which to focus and organize their efforts.

The BCII PD program in our study was designed to support educators in creating the instructional infrastructure that aligns leadership, organizational processes, and teachers’ opportunities to learn with a shared understanding of teaching and learning.

BCII PD program design

The BCII PD program is based on the Internal Coherence Framework for school improvement and incorporates clinical practices for developing leadership, organizational processes, and collective efficacy beliefs when it is employed in participating schools. The program activates research about the importance of shared or “distributed” leadership (Spillane et al., 2001) by inviting leadership teams composed of administrators and teachers from each school to work collectively to develop a shared vision and strategy for improving instruction and student learning in their school.

The theory of action behind the design of the BCII PD program is that participating schools will improve leadership, instruction, and student learning by: (1) developing a shared vision for improved instruction among the faculty; (2) putting in place a leadership team to develop a schoolwide strategy for reaching their vision, identify areas for professional learning, and coordinate the work of teams; and (3) creating deliberate opportunities for collective reflection on progress against a shared vision for improved instruction. This effort calls on teachers and administrators to work together to create more supportive conditions for adult and student learning. They do this by engaging in a shared set of clinical practices, or tools and routines that are based on research but have been systematically developed and tested with practitioners (Forman et al., 2017).

In this study, educators in participating schools had identified teaching to the CCSS in mathematics as a major challenge. At the beginning of our partnership, they had just adopted a new mathematics curriculum and provided PD to teachers with regard to using the curriculum to raise the level of complexity and student thinking in mathematics instruction. Through our partnership using the BCII PD program, we supported the leadership teams in developing a vision and strategy for improving instruction and student learning in mathematics to meet the new and higher expectations of the CCSS.

Research design

To understand how the school leadership teams responded to the BCII PD program, and refine the PD approach based on participants’ experiences, we engaged in a method known as DBIR. DBIR is a process where practitioners and researchers contribute to the focus and development of a program or intervention that is designed to work in a specific context (Anderson and Shattuck, 2012; Brown, 1992; Walker, 2006). DBIR allows researchers to start with research or theory and put the theory directly into “action” within the design process (Cobb et al., 2003; Collins et al., 2004). DBIR is a true partnership between researchers and practitioners because the process both supports the development of interventions as well as contributing to theory-building (Van den Akker, 1999; Walker, 2006), which in turn influences subsequent iterations of the intervention.

A review of DBIR investigations reveals several characteristics of the approach. DBIR is: interventionist (creating solutions for needs in the field); iterative (the design and research processes work dynamically and repetitively); process-oriented (the emphasis is less on quantifying results than on the means of obtaining them); utility-oriented (the applicability for actual practitioners and students is a central focus); and theory-oriented (projects are theory-informed and, ultimately, theory-building) (Van den Akker et al., 2006). By engaging in DBIR, we as researchers and developers of PD programs benefited from collecting data on practitioners’ direct experiences with the PD design and using those experiences to further refine our approaches (Burnaford et al., 2001). In this way, DBIR uses research to support practitioners’ work in their own contexts.

As the researchers and developers of the PD program we worked closely with the district leadership in the area in which the chosen schools were situated to design and implement the two-year PD sequence. We drew on our expertise with developing clinical practices (City et al., 2009), data-based decision-making (Boudett et al., 2013; Stosich, 2014), team-based learning (Bocala, 2014), and educator efficacy for instructional improvement (Forman, 2014). We conceptualized the arc of the PD series and created specific learning experiences for each session. Then, as described further below, we adapted the content of each session in response to feedback from practitioners, especially the principals and the six BCII coaches. In addition, we reviewed participant feedback and determined implications for subsequent sessions during a formal debrief with coaches after each PD session.

Site and participants

As part of our DBIR approach, we partnered with six elementary schools in a rural district in California. The district leaders had reached out to us for support because they wanted to create more conducive conditions for making the pedagogical shifts required by the CCSS. Meeting the CCSS was particularly challenging for schools in this rural district because they serve a high percentage of English learners and also many children of migrant workers, who present high mobility rates.

The participants in our study are 13 administrators and 35 teachers who comprise the leadership teams from the six elementary schools participating in the BCII PD program. We also collected data from the six coaches who supported them through the program. These coaches included university professors and district-level administrators.

Data collection

Data were collected during the first year of a two-year PD series. Our data collection strategy included interviews with administrators, teachers, and PD coaches about their experiences, as well as direct observations of collaborative work in their schools and during each full-day PD session. In this study, interviews are appropriate because DBIR draws from direct individual experiences with the idea or concept under design (Burnaford et al., 2001) and also values the role of participant reflection in articulating findings. First, we interviewed participants to learn about their experience with regard to PD and how they had applied this learning in their school context. Second, we observed teacher classroom practice and team meetings to ascertain how teachers were applying what they had learned about leadership practices, collaboration, and instruction. Third, we collected relevant documents from the BCII PD program sessions and also in relation to leadership teams’ application of what they were learning at their schools, including written feedback from participants after each PD session and artifacts from faculty meetings. Finally, we collected observational notes from each PD session to examine participants’ reactions to session content, aspects of the session’s design that supported or hindered their learning, and how leadership teams were envisioning applying their learning in their respective school contexts.

Data analysis

We examined the data qualitatively, primarily focusing on close analysis of the educators’ narratives in interviews and summary findings from the school observations. During initial readings of transcripts and field notes, we wrote interpretive memos and asked questions of the data that centered on what participants were able to apply from the BCII PD program at their schools and how this related to their learning experiences when undertaking PD. We sought to reduce the risk of systematic bias by drawing on multiple data sources and collection methods and by adopting a DBIR approach designed to improve, rather than validate, the logic of the PD model (Maxwell, 2012; Penuel et al., 2011).

Findings

We conclude that in developing PD programs, three key challenges must be addressed in designing experiences for educators that build organizational capacity: maintaining the connection between organizational processes and instructional practice; approaching school leadership team collaboration as joint work; and utilizing a developmental approach to improvement.

Finding 1: When designing a PD program leaders must maintain the connection between developing organizational systems and advancing instruction

Our first finding reinforces the idea that professional developers and school leaders should not attempt to build organizational capacity without connecting those efforts to an instructional focus and explicitly fostering participants’ understanding of the connection between the two. Educators attending the BCII PD program sessions initially confused building school capacity with simply building structures for teamwork or fostering psychological safety, rather than using these processes as a means to advance a common instructional vision. For example, educators in two schools thought they had already achieved internal coherence because they knew each other well and had worked together for a long time. These two schools had to redefine coherence as a working system of organizational structures, practices, and processes, aligned to support the enactment of an instructional improvement strategy, rather than a larger sense of collegiality or common history. In fact, these two schools had recently undergone changes in staffing due to higher staff turnover and a growing faculty. Reframing their understanding of coherence allowed them to design ways of more systematically inducting new teachers into their organization, rather than assuming all new staff would integrate easily with previously established collegial norms and relationships.

In other schools, educators initially saw the BCII PD program as building up their collaborative norms, such as psychological safety and trust, but they struggled to make the connection between having these norms and their ability to enact a schoolwide instructional improvement strategy. One teacher described her team’s efforts to work on creating an atmosphere of psychological safety, but how they initially had difficulty seeing the connection to their work implementing the new mathematics program in the district:

After the first meeting, we met with our staff and went over the data that was collected and talked about […] psychological safety. So that was our focus; whereas, all the other schools were focusing on more academic goals. […] And then the next time [the task was to create] a chart with [the math curriculum]: “What I hear and see, and what the student is doing,” and so we went from psychological safety, to [the math program] but I don’t think that they really saw the connection with that.

As PD program designers, we discovered that the choice to present the entire Internal Coherence Framework (with its corresponding domains of leadership practice, organizational processes, and efficacy beliefs) led the educators to understand the need for a schoolwide approach, but participants lacked clarity in how improving the organization would connect to their instructional strategies. We reflected that it would have been more helpful to start with the school choosing or defining the instructional platform or initiative they wanted to advance, then next introducing the Internal Coherence Framework as the way to create an infrastructure or system to support that initiative. Framing the discussion about the instructional strategies would give educators a familiar, high-priority place to start before moving on to the more abstract work of creating organizational processes that build individual and collective efficacy. One teacher explained that it was helpful every time we introduced examples that related to instruction:

Giving the [internal coherence] foundations and the background and the models with all the diagrams is important. But it really became tangible when [the PD program designers] brought it into the classroom setting and [explained], “This is how it affects the classroom setting.”

Finding 1: Changes to PD program design

After hearing these insights from educators in the first year, for the second year we revised the PD program design to begin more explicitly with the connection between developing organizational capacity and using that capacity to improve instruction schoolwide. In this way, we reflected Elmore’s (2004) argument for designing infrastructure for improvement from the “inside out”—starting with developing a deep understanding of effective instructional practice, then creating an organizational form that best supports that vision of learning and teaching.

In an attempt to make this connection more concrete for participants, we created learning experiences that explicitly interwove the constructs of organizational capacity and instructional improvement. For example, we engaged participants in analyzing a case study of a school enacting a strategy to improve instruction and student learning in mathematics together with data from the school’s Internal Coherence Survey, which is a teacher survey assessing a school’s existing level of organizational capacity for instructional improvement (Forman et al., 2017). We asked participants to identify what the faculty was trying to achieve with regard to instruction and student learning in mathematics and whether and how the school was organized to achieve these results, as evidenced in the survey. Feedback collected from participants suggested that using specific examples, such as the case study and survey described, supported administrators and teachers in understanding how organizational capacity relates to the ability of educators to meet their goals for instructional improvement.

Finding 2: Leadership teams have to experience and reflect upon their work as complex and interdependent before they can create similar professional learning experiences for their teachers

Our second finding reinforced the assumption that educational teams are rarely given what Little (1990: 520) calls “joint work,” or “complex work that cannot be accomplished by even the most knowledgeable individuals acting alone.” Therefore, when school leadership teams attending the BCII PD program sessions were asked to work together to “apply their learning back at their schools,” many of the teams tended to simply share the activities or materials with their faculty without engaging them in deeper understanding of the relationships between leadership, organizational processes, and efficacy. One teacher described this as explaining what they had learned to their colleagues at staff meetings:

I think it’s a lot of information and we come back. You know, we learn a lot at the internal coherence day that we go to. And then we come back, and we try and share it with the staff. I feel like they’re just getting a little glimpse into all of the information that we were given. I don’t feel like we’re doing a very good job of informing the staff of what we’ve learned or the importance of the internal coherence. I feel like we don’t really have enough time to go over it with them. You know, once-a-month staff meeting where we get 20 minutes at the beginning isn’t really enough time to convey the importance of what we’re doing.

As PD program designers and facilitators, we discovered that asking schools to “take back” what they had learned after each session may have resulted in an increase of “sharing” of topics or specific learning activities but not sustained work in building a strategy for increasing organizational coherence. Little (1990) describes the prevalence of team “storytelling and scanning” behaviors, where teachers share anecdotes or examples but do not integrate these into complex tasks that they are trying to accomplish together. We observed that some schools seemed to be focusing on sharing something new after each session, rather than building capacity toward an overall strategy. While sharing might have resulted in spreading information or keeping other teachers updated on what the school leadership team learned from the BCII PD program, it did not lead to the kind of focused, sustained capacity-building work that we wanted to inspire.

It is worth noting that some schools did regard the BCII PD program as a helpful structure to clarify jointly their high-priority goals and the vision they had for their school. For example, one school developed a public board for displaying their goals for the mathematics curriculum they were implementing, as well as their goals for students’ writing. Members of another school leadership team engaged in an activity that required administrators and teachers to work together to develop a shared vision for ambitious mathematics instruction and they described it as helping them to develop a shared understanding of how to teach the new mathematics curriculum.

In addition to school leadership teams having less experience with designing and engaging in interdependent tasks as team, we found that it was difficult for some of them to engage one another in the kinds of authentic, productive debate required for interdependent learning (Achinstein, 2002). Primarily, the educators seemed to equate working together well as a team with staying positive, rather than with engaging in constructive criticism. The educators at one school appeared to understand that psychological safety was about creating a safe place for sharing what was working and asking for help. However, they seemed to think that making judgments about each other’s teaching would make them work less well as a team. One teacher explained that they started talking about classroom observations as benefiting the individual teacher who visited a colleague, but not necessarily the team or the school:

When we came back [to our school], we started immediately the discussion that to improve yourself, observation is very important. And to see other people doing things and there’s always something you can take away from the way someone else is doing something. […] We started seeing that this is part of the whole [internal coherence] process now; it’s about us becoming better as individuals and not picking at each other.

Moreover, in this environment of protecting positive interactions, the principals seemed to be viewed as resources who “have the answers,” rather than joint learners. In the BCII PD program, we framed the concept of “public learning” as a situation where a person does not have the all answers, but in which he/she asks questions, and publicly reflects on changes in thinking. We found that principals often described their leadership as having an “open door”, and that they were willing to make mistakes, but they did not use language about learning together or challenging each other. To effectively model public learning in the internal coherence approach, the principal and the teachers must “co-negotiate” their improvement strategy and learn together, with principals acknowledging the limits of their expertise and working jointly with teachers.

In one school, the leadership team did have a principal who felt comfortable in the role of public learner. This principal was new, and some of the leadership team members expressed dissatisfaction with her during initial interviews. Through the BCII PD program, the team decided to create the conditions of psychological safety in their school. This began with the new principal modeling a certain level of vulnerability as the team examined their Internal Coherence Survey data, which showed that teachers in the school did not feel comfortable taking risks and that the teachers did not feel supported by the principal. A teacher recalled how they spent time during the PD session discussing how to improve the atmosphere of “respect”:

That was actually our very, very first [BCII PD program] meeting—we shared the psychological safety [survey data] and what we can do [to address this]. […] I don’t remember exactly what we decided but we came up with norms, which [the principal] posted. Just our staff meeting norms and how we can respect each other in the professional learning community to protect that safety. We also try to do different activities at the beginning of a staff meeting […] so we can feel more comfortable with each other coming in. […] Making sure we still understand each other to get that safety up.

Finding 2: Changes to PD program design

In order to address the tendency of leadership teams to bring session materials back to their faculty, rather than engage with them as a team to grow capacity for instructional improvement in the school context, we became more explicit about the nature of the work expected by using the BCII PD program. For example, in our fourth session, we introduced the following formal definition of the leadership team’s task: “Set the direction for improving teaching and learning at your school through the creation of a shared instructional vision and strategy that evolves over time.” In a similar fashion, we introduced a definition of strategy that aligned with our expectation for the teams’ interdependent work. Childress (2004: 1) defines strategy as a set of “puzzle pieces that fit together to create a clear picture of how the people, activities, and resources of an organization can work together to accomplish a collective purpose”. In this way, we attempted to establish the expectation that the teams taking part in the BCII PD program must collectively understand session materials and apply their new learning to the larger project of how the organization would function to reach their vision for ambitious instructional practice.

Further, after principals expressed discomfort with modeling public learning in front of their staff, we revised our PD design to help principals reflect on why it was important for them to acknowledge what they did not know and how to manage learning alongside their teachers. Specifically, we began meeting separately with the principals before each PD session. This role-alike setting was intended to alleviate principals’ anxiety about expressing confusion or asking questions in front of their teachers. Additionally, these sessions gave principals the opportunity to preview session goals and the learning experiences they would engage in with their leadership team.

Finding 3: School leaders need support to change their mindset and forget the notion that organizational capacity is measured as a status, instead moving toward the idea that capacity can be developed, no matter where a school begins

Given policy efforts to focus on accountability in the United States education system, it is common for educators to examine data to see whether goals have been met, rather than using data for continuous improvement and development of new goals (Mandinach and Jackson, 2012). We often refer to this as having a “status orientation,” where educators talk about “having or not having” organizational capacity but with little differentiation related to their organizational assets and challenges and what they might do to strengthen the structures, processes, and conditions that influence educators’ ability to improve teaching and learning. We found evidence of this status orientation when we provided schools with their data from the Internal Coherence Survey (Forman et al., 2017; Stosich, 2014) in the first PD session. Participants from schools with higher levels of capacity, as measured by the survey, found it more difficult to see the purpose of the BCII PD program because they believed they already “had” internal coherence—they did not yet understand that the data contained information about how they might continue to set even more ambitious organizational goals over time.

In one school, a teacher explained that the educators at her school did not initially understand why they were selected to participate in the BCII PD program: “I feel like we already had internal coherence. I feel like if you look at our [survey] data, you will see that we didn’t see an issue actually with our leadership, with our interactions between ourselves.” This teacher held the mindset that internal coherence was more like a fixed condition—you had a problem with it or you did not—and that the purpose of the PD program was to help “fix” that problem, rather than to develop stronger systems of leadership and professional learning, no matter what the school’s starting point might be.

This teacher went on to describe how her team decided to focus more on learning how to implement the mathematics curriculum, rather than building internal coherence, and in her mind the two activities were separate:

Knowing the other schools in this area, I totally get why those schools were involved in [BCII PD program] because I know that there are two schools in particular that have a really difficult time with their staff sharing with each other. […] They don’t trust their principal. They don’t trust each other. It’s kind of a mess. We didn’t have that issue, so I think we’ve kind of wondered from the beginning why we were involved. […] I think we kind of wondered if there was something else that we could’ve been doing. […] I think we kind of moved into the [mathematics program] area because it is an area that we wanted to explore, that we needed to explore. We felt this gave us the opportunity to do that and to have that be a focus and to spent time doing it—but it’s not really about internal coherence. Implementing [the mathematics program] doesn’t fix our internal coherence because we don’t have an internal coherence problem and our data kind of show that.

Although we tried to reinforce the theme that in order to enact any improvement strategy effectively, schools must function as well-connected, supportive organizations that are committed to learning, some teachers, including this one, separated out the organizational processes from the instructional work.

Beyond reinforcing the idea that building organizational capacity can be fostered at all levels of school readiness, we discovered that we as PD program designers had to be prepared for those various levels of readiness. The BCII PD program sessions were intended to enable educators to adapt what they learned to their specific school contexts; however, we did not anticipate the wide variation in readiness presented by the schools in question or the need for someone to continuously support their development over time. In this district, there were schools starting from various points in terms of leadership, organizational structure, and instructional knowledge. For example, some schools were readily able to see the value of building organizational capacity because they had new leaders or the staff perceived low trust or ineffective teamwork, but two schools in particular had difficulty understanding how the BCII PD program applied to their school because the staff had close, collegial relationships and had worked together under the same leader for several years.

Finding 3: Changes to PD program design

After realizing the difficulty that participants were having with moving from a status orientation to one of ongoing development, we made several design changes so that the necessary focus on development and improvement could be implemented from any starting point. We revised the PD sessions in order to take into account the variation in schools’ readiness, including having them choose learning opportunities based on areas of focus such as teamwork or observing instruction. We also used the DBIR process to interview educators in schools that already felt they had “high internal coherence,” in order to understand what this might mean to them. This led us to engage participants in schools with strong collegial relationships in more challenging and inquiry-oriented collaborative practices for improving instruction, such as systematic peer observation and productive debate. Ongoing observations and feedback from participants helped us clarify the dynamic and developmental nature of our approach as we worked with educators.

Implications

Our district partner faced a familiar problem of practice: how to create the school conditions necessary to support instructional improvement. Through the DBIR process, we learned that a PD program intended to strengthen organizational capacity must be rooted in an instructional agenda—that in order to affect change, educators must learn how to work in ways that are more interdependent and go beyond traditional habits of merely “sharing” what has been learned. We also discovered that we must reinforce the developmental nature of capacity building and adult learning, and strongly encourage educators to move away from mindsets that indicate status or attainment. However, this work is not without its challenges, for example: supporting participants to see the purpose of PD; helping them to understand the Internal Coherence Framework; and ensuring they use their own learning to influence the organizational and instructional practices at their schools.

We have found that a DBIR approach helps PD program designers to address these challenges, specifically because it allows for continuous improvement, feedback from participants, and revision to the program design. The interview and observation data we collected from participants over the first year of the BCII PD program allowed us to re-examine our own approaches.

As we work on future iterations of the BCII PD program, we will continue to address several questions. For example, we are still working on accurately describing and illustrating what it looks like to be at a more advanced stage of organizational capacity, since we often face the problem of certain educators believing that having “high internal coherence” means that “everyone gets along,” and others describing it as “everyone does exactly the same thing.” Additionally, our participants’ feedback has helped us understand which elements of the BCII PD program are most helpful for them, but we continue to examine how best to translate the abstract concepts from the research into actionable practices. It seems that the Internal Coherence Survey and the BCII PD program might have influenced the work of teachers at the schools by the simple act of getting them talking about these concepts, psychological safety, for example. Although some schools had difficulty creating a plan of action to create psychological safety, taking time to communicate the importance of talking honestly, asking questions, and being open to mistakes may have helped teachers feel safer.

Additionally, it would be helpful to be explicit with educators about the nature of interdependent tasks. This might be done through reflection on their own experience of attending the BCII PD program sessions—where they had to engage in complex, interdependent work—and using this as a model for how to foster productive teamwork at their schools. In the future, we will also work to clarify the shift in leadership practice that underpins the Internal Coherence Framework and the logic of the BCII PD program sessions—the move from top-down improvement efforts to shared instructional leadership (Marks and Printy, 2003).

Ultimately, the type of forward-looking, iterative approach practiced in DBIR is what we hope to build in schools that engage with the Internal Coherence Framework and associated PD. Federal and state policy changes, such as new standards and assessments and complex educator evaluation systems, have led to an environment in which educators are asked to work differently than they have in the past. In the face of these multiple initiatives and shifting policies, it has become more important for schools to develop internal coherence and focus on becoming a faculty that is proactive, rather than reactive. By working closely with educators through a DBIR approach, we as designers of PD programs are better able to understand their challenges, ensure the learning experiences meet their needs, and learn from them as they are learning from us.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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