Background:
Research
suggests a number of benefits from teacher participation in school improvement—chief among them that it can
increase teacher receptivity to innovation and reform adoption. Improvement science has been
put forward as a new paradigm for involving local school stakeholders in the improvement
process.
Purpose:
This study describes the beliefs held by teachers and teacher leaders
during the development and
implementation of a locally developed innovation. To explain why the beliefs of
these two school stakeholder groups
would differ, and the implications these differences have on receptivity to
the innovation, we merge the sense-making framework and status risk theory.
Setting:
Three high schools in a large urban school district in the southwestern United
States. Research Design: The data for this study come from a seven-year study
of the process of scaling up effective practices in a large urban district.
This qualitative case study is based on transcripts
from 260 semi-structured interviews and 24 focus groups with development team members and teachers. The researchers analyzed transcripts
to understand participants’ attitudes toward and understanding of the innovation design.
Findings:
Allowing for teacher self-determination in the innovation design and implementation
helped to garner a high level of teacher buy-in to the innovation. Compared
with externally developed reforms, the
innovation was less challenging to teacher autonomy and was customized to fit the needs of their
students. These conditions led to high levels of teache ownership over the innovation. Yet, in the
process, teacher leaders grounded the innovation in preexisting and easy-to-implement practices
that did not require significant investment from teachers to adopt.
Conclusions:
Teacher
self-determination in the innovation development process contributed to greater teacher ownership of, and
receptivity to, organizational change, but at the cost of adopting more ambitious practices that likely
had a greater chance of improving instruction and positive student outcomes
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