Capturing Sense-Made School Practice. The Activities of the Interviewer

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to discuss how to interview to investigate the practice of school organizations. The research question is: What are the activities the interviewer uses to capture improvement practices in school organizations? We apply a self-assessment method to examine two former projects. We argue that a practice lens is required and, thus, the analytical questions we ask ourselves are derived from practice theory and sense-making. The activities the interviewer uses to capture improvement practice in school organizations are expressed in four categories: (1) interview questions, (2) tools, (3) samplings, and (4) interview groupings. We found it difficult to address the critical role of body and material things and to pay attention to the importance of power and politics. An overall reflection is that the textual aspects tended to dominate in the interview, whereas the bodily and material aspects of practice seemed more elusive.

KEYWORDS:

• Research methods
• interview
• school practice
• sense-making

It is important to investigate school practice in local school organizations when planning for improvement. How teachers, school leaders, and students relate to one another and how they handle change is decisive in building capacity to improve. As a researcher, capturing life and social practices in schools is challenging. Interviews are frequently used in school organization research, but how the interviews are conducted and what the interviewer’s activities are has seldom been explored (see, e.g., Höög, Johansson, & Olofsson, 2009; Moos & Kofod, 2009). We agree with Cassell (2011, p. 501), who concludes, “Despite the prevalence of the interview and the role it has in mass culture, apart from the occasional article (e.g., Alvesson, 2003), surprisingly little has been written about its role in organizational research.”

As researchers of school organizations, we agree with Buchanan and Bryman (2011) that organizational research is characterized by transboundary methodology and is innovative in regard to developing research methods. Nicolini (2009) invites nuanced reflections on how different methods are sensitive to different aspects within the nature of practice; thus, we acknowledge that the optimal methodology is to triangulate interviews with other data sources in organizational research to capture the complexity of practice. However, we experience that it is often challenging to acquire the resources to do this. Among other factors, research funders are seldom willing to pay for the time and personnel required, and, for better or worse, researchers are frequently left with interviews as the main tool to collect data.

Nonetheless, we argue that interviewing – using language as the symbol and as the sense-making instrument – is appropriate for capturing essential aspects of the sense-made practice of school organizations. In this reflective article, we seek to contribute to the organizational research field with a discussion of interviews conducted over a short time span for purposes of investigating school organizations by applying a practice and sense-making perspective (Nicolini, 2013; Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005). Thus, the aim of this article is to discuss how to interview to investigate the practice of school organizations by describing and systematically reflecting upon the framework and method we employed in our research. The underlying research questions are as follows: (1) What are the activities the interviewer uses to capture improvement practices in school organizations? (2) To what degree does the interviewer experience these activities as effective in relation to important elements from a practice perspective, that is: (a) sense-making, (b) activity and its processual character, (c) the critical role of the body and material things, and (d) the importance of power and politics?

The remainder of this article is organized as follows. In the research background, we will briefly address the increased need for knowledge regarding the practice of school organizations and treat the interview as a research method used to investigate school practice. In the theoretical framework, we consider the practice and sense-making perspective and thus acknowledge two fundamental aspects of human life, that of symbol making and that of materiality and the bodily present, termed the idealistic and realistic standpoint in research methodology (Cohen, Manion, & Morrison, 2007, p. 10). Being human means being in a body facing a world of symbols and materiality, which is considered in practice theory (Nicolini, 2013) and sense-making (Weick, 2001; Weick et al., 2005) and is our point of departure in arguing that interviewing can capture essential aspects of the practice of school organizations. In the procedure, we introduce the self-assessment method we used to retrospectively investigate two of our interview studies. Next, in the empirical illustrations, we describe our interview practice through systematic reflection and assessment of the interviewer activities in our studies. In the concluding remarks, we summarize our findings, discuss them in relation to the need to investigate local school practices, and offer recommendations and suggestions for future research.

Research Background

The Practice of Local School Organizations

In the 1960s, researchers investigating state-governed educational reforms found that an important unit of change was the local school organization (Dalin, 1973). Organizational researchers Meyer and Rowan (1977) explained how organizations adapt to the complex rules and norms expected of them by society and how they de-couple their structures and processes in order to do so. Instead of controlling the processes, they employ a logic of confidence and good faith. Thus, they showed that organizations can adapt and gain legitimacy from society by de-coupling their structures and processes. This seems particularly valid for public organizations whose goal or product is complex and difficult to measure, as in educational organizations.

Sarason (1982) performed a detailed analysis of what happens inside a schoolhouse, describing its practice, which consisted of its social life and work patterns. Rosenholtz (1989) added to this perspective by concluding that central state reform and implementation must pay attention to the adaption processes of local school organizations. Since that time, descriptions of various school cultures have abounded. Staessens (1993a, 1993b) described three types of school organizations: the living-apart school, the family school, and the professional school. These school types differ substantially in terms of culture or practice, where the first type lacks those social relations that promote communication throughout the school regarding how to improve teaching and learning, and where the professional type is characterized in exactly the opposite terms. Hargreaves (1994) adds a fourth type, “the contrived collegial school,” which is in a way forced to match a certain model for collaboration and professionalism. These types, as with other school culture classifications, show the various ways in which the practice is constituted. Recurrent aspects are clarity of goals, collaboration, and distribution of leadership. The optimal mix of variation is summed up in the research of professional learning communities, successful schools in which teachers and principals work together to discover the learning needs of the students and to adapt teaching accordingly (Bolam, McMahon, Stoll, Thomas, & Wallace, 2005).

School culture and organizational research reveals different types of school practice as well as complex and frequently contradictory internal processes. Argyris (1999) uses the terms theory-in-use and espouses theory to explain conflicting organizational processes. The espoused theory is maintained vis-à-vis society to gain legitimacy, and the theory-in-use is used in practical organizational life. Useful from our practice theory perspective is Brunsson's (2002) distinction between talk and action. Talk refers to the ideology depicted to gain legitimacy from society, while action refers to the procedures in place to deliver the objective of the organization, in our case education and student learning.

Based in practice theory (Kemmis et al., 2014; Schatzki, 2002, 2008; Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, & Savigny, 2001), Nehez (2015) identifies how different “informal projects,” or practices, of school leaders relate to planned change and concluded that these projects in many cases counteract the intentions of the planned change efforts and that in only a few cases did they promote change. The study makes clear the necessity to find ways of mapping the practice when planning for change to increase the likelihood of goal fulfillment. Blossing, Nyen, Söderström, and Hagen Tønder (2015) contribute to the question of the processual aspects by analysing how the practice of local schools is developed based on sense-making among teachers and school leaders. They show how certain practical ideas regarding how to create improvement are constituted at the beginning of a school’s history and how these ideas thereafter drive and shape the practice. In addition, Nordholm (2015) contributes with an account of how sense-making impacts the character and outcome of development efforts in temporary school organizations by pragmatic task interpretation and reduction of the complexity of circumstances when disruptions of work emerge.

Interviews often constitute an important part of data gathering within organizational research. A challenge, however, is that research articles on school practice often treat the manner in which interviews are conducted in rather short summaries. In fact, methodology is very much a black box. Consider, for example, the International Successful School Principalship Project (ISSPP), which began in 2001 (https://www.uv.uio.no/ils/english/research/projects/isspp/) and involved 14 countries and researchers from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the USA, the UK, Australia, Canada, South Korea, China, Spain, Mexico, New Zealand, and Cyprus. The project led to many publications. Investigating the Scandinavian articles from the “revisiting round” (Höög et al., 2009; Moos & Kofod, 2009; Møller, Vedøy, Presthus, & Skedsmo, 2009), we find that the interview is the primary data collection method, but the basis for using this method and – most importantly – how interviews are conducted, is not accounted for in capturing the practice of successful leadership. We obtain more information by returning to the original study forming the basis of the ISSPP, Leading schools in times of change (Day, 2000). This study consists of qualitative fieldwork in 12 schools and focuses on the effective leadership of 12 principals. Reading the methodology, the intention was to use multiple perspectives and hear from many voices regarding leadership in schools. The argument for adopting this approach is that the real world of a school, even a small primary school, “can be bewilderingly complex” (p. 30). No single observer, the authors conclude, can see or hear everything, and observers will consequently provide a biased view of school leadership.

The empirical example above demonstrates what Alvesson (2003) argued when asserting that researchers spend a lot of time conducting and securing qualitative data and less time reflecting on and placing the data in an epistemological and theoretical perspective. In this article, we reflect on a chosen theoretical perspective and its influence when conducting interviews. We use contributions from the methodological literature and practice theory in our reflection on how different interview activities are effective in capturing different aspects of local school organization practice.

Theoretical Framework

In this article, we apply a practice lens to explore our chosen phenomenon, school organizations (and their improvement capacity), and our chosen methodology, the interview situation. A practice lens is informed by several distinct scholarly traditions developed over several years. In accordance with Nicolini (2013), we focus upon the ontological basis for these theories, that is, “ … a recognition of the primacy of practice in social matters, as well as the adoption of the idea that practices (in one way or another) are fundamental to the production, reproduction, and transformation of social and organizational matters” (Nicolini, 2013, pp. 13–14). Nicolini (2013, p. 7) claims that practice is meaning-making, identity-forming, and order-producing activities. Practice is characterized by: (1) activity and processual character, (2) the critical role of body and material things, (3) individual agency, (4) knowledge as capacity to make meaning and to perform a social and material activity, and (5) the importance of power and politics. Social phenomena are, through the practice lens, explained in a processual way, including the complex nature of everyday life, with the concrete and material nature of all activities.

We argue that this practice lens is required for gaining more profound knowledge regarding the local and social prerequisites for working towards improvement. A central argument is the acknowledgement of both a realistic and idealistic standpoint (Cohen et al., 2007, p. 10) within practice-based theory. The realistic view is the objective and material one, which states that the world exists and is knowable as it really is. The idealistic view, by contrast, posits that the world exists but that different people construe it in heterogeneous ways. Hence, the realistic and idealistic perspectives emphasize different aspects within school improvement practices. It is, however, irrelevant and impossible to split the aspects completely. Van Manen (1990, p. 2) emphasizes how meaning about the world is in the world and is embedded in certain situations.

Research interviews, which are our concern, are often used in a qualitative paradigm emphasizing the idealistic perspective in terms of the meaning with which individuals imbue their situations. The practice perspective developed by Nicolini (2013) combines both the realistic and the idealistic standpoints. Nicolini means that discourses alone, as expressions of an idealistic standpoint, are not sufficient to explain the world we live in. Van Manen (1990) proposes that four fundamental existential elements – spatiality, corporality, temporality, and relationality – shape the foundation of all human experiences and form the basis of all meaning-making. Meaning-making activities and processes in school organizations, we would say, are thereby dependent on bodies being present in the same room, on finding time slots within a working schedule to meet and talk, and on finding free spaces in which to work undisturbed. In practice, body and situation constitute our opportunities to make meaning. In schools, time and bodily-ness make up the social, material, and objective reality and must be addressed, which means that meaning-making and objective materiality are two sides of the same coin – both require examination in order to understand school organizations and their capacity to improve.

Weick (2001) and Weick et al. (2005) describe sense-making as the manner in which members of an organization give meaning to what they do (their practice) through a retrospective process and bring order to what they do through forward-oriented actions. Weick’s theory builds on the idea of organizations as a socially constructed phenomenon (Hatch, 2011). People act and interpret these actions within a social context they themselves have created. Sense-making processes become particularly intense when a crisis or disturbance occurs that shakes the professional identities of the organization’s members. Under these circumstances, members look to the organization’s history and remind themselves of what has worked before and what is most important. This process implies reducing the complexity of professional practice to a few symbols or tokens that encapsulate the underlying meaning that has shaped the professional identities of the organization’s members. Such tokens become the “cues” by which organizational members can take action to handle the disturbance in a manner that restores the meaning on which their professional identity rests.

“Sense-making is about flow, a continually changing past, a variation in choice, irrevocability and visibility that change the intensity of behavioural commitments” (Weick, 2001, p. 11). This quotation describes the reality of everyday life in organizations as an ongoing accomplishment, characterized by complexity, instability, and individual interpretation. To counteract flow and complexity, people attempt to find meaning by creating order and structure. Important sources of meaning and stability are social comparison, expectations and action. Weick (2001, 2009) highlights seven central themes to describe the theory of sense-making in organizational settings: (1) social (organizational sense-making is relational), (2) identity (the personal sense of what he/she is in a setting), (3) retrospect (looking back, remembering, and attempting to understand the past), (4) cues (what is salient in the organization), (5) ongoing (understanding and organizing the continuous flow), (6) plausibility (coherence, how events hang together), (7) and enactment (actions).

One of the key sources of meaning is the retrospective process (Weick, 2001, 2009). Since this concept is particularly relevant to the issues discussed in this paper, we examine it in further detail. Sense-making related to the retrospective perspective is influenced by what people remember, how far back they remember, and how well they remember the different situations in which they participated. Weick confirms that people can only know what they have done after they have done it. They are therefore dependent on the retrospective perspective to create understanding. If people ignore the past, they will find it difficult to understand what is happening in organizations. When people in organizations are in touch with the past, for example, by collecting and analysing elapsed data, opportunities for learning and directions for the future will emerge.

Nicolini (2009, 2013) emphasizes the need for coherence between ontology and methodology within the practice-based approach and favours a combination of different research methods to capture the complex nature of practice. Bearing in mind that a single method hardly ever captures all available data, we chose in this article to focus on the possibilities found in different interview activities to capture essential aspects of school improvement practices. By exploring the activities of the interviewer through a practice lens, we argue for a possible development within the interview as a research method. To this end, we must take a closer look at the practice of interviewing.

The Practice of Interviewing

Research interviews are often used in a qualitative paradigm emphasizing the idealistic perspective in terms of the meaning with which individuals imbue their situations. The interview itself is a social practice in which two or more people are actively involved and in which their exchanges lead to the creation of a contextually bound and mutually created story, involving all members as co-constructors of knowledge (Fontana & Frey, 2005; Kvale, Brinkmann, Anderssen, & Rygge, 2009). The interactional processes of generating an account of school practice through interviews affect the results obtained. Most of the studies discussing research interviews acknowledge the construction of meaning and knowledge.

However, the focus is primarily on individuals’ experiences, understandings, and views of particular phenomena and activities. Thus, we conclude that the practitioners receive more attention than the practices in the literature on interviews. A practice-based and sense-making approach shifts the focus from individuals in an organization to the organizational phenomenon, emphasizing social practices – and not individual practitioners – as the basic unit of analysis, which contrasts with exclusively observing and describing isolated practices within an organization or capturing what people do. However, following Nicolini (2013), the challenge is to capture practices as meaning-making, identity-forming, and order-producing activities.

The aspect of power becomes essential within every social practice and is therefore also important in interviewing practice. The concept of power is closely related to politics and decision-making. A recognized definition of power in organizations was developed by Dahl (1957): A has power over B to the extent that A can have B do something that B would otherwise not do. This definition highlights that the power that exits within social entities is relational. Power in organizations can be used to achieve personal benefits or can create positive results for the collective. Power can be understood as having both a positive and a negative potential (Hatch, 2011). There are many sources of power (e.g., personal characteristics, competence or circumstance), but the concept of authority is probably the most frequently highlighted because it is closely related to organizational hierarchy.

Within interviewing practice, we acknowledge a power asymmetry between the interviewer and the interviewees. Additional asymmetries of power are potential when groups of people are interviewed together, either through responsibilities within the studied organization or through informal structures within the practice. It is necessary to be aware of these elements of power and address them when planning, conducting, and analyzing the interview.

Focusing on the methodology of research, King (2004) concludes as follows: “The interview remains the most common method of data gathering in qualitative research, employed in various forms by every main theoretical and methodological approach within qualitative applied psychology” (p. 11). Approaches vary in how they elucidate knowledge and process and in their degree of interest in individual variations and collective perspectives (Brenner, 2006). The practice perspective developed by Nicolini (2013) combines both a realistic and an idealistic standpoint. Nicolini (2013) means that discourses alone, as expressions of an idealistic standpoint, are not sufficient to explain the world we live in.

 … Discursive practices thus need to be considered side by side with other forms of social and material activity. Practice theory is thus an alternative and a corrective to extreme forms of textualism that reduce organizations and the world to texts, signs, and communication. (p. 6)

A challenge in interviewing practice is then to handle the concrete, material, and bodily aspects within school organizations. We argue, therefore, for a semi-structured interview, combining open-ended questions, follow-up questions, and closed-ended questions. Kvale et al. (2009) present nine categories of questions often used in research interviews, including questions that open or introduce; questions that follow up, pursue, explore, and operationalize themes; and questions that structure the interview or interpret. Different techniques are presented within each category. For example, it is necessary when following up to capture the essence of what the interviewee says while simultaneously holding the research question in mind, which can be accomplished by listening for the use of unusual words, strong intonations, or other things signalling what the interviewee finds important. Follow-up questions about where, what, and who are relevant tools to approach the social and material activities and to get closer to the reality of school organizations.

An open question is often applied as a starting point, giving the interviewees the opportunity to explore a theme in their own terms, in their own meaning. The grand tour question is an open type of question often used by educational researchers, stemming from cognitive anthropology. It is used to obtain a broad description of a specific topic, to acquire insight into the language of the informant, and to identify significant topics within the culture of the informant (Brenner, 2006). Different interview forms use different modes of questioning. In a narrative interview, for example, the interviewer introduces the interview with a prompt about a specific episode or period but essentially remains a listener to the story of the interviewee, only asking for clarification or assisting the storytelling when needed (Kvale et al., 2009). Other approaches follow up and structure the interview more with topic-related questions, probing deeper into the interviewee’s meanings or internal structures within a topic, a culture, or a practice.

Procedure

We apply a self-assessment method that is presented below. We examine two of our own investigations by going through the interview guides, process, and results in a practice and sense-making perspective. Nicolini’s (2013) summary of practice theory and his five points (above) are used as the basis for constructing analytical questions. We reduced this to four questions:

• How do we focus on sense-making?

• How do we focus on activity and its processual character?

• How do we address the critical role of the body and material things?

• How do we address the importance of power and politics?

The point about agency is the basis for all the questions, and the questions in sum focus the point about knowledge as capacity to make meaning and to perform a social and material activity.

For each question, we put together a reflective story of our intentions and activities as researchers. Seeing patterns and drawing conclusions from own experience might be highly biased. Miles, Huberman, and Saldaña (2014) remind us that “ … people are meaning finders, even in the most genuinely chaotic data sets” (p. 303). We do not assert that we have solved that problem, but we have approached it by: (1) assigning an order for relating our experience led by the four questions above, (2) summarizing by highlighting the most prominent activities for each question (see Table 3), (3) assessing our own experienced effectiveness in performing interview activities in relation to the analytical questions (see Table 3), and (4) reflecting on the summarized “results.” To assess our own experienced effectiveness in performing interview activities we used the three degrees of “in-effective, mixed effective, and effective” inspired by the qualitative matrixes and assessment scales in Miles et al. (2014). The assessment focused on the degree of effectiveness we experienced or the extent to which interview activity provided us new information regarding the school organization’s practice in relation to meaning-making (the idealistic standpoint) and material and bodily issues (the realistic standpoint).

Empirical Illustrations

Illustration 1

The first illustration is an investigation in a Swedish municipality of 26 school leaders who were involved in a three-year (2014–2017) action research project (Blossing, Blom, & Persson, 2016). The overall aim of the project was to increase the school leaders’ knowledge regarding the importance of the local school organization and to strengthen the capacity for school improvement, with a focus on teaching and learning.

It is important in this article that the school leaders’ practice is captured by interviewees’ descriptions of its most prominent aspects. An interview guide was elaborated (see Table 1). The research object is specified in italics and followed by opening questions. These were intended to open a conversation regarding the research object.

Table 1. Interview guide.

Object and opening questions
Practice of the school leader
What does your practice consist of? What areas does it involve?   What activities does it involve? What do you do? In what situations? With whom? How often? What is the goal?
Sense-making
What is most important? In what do you engage the most? Why? What is the aim? In what practice area do you feel most at home? Where do you find your identity?
History
Look back on your professional life. Where does your engagement come from?
Organization
What is an organization? What does it mean to act organizationally? What does it mean in relation to what you think is important in your leadership practice?   How accustomed do you feel to doing that?   What importance has it had in your professional life?   Which of the things we have talked about do you share with other school leader colleagues? What is your joint engagement?

The interviews began with an open question and a task: “What do you consider as your main tasks as a school leader and which tasks occupy most of your time? Please write them down on post-it notes.” The school leaders were subsequently asked to talk about what they had written on the post-it notes. Field notes were taken during the interviews, all of which were digitally audio-recorded and subsequently transcribed verbatim. Below, we include a reflective story of the activities as a researcher in relation to the four analytical questions focusing on the practice and sense-making perspective.

How did we pay attention to sense-making?

Every new area in the interview guide was introduced with an open question. The open question was intended to let the respondent take any perspective he/she would like on the question, thus showing his or her way of making sense of the situation. In this interview, a new activity was tried by letting the interviewees write their areas of school leadership practice on post-it notes before they spoke, one area on each, which was to give even more time for the respondents to consider their own perspective, their own meaning. Then, they were asked to set out the note they thought was most prominent and begin talking about that. Another activity added after having talked through all the notes was asking in what field or activities they felt most comfortable and accustomed to, which was meant to check the underlying interpretation of their sense-making.

How did we pay attention to activity and its processual character?

The activity character of practice involves paying attention to concrete actions and how they unfold over time. It is frequently difficult to know whether what the respondents say is factual. Interviewer A checked this by repeating what he recognized as “what to do” and asking if this was what the interviewee meant. When repeating, Interviewer A did not merely say the same thing once more but attempted to fill in the gaps in the activity process.

Perhaps a principal says that his or her improvement strategy relies on “keeping the flow of ideas free, thus letting it permeate the practice of the school organization.” This seems to be an interesting strategy, but how is it realized? What activities embody this meaning? To understand the activity aspect of practice, Interviewer A asked: Could you please give me an example of how this flow of ideas is carried out in practice? Perhaps with the following clarification: Where and in what way could I observe this happening? Well, says the principal, when we have our staff meeting I present new projects funded by the municipality or the ministry, and if any teacher thinks it is interesting, I encourage them to apply for it. If any other teachers suggest other projects that they would like to plan for in their subject or class, I also encourage this. I think keeping the teachers creative and letting them realize their intentions is the best way to drive improvement projects.

Interviewer A followed up by asking how often this was undertaken (e.g., every week or every month) and if this had been a routine that they had been engaged in for a long period of time or if it was a recent activity. This was to capture the processual character of the activity.

How did we address the critical role of the body and material things?

Paying attention to the critical role of the body and material things means relating it closely to the activities and process in practice. In the example above – in which the principal talks about the staff meeting as an activity in relation to his strategy of keeping creativity flowing – interviewer A also asked where, when, and who was attending, in addition to asking how often these meetings occurred. Asking where might, for example, reveal that the meeting occurred in the teachers’ staff room, which has power implications because the pre-school teachers and the recreation pedagogues feel that this is not their “territory.” The when and who question might reveal that the pre-school teachers could not attend the meeting because it is held at a time of the day when they still have children to take care of.

How did we pay attention to the importance of power and politics?

Interviewer A’s main strategy for handling the power and politics of practice was to pay attention to it when selecting respondents. In larger projects with sufficient economic resources, he typically selected representatives from every professional group involved in the practice of teaching and learning at the school he investigated. In a Swedish elementary school with students ranging from pre-school (pupils 6 years old) to grade 9 (pupils 16 years old), this means selecting teachers from pre-school, lower-elementary (grades 1–6) and upper-elementary (grades 7–9). These groups of teachers have historically had somewhat different approaches to teaching and learning due to differences in their curricula, organization, status, and so on. In addition, different school subjects might be important to consider in selection because they signal different status. Traditionally, mathematics and science subjects or subjects covered by national tests have a high status. Moreover, Interviewer A interviewed different types of leaders separately, principals individually, teacher team leaders in groups, special pedagogues in groups, and so on.

In the research example regarding school leaders, only the principals and pre-school managers were selected. In this case, a mapping of the school organization of each school leader had already been conducted using the selection procedure noted above. However, often it was not possible to make this type of extensive selection for several reasons. Nonetheless, the practice involved relations among the agents at the school site, as Interviewer A asked the interviewee what he or she thought the teachers would answer if he asked them the same question. This activity aimed to virtually address the relations in the school organization and to find conceivable power and political patterns.

Power and politics features could also be noted when asking for concrete processual examples. Above, where the principal told about the staff meeting, it might be revealed that the health counselors always attended the meeting but that their questions seldom were addressed. Asking who attended the meeting and had the opportunity to express their meaning and investigating where the “bodies” of different personnel categories were was a way to focus on the importance of power.

Illustration 2

The second illustration is from interviews in a study of schools participating in a national initiative on developing lower-secondary schools (secondary schools in development [(UDIR, 2013)]. This intervention lasts for three semesters at each school and covers the 2013–2017 period. The research project, named CIESL (classroom interaction for enhanced student learning), is a mixed-method project that uses a combination of video observations, individual and focus group interviews, teacher logs, and questionnaires (Ertesvåg, 2014). One qualitative part of the project, which discusses the focus-group interviews, will constitute the second illustration in this paper. Ten schools participated, with 4–6 teachers in each group interview.

The interview guide (Table 2) was developed to begin with an open question. The aim of this question was to encourage open reflections by the members of the focus group. Italics specify the main topics. These open questions were followed by operationalized topic-related questions.

Table 2. Interview guide.

Object and opening questions
Knowledge of classroom management
How would you explain what classroom management involves?   Define classroom management. Give examples of what strong classroom management consists of. What are the most important elements in classroom management?
The teachers’ practical experience of classroom management
How do you work with classroom management?   How do you build relationships with students? Describe the aspects of classroom management you find challenging. Give examples.
Classroom management as a collaborative effort
In what way do you and your colleagues work together to learn more about classroom management?   Does the team have some responsibility for this work? Are there other groups who are responsible for this work? Is classroom management a topic that is discussed by the entire teaching staff? Have you developed a shared standard for classroom management? Can you give some examples of collaborative processes used to develop classroom management?
Transforming theory into practice
How can you transfer theoretical perspectives into your day-to-day work in the classroom? What challenges do you face in regard to transforming theory into practice? Which methods do you think are the most effective in helping teachers transform theory into practice? Give examples. How do you work with classroom management theoretically?
The organization’s role in developing teachers’ classroom management skills
How does the school as an organization stimulate/facilitate teachers’ classroom management efforts?   Can you describe the classroom management learning process at the individual, team, and school levels? Give examples. Do the teachers observe each other’s performance in the classroom? If so, what effect has this had, if any? Are there any organizational barriers to improving classroom management?   Do the members of the school’s leadership team stimulate and facilitate teachers’ work with classroom management? Give examples.

How did we pay attention to sense-making?

In the interview guide, each topic began with an open question intended to capture the informant’s perspective in a manner that minimizes the researcher’s influence. Interviewer B was searching for the informant’s own opinion related to the concept of sense-making. When using open questions, the answers may give the interviewer certain new and unexpected information. For example, the open question “How would you explain what classroom management is about?” revealed that the teachers’ understanding about classroom management is generally unclear and heterogeneous.

After the open question, we followed up with more structured questions on specific topics. Through these follow-up questions, the influence of the researcher on the conversation grew.

How did we pay attention to activity and its processual character?

Most of the questions in the interview guide focused on activity and processes relating to classroom management and were deduced from the research questions. In the focus-group interview, answers regarding activities and different processes were often commented on by other group members, which provided an opportunity to collect a rich amount of data.

Interviewer B and colleagues followed up the questions about activity and processes and encouraged their informants to give examples. Such examples told us what were the most important factors in the speakers’ experience. We could also obtain new insights for other research topics and questions.

How did we address the critical role of the body and material things?

Asking the teachers who is responsible for different actions when implementing theories related to classroom management was one approach to capturing the role of the body. This question was followed up when Interviewer B and colleagues asked for examples.

There were questions regarding the methods the teachers used in their working process with classroom management, such as the following: “Which methods do you think are the most effective in helping teachers transform theory into practice?” This question was followed up by the teachers’ examples and provided an opportunity to grasp what material things they had used in this work and how they had used them in the schools. The question regarding barriers in the organization also represented an opportunity to talk about material things.

How did we pay attention to the importance of power and politics?

The teachers were all volunteers and were interviewed in focus groups. None had a leadership role. The principals were interviewed individually in this research project with a focus on their roles as leaders in the change processes. It is probably easier for teachers to speak about sensitive issues in the organization (e.g., the role of the school’s leadership and barriers to intervention) when there are no formal leaders in the group. Likewise, the principals may feel less inhibited about disclosing their perspective in individual interviews. When Interviewer B decided to divide the informants into two groups, teachers and principals, the intention was for the informants to speak more openly about power without experiencing a power imbalance during the interviews. Focus groups seemed to be a good method when the subject matter was controversial, complex, and sensitive.

Summary

Table 3 summarizes our empirical illustrations, focusing on the activities of the interviewer regarding the four analytical questions in relation to practice theory and sense-making. For each question, the interviewer activity is listed, as well as an assessment of our own experienced effectiveness in performing interview activities in relation to the analytical questions.

Table 3. A summary of interview activities and an assessment of experienced effectiveness.

Analytical Question	Illustration I		Illustration II
	Interviewer activity	Assessment	Interviewer activity	Assessment
How do we pay attention to sense-making?	Asking an open question and using the post-it notes tool.	Effective	The combination of an initial open question and further questions specific to the theoretical topics. Focus-group interviews help participants to remember the past when they listen to the other teachers’ reflections.	Effective
How do we pay attention to activity and its processual character?	Asking for concrete examples. Repeating the concrete activities told by the respondents, filling in the gaps in the process to check its validity. Asking questions regarding when and how often; the history of the activity; whether it has been a routine for a long time.	Effective	Asking directly about activity and processes. Focusing on examples from the teachers. Encouraging them to be specific in their answers. The focus-group interview stimulates reflections about the school’s activity and processes when the teachers reflect together.	Effective
How do we address the critical role of body and material things?	Asking questions of where (in what material situation) and who and how these relate.	Mixed effective	Asking questions about responsibility and using the word “who” in the questions. Asking about methods and stimulating to give examples.	Mixed effective
How do we pay attention to the importance of power and politics?	Sampling and organizing respondents from different interest groups. Asking questions about tensions or conflicts in the work and what the content of these conflicts has been.	In-effective	The focus groups consist only of teachers. The principals have their own individual interviews. We asked the teachers questions about leadership and organizational issues. Barriers to innovation proved to be a sensitive and challenging topic to capture.	In-effective

Concluding Remarks

The aim of this article was to discuss how to interview to investigate the practice of school organizations by describing and systematically reflecting upon the framework and method we employed in our research. We will consider some general reflections from undertaking this self-evaluation process before answering the research question.

We found it fruitful to create questions in line with the main topics in practice theory (Nicolini, 2013) and the theory of sense-making in organizations (Weick et al., 2005), that is, sense-making, activity and processes, body and material things, and politics and power. We posit that these sense-making and practice theory issues underpin the process of developing questions in interview guides to investigate school organizational improvement practices.

We reflect, in particular, on the need for the interview guide to include both open and more topic-related questions. During this self-evaluation process, we have experienced how this inclusion can help focus a sense-making and practice perspective and thus capture the school improvement process. We find it important to begin with an open approach, which allows informants to voice their own opinions and which may induce some unexpected insights. This setup helps the interviewer to begin discovering the core value in sense-making, in line with the observation by King (2004) that these types of questions aim to reveal the interviewees’ understanding of the research topics. Miles et al. (2014) suggest a combination of open and tight topic-focused questions when designing an interview guide. The topic-related questions ensure that the interviewer remains focused on the issues being investigated. We add that it also helps to remain focused on the practice perspective in terms of capturing the realistic aspects of the school organization, such as their activities and materiality.

We now move on to the research questions: (1) What are the activities the interviewer uses to capture improvement practices in school organizations? From Table 3, the activities can be decomposed into four categories: (1) interview questions, (2) tools, (3) samplings, and (4) interview groupings. Concerning Interview Question 1, an initial opening question was used to make space for the interviewee to express his/her opinion and was followed up by deeper questions. We also probed for concrete examples and asked when, how, and how often. We probed the timing of each activity and process. We filled in the gaps in the interviewees’ stories by asking about their part in the process. We asked questions of where, in what situation, and with whom to seize the physical and material aspects. Another way of asking this was to ask questions about responsibility. Our structuring of the interview questions led the conversation into specific dimensions within the organizations, helping us to get information about desired areas and practices. We are aware of Nicolini’s (2009, 2013) argument that we direct the conversation through our prompts and structure. We argue, however, that variations of open questions maintain Weick’s (2001) sense-making perspective by helping interviewees give meaning to their practice through a retrospective process. Additionally, the conscious use of follow-up questions, asking for concretizing and factual understanding, focuses the reality of the processes and activities within the school practice.

The only tool (2) we used was post-it notes in combination with the initial opening question to create even more space for the interviewee to develop his/her opinion regarding the question asked. To give an image of this category, other possible tools might have been colour crayons, cards with symbols, or short video sequences on YouTube extending or “helping” to widen or complement the textual aspects of communicating in an interview. Sampling (3) was used to separate between formal power positions of principals and teachers, and interview groupings (4) were used with different motivations. Individual principal interviews were used because principals have an individual leadership position and mostly work alone, and the teachers were interviewed in groups because they work in teams and might help one another to remember past activities and processes.

Concerning Research Question 2, we experienced ourselves as effective in terms of addressing (1) the sense-making, (2) activity, and process aspects but as having mixed effectiveness in terms of addressing (3) the critical role of bodily and material issues. We attempted to do so by asking where and in what situation certain activities occurred. We attempted to locate the “bodily origin” of the activity by asking who and other questions about the responsibility for a certain activity. We found ourselves ineffective in terms of (4) focusing on power and politics. We conclude that we mostly did this in the sampling and sometimes in asking questions about tensions, conflicts, and barriers to innovation as possible ways of making one’s voice heard. However, because we did not always capture the material and bodily elements, we were not entirely successful in capturing the power relations in different situations in the school organization. We reflect that it is essential to consider the material situation, such as which persons are present in a specific situation, to be able to ask questions about power relations.

Individual and focus-group interviews can constitute an interesting combination for grasping sense-made school practice. The two forms of interviews can offer different approaches to answering research questions. Performing research on organizations is complex business (Buchanan & Bryman, 2011). One element of this complexity is the researcher’s attempt to capture people’s opinions at both the individual and the collective levels. Focus-group interviews allow the researcher to listen to and observe exchanges that are revealing on both levels. In an individual interview, the researcher must ask specific questions about the collective level, whereas a group perspective may offer broader insights into the collective level through the interactions in the group. The exchanges in the focus group can also uncover different memories and perspectives regarding retrospective processes (Weick, 2001), concerning how respondents capture the symbols, ideas, observations, and patterns used in the past and reflect over the context of today and the future. The moderator should have these themes in mind throughout the interview. In a focus-group interview, participants can stimulate discussion and help one another to remember the past and reflect on the context of the present and the future.

An overall reflection is that the textual aspects tended to dominate interview activities, whereas the bodily and material aspects of practice seemed more elusive. Although we experienced that our different interview activities clearly addressed certain meaning-making and material aspects, we presume that developing the activities could further enhance our research on local school organizations and the capacity to improve. We noticed, for example, that open-ended questions worked well to grasp the meaning or ideas that underpinned the work in the school organization, while more structured questions about who, where, and when helped us to capture the material and realistic aspect. However, these interview activities could indeed be improved.

For qualitative investigations, we recommend that material and sense-making aspects underpin the process of developing questions in interview guides to investigate the often-contradictory talk and action (Brunsson, 2002) of local school organization practices and organization practices in general. We suggest keeping the four activities (interview questions, tools, sampling, and interview grouping) we have revealed in mind to address sense-making as well as the material, bodily, and power aspects of practice. Concerning interview questions, we stress that it is important to start with open questions focusing on the sense-making process, and gradually move on to specific questions focusing on the bodily and material aspects of practice, asking where, who, and how to capture organizational situations and activities. In particular, we recommend paying attention to power relations when sampling and grouping the respondents. Finally, we encourage researchers to innovate “tools” to use in the interview situation in order to avoid “textual” dominance and to orientate the focus towards the realistic side of the organization.

This reflective article needs to be followed up by empirical research on real interview situations. The activities found here as well as the practice and sense-making elements could be areas to further investigate. Of particular interest is retrospective interview questions as the key in the sense-making process that reveal symbols or cues that shape the understanding and identity of the practitioners. What do respondents remember, and how far back? How can we be sure that respondents’ statements indicate “cues” and are not just haphazard accounts? How do these remembered statements regarding the practice vary between individual and focus group interviews? What happens if several interview rounds are performed? There is also a need to relate these questions to different organizational practices, as in our case, with school practices of school leaders, teachers, counselors, and teams.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Council of Norway (CIESL-Project, Classroom Interaction for Enhanced Student Learning) [grant number 238003/H20] and the Swedish municipality of Lerum.