Organizing for instruction in education systems and school organizations: how the subject matters

Abstract

Teaching, the core technology of schooling, is an essential consideration in investigations of education systems and school organizations. Taking teaching seriously as an explanatory variable in research on education systems and organizations necessitates moving beyond treating it as a unitary practice, so as to take account of the school subjects implicated in the work. Building on and extending earlier work, in this paper we examine subject matter differences in how one education system (Local Educational Agency) and its elementary schools organize for instruction in the core elementary school subjects. Specifically, this paper explores how education leaders and teachers in one local American school district interact with one another with respect to advice and information about teaching and learning in literacy, mathematics and science. We examine similarities and differences in school staff members’ advice and information networks and consider how these differences relate to the formal organizational infrastructure intended to support instruction.

Keywords:

• instructional improvement
• instructional systems
• school organization
• school subject matter
• social networks

Acknowledgements

Work on this article was supported by NebraskaMATH Study, a Distributed Leadership Study project (http://www.distributedleadership.org/DLS/projects), funded by a research grant from the National Science Foundation (DUE-0831835). We gratefully acknowledge our collaborators at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, including Jim Lewis, Carolyn Edwards, Ruth Heaton and Wendy Smith. The work was also supported by the Distributed Leadership Studies funded by research grants from the National Science Foundation (REC-9873583, RETA Grant # EHR-0412510). Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy and Institute for Policy Research supported this work. All opinions and conclusions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any funding agency.

Notes

1. Given the relative similarity in network size across schools, we present unstandardized measures in this paper so that the data could be interpreted more meaningfully. Our analysis of the standardized measures showed slightly larger differences between groups; thus, our presentation of the unstandardized measures does not overreport our findings.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James P. Spillane

James P. Spillane is the Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin professor in Learning and Organizational Change at the School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University, 2120 Campus Drive, Annenberg Hall 208, Evanston, IL 60208, USA; email: [email protected]. He has published extensively on issues of education policy, policy implementation, school reform and school leadership.

Megan Hopkins

Megan Hopkins is an assistant professor of education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Pennsylvania State University, Chambers Building, University Park, PA 16802, USA; email: [email protected]. Her interests centre on the intersections of education policy, school organization, teacher education and curriculum and instruction.