Architectures for Learning: A Comparative Analysis of Two Urban School Districts

This article explores the usefulness of communities of practice theory for understanding how districts can create organizational environments that foster teachers’ opportunities to learn the new ideas and practices required to carry out ambitious reforms. It draws on data from a longitudinal study of the implementation of ambitious mathematics curricula in two urban districts. By analyzing the contrasting ways that teachers in two schools in each district were linked to each other and reform efforts at the district level, the article shows how the district reform effort in one district led to significant opportunities for teacher learning and alignment with reform goals while efforts in the other district coordinated action but failed to spur meaningful opportunities for teacher learning. The article closes with implications for policy and practice.

[1]  Andrew C. Porter,et al.  National Standards and School Improvement in the 1990s: Issues and Promise , 1994, American Journal of Education.

[2]  M. Stein,et al.  Communities of Practice Theory and the Role of Teacher Professional Community in Policy Implementation , 2006 .

[3]  S. D. Berkowitz,et al.  Social Structures: A Network Approach , 1989 .

[4]  J. Greeno.  THE SITUATIVITY OF KNOWING, LEARNING, AND RESEARCH , 1998 .

[5]  J. Brown,et al.  Organizational Learning and Communities-of-Practice: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning, and Innovation , 1991 .

[6]  Diane Vaughan,et al.  The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA , 1996 .

[7]  Charles E. Bidwell,et al.  The Collegial Focus: Teaching Fields, Collegial Relationships, and Instructional Practice in American High Schools. , 1999 .

[8]  K. Howe.  Validity in Educational Research , 1992 .

[9]  Etienne Wenger,et al.  Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity , 1998 .

[10]  B. Achinstein,et al.  Conflict Amid Community: The Micropolitics of Teacher Collaboration. , 2002 .

[11]  J. Little.  Norms of Collegiality and Experimentation: Workplace Conditions of School Success , 1982 .

[12]  A. Collins,et al.  Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning , 1989 .

[13]  James P. Spillane,et al.  Policy Implementation and Cognition: Reframing and Refocusing Implementation Research , 2002 .

[14]  T. Hatch,et al.  Crafting Coherence: How Schools Strategically Manage Multiple, External Demands , 2004 .

[15]  Pamela Jordan.  Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques , 1994 .

[16]  S. D. Berkowitz,et al.  Social Structures: A Network Approach , 1989 .

[17]  James P. Spillane.  External reform initiatives and teachers' efforts to reconstruct their practice: The mediating role of teachers' zones of enactment , 1999 .

[18]  J. Morse.  Qualitative data analysis (2nd ed): Mathew B. Miles and A. Michael Huberman. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994. Price: $65.00 hardback, $32.00 paperback. 238 pp , 1996 .

[19]  Paul Cobb,et al.  Situating Teachers’ Instructional Practices in the Institutional Setting of the School and District , 2003 .

[20]  Mary Kay Stein,et al.  Building Student Capacity for Mathematical Thinking and Reasoning: An Analysis of Mathematical Tasks Used in Reform Classrooms , 1996 .

[21]  B. Rogoff.  Apprenticeship in Thinking: Cognitive Development in Social Context , 1990 .

[22]  Amy M. Hightower,et al.  School districts and instructional renewal , 2002 .

[23]  Barry Wellman,et al.  An egocentric network tale: comment on Bien et al. (1991) , 1993 .

[24]  Marshall S. Smith,et al.  Systemic school reform , 1990 .

[25]  Andrew C. Porter,et al.  How Do District Management and Implementation Strategies Relate to the Quality of the Professional Development That Districts Provide to Teachers , 2002 .

[26]  J. Little.  The Persistence of Privacy: Autonomy and Initiative in Teachers' Professional Relations , 1990, Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education.

[27]  W. Frawley.  Mind as Action , 1998, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[28]  Etienne Wenger,et al.  Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation , 1991 .

[29]  James P. Spillane,et al.  Implementing State Standards for Science Education: What District Policy Makers Make of the Hoopla. , 2000 .

[30]  Margaret Riel,et al.  Analyzing Teachers’ Professional Interactions in a School as Social Capital: A Social Network Approach , 2009, Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education.

[31]  James P. Spillane,et al.  Reform and Teaching: Exploring Patterns of Practice in the Context of National and State Mathematics Reforms , 1999 .

[32]  C. Coburn,et al.  Collective Sensemaking about Reading: How Teachers Mediate Reading Policy in Their Professional Communities , 2001 .

[33]  M. Lipsky,et al.  Street-Level Bureaucrats and Institutional Innovation: Implementing Special-Education Reform , 1977 .

[34]  E. Wenger,et al.  Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier , 2000 .

[35]  Eric J Miller,et al.  Collecting Social Network Data to Study Social Activity-Travel Behavior: An Egocentric Approach , 2008 .

[36]  Anthony S. Bryk,et al.  Coherence : What It Is and Why It Should Guide School Improvement Policy , 2002 .

[37]  James P. Spillane.  Cognition and Policy Implementation: District Policymakers and the Reform of Mathematics Education , 2000 .

[38]  A. Portes.  Social Capital: Its Origins and Applications in Modern Sociology , 1998 .

[39]  Chrysan Gallucci,et al.  Communities of Practice and the Mediation of Teachers' Responses to Standards-based Reform. , 2003 .

[40]  James P. Spillane.  State Policy and the Non-Monolithic Nature of the Local School District: Organizational and Professional Considerations , 1998 .

[41]  Charles E. Bidwell,et al.  The Collegial Focus and High School Students' Achievement , 2001 .

[42]  Larry Cuban.  How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms, 1890-1990 , 1984 .

[43]  S. Heine,et al.  Cultural psychology. , 2010, Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science.

[44]  James P. Spillane.  Primary school leadership practice: how the subject matters1 , 2005 .

[45]  J. Little,et al.  Inside Teacher Community: Representations of Classroom Practice. , 2003 .

[46]  H. Hill.  Policy Is Not Enough: Language and the Interpretation of State Standards , 2001 .

[47]  M. Feldman,et al.  Reconceptualizing Organizational Routines as a Source of Flexibility and Change , 2003 .

[48]  J. Talbert,et al.  Professional Communities and the Work of High School Teaching , 2001 .

[49]  Susan Leigh Star,et al.  Institutional Ecology, `Translations' and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39 , 1989 .

[50]  Fangcheng Tang,et al.  Network Structure and Knowledge Transfer , 2007, International Conference on Computational Science.

[51]  C. Coburn,et al.  Beyond Decoupling: Rethinking the Relationship Between the Institutional Environment and the Classroom , 2004 .

[52]  D. Cohen,et al.  Learning Policy: When State Education Reform Works , 2001 .