Beyond Ritualized Rationality: Organizational Dynamics of Instructionally-Focused Continuous Improvement

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Title: Beyond Ritualized Rationality: Organizational Dynamics of Instructionally-Focused Continuous Improvement
Abstract/Description: With the following chapter, our purpose is to examine organizational dynamics that support instructionally-focused continuous improvement: that is, improvement activity aimed at increasing effectiveness in the primary educational function of schools – classroom instruction. Our chapter is not a ‘how to’ guide. Rather, it is an embedded analysis of conditions in and among three interdependent levels of organization that enable and complicate instructionally-focused continuous improvement:

-Schools as the locus of classroom instruction.
-Networks as novel resources supporting instructional improvement.
-Educational environments that provide essential resources for schools and networks, that accord them legitimacy, and that establish and enforce expectations for their performance.

Our argument is that history tilts the field more toward ritualized rationality than toward instructionally-focused continuous improvement, and that tipping the field in the other direction will depend as much on dynamics in and among agencies, organizations, and interests in educational environments as on dynamics in and among schools and networks. The argument turns on an analysis of competing logics – modes of thinking and reasoning – at each level of organization that push improvement and instruction toward and away from each other: a ‘logic of confidence’ in schools; an ‘evolutionary logic’ in networks; and a ‘research-development-diffusion-utilization logic’ in environments. It also turns on an analysis of longstanding pulls in education away from cooperation and coordination and toward fragmentation and incoherence.; [Excerpted from Sage Website]
Author/creator: See all items with this value Peurach, Donald J.; Penuel, William R.; Russell, Jennifer Lin
Date: 2018
In publication: The Sage Handbook of School Organization
Pages: 465-489
Resource type: Research/Scholarly Media
Resource status/form: en Published Text
Scholarship genre: en Theoretical; en Historical
IRE Approach/Concept: Continuous Improvement; Organizational Dynamics; School Improvement Networks/Networks for School Improvement (NSI); Infrastructure
Open access/full-text available: en No
DOI: 10.4135/9781526465542.n28
URL: Chapter Link (via Publisher)
Citation: Peurach, D., Penuel, W., & Russell, J. (2018). Beyond Ritualized Rationality: Organizational Dynamics of Instructionally-Focused Continuous Improvement. The Sage Handbook of School Organization, Query date: 2020-06-13 16:13:41, 465–489.
Cited in: Critical Perspectives on the Contexts of Improvement Research in Education; Conclusion: Building the Field of Improvement Research in Education; The Work of Improvement; Critical Perspectives on Educational Innovation and Improvement Science