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Title
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Is Sustainability of Schooling Improvement an Article of Faith, or Can It Be Deliberately Crafted?
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Abstract/Description
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Sustainability of reform has been characterised in various ways in the literature, but most often as some sort of endurance test for educators. School leaders and teachers are left to weather the “tempests” of reduced funding, shifting priorities, and constant turnover of teachers and leaders (Wood, 2007). The review of research literature exposes sustainability as a problematic notion, since a plethora of ideas about school-based and system conditions has been reported and very few studies connect these conditions to ongoing achievement of student outcomes (Timperley, Wilson, Barrar & Fung, 2007). Rarely have researchers regarded sustainability in terms of how one project melds into the next initiative in a school. For the most part, schools have to beat their own path towards a nebulous destination, and they do. This research reframes sustainability as two interdependent and dynamic continua that form the conceptual framework, namely, coherence of effective instructional practices and co- and self-regulated inquiry. The purpose was to investigate the significance of these dimensions in two interconnected studies using a mixed methods case study approach. Study 1 examined 16 schools, tracking students’ literacy achievement and participants’ actions in the two years following their participation in a national literacy programme in New Zealand. Ten of the thirteen schools that presented their data maintained or improved their gains in student achievement. Study 2 investigated four of these schools in more depth over 2006–08, their selection contingent on their having varied combinations of the framework dimensions and distinctively different mediating and outcome variables. Analysis of findings from both studies suggested that participants’ perspectives of sustainability were limited to a single domain and to maintenance of newly developed practices, rather than being focused on an improvement paradigm. Inquiry as a model for schooling improvement was not fully embedded in these schools. However, when evidence-based practices were more systematically applied, this condition appeared to be a sufficient threshold to support sustained outcomes for new cohorts of students. Engaging with persistent issues of underachievement and establishing coherence of instructional practices were more strongly evidenced in those schools that improved on their achievement gains over time.
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Date
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2010
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Publisher
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The University of Auckland
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Open access/full-text available
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en
Yes
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Peer reviewed
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en
No
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Citation
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O’Connell, P. J. (2010). Is Sustainability of Schooling Improvement an Article of Faith, or Can It Be Deliberately Crafted? [Ph.D., The University of Auckland]. https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/handle/2292/5795
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Place
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Auckland, NZ
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Rights
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Items in ResearchSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.
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Type
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Ph.D.
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