Who knows

I have some questions about teachers, teaching, and the burden of accountability. How personal is a teacher's practice? How individualized is instruction for each child? If the general public is supporting public schools, how can schools justify inconsistencies from lesson to lesson, classroom to classroom, and school to school? How much does the public know about what's happening in their schools?

I think coaches are an interesting link between public policy and the district and individual teachers and their teaching practices. Coaches can peer into multiple classrooms, determine what's going on, and maybe change things or encourage things, or bring back some information about implementation. Coaches deal with multiple pressures, from multiple sources, and juggle many teachers. Coaches may or many not reduce inconsistencies. What do coaches need to know- about instruction, about individual teachers, about the context of the school, about the nature of the policy- to fulfill their role? Do coaches have access to the information they need? Why or why not? Who could have the knowledge and capacity to change teachers' instructional practices?

No circles

How do you keep your work and the arguments within your work nice and tidy? I feel like a lot of my ideas are circular, and circular logic doesn't always work out so well.

I'd like my polisci paper to go somewhere....I know it should examine literature that plays a role in training teachers, principals, and/or superintendents and check how that literature is presenting the way that schools, as terrifically complex organizations, work- or don't work.

The point is not how these practitioners are trained. The point is not about teacher education (a whole other ball of wax). Hmm, it's actually helping me to write about what my paper will NOT be about!

The point IS to snoop around and figure out how this literature is using organization theory.

• Does the literature think organizations are rational places?
  
• Does it think people matter in organizations?
  
• Does it think that the boss should make all decisions?

Many worlds

POME immersed me into the deep pool of sociology, and I quickly became attracted to organizational theory and its cousin--institutional theory. This semester I'm in a different world with different assumptions; I'm taking a political science course, and sometimes I even feel unfaithful ;)

In polisci, folks are comfortable with assuming that people, cities, our nation, and the world work, for the most part, in rational ways. They talk about bureaucrats administrations accomplishing big goals and don't always mention the gory details involved!

But there's one framework from Kaufman that I like, and it could be useful for education and policy implementation. He mentions three approaches to bureaucracy:

1. Representativeness- We want to vote and have local control for everyone doing anything related to running/administering our government. I feel like some charter school supporters are in this camp.
   
2. Neutral competence- It would be a good idea to have people who have the appropriate skills and knowledge to work in government administrations and implement policy; don't even worry about their political stance. School reformers who want to train teachers till the cows come home ascribe to this.
   
3. Executive leadership-Should have someone controlling all the administrative units that are floating about. When we talk about the role of districts and particularly effective superintendents, I think we're commending them for coordinating and integrating efforts to improve schools.
   

Two courses, two papers, one goal

I will be taking two meaty courses during the fall semester- Public Organization Theory and Qualitative Methods. The organization theory course is in the Political Science department at Berkeley and will let me go deeper into theories related to organizational change and policy implementation. The methods course will teach me how to design a rigorous research project, including choosing sites and informants, writing interview questions, and coding data.

It seems possible for the poli sci course paper to be a draft of a literature review on organizational change. I could use organization theory to analyze literature, but I need to think more about WHAT literature ;) Hmm.

I hope to write a paper for the methods course that includes some preliminary findings about catalytic strength. But I do not think my school sites will be Reading First schools, so I need to think more about the specific policies being implemented by school level actors. Hmm, again :)

Yes, there's much to think about, but it sustains me to draw connections between my course work and my numero-uno goal of making significant progress this school year!