Search results

Seashore Louis has enjoyed a long and productive career, contributing many key understandings to the field; among them, foundational theorizing regarding professional community, organizational learning and the role of principal leadership in organizational and student learning. In each, the role of organizational change and its bearing on school improvement has been a key focus of her research. Central to Seashore Louis' organizational change theorizing has been the contention that organizations are expected to produce outcomes (i.e. that they exist to do things), and in turn, those outcomes have consequences for the organization and its members. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the impact her work has had on the field of educational leadership research.

This article traces the development of Karen Seashore Louis' contribution to and work in organizational theory.

By focusing on Seashore Louis' contribution to our understanding of how professionals learn, both individually and together, and what they do with that information and knowledge, this article will synthesize Seashore Louis' contributions to understanding how change is established, enacted and experienced in schools, as well as how those understandings are informed by theorizing about the role of school culture, openness to new ideas and understandings, alternatives and multiple perspectives, and caring as it relates to leading schools.

The authors’ experience of learning from and with Karen Seashore Louis has deepened the authors’ own understandings of how schools work, how teachers and leaders learn, and the ways in which school organizations can thrive. Key to her influence is her ability to generate and use conceptual and theoretical lenses to explain why people act the ways they do, and how understanding those actions can help us all to improve. Her theorizing has provided the field clarity about what works, where it works and why it works while still problematizing our understandings and pushing for greater depth of understanding and analysis.

The article asserts that systems thinking and its concurrent organizational processes are central organizing structures in schools, yet “hide in plain sight” and are therefore underexplored and underutilized in leadership theorizing.

By exploring the theoretical literature concerning school organization and leadership, tensions and contradictions within the literature are surfaced. The article examines and critiques distributed leadership theory and provides new directions for thinking about leadership practice based on school organization literature.

Recent work (Kruse and Johnson, 2017; Murphy, 2015, 2016) suggests that schools are far too complex to be led and managed by a single dedicated leader, yet the practice of leadership remains largely reified within the literature (Bryk et al., 2015), Insofar as leadership theory relies on narratives derived from and about work of “the” leader, it ignores the larger system. A contrasting literature is that of distributed leadership (Gronn, 2000; Spillane, 2006). Yet, even within that literature, the focus remains on interpersonal interactions and conjoint actions concerning school operation. While not dismissing the importance of leadership as a theoretical and practical construct, thinking about leadership as less a property of individuals and more a variable within effective organizational practice holds promise for the study of educational leadership.

This article extends the existing literature by suggesting how systems processes and structures serve school leaders in addressing the leadership demands of fostering continuous (rather than episodic) change, processing information and creating contextual local knowledge with the potential to enhance school outcomes.

This paper explores how individual and collective burnout has become an organizational concern for school leaders, why burnout matters and what might be done to address the problems individual and organizational burnout generates.

This paper presents an analysis of the current literature regarding individual and collective burnout, identifies contributing factors and explores the impacts of each. Following a discussion and synthesis of the research literature, implications for practice are presented.

Highlighting exhaustion as a factor in burnout and as a significant consequence of stress, the paper proposes specific individual teacher and leader actions focused on addressing broad organizational responses with the potential to address the consequences of burnout including depersonalization, cynicism, emotional and compassion fatigue, and a loss of individual and collective efficacy. The authors argue that for burnout to be successfully mitigated, urgent strategic and focused organizational responses are essential to identify, track, and counter individual and collective burnout.

Much of the existing burnout literature focuses on the individual as the locus of experience and inquiry. The authors contend that this predominant focus on individual experience is insufficient to address systemic organizational issues, problems and concerns facing educational organizations that perpetuates and accelerates the experience of individuals. This paper contribution elevates conceptions of and discussions about burnout to the organizational level and reframes the conversation by focusing on organizational responses.

Presents an analysis of the potential for continuous improvement planning teams to foster organizational learning and professional community in three school district teams. The findings of this three‐year study suggest that carefully orchestrated continuous improvement efforts can succeed in creating conditions responsive to the development of both learning and community. Organizational factors that influence development of both learning and community include: the development of leadership within and among faculty; ongoing focus on data‐driven decision making and the creation of venues for dense interpersonal dialogue related to issues of curriculum and instruction. The findings further suggest that the context of instruction and the work of instruction are important factors in sustaining learning and community.

Reform efforts increasingly promote collaboration among faculty and staff in schools with the intent to increase student achievement. Central to this literature is a focus on the members of the school's community to learn as individuals and as a community. Called organizational learning, this discussion has most commonly developed notions of knowledge acquisition and use, this study extends existing theory in organizational learning to include the construct of memory as an important organizational tool for staff and faculty to advance innovation and student achievement. Key to the school organization's ability to use memory in ways that foster the potential for change are the organizational member's capacity for using data within the school structure, to develop both information systems and knowledge structures, the group's ability to develop a coherent and shared memory of events and practices and school leader's capacity to apply aspects of wisdom theory to each problem resolving opportunity.

This chapter argues we should not regard school-to-school collaboration as simply a mechanism for outcome-driven improvement but rather consider the establishment of teacher relationships as the necessary priority when building highly effective collaborative networks. By revisiting the research of Sandra Kruse, Amanda Datnow and Andy Hargreaves, we develop an additional tool to Hood’s matrix of regulation and cohesion in an effort to position collaborative networks in the context of international private fee-paying schools. The tool visualizes the collaborative network development as a relationship continuum in which time is the necessary driver of a network’s success. The 12 Asian private international schools in the case study were given collaborative framework guidance drawn from multiple sources. Subsequently, the enablers and hindrances reported by the collaboration leads highlight the need for trust and teacher agency development to be prioritized by leadership. Finally, on sharing some lessons learned from the case study, we close by arguing the value of collaboration lies in opening the door to allow for agenetic cultures that build reflexive practitioners.

Reflecting on professional learning networks (PLN) in rural and equity-seeking spaces, the authors foreground the importance of “relational space” in studying PLNs in this commentary. The authors argue that while the complexity of taking a relational approach is challenging, it offers an important and necessary perspective, one which is often implicit in the studies featured in this book but not explicitly considered. The chapter is organized around three broad concepts from social network theory – boundedness, connectedness, and mutuality – which serve as starting points for shifting our gaze from formal system structures to more deeply interrogating the informal relational spaces within PLNs. The authors conclude with a call to make use of network theory and methods on their own, and in complement to other literatures, to do so.