The emotional ecology of school improvement culture. Charged meanings and common moral purpose

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-01-2018-0014
Published date06 August 2018
Pages488-503
Date06 August 2018
AuthorPeter Demerath
Subject MatterEducation,Administration & policy in education,School administration/policy,Educational administration,Leadership in education
The emotional ecology of school
improvement culture
Charged meanings and common moral purpose
Peter Demerath
Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy and Development,
University of Minnesota System, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to understand how high-performing schools develop and sustain
improvement culture. While school culture has consistently been identified as an essential feature of
high-performing schools, many of the ways in which culture shapes specific improvement efforts remain
unclear. The paper draws on new research from social cognitive neuroscience and the anthropology and
sociology of emotion to account for the relative impact of various meanings within school culture and how
school commitment is enacted.
Design/methodology/approach The analysis here draws on three years of ethnographic data collected
in Harrison High School (HHS) in an urban public school district in River City, a large metropolitan area in the
Midwestern USA. Though the schools surrounding community had been socioeconomically depressed for
many years, Harrison was selected for the study largely because of its steady improvement trajectory: in
December, 2013, it was deemed a Celebrationschool under the states Multiple Measurement Rating system.
The paper focuses on a period of time between 2013 and 2015, when the school was struggling to implement
and localize a district-mandated push-in inclusion policy.
Findings Study data suggest that the schools eventual success in localizing the new inclusion policy was
due in large part to a set of core interlocking feedback loops that generated specific emotionally charged
meanings which guided its priorities, practices and direction. Specifically, the feedback loops explain how
staff members and leaders generated and sustained empathy for students from disadvantaged backgrounds,
optimism in their capabilities and motivation to help them learn and flourish. Furthermore they show how
school leaders and staff members generated and sustained confidence and trust in their colleaguesabilities to
collaboratively learn and solve problems.
Originality/value The model of the schools emotional ecology presented here connects two domains of
educational practice that are frequently analyzed separately: teaching and learning, and organization and
leadership. The paper shows how several key features of high-performing schools are actually made and
re-made through the everyday practices of leaders and staff members, including relational trust, academic
optimism and collective efficacy. In sum, the charged meanings described here contributed to leadersand
staff memberscommitment to the school, its students and each other and what Florek (2016) has referred to
as their common moral purpose.
Keywords Change, Organizational culture, Leadership, Beliefs, Commitment, Secondary schools
Paper type Research paper
This paper examines the emotional ecology underlying the improvement culture of a
beating the oddsUS urban high school. Using an anthropological approach and
ethnographic methods, the paper identifies six core interlocking feedback loops that
generated specific emotionally charged meanings which powered the schools improvement
efforts. The analysis here draws on three years of ethnographic data collected in Harrison
High School (HHS) in an urban public school district in River City, a large metropolitan area
in the Midwestern USA. Though the schools surrounding community had been
socioeconomically depressed for many years, Harrison was selected for the study largely
because of its steady improvement trajectory: from 2007 to 2013 it had six consecutive years
of improving scores on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment in reading, and was
deemed a Celebrationschool under the states Multiple Measurement Rating system
in December 2013. The paper focuses on a period of time between 2013 and 2015, when
the school was struggling to implement and localize a district-mandated push-in
Journal of Educational
Administration
Vol. 56 No. 5, 2018
pp. 488-503
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0957-8234
DOI 10.1108/JEA-01-2018-0014
Received 18 January 2018
Revised 6 May 2018
12 May 2018
21 May 2018
Accepted 21 May 2018
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0957-8234.htm
488
JEA
56,5
inclusion policy. Throughout this timeframe the district was characterized by a directive
administrative style, and school leaders and staff members operated in a climate of
considerable fear. This atmosphere threw the charged meanings and improvement efforts
under study into sharp relief and amendable to study using ethnographic methods.
The paper argues that the schools eventual success in localizing the new inclusion
policy was due in large part to a set of core interlocking feedback loops that generated
specific emotionally charged meanings which guided its priorities, practices and
direction. Specifically, the feedback loops explain how staff members and leaders
generated and sustained empathy for students from disadvantaged backgrounds,
optimism in their capabilities and motivation to help them learn and flourish.
Furthermore they show how school leaders and staff members generated and sustained
confidence and trust in their colleaguesabilities to collaboratively learn and solve
problems. All of these processes contributed to leadersand staff memberscommon
moral purpose and underlay how they enacted their continuing commitment to the school,
its students and each other.
School improvement and school culture
While researchers have learned a great deal about school improvement, many of the
processes involved remain unclear, in part because they involve cultural meanings and
contextual factors. Harris and Jones (2017) recently argued:
The inconvenient truth is that context and culture are not just irrelevant background noise in the
process of educational change and reform but rather, they fundamentally define, elucidate and
explain educational outcomes and performance. The failure of many large-scale reform efforts
therefore may not reside chiefly in the inappropriateness of the improvement strategies or in weak
implementation processes adopted but more fundamentally in an abject failure to adequately
acknowledge powerful contextual and cultural influences (p. 636).
More specifically, it remains unclear how synergy gets created across school effect
variables,and how latent capacities in organizations get unleashed(Leithwood and
Seashore, 2012, p. 4). Also, while professional community, for example, has been shown to be
a critical component of high-performing schools, the characteristics of professional
communities, and what makes them professional and community, are still underelaborated
(Seashore, 2009). In addition, it is important to understand how schools establish cultural
norms of security and relational trust, where the risk-taking essential to improvement is
encouraged and supported (Goodlad in Hargreaves, 1998; Bryke et al., in Hoy, 2012).
Relatedly, we need to understand how collective efficacy is developed and sustained in
schools (Hoy, 2012). Academic optimism, comprised of academic emphasis, collective trust
and collective efficacy, has been shown to be a useful construct in understanding school
improvement variables. Yet Hoy (2012), who is responsible for much of the work in this area,
acknowledged that we need to understand when and how academic optimism promotes
student achievement.
Leadership plays a key role in school effectiveness and instructional improvement.
Yet there are several key dimensions of leadership practice that remain understudied,
includingthe role of school leaders in developingand sustaining improvement-orientedschool
culture; and how school leaders motivate teachers and sustain their discretionary
commitmentsto student learning and success (see Leithwood and Seashore, 2012;
Hargreaves, 1998). Meanwhile, distributed leadership has increasingly been shown to affect
school improvement, but its effectiveness depends on how it is implemented and practiced.
Indeed Harrisand DeFlaminis (2016)pointed out that the effectivenessof distributed modelsof
leadership lies in the emphasis on leadership as practice rather than role, and interactions
rather than actions. They stated that research on actual practices of distributed leadership is
489
Emotional
ecology of school
improvement
culture

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