In this lecture today, we will discuss the case of a school reform effort.

An identify the organizational elements being discussed within it. The case we use wasn't written for organizational analysis, but rather for educators. Hence the writer Mary Metz, selects the features she thinks characterize the case. And she actually went into these schools and observed them and took field notes. Our job is that we want to see if we can identify the organizational elements in the case and see if they help us understand what sort of account it is. What elements are the point of focus? What, which of those elements are characterized as having an interrelationship, and being changed by the reform that we're going to discuss? Through such an application, I hope you'll begin to see that even when we take down off the shelf a random case about an organization even as small as one school, we can see how the case draws our attention to particular details and how they interrelate. The beginnings of an organizational theory say that specific to this case. Let's begin with a quick review of the core elements before I recount the case. So here in this slide you will see actors and participants. And just to remind you, actors and participants are the individuals that make contributions to, and derive benefits from, the organization. Social structure concerns the persistent relationships among participants in an organization. And it can also reflect their norms and beliefs that, that guide those relationships. Goals concern the desired ends that the participants attempt to achieve through the performance of task activities. And then technologies and tasks are the means by which organisations accomplish work or render inputs and outputs to the tasks. And then finally environment. The physical, technological, cultural and social context in which an organization is embedded. Now let's recount the case of the Adams Avenue School. This is a case about the creation of a Magnet Middle School. With a new kind of curriculum that will

hopefully serve a struggling population. It's meant to build a sense of community, to bring into the fold lower academic performing students, and to improve student achievement overall. Now, before we begin about the actual implementation of format, it helps to have a little pre-history. Some kind of historical environment in which to embed this case. So, before it became a magnet, and was called Adams Avenue School, it was actually, an annex or a seventh grade annex, in particular, to another junior high school called Williams Junior High School. And Williams Jr. High school was an overcrowded black school in the poorest part of the town. Williams Annex was established to relieve severe problems of discipline and underachievement. The annex was voluntarily staffed by young faculty who didn't have seniority at Williams Jr. High and saw this as an opportunity. Mrs. Michaels led this annex but she wasn't a principal, in she was more of an informal or a tributed leader. And she had a good deal of say in how they developed their program. She and her, her, faculty colleagues initially decided the annex should follow a multi-unit plan and be divided into three smaller schools of about 100 students each. At the same time, the school district was going through a change. And it, it was planning a new magnet school program throughout the district. The Williams Annex was selected as a great site for becoming a new magnet, and they wanted to call it Adams Avenue School. Mrs. Michaels was selected as the principal. And the faculty met and decided to adopt an, an individually guided education curriculum. And I'll call it IGE for short. And this. Curriculum basically is one where students proceed at their own. Pase, they complete a series of individualized tasks showing mastery of material in different stages, and, the like. So it's individually guided as opposed to grade level, staged. Anyhow, before the school opened, the

faculty was sent for training in this program, but it was tailored toward elementary students, the training was. So they were kind of ill prepared when the school opened to sixth through eighth grade students. In addition, the faculty lacked materials and had to make do with the best they could, so, photocopying or sharing. By the second year, the school received funds and the faculty received more training in individually guided education and according to Mary Metz, the school seemed established and had a coherent program in place by year three. Now upon opening, Adams Avenue attracted well educated parents. Mostly for the gifted program. Who had an influential role in the school's affairs. And took up a good deal of the principal, and the assistant principal's time. These parents were not afraid to tell the teachers what to do, and to check up to see what they did. And they actually did what they were asked to do, by them. So in addition, they also campaigned for the school at board meetings and with the district office to retain an Assistant Principal position and to get a larger, better building. So, it was a mixed blessing, you had, aggressive parents involved in your, the process of schooling, as well as ones that would become stakeholders and advocates on the part of the school. So anyhow, a lot of these things happened because of these parents and as the school's reputation grew, it attracted the interest of lower-middle class families and ordinary families. So by the third year of operation, the magnet school's population reflected that of the surrounding community. And had less of a bifurcated population of highly educated families and working class families. By the third year, the, the really high achieving kids of these initially aggressive parents, were now in eighth grade and were about to rotate out. So because of its success, it, it kind of changed in its nature. Now, lets talk about individually guided education, and the effort to impose that curriculum. The textbooks for the individually guided education curriculum was not as clear as it might seem.

Given it was a specific plan written by a specific group of educators. The faculty found it far from clear in implementation. Hence, the, the principal had broad discretion in how it was defined. Eventually, the curriculum was defined on two sets of requirements. The first specified a number of concrete learning objectives for each subject in each grade. And students were needed to be tested on them before an after instruction was given. And this progress was to be monitored and mapped carefully. Second, children were grouped according to the progress they had already made by some kind of pretest. And then they were instructed from where their knowledge left off. And so these skill groupings were to be fluid and reconfigured when a new objective was introduced. So in some ways this replaced grade level kinds of, of segmentation of students. An it, it kind of made the progress of students more individually based, and guided. The school also, at the same time kept its small school layout and each school had four homerooms that traveled through all the same classes together. So, you have more of a personable environment for them and teachers in each school had an hour a day for common planning, and the lead teachers met with the principal, it was kind of an instructional improvement committee and that enabled more two-way communication between teachers and principal. Now let's talk about the school character. Metz reports that teachers directed their attention on their work with students. Their energy was directed toward planning and teaching. Or running lots of extra curricula. Rather than speak of students in terms of, of individually guided education, the teacher spoke of them in terms of their relationships with students. So they talked about how, how positive those relationships were for students. And the school was notable, in that potentially volatile relationships were not so evident. Instead, positive relationships persisted between the faculty, with the parents, and between students and teachers. There were of course exceptions that

suggested a harder past, like say in the years before Mary Metz showed up to observe. But the school was mostly in harmony by the time she arrived. All the classes were heterogeneous in composition. But as stated earlier, they were internally divided into groups on the basis of skills development. So you had high groups, low groups, etc. And these groups were specific on the learning objectives, so it depended on the kind of, objective in mind. So it wasn't across the board. Was more fluid kinds of ability grouping. Lower skill groups nonetheless did have more African Americans than, than normal but they remained relatively heterogeneous or at least more so than they would be otherwise, and the interactions between students and teacher with the students were task-oriented and respectful for the most part. Even the students themselves reported having positive relations with teachers and many interracial friends, and they seemed open to heterogeneous kinds of relationships. Overall, there was a general absence of conflict. Discipline was often a simple matter. Adams Avenue faculty issued a yellow card as warning and informal referrals to administrators for discipline and this was noted in the child's record. Metz reports that these yellow cards were issued less than two times a day for all 300 children over the course of the year and suspensions less, totaled less than one out of ten kids. So this, the disciplinary problems were present, but they were, more common, than these formal indicators suggest, just not very comm-, as common as one might think. Moreover, a lot of them were handled informally, so they weren't sent to the office. They were done, dealt with by the teacher in the class. If there was any conflict, it was likely between the principal and some teachers. And that conflict went back to end of year one when some teachers did not strike with the rest of the teachers. And some sided with the principals, the principal, so, in particularly, the union leaders were somewhat bitter over this. So there was some conflict, it wasn't a perfect, it was more of a natural, organic

system of these kinds of associations. But for the most part, in the IGE and small school kind of arrangement seemed to create some of these kinds of outcomes. So, next let's talk about the program and practice. We have some indication that IGE was working in the small school thing, but that goes into more detail. The teachers and principal followed the two sets of practices believed to be the core of the IGE program. Teachers charted progress, and the principal checked it. There is still some variation in teacher compliance with IG. Some teachers were relaxed in their application of it. Some rotated students through the same set of tasks in spite of being in differently skilled groups. So they didn't, they didn't have differentiated work. Some teachers produced charts on estimates of student progress. Rather than pretest, post test scores. So. Some of the teachers said they adapted IGE like this because it was a lot of work. So a little more work than or a lot more work than their regular teaching, and they were unwilling or unable to do all of it. So in addition there were a few teachers that openly resisted IGE. They didn't comply as a matter of principle. They argued their subject matter was poorly suited to IGE and required fundamentals or too many skilled demonstrations. But even these relaxed, resistant teachers were influenced. They conveyed clear purposes for each day's instruction. They had relatively well formed understandings of each kid's skills and deficits. Even if they didn't use the explicit features of the curriculum, they seemed in line with the general philosophy and focus on skill development in their subject and they thought carefully how to get that across to varied kind of students and how to track that progress. So, instruction also involves quite a bit of adaptation for teachers in order to administer this kind of curriculum, and some of them did it more than others, but overall there was some kind of adaptation even across the least committed groups.

A final feature of instruction that was interesting at the school was that they did a lot of field trips because of their location and then their city. They went on a lot of places to museums, they had a lot of rich extra curricular experiences. And all this kind of added an additional personal element. So the individually guided education had a, a series of influences. The technology influenced the school character like the social structure for example. So Metz reports that the imposition of IGE changed the character of the, the school. It changed the relationship of the low achievers with teachers. And between students of different races. So IGE in, E induced a communal ethos and more positive relationships. It didn't make some people losers and other winners in this environment. It kind of made that a more of a private affair, and rendered things more positive. It also had an effect on the traditional curricular structure, so the IGE curriculum removed grade level differentiation from view and instructional differentiation was rendered more on individualized kinds of differences. So it removed the stigma placed on students performing at say a fourth or fifth grade level below the, the grade level in the school and enable the accelerated students to work at a level beyond their grade level, so even ninth grade, say. All that mattered was forward movement for every kid in this curriculum. So not where they were moving from. And teacher the judgement of teachers was based upon the general change that they could create in, in each student as an individual. In terms of rewards structure, meaning kind of like grades and status markers, Adams Avenue used report cards that emphasized effort and the level at which the student worked in each subject. Hence, a hard working student with a fifth grade skills level might receive an I for superior effort and progress, while the lackadaisical sixth grader who was achieving at an eighth grade skill level might get an E for achieving inadequate progress. So, it wasn't enough that you were high achieving, it was that you improved.

It was the, the slope, the change in your progress. So, the honor roll. All was based on effort, not skill level grades. In this manner, IG's reward structure worked to equalize social prestige. And included lower performing kids and give them, gave them, academic legitimacy. This conversely lowered, the rewards experienced by high achieving students. And some teachers worried these students weren't pushed enough to excel higher. Now, IGE also influence the task structure in relationships. Among teachers, principals and what not. So, all the instruction was done in, in groups based on skill where the students worked independently. This meant no one performed for everyone publicly, and achievement or work was more a matter of private accomplishment. And there were few opportunities for public embarrassment, right? Teachers spoke with students as a group for instruction and then they kind of guided their progress individually or in or in their subgroups, right? Metz reports that everyone felt they got the attention and assistance they needed, and these relations built into ones of trust between teacher and student and less in conflict. They also equalize persons more, de-emphasizing initial differences and skills, and this served to build into racial ties.