R ESTRUCTURE AS ADAPTIVE RESPONSE

The interviews and secondary data provide rich descriptions of the major restructuring initiated from 2001, where the core teams were induced into the subject departments. The initiative focused upon perceived needs for improvements in the technical organization of teaching, in order to respond more effectively to reoccurring challenges that had shown a stable pattern over years. The motivational drivers were growing perceptions of dissonance among the school managers. Since this emerging perception of the school’s situation was increasingly shared among teacher groups, a relatively strong coalition emerged. The restructuring process induced a distinct new form element, and team participation became compulsory, formally anchored in the tariff agreement of each teacher from the early beginning. However, the restructuring process also prepared the ground for

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the building of a new methodology in terms of a team based local routine, rooted in a well-defined distribution of authorities and responsibilities between the hierarchy and the teams. New emerging tools and frameworks that guide both the teamwork and individual teaching were developed and gradually situated into the work context of teaching.

7.6.1 Launching a change project

A change project was initiated in 2001, highly prioritized from the management core, and additional resources were allocated, in order to gear the project activities. The core motivation factor was the recurrent mismatch between the traditional mode of organizing the teachers’ work and the perceived future needs associated with a more complex work context. I analyzed all available secondary documents from the change process during the preparation for the interview sessions, and a selection of topics from the documents was presented and focused on in the interviews. Although the project documents were overlain with strong rhetoric of ‘differentiation’ and

‘student adaptation’, the essence of the change project was the restructuring of the operating organization of the school. Key actors within the art, crafts and design subject departments launched the project proposal. They created the proposal based on their own perceptions of recurrent gaps in the existing technology, but also based on information and performance feedback transmitted through other channels. The change process, thus, departed from a ‘reform center’ at the local level of the organization, close to action, where the change agents had premium access to knowledge and critical information. Furthermore, this closely-knit group of teachers and their department head found strong political support from the top of the school hierarchy.

7.6.2 Search in response to mismatches

The project started with search activities in the environments for appropriate solutions that could be translated and implemented into the local work context. During the search process, there was a clear perception of a need to create a permanent team-based collaborative context close to action of the students. The second search criterion was the need for a didactical model that allowed level-differentiation in teaching and student work, in order to provide appropriate solutions for the lowest performing group within the classes. A third criterion was the need for significant delegation of authority

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to a collaborative team layer. This issue collided with the complex system of tariff agreements and formal regulations of the teacher’s yearly work duties.

After some time, a preferred solution, which initiated a school-wide decision making process, was proposed. The approved solution implied a structural change of the school design, the decentralization of authority, a higher degree of freedom to the subunit level as well as altering educational planning routines and introducing a didactical model based on differentiation in instruction. The elements of the reform proposal are presented in table 7.2 below.

Table 7.2: The components of the restructure

Partial

• A design for closer-knit teacher collaboration and flexible organizing

• Tight couplings between students and teams

• A revised total planning design: The school year is split into two intervals of equal duration. One half is in principle decoupled

• Responsibility for time-planning is shared between the central office, the department

• Based on moderate streaming and level-differentiation

Team

empowerment Swedish private gymnasium

• Teams given responsibility for the management of its members’ work contracts

• Teachers’ work contracts managed as a joint pool of resources

Each of the components, i.e. partial solutions, were outcomes of incremental processes of search in the environment, selection, translation to the local context, testing, modifying and re-modifying until an acceptable prototype was reached. The four partial solutions; team technology, interval planning, level differentiation and decoupling from the central planning structure, were then assembled and combined into a team practice. The descriptions of the

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interview data underscore that each element of the model was not adopted its in raw form, but translated and modified. When a component was classified as potentially interesting, it was modified and tested in a limited context.

Limited context means testing the model in a class or two within a limited time interval. Perceptions of how it worked in practice were then used to modify the partial solution.

7.6.3 Transforming the operating core

When the decision making process had reached a solution ready for implementation, the level of conflict among the teachers increased. Some of the teachers felt insecure about their formal position and working conditions, and coupled the trade union into the process with the purpose of canceling or postponing the changes. During these clashes, the middle manager utilized the top of the school hierarchy and the civil service bureaucracy as a reservoir of political support, and besides, the performance appraisals and department meetings were used as an opportunity to map the political terrain and space for maneuvers. These events were described as important in entering the ‘from idea-to-practice’ phase. To implement the preferred changes in the core technology, a deliberate strategy of incremental implementation and diffusion was chosen. In the first school year of implementation, the new technology was only introduced in the half of the split foundation classes. Thereafter, the new technology ‘followed the students’, so to speak, which established tight couplings across classes and levels. When the students continued with their first advanced course, the teachers had to maintain the team based practice, whether they liked it or not. The whole core technology of the school was changed over 3-4 years.