Instructional Leadership and the Sociopolitics of School Turnarounds: Changing Stakeholder Beliefs through Immersive Collaborative Learning

doi:10.4236/aasoci.2013.37035

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Advances in Applied Sociology

2013. Vol.3, No.7, 258-281

Published Online November 2013 in SciRes (http://www.scirp.org/journal/aasoci) http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/aasoci.2013.37035

Open Access 258

Instructional Leadership and the Sociopolitics of School

Turnarounds: Changing Stakeholder Beliefs through

Immersive Collaborative Learning

Joseph Claudet

Department of Ed uc a t i o n a l Ps ychology and Leadership, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA

Email: joe.claudet@ttu.edu

Received August 31st, 2013; revised September 30th, 2013; accepted October 7th, 2013

bution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the

original work is properly cited.

This article highlights case production and analysis efforts associated with a multi-year, multimedia case

development project focused on providing alternative organizational learning opportunities to regional

K-12 schools and school districts. The School Leadership Case Simulation (SLCS) Project utilizes a

unique multi-entity partnership and school-based collaborative learning design in which teams of univer-

sity-based education researchers, multimedia production specialists, and regional education service center

school improvement consultants work in tandem with K-12 school educators and community members to

help these school stakeholders develop and produce multimedia organizational learning cases about their

own real-world, context-specific school dilemma challenges. Collaborative team learning efforts of one

group of school educators and community stakeholders grappling with an organizationally entrenched set

of instructional leadership and school improvement challenges in one regional high school community are

presented. Project findings relating to the viability and usefulness of the project’s multi-entity, immersive

collaborative teaming design and multimedia-integrated case learning tools for helping groups of K-12

school community stakeholders learn how to adopt a team-centered organizational learning approach to

reframing their real-world school leadership dilemma challenges and engage directly in data-informed,

collaborative decision-making are presented and discussed.

Keywords: Multimedia Case Development; Organizational Learning; Instructional Teaming; School

Turnaround Leadership

Introduction

As an organizational psychologist focusing on studying col-

laborative leading and learning behavior in education settings, I

am continually fascinated by the complex dynamics involved in

the ways multiple stakeholders and stakeholder groups confront

difficult, system-wide school improvement dilemma situations

and navigate the challenges of enacting meaningful organiza-

tional change. To explore as directly as possible the processes

of change leadership and organizational learning in real-world

education contexts, I have spent considerable time over the past

25 years serving as a staff developer and school improvement

consultant to K-12 schools and school districts in the southern

and southwestern United States. Within this capacity, I have

worked with large numbers of education stakeholders (teachers,

campus principals and assistant principals, instructional coach-

es, district-level curriculum program coordinators and adminis-

trators, parents, elected school board officials, and community

members) to help these individuals learn how to work together

effectively as collaborative leading and learning teams to di-

rectly address and find creative solutions to their entrenched

school improvement dilemma challenges. During the process of

engaging in this work over many years, I have developed a

penchant for employing phenomenological case methods in

conjunction with a broad-based sociological inquiry approach

to glean rich descriptions and case-specific detail about these

school leaders, the varied school community contextual envi-

ron me nt s wi th i n wh i c h t hey i nt e ra ct , an d t he multi-faceted, real-

world instructional leadership challenges they face. Along this

journey, I have also expended considerable time and energy in

exploring the potential of using available multimedia technolo-

gies in connection with theatrical production techniques as

creative organizational learning tools to help school educators

and associated community stakeholders engage in immersive

“organizational case learning” projects to produce multimedia

cases about their own complex school leadership experiences.

These case-based learning projects are designed as an alterna-

tive means for enabling education leaders to intently exam-

ine—in a team-centered and data-intensive way—their school

dilemma situations in order to: 1) reframe their organizational

challenges; 2) focus on and energize their collaborative teaming

practices; and 3) improve their school improvement decision-

making. I have discovered that this kind of immersive, technol-

ogy-integrated case learning method can be useful in helping

large groups of education stakeholders who have reached an

impasse in their school improvement efforts learn how to think

differently and work together in new ways to better address the

political pressures and myriad uncertainties that often accom-

pany entrenched, organization-wide dilemma situations.

J. CLAUDET

Steven Spielberg’s 2012 movie Lincoln captures well the

kind of determined change agent leader skills and creative team-

forging abilities that are needed by those attempting to lead

organizations that are experiencing system-wide dilemma chal-

lenges—challenges that are fueled by intense, multi-stake-

holder perspectivist conflicts and political turmoil. As the coun-

try’s 16th president during the American Civil War (1861-1865),

Abraham Lincoln (played in the movie by Daniel Day-Lewis)

had to confront head-on the intractable leadership impasse that

arose as multiple, competing groups of stakeholders and stake-

holder groups spreading across the American Union pro-

claimed (and acted upon) their passionate and unbending con-

flicting beliefs regarding the country’s proper organizational di-

rection and purpose. The entire sociopolitical environment of

the United States at the time was being torn apart by the fier-

cely conflicting perspectives and beliefs of citizens concerning

the legality of slavery and the rights of individual states to de-

termine their own economic destiny. These issues and how they

should be properly addressed were of central importance to

both southern and northern states, and to the future of the entire

country. And, as the Lincoln movie portrays, in the early months

of 1865 (at a time when a recent succession of northern victo-

ries was making it more and more probable that the war might

soon be coming to a close), Lincoln knew that he had to act

boldly and decisively (while the horrible atrocities of the war

were still vivid in people’s minds) to get the Thirteenth Amend-

ment to the nation’s Constitution—the amendment that would

abolish slavery in the country forever for both present and fu-

ture generations—passed by Congress. At this important time

in the nation’s thus far brief history, the clashing southern and

northern views regarding slavery were nowhere more passion-

ately expressed and debated than in the United States Congress.

Whereas a majority of Republican senators had enabled the

proposed amendment to pass easily through the Senate, it was

not at all clear whether the measure would be able to get enough

support to gain passage in the House of Representatives, within

which there were sizeable numbers of representatives putting

forward passionate arguments both for and against the amend-

ment. Rather than shrink from this conflict, Lincoln seized upon

this rivalry and brought it close to himself by appointing men

with differing perspectives and beliefs to serve on his Executive

Cabinet. Although, as a group, these cabinet members favored

preserving the Union, their varying temperaments and contrast-

ing beliefs about the right way to go about accomplishing this

task infused the Lincoln presidency cabinet meetings with tre-

mendous energy (and, often, passionate disagreement). Lincoln

tapped into the multi-perspectivist friction and political energy

of his executive cabinet—his administrative team of rivals—as

a source of leadership strength within his administration (Good-

win, 2005). As an organizational change leader, Lincoln knew

intuitively that in order to build a “team mentality” out of such

disparate forces (both within his own cabinet and within the

larger United States C ongress) he had to bring these fo rces close

together. Lincoln knew he had to fashion a highly immersive

collaborative team-learning environment within and through

which these rival political leaders could discuss their differ-

ences and, in doing so, learn to listen openly to and respect each

others’ views, and from there begin to forge a workable con-

sensus—to find “common ground” based on shared principles.

Lincoln’s genius as an organizational change leader lay in his

intuitive understanding that through bringing such strong-

willed personalities with passionate conflicting beliefs close to-

gether in a team-of-rivals environment, this very teaming envi-

ronment could become a powerful catalyst that could motivate,

challenge, and inspire these stakeholder leaders to use their

combined energies and principled convictions to construct—out

of their collective differences—a coherent team vision and prac-

tical plan of leadership action.

In an early scene in the movie, William H. Seward (played

by David Strathairn), Lincoln’s Secretary of State, admonishes

the President on the poor chances which the proposed Thir-

teenth Amendment had, in Seward’s view, of gaining passage

through the House of Representatives. Seward, a man of keen

political intelligence, berates Lincoln for attempting such a bold

move and attempts to dissuade Lincoln from embarking on an

enterprise that will surely fail and mar his second term as

president. Seward explains to Lincoln that they were twenty

votes short of the number of votes necessary to ensure the

amendment’s passage in the House of Representatives and that

it would be very unlikely that these votes could be secured. As

Seward emphasizes in this scene, the chances of building bi-

partisan support for the amendment’s passage were practically

non-existent: “Why tarnish your invaluable luster with a battle

in the House [of Representatives]? It’s a rats’ nest in there, the

same gang of talentless hicks and hacks that rejected the

amendment ten months back. We’ll lose”. To which Lincoln,

the ever-adept political consensus builder, replied: “I like our

chances now” [emphasis added] (Kushner, 2012: p. 19). Lin-

coln’s confidence as a change agent leader was firmly grounded

in his realization that within such passionate rivalries resided

the potential for deep common understanding—deeper insights

and common ground could be forged in the crucible of multi-

perspectivist conflict. And that, paradoxically, a team compris-

ed of rivals harboring contrasting organizational beliefs and

political views could become a practical vehicle for forging new

shared vision and common purpose on how to move the nation

forward decisively.

The Lincoln movie presents a remarkably compressed and

probing portrait of team-centered “change agent leadership”.

Lincoln’s nuanced insights into the sociopolitics of his time and

firm grasp of the American people’s fervent desire to address

their challenges head-on and to make sense of their complex

reality helped Lincoln realize that his central challenge and task

as a leader was to find a creative way to reunite the people

around core principles. And Abraham Lincoln, the insightful

change agent leader, accomplished this through bringing people

with conflicting ideas and beliefs close together in an immer-

sive team-building environment within which passionate diffe-

rences could be openly discussed and carefully examined, and

ultimately refashioned to build common understandings—to

create new organizational unity and sen se of purpose from, to use

Doris Kearns Goodwin’s evocative phrase, a team of rivals

(Goodwin, 2005). Lincoln intuitively understood that immersing

strong-willed individuals with passionate views and beliefs in

an intensive, extended team of rivals environment could become,

paradoxically, a powerful organizational learning catalyst for

challenging and enabling these stakeholders—motivated by the

power of team-initiated cogent argument and carefully consid-

ered evidential reasoning—to re-examine and ultimately change

their beliefs for the sake of the organizational survival and fu-

ture welfare of the country. In very similar ways, this manner of

responding to the leading and learning needs of organization

stakeholders experiencing multi-perspectivist dilemma challeng-

es through utilizing immersive team-building and organizatio-

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J. CLAUDET

nal sense-making strategies has been a dominant feature of my

own ongoing consultant work spanning two decades with edu-

cators and community stakeholders in K-12 schools and school

districts. A central emphasis of my consulting efforts has and

continues to be on assisting groups of K-12 school community

stakeholders—who also desire to address their school improve-

ment challenges “head-on” and who strive to “make sense” of

their complex school leadership situations—to find new ways

to work together to engage collaboratively in data-informed de-

cision making to enhance the overall quality of teaching, lead-

ing, and learning in their schools and districts.

Through my involvement, beginning in the early 1990s, as a

school improvement a nd staff development consultant for sc hool

districts in the Permian Basin region of West Texas, I have had

the privilege of working with large numbers of education stake-

holders in a number of regional elementary and secondary school

communities and becoming familiar with the campus-specific

school leadership and improvement challenges facing these

school leaders. A singular focus of my ongoing consultant ef-

forts in working with these school stakeholders has been on

helping stakeholders in these communities reexamine and lev-

erage their own contextual situations and school performance

data to develop “organizational cases” about their own dilemma

challenges. These organizational cases are designed as an al-

ternative team-building means to enable these stakeholders to

learn how to work together in new ways to generate deep colla-

borative insights about their leadership challenges and fashion

creative, actionable school improvement strategies—and, as a

way to jumpstart these school stakeholders’ renewed commit-

ment to their own ongoing organizational learning and devel-

opment. During this time, my university-based, multimedia pro-

ject research team and I have worked and continue to work di-

rectly with stakeholder groups in several different school commu-

nities in the region to develop a number of multimedia organ-

izational learning cases about these school stakeholders’ own

real-world school improvement dilemma challenges. The indi-

vidual organizational case development project work completed

by groups of school stakeholders and university-based, multi-

media production teams at each participating regional campus

site is designed as an alternative staff development approach to

helping these K-12 school community stakeholders grow and

realize their potential as organizational leading and learning

teams. A central focus of this approach is on immersing school

community stakeholders in each participating school (teachers,

campus administrators, parents, community leaders, and asso-

ciated central office staff) directly—in an intensive, in-depth

way—in analyzing their own school community situational and

performance data in order to develop a “multimedia organiza-

tional case” about their school’s own school improvement chal-

lenges. This alternative multimedia case development method is

employed as a creative means to help school stakeholders at

each participating school explore learning how to work together

in a new way—as a school community multimedia case pro-

duction and analysis team—to collaboratively reexamine their

own school dilemma situations from different individual and

group perspectives and to brainstorm new team-generated solu-

tions to address their school improvement challenges.

As an off-shoot of this ongoing school district-university

partnership work, I sometimes receive calls from principals in

neighboring schools and school districts in the region who have

heard about the case development work my research team and I

have been engaging in with other school communities, and who

are interested in talking with me about their own school lead-

ership challenges. This article reports on the collaborative case

development and analysis project work my university col-

leagues and I completed with one such group of school com-

munity stakeholders. In responding to this principal’s request

for assistance, I soon learned that she and her fellow campus

educators and community stakeholders were struggling with a

complex set of politically charged organizational challenges

arising from an entrenched instructional leadership and school

improvement dilemma situation—a situation that was boiling

over into the larger district community and fraying the organi-

zational fabric of their high school teaching and learning com-

munity.

A High School Community Struggling with an

Entrenched School Improvement Dilemma

Around the middle of August 2007 I received a telephone

call from a principal of a large high school in one of the West

Texas regional school districts who was very interested in

speaking with me about her school community and the school

improvement challenges she was facing. During this initial call,

the principal indicated that she was just beginning her second

year as the principal of this high school campus, having moved

here from another area of the state. The principal informed me

that her superintendent had told her that he had hired her be-

cause he had high confidence in her abilities to bring together

stakeholders at this school to “turn things around” and move

the school community forward. In the last several years, this

high school has been struggling to deal with a number of inter-

related instructional leadership challenges, including: 1) an in-

creasingly diversified district student population base with a

continuously growing number of Hispanic families and students

entering the district, many of whom become students at this

high school; 2) an alarming trend of decreasing student exit

exam performance scores in STEM-related (i.e., science, tech-

nology, engineering, and math) content areas—particularly math

and science; 3) a large and multi-generational teaching staff;

and 4) continuing pressure from the district central office and

area business community constituents to find creative ways to

integrate technology effectively into classroom- and grade-le-

vel instruction. The principal explained to me that she was at-

tracted to this school district community, and specifically to

this high school position, because she viewed herself as a com-

munity change agent, and she was intrigued by the set of unique

school community leadership challenges this school was facing.

The principal also stated that she was impressed with the school

community’s considerable potential—in her view—for being

able to come together to address these challenges head-on to

bring about positive change and improvement. This veteran

principal’s evident enthusiasm for school change leadership

came across clearly during our telephone conversation as she

recounted a few of the efforts she had already made at her

campus to become familiar with her teachers and parents, and

the school’s various co mmunity stakeholders and education con-

stituencies.

Following our initial telephone conversation, I was able to

learn that this particular principal was well respected by mem-

bers of the state’s secondary school principal’s association and

had developed a solid reputation as a no-nonsense “school turn-

around change agent”. In her twelve years as a campus admin-

istrator in previous school leadership positions, she had gar-

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260

J. CLAUDET

nered praise from educators and community members alike for

being “tough, but fair” in her approach to instructional leader-

ship and school reform. Eager to meet this principal in person

and learn more about her school and the intriguing leadership

challenges she had briefly described to me via telephone, I

scheduled an on-campus visit in early Septemb er.

I arrived at the campus early on a Monday morning in Sep-

tember. The principal greeted me in the administrative suite,

welcomed me to the campus, and invited me into her office.

The principal was clearly very interested in continuing our

initial conversation about her school’s instructional improve-

ment challenges. To help me more fully understand her

school’s overall instructional environment and some of the

leadership challenges she has been facing, she offered to share

with me a summary overview of the history of her leadership

efforts to date at the school. The principal explained that the

student demographics at the high school and the district have

changed in the past three years because of a redistricting effort

in response to burgeoning population growth that has caused

some students from neighboring areas to be bused to the cam-

pus. Many of the new students the high school is now serving

are minorities—predominantly Hispanic students, reflecting the

continuing large growth in the Hispanic population occurring

throughout the West Texas region. In addition, the school’s

teaching staff reflects a broad spectrum of professional teaching

experience, with a little over a third of the staff consisting of

veteran faculty who have been teaching in the district for 15 to

20 years or more, several of whom have been teaching at this

school for most or all of that time. Some recent teacher retire-

ments, in conjunction with the school’s student enrollment

growth, have enabled the district to recruit and hire a number of

new faculty members, and this principal stated that recruiting

and hiring new faculty had been a particular priority of hers du-

ring the summer preceding her first year at this school. Most

importantly, as the principal had briefly mentioned during our

initial telephone conversation, the campus is currently strug-

gling to deal with decreasing student “end-of-course” exit exam

performance scores, particularly in math and science content

areas. The principal emphasized that district central office ad-

ministrators have been unrelenting in their efforts to “pressure”

campus principals to engage proactively with their teachers to

respond to the state’s student performance accountability de-

mands, particularly in “STEM” (i.e., science, technology, engi-

neering, and math) content areas. As a result, the principal ex-

plained that a large part of her time during her first year here

has been devoted to instructional oversight in getting to know

and working with her teachers in addressing these instructional

improvement challenges.

The principal further explained that during the past three

years the superintendent had moved aggressively to seek and

acquire funding to implement several district improvement ini-

tiatives, including a district-wide dropout recovery program,

expanded staff development opportunities for teachers, and a

new instructional teaming initiative designed to bolster teach-

ers’ collaborative planning to enhance student learning. To ad-

dress student learning performance challenges at her school, the

principal indicated she has been working with the district’s cur-

riculum director to help teachers at her campus implement a

STEM-focused, collaborative teaching model that emphasizes

involving grade-level teachers in active instructional team plan-

ning as a means to enhance the quality and effectiveness of

STEM-related teaching and learning in secondary classrooms.

The principal recounted how, as part of her focused efforts to

get to know her teachers during her first year at the campus and

“to get a pulse” on the school’s teaching and learning environ-

ment, she spent a good deal of her time engaging in unsched-

uled, informal walk-throughs during individual teachers’ vari-

ous classroom teaching periods followed by scheduled collegial

conversations with each teacher. The principal explained that

she emphasized to teachers that these informal walk-throughs

and follow-up conversations were a way for her to: 1) observe

student-teacher interactions in each grade level within specific

content area classes; 2) become familiar with individual teach-

ers’ classroom teaching styles; and 3) begin to develop an in-

formed sense of the overall teaching and learning climate at the

school.

The principal noted that while a number of her teachers were

open to her informal classroom observation and conversation

strategies (as well as her interests in encouraging teachers’ col-

laborative planning and integration of technologies into class-

room teaching), some others were not. One veteran teacher in

particular, the principal stated, was especially unappreciative of

her instructional supervisory approach, and openly derided the

new principal as being “intrusive” and “prone to meddling in

teachers’ work”. This teacher, “Steve”, has been at this high

school campus for fifteen years and also currently serves as the

math department chairperson. The principal characterized Steve

as a well-respected, long-time member of the high school

teaching staff, as well as a sometimes outspoken and stalwart

proponent of staunchly conservative educational values—val-

ues grounded firmly in “traditional ways of doing things” that

have been nurtured and reinforced over multiple generations in

this tight-knit West Texas school district community. In es-

sence, Steve’s educational beliefs centered around a “back-to-

the-basics” approach to instruction, placing heavy emphasis on

teaching essential content with “tried and true” teaching meth-

ods, namely: classroom lecture/direct instruction, student math

problem worksheets, and follow-up instructional intervention

strategies for individual students when needed (typically, one-

on-one diagnostic tutoring via additional problem-specific work-

sheets).

According to the principal, Steve has consistently opposed

her efforts to encourage departmental faculty to work together

to integrate available mobile technologies (such as ipads, ipods,

and the like) into their classroom teaching. In addition, Steve is

particularly adamant in eschewing requests from other faculty

within his multidisciplinary STEM-teaching team to engage

together with them in cross-content instructional planning, ar-

guing that this kind of integrated team planning is just “too time

consuming” and doesn’t really enhance classroom instruction.

Steve’s passionate beliefs about teaching and the kinds of

classroom learning environments that work best for secondary

students emanate from his sincere commitment to his profes-

sional teaching craft and to his students, and he is quite vocal in

sharing these beliefs with teaching colleagues in the math de-

partment as well as with other content area faculty throughout

the campus. Several of Steve’s veteran teaching colleagues at

this high school, in fact, share his views on teaching and in-

structional quality, and also resent the district’s new interdisci-

plinary team planning and technology integration initiatives as

unwanted intrusions into their professional autonomy. More-

over, the principal further explained, a lot of the “old guard”

members of the community strongly support Steve and his

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J. CLAUDET

ideas about teaching. In fact, many parents whose families have

been in the community for generations (a majority of whom

attended school in this district and graduated from this high

school) feel that Steve and other teachers with similar instruc-

tional beliefs represent the exact kind of “quality teaching” that

their children need. And these community members don’t un-

derstand why Steve and other “valued teachers” at the school

are being asked to radically change the way they teach. This

clash of instructional values has even worked its way into dis-

trict school board meetings, the principal added, since Steve

and several of his like-minded veteran teacher colleagues are

well-connected in the community and enjoy long-term friend-

ships with many prominent community business leaders, some

of whom are also current school board members.

At this point in our conversation, the principal leaned back in

her chair for a moment and stared pensively at an impressive

array of curriculum binders and team planning guides filling

one bookshelf on her office wall. Then, with a hint of frustra-

tion in her voice but still exuding determination, she explained

to me that she has spent considerable time in the past several

weeks reflecting on what she believes, in her words, is a “po-

litical impasse” existing among her faculty regarding instruc-

tional change. Steve and several other veteran teachers’ impas-

sioned ridiculing and rejection at recent campus faculty meet-

ings of her efforts to encourage departmental and grade-level

teams to move forward in their work to implement instructional

team planning and mobile technology integration have served

to frame in stark terms what she believes is the essence of this

school community’s instructional improvement dilemma chal-

lenge: a clash of conflicting teacher (and community stake-

holder) beliefs at a fundamental level regarding the nature of

instructional effectiveness and the purpose of instructional

planning.

This principal’s story of clashing educational beliefs and the

accompanying sociopolitical turmoil spilling over into her

school community regarding instructional change and teaching

effectiveness resonated in my own mind with similar campus

stories which I had heard over several years from other ele-

mentary and secondary principals in the region. Her story, in

fact, closely followed a pattern of recurring themes that typi-

cally emerge in similar school communities centering around: 1)

the “entrenched nature” of some educational stakeholders’ be-

liefs about classroom teaching and learning; 2) a collective fear

by teachers in general of “externally imposed” change initia-

tives; and 3) the resulting resistance to change mentality that

can ensue from these beliefs. Taken together, these themes

serve to put into stark relief what are considered by many to be

a set of “intractable roadblocks” that are often associated with

the challenges of enacting successful school turnaround leader-

ship and meaningful instructional improvement in elementary

and secondary school communities.

This story of heightened student learning challenges in

STEM and related content areas, sociopolitical gridlock ema-

nating from stakeholders’ conflicting teaching and learning be-

liefs, and the pressing need for instructional change in a secon-

dary school setting was one that appealed directly to my own

interests as a “change agent leadership” consultant, and I read-

ily agreed to begin working with this principal and her high

school community stakeholders on their instructional change

dilemma. Through my ongoing experiences in working with

principals and teachers in several other school communities in

the region, I was keenly aware of the need to immerse myself

directly in the school’s instructional culture to learn as much as

possible about the multiple educational beliefs and perspectives

of the various role players (teachers, department chairs, instruc-

tional support specialists, parents, etc.) who are so intimately

involved in the day-to-day instructional life of the school com-

munity. Thus, I proposed to the principal that I spend a few

weeks at the school early in the fall sitting in on a number of

teachers’ regularly scheduled departmental and grade-level ins-

tructional team meetings as a means to get to know her teachers

and their perspectives and to observe teachers’ daily conversa-

tions and interactions during their instructional planning. The

principal readily agreed to this plan of action and proceeded to

arrange my schedule of on-site observations to take place in

October of this same school year.

What’s the Point of Teaming, Anyway?

From my past experiences in working with educators at other

regional campuses, I knew that sitting in on teacher team meet-

ings and observing teachers interacting with each other during

their daily instructional planning was an effective way to: 1)

learn about teachers’ instructional practices; 2) glean important

insights about teachers’ instructional values and beliefs; and 3)

get an informed sense of teachers’ own perspectives regarding

current campus and district improvement initiatives that they

were being asked to implement. These kinds of informal, direct

observations were essentially a great way to get a “pulse” on

the overall professional learning climate existing on the campus.

Using this informal observational method, I began attending se-

veral grade-level team meetings at this high school campus in

early October.

One of the teams I observed early on was a ninth grade in-

structional team. Like many teacher teams at this campus, this

instructional team was comprised of educators with varied

years of teaching experience, both in and out of the district.

This ninth grade team consisted of Phil, a social studies teacher

who has been teaching for eighteen years, the last ten of which

has been in this district; Lois, a math teacher in her seventh

year of teaching, and beginning her third year at this campus;

Megan, a science teacher with three years teaching experience

at this campus; and Kelly, a new literature and language arts

teacher at this campus and district, who was beginning her sec-

ond year of teaching. As part of the planning conversations at

this instructional team meeting, Kelly shared with her team

members some creative ideas she had been exploring about

leveraging internet-enabled communication technologies to de-

sign an “international learning project” for her ninth-grade stu-

dents. The other team members listened attentively as Kelly ex-

plained that this project idea would enable the team’s ninth

grade students to learn and share broader “world-culture” per-

spectives on their reading assignments through collaborating on

book reading and creative writing critique project assignments

with fellow students in Sydney, Australia—using the internet to

engage in critical readings and discussions of literature. Kelly

became quite animated as she talked about the prospect of util-

izing wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, twitter, and other digital com-

munication tools to broaden and enliven the interactive learning

environment for her students. It was clearly evident that Kelly

was a teacher who was already very familiar with using digital

technologies as she described to her team the educational po-

tential of leveraging internet/world-wide we b resources and so-

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J. CLAUDET

cial media to motivate students to engage dynamically with

other students to bring some 21st century learning excitement to

the study of language arts and literature. Kelly’s enthusiasm

was contagious, and other team members who had been listen-

ing attentively congratulated Kelly on her creative instructional

design thinking and began to offer their own ideas on how

Kelly’s collaborative “international learning project” design

might be potentially broadened to incorporate their own content

teaching areas as well.

After several minutes of open team conversation in reaction

to Kelly’s international learning project ideas, Phil—the most

experienced teacher on the team—who had been sitting quietly

and pensively during this time, broke in with his own observa-

tions: “I think Kelly’s project ideas are very creative and have

some real potential for motivating our ninth grade students to

get them excited about literature and sharing their critical

reading with other students. And, I’m generally supportive of

our team’s efforts to explore these ideas in our instructional

planning. But, we’re talking about digital technologies, using

wikis, blogs, social media, and so on—technologies that many

of us are not very familiar with. I’m not comfortable enough yet

with these communication tools to feel like I can confidently use

them in my teaching. I feel like I, as well as other teachers like

me, need some help to get up to speed on these tools to have the

confidence to be able to use them effectively in the classroom.”

As it turned out, Phil wasn’t the only teacher on this ninth grade

team who was feeling some “technology anxiety”. Other teach-

ers on the team were also feeling that they lacked the requisite

knowledge and skills to be able to integrate digital technologies

effectively into their classroom teaching. In fact, Phil’s com-

ments triggered other team members to voice their own con-

cerns about their lack of familiarity with many of these new

digital learning tools. Lois, the team’s math teacher, offered her

perspective: “You know, in the last couple of years the district

has offered a few introductory staff development sessions for

teachers on available content-specific internet resources, such

as in math, science, and other content areas, that teachers can

utilize to broaden and enrich their lesson planning. But, the

kind of project Kelly is talking about is taking technology inte-

gration [emphasis added] to a whole new level. How are we

going to be successful in integrating these new digital commu-

nication technologies into our instructional planning if we

don’t have the required knowledge and skills?” Lois paused re-

flectively for a moment as she surveyed the other members of

her team, and then exclaimed: “Many teachers like myself are

going to need some additional specific training to learn how to

incorporate social media and digital communication tools into

our teaching—tools that many of the kids in this school are

already very comfortable with.” The team’s conversation ended

with no clear sense of how to go about bridging the real gap

between the “teaching and learning potential” of Kelly’s inter-

national learning project instructional planning ideas and the

“evident need” for more focused professional development for

teachers in the area of technology-integrated instruction using

digital technologies and social media.

Following this ninth grade team meeting, I then sat in on an

eleventh grade team meeting later on during the week. Interest-

ingly, this eleventh grade team reflected rather well the mix of

old and new instructional perspectives about which the princi-

pal and I had talked during our preliminary meeting. This parti-

cular eleventh grade faculty team consisted of two recent

teacher hires, both new to the district and in their initial three

years of teaching. One of the new teachers, Nick, is an enthusi-

astic social studies teacher, who is beginning his third year of

teaching at this campus, having moved to the district two years

ago and hired by the former principal. Jocelyn, the other new

teacher, is a science teacher in her second year of teaching,

having been hired by the school’s current new principal just this

past year. Teaching chemistry and physical science courses at

this campus, Jocelyn is a science teacher with strong science

educator interests in physical science, technology, and engi-

neering design, and who is a strong advocate of building a ro-

bust STEM-integrated curriculum—a curriculum that develops

students’ critical thinking skills through focused STEM teach-

ing. She is especially interested in brainstorming and discover-

ing ways to creatively integrate Next Generation Science Stan-

dards (NGSS) directly into her own classroom teaching and

instructional team planning with colleagues. The other mem-

bers of this eleventh grade team include Christie, a literature

and language arts teacher with seven years of teaching experi-

ence (three years at this particular campus), and who also

serves as the high school’s director of student drama produc-

tions, and Steve, a fifteen-year veteran math teacher and the

current math department chairperson on the campus. At the

outset of this eleventh grade team meeting, I listened attentively

as Christie and Nick engaged in an enthusiastic discussion re-

garding a creative plan put forward by Christie to perhaps work

together to develop a “language arts/social studies” collabora-

tive instructional unit around the idea of a “Readers’ Theatre”.

Christie explained that she felt utilizing a “Readers’ Theatre” as

a teaching and learning design format might be an effective

way to creatively engage students in “active, immersive learn-

ing” through involving them directly in dynamic reading and

interactive role playing as complementary means to explore key

concepts that Christie and Nick would be teaching during the

upcoming nine weeks period. Christie also noted that she felt

involving eleventh grade students in an experiential “Readers’

Theatre” environment would be a creative, practice-oriented way

to provide additional “English language literacy” immersive-

learning opportunities for the Hispanic students in their classes.

It was apparent that both Christie and Nick enjoyed brain-

storming creative ideas for potential new classroom teaching

units and instructional strategies to better reach their students,

and their dialogue on the possibilities of Christie’s “Readers’

Theatre” idea continued for several minutes as they explored

various directions they might pursue in incorporating this col-

laborative content idea into their team’s overall instructional

unit planning efforts.

Reacting to this conversation her social studies and language

arts team colleagues were having regarding their creative plans

to design a “Readers’ Theatre” instructional unit for students,

Jocelyn, the second year science teacher, turned enthusiastically

toward Steve, the team’s veteran math teacher, and stated:

“Steve, what Nick and Christie are talking about—using a

‘Readers’ Theatre’ format to develop a collaborative instruc-

tional unit in social studies and language arts—sounds great.

I’m wondering if you and I could work together in a similar

way to design a collaborative unit in science and math around

the metric system? This could be a way for you and I to work

together to develop an exciting unit to help our students learn

how to transition naturally into integrated STEM thinking—

through ‘putting the math in science, and the science in math’.”

“As you know,” Jocelyn added, “the metric system is something

our students need to become familiar with. We could incorpo-

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J. CLAUDET

rate using the metric system into some STEM-focused word

problems that we could develop together to help students see

natural connections in the areas of science learning and math

application.” Steve, who had been diligently grading papers at

the team table throughout the team’s discussion, looked up for a

moment and then responded in a monotone voice, “I don’t

teach the metric system, I teach Algebra. Anyway, if they don’t

have it by now, they never will.” At this point, Christie, the

literature and language arts teacher, who was also the group’s

instructional team leader, looked worriedly at Steve and then

turned her chair to face the members of her team directly and

declared, “The stakes here are high! Our grade level team’s

end-of-course test scores—in math and science as well as in

other content areas—have to improve. The reason the district

has mandated this ‘instructional teaming initiative’ is to ensure

that teachers in schools throughout the district are motivated to

engage actively in instructional planning for student learning

improvement. Steve, I know change is hard. But, we’re all go-

ing to have to learn how to do things differently if we’re going

to improve the quality of instruction to meet our students’

needs.” Steve took some time to reflect on what Christie had

just said, and then addressed the team: “I’ve been teaching here

a long time; and, overall, my students have been pretty suc-

cessful over the years. I don’t know why I have to change my

teaching practices—practices that I have perfected over the

years and that I have used effectively with my students. What’s

the point of teaming, anyway? [emphasis added] This is just the

latest ‘instructional fad’, and we all know how those come and

go. This ‘instructional teaming’ initiative is just being pushed

on us by administrators who don’t really understand the reali-

ties of classroom teaching and don’t know what our students

need to succeed.” “And, let me tell you something else,” Steve

continued. “I’ve been talking with my friends on the school

board about this ‘instructional teaming initiative’ our principal

and the superintendent are advocating, and they are not at all

happy about this either. These school board members are very

supportive of the long-term teaching efforts of veteran teachers

in this district and they want this kind of teaching—quality

teaching that has been part of the tradition of excellence in our

community for generations—to continue. They’ve told me they

have some serious questions they are planning to bring up at

the next board meeting regarding the value of the instructional

changes that the superintendent has been implementing.” The

other members of this eleventh grade instructional team stared

silently at each other as they reflected on the implications of

Steve’s comments.

These two teacher teams were representative of the dynamic

mix of instructional beliefs and educator interactions I was able

to observe over a three-week period sitting in on multiple tea-

cher team planning meetings at this campus. As had happened

many times before in working with groups of teachers and ad-

ministrators in other regional schools and districts in which I

had served as an educational change consultant, through attend-

ing these instructional team meetings I was able to collect im-

portant first-hand observer information relating to: 1) teachers’

perceptions regarding current school and district improvement

initiatives; 2) teachers’ individual and collective views regard-

ing the perceived supportiveness of campus and district admin-

istrators; and 3) teachers’ own professional sense (from their

unique classroom and instructional planning perspectives) of

what they felt were the realistic prospects for positive instruc-

tional change and improvement on their campus. Moreover, this

information provided an important backdrop to help me deve-

lop a more complete, multi-layered picture of the sociopolitics

of organizational change presently existing and evolving within

this school and district community. My observations confirmed

that there were definitely conflicting perspectives existing among

teachers at this campus regarding a number of core areas of

professional teaching practice, including: 1) the appropriate

overall structure for classroom teaching and learning; 2) the

purpose of instructional planning; and 3) the practical useful-

ness of externally imposed school- and district-level change ini-

tiatives and their impact on school improvement. These con-

flicting teacher perspectives were all driven by deep-seated

teacher beliefs about instructional quality, student performance,

and organizational effectiveness that were held and espoused by

individual teachers working within the grade-level teams I ob-

served on this campus. Armed with these sets of observational

data and organizational insights, I scheduled a follow-up meet-

ing with the principal to share what I had learned and to plan

next steps.

Coming Together as a School-wide Community

to Reassess the Purpose of Instructional Change

As I began planning for my next meeting with the principal, I

was very aware that I would need to not only report on my

organizational analysis of the various faculty team interactions

and related observational data I had collected over the previous

three-week period, but also be prepared to offer this principal

some concrete strategies on how to address the instructional

malaise currently existing at this campus and to recommend a

workable plan for moving forward. The principal at this high

school had already been expending considerable time and effort

over a period of several months to encourage her teachers to

realize the need for change in their instructional planning and to

motivate them to work together as grade-level teacher teams to

embrace the district’s instructional improvement initiatives. But,

as the principal had made resoundingly clear to me at our initial

meeting, the increasing student diversity at this high school

campus, in conjunction with the nature and complexity of tea-

chers’ multi-generational beliefs about classroom teaching and

learning and some teachers’ adamant negative views regarding

the “improvement potential” of the change initiatives themselv-

es, were combining to form major roadblocks inhibiting her

efforts. I would need to provide this principal with some new

creative strategies that could be genuinely useful to her and the

school community’s stakeholders in helping to break down the

organizational gridlock that had stymied instructional improve-

ment at this campus thus far.

As part of my data collection activities at this campus, I had

learned that during the past two years the school had been en-

gaging in a number of potentially worthwhile, albeit disjunctive

and disconnected, staff development emphases. A variety of in-

dividual staff development “events” were planned and sched-

uled at different times during the school year by the school’s

Campus Improvement Team (CIT)—a school-wide team con-

sisting of department chairs and teacher representatives from

each grade-level instructional team. This CIT group identified

staff development topics for the upcoming year’s series of quar-

terly staff development offerings through surveying faculty in

the spring to identify teacher interests and topic area recom-

mendations. At the time of my consultant work at this school,

the slate of staff development events included program topics

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focused on such things as “teacher stress and wellness”, “bul-

lying prevention”, “remediation strategies”, and the like. While

these topics were certainly worthwhile in terms of the individ-

ual professional learning content they could provide, I quickly

pointed out to the principal that, in my estimation, these kinds

of “stand-alone” staff development offerings were disjunctive

at best and were providing only surface-level content informa-

tion to teachers. Most importantly, these staff development to-

pic selections were certainly not doing anything to address in

any coherent and systematic way the deep-structural organiza-

tional and instructional change issues that stakeholders at this

campus were currently grappling with. As the principal and I

continued our conversation, I emphasized to her that based on

my overall analyses of the school’s performance data and the

collective observational notes I had compiled, teachers, admin-

istrators, and community members at this high school were

struggling with a number of interrelated systemic challenges,

including: 1) the increasing student population diversity at this

school and throughout the district which was presenting new

(and difficult) instructional planning and student learning sup-

port challenges for teachers; 2) coping with the accountability

pressures resulting from the state’s new, much more rigorous

End of Course (EoC) exams and the district’s new instructional

improvement initiatives in response to these increased student

performance demands; 3) teachers’ multiple perspectives regar-

ding instructional planning and technology integration—fueled,

in some cases, by teachers’ longstanding, entrenched beliefs re-

garding teaching and learning, their roles as classroom teachers,

and the nature (and limits) of instructional effectiveness; and 4)

the fomenting anger and disgruntled reactions of multiple stake-

holders and stakeholder groups both within the high school and

throughout the district who were becoming more forceful of

late in voicing their strong objections to the district’s change

and improvement initiatives—initiatives which, in their view,

were unnecessarily disruptive and which were undermining the

history of instructional excellence that has been a longstanding

source of pride within this district community for generations.

Collectively, these systemic challenges were creating a hotbed

of sociopolitical instability within this campus community.

This instability was contributing to and exacerbating a dysfunc-

tional professional and community-wide educational environ-

ment that was effectively creating an impassable roadblock to

any meaningful instructional change and improvement. The

principal agreed with my organizational assessment and readily

acknowledged that a new, more targeted approach to the prob-

lem was needed.

Following an approach I had been utilizing in my consulting

work with several other schools and districts in the region who

were grappling with similar organizational change and im-

provement challenges, I shared with the principal my experi-

ences in using future search meetings as a means to bring to-

gether multiple stakeholders throughout an organization—par-

ticularly an organization that is experiencing internal conflict

and whose members are having difficulty identifying and im-

plementing workable strategies for addressing needed organiza-

tional improvement. These future search events are adapted

from “future search conferences” which are often used in cor-

porate settings as a structured means to enable organization

stakeholders to engage in open, reflective group conversations

to: 1) assess their organization’s history; 2) examine multiple

stakeholders’ perspectives on the organization’s present per-

formance; and 3) construct a communal vision grounded in

real-world strategies of a preferred future direction for the or-

ganization that can ensure the organization’s continued com-

petitive advantage and optimal growth. Importantly, future

search meetings can “enable organizations and communities to

learn more together than any one person can discover alone

through bringing the ‘whole system into the room’, [to make]

feasible a shared encounter with complexity and uncertainty

leading to clarity, hope, and action” (Weisbord & Janoff, 2010:

p. 4). Due to the entrenched and politically charged nature of

the multiple stakeholder perspectivist conflicts existing at this

campus (as well as throughout the district), I knew I would

need to adapt and customize a series of future search meetings

for this campus in very specific ways if they were to be genu-

inely useful to the educational stakeholders at this campus and

within this school district community. Given the limited suc-

cess of this principal’s recent change leadership efforts and her

negative experiences involving some teachers’ and other com-

munity stakeholders’ entrenched attitudes at her campus, the

principal was understandably skeptical about the prospects of

the future search meetings idea for positively addressing the

instructional gridlock existing at her campus. But with hope in

the possibility of change and a willingness to support any effort

that could potentially bring about meaningful instructional im-

provement on her campus, she agreed to convene a meeting of

the school’s Campus Improvement Team (CIT) the following

week so that I could present the future search meetings idea

myself to the school’s leadership team.

As I anticipated, the Campus Improvement Team shared the

principal’s skepticism about my future search meetings pro-

posal and expressed their concerns about involving teachers in

“yet more meetings and additional work” on top of their already

demanding classroom teaching and grade-level team planning

responsibilities. To underscore the point, one CIT member ref-

erenced an incident that had just occurred at the most recent

school board meeting the past Monday evening. At this board

meeting, which was widely attended by a variety of local

community members (parents and area business leaders, as well

as a large contingent of the district’s teachers), tempers had

evidently boiled over during some verbal interchanges that

occurred between school board members, district leadership,

and some community members in attendance regarding the dis-

trict’s new change initiatives. As this teacher recounted the

event, stakeholder perspectives were in sharp contrast at the

board meeting as some board members siding with vocal com-

munity members took the floor at the meeting to voice in no

uncertain terms their adamant opposition to the instructional

teaming and related district “instructional improvement” initia-

tives the superintendent and the district leadership team were

implementing. These school board and community members

were intent on making it clear that they considered these new

initiatives to be misguided change efforts that were being forc-

ed on teachers by an out-of-touch superintendent and central

office staff who did not fully understand the instructional reali-

ties of classroom teaching or the legitimate professional support

needs of the district’s teachers. In response to this teacher’s

report, I used this new information to impress upon the CIT

group and the principal the even greater sense of urgency this

turn of events signaled within their school community on the

need for the school’s leadership team to make some proactive

move to demonstrate that they were actively addressing stake-

holders’ concerns and were working to move their school com-

munity forward in a positive way that would be best for all

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concerned—especially, for the students. After some further in-

tense discussion among CIT members, the principal, and my-

self, in which these campus leaders considered the implications

of these latest school board clashes which clearly reflected the

escalating stakeholder tensions within the community and the

increasingly unstable instructional climate across the district,

the group conceded, albeit reluctantly, that they had exhausted

their ideas on how to address what had now clearly become an

intractable instructional improvement dilemma at their campus.

In view of the evident need to find creative ways to address

their school improvement challenges, CIT members agreed that

it was in their best interest to embrace any new creative strate-

gies available that might have potential for helping school

stakeholders tackle their school’s instructional challenges and

move their school community forward.

I readily seized this opportunity to share with this high

school CIT group my successful experiences over the years in

utilizing the future search meeting process in several other

schools and districts within the region. As I explained to these

high school campus leaders, the power of the future search

process is in leveraging this open meeting format as a means to

bring multiple stakeholders together within a school community

in a non-threatening way to review their organization’s rich his-

tory and accomplishments, to explore the changing conditions

and events that have combined to help create their present or-

ganizational reality, and to openly share stakeholder perspec-

tives on their school’s current instructional challenges. I em-

phasized that, if engaged in properly, these community-wide

future search conversations can serve as an initial useful spring-

board for identifying commonalities in stakeholder thinking—

which can become an important foundation to support school

stakeholders’ subsequent extended efforts in building organiza-

tional cohesiveness and eventually arriving at shared consensus

on how best to move their school community forward. With

some anxiety about the unknown, but with determined hope

and a firm commitment to explore this new possibility for posi-

tive change, the members of this school’s campus improvement

team agreed to work with the principal and myself in planning

and scheduling a series of future search meetings to take place

at this high school during the winter months of the current

school year.

On my recommendation, participants in the future search

meetings included representatives from all major constituent

groups involved in this high school community, and consisted

of the following stakeholders and stakeholder groups: 1) several

parents of current high school students, some of whom were

elected parent officials serving on the school’s parent-teacher

organization (PTO); 2) an expanded Campus Improvement

Team (consisting of the various grade-level department chair-

persons, plus five to seven teacher representatives from each

grade level); 3) the school principal and two assistant principals;

and 4) the school district’s assistant superintendent for curricu-

lum and instruction, along with instructional specialists and

other central administration staff members from the district cen-

tral office. Because of the large number of stakeholder partici-

pants involved in the search conference meetings, the meetings

were held in the school’s expansive cafeteria, with the school

library and nearby classrooms used for breakout sessions. As

the school’s organizational change consultant, I served as both

conference facilitator and process observer for the series of

three future search meetings that was conducted at this campus

in January and February.

The series of three day-long future search meetings was or-

ganized into two parts: Part One was delivered on “Day One”

and focused on exploring the history and development of the

school community; Part Two encompassed “Day Two” and

“Day Three” of the future search meetings and was devoted to

examining the school community’s present overall organizatio-

nal environment and the instructional challenges the school was

facing. Each of the all-day meetings was structured to include a

number of “full group” sessions interspersed with smaller “break-

out” sessions to facilitate further brainstorming and informal

discussion among smaller groups of participants. Fully aware of

the volatile nature of the political climate existing in the district

and the intensity of the perspectivist views held by many stake-

holders regarding the district’s instructional change initiatives, I

emphasized at the opening of the first future search meeting

that the purpose of these meetings was not for stakeholders to

be critical and/or judgmental of each other, or even to attempt

to arrive at definitive sets of school leadership action strategies,

but to use these meetings as creative opportunities for stake-

holder participants to explore each others’ educational beliefs

and perspectives (including differences) regarding their school

community, and from this beginning to explore and identify

potential commonalities (i.e., areas of agreement in educational

values and beliefs) in their thinking.

“Day One” of the future search meetings focused on encour-

aging participants to explore the rich history of their school

community organization—and, particularly, to listen to and in-

ternalize this history as related through the multiple lenses and

perspectives of the diverse stakeholders and stakeholder groups

that were and are an integral part of the school’s communal fa-

bric. As school consultant and facilitator for the future search

meetings, I took special care during this important “Day One”

meeting to encourage each participant (parents and other com-

munity members, teachers, administrators, etc.) to contribute

their own perspectives and stories to help create a rich, multi-

dimensional “composite picture” of the historical journey these

school community stakeholders have taken and experienced to-

gether over the years. I was particularly interested in assisting

participants in developing a broad understanding of the multiple

contributions various stakeholders and stakeholder groups have

made to the school community over many years, in order to

help participants develop a larger “communal sense” of the

multi-dimensional, shared history of the organization. This

“Day One” future search work provided an important founda-

tion for the subsequent “Day Two” and “Day Three” future

search meetings which were devoted to examining the school’s

present organizational environment and the challenges school

community members were currently facing.

As I had anticipated, it wasn’t long into Part Two of the fu-

ture search meetings before the major topic on participants’

minds—the highly contentious district “instructional teaming”

initiative—took center stage in the discussion. It was during the

second and third days of the future search meetings that the

political tensions percolating throughout the school and district

community began to spill over into the future search meetings

and infiltrate into full-group discussions. As it turned out, sev-

eral of the school’s teachers had come to these future search

meetings fully prepared and eager to share their views on the

district’s instructional teaming/campus learning improvement

initiative. During the final “Day Three” meeting, one veteran

teacher (one of the most experienced educators in the district

who has been teaching at this high school for almost two dec-

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ades) took the floor during one of the full group sessions to

vent her anger at district and campus administrators for their

“heavy-handed implementation tactics” and “callous disregard”

for the professional autonomy of teachers—particularly, teach-

ers who “have been teaching effectively in this district for many

years”. Relishing this opportunity to address the full group, this

teacher openly voiced her concerns about what she perceived to

be an ill-conceived and misguided initiative: “You all know me

well. I grew up in this community, went through this school

system as a youngster, and as an educator I’ve been teaching

here in this district—and at this high school—for many years.

And, you all know that I’m usually very up-front in making it

known how I feel about things, especially when it comes to

what’s needed to ensure quality instruction for the students of

this district.” The full group of future search participants—

teachers, administrators, and parents assembled in the high

school’s cafeteria—were listening intently as this veteran tea-

cher continued, “The teaching strategies many of us have been

using consistently in our classrooms over the years have been

very effective in helping the students in our community be suc-

cessful, from one generation to the next—and these same tea-

ching strategies are exactly the ones we should be continuing to

use today. You do n’t change tried and true instructional strate-

gies just because central office administrators are feeling in-

creased student performance accountability pressures from the

state. The best way to address the state’s performance ac-

countability demands is to provide teachers with additional

classroom aides and other kinds of instructional resources to

make sure we have the ongoing support we need to continue

our present efforts in our classrooms. We don’t need instruc-

tional change, we need instructional support!” The reaction

from meeting participants to this veteran teacher’s impassioned

rhetoric was palpable as several groups of teachers and parents

sitting at small-group tables across the cafeteria meeting room

could be seen nodding to each other and echoing their agree-

ment with this veteran teacher’s views.

After a few moments of nervous fidgeting throughout the

conference room, the district’s assistant superintendent for

secondary instruction, who had been in attendance through all

three days of future search meeting events, stood to address the

full group. Stakeholders in the room turned in her direction as

she spoke, “I’ve been privileged to be able to attend these three

days of future search meetings, and I’ve been listening very

attentively to the perspectives that many of you have put for-

ward here regarding the quality of teaching and learning in our

classrooms and the excellent efforts of teachers both at this

high school campus and throughout the district who have been

working tirelessly to continue the tradition of educational ex-

cellence our district has been justly known for over the years.

And, this spirit of instructional leadership and commitment to

quality teaching and learning effectiveness is something that all

of us in our school district community should rightly celebrate

and be very proud of. This is a touchstone of excellence and

pride that those of us who are educators and school adminis-

trators, as well as those of us, myself included, who are parents

of children attending our schools can all draw inspiration from

as we look toward the future [emphasis added]. This focus on

the future will be especially important as we continue to work

together to find new, creative ways to address the real present

and future learning challenges of our diverse student popula-

tions and their learning needs .” A hushed silence permeated the

conference room as future search participants listened atten-

tively as this district instructional leader continued to address

the full group: “The present reality,” the assistant superinten-

dent proclaimed (pausing briefly to highlight her point), “is that

the students in our school district community have changed.

Our student populations have become much more diverse, and

the students sitting in our district’s classrooms today come to

us with different cultural heritages and backgrounds—and also

with different kinds of learning needs and challenges. And, as

educators, our job is to provide all of our district’s students

with the appropriate kinds of instructional support they need to

be successful. But, we will have to think differently and work in

new ways to leverage new 21st century teaching tools and

technologies that are available, and put in place the right kinds

of instructional support programs to meet our students’ needs.

And, in order to do all of this, we’re all going to have to work

to reinvent ourselves as instructional leaders [emphasis added].

We will all need to learn how to work collaboratively in new

ways to be able to examine effectively our students’ individual

learning needs and to make data-driven team decisions that

enable us to make informed choices on the appropriate mix of

instructional tools and support strategies that will ensure that

our district’s celebrated tradition of teaching and learning

excellence will continue.” The assistant superintendent con-

cluded her remarks by stating emphatically, “Our unwavering

commitment to instructional quality has not changed. But, we

as instructional leaders will need to change! [emphasis added]

We will need to change how we think about instruction, how we

select the kinds of instructional tools and strategies that we use,

and how we leverage these tools and strategies to work to-

gether in new and more effective ways—in order to continue to

provide that level of classroom teaching and learning effec-

tiveness and quality instructional support to our students that is

the hallmark of excellence in our district.”

As a final full-group task to culminate the series of three day-

long future search meetings, participants were asked to collabo-

ratively review the various perspectives that were articulated by

stakeholder participants during the future search meetings and

generate a summary list of shared “common perceptions” regar-

ding the organizational realities and challenges facing the high

school and school district community. The “common percep-

tions” that were generated by future search meeting participants

included: 1) a broader recognition of the systemic impact of the

demographic changes that have irreversibly altered the makeup

of the student populations being served within this school and

district community; 2) a more focused realization of the kinds

of complex challenges involved in planning for and delivering

quality classroom instruction to diverse student learners, par-

ticularly in STEM content areas; 3) a better grasp of the perva-

sive feeling held by a majority of teachers at this high school

that they are ill-equipped to learn about and use digital tech-

nologies in their own teaching; and 4) a new, collective recog-

nition among participants that the intense, multi-stakeholder

perspectivist conflicts and resulting sociopolitical gridlock cur-

rently affecting this school and district community was not

sustainable, and that new creative ideas on how to bring about

meaningful organizational change were needed. This final list

of “common perceptions” which these future search partici-

pants generated reflected well both the nature and extent of the

instructional dysfunction existing within this high school and

district community, as well as participants’ evolving collabora-

tive insights—as a communal group—on the compelling need

for a major shift in their collective thinking regarding the pur-

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poses of organization-wide instructional change.

The culminating sets of “communal perceptions” and “col-

laborative insights” generated by meeting participants as a re-

sult of the collective future search activities conducted at this

high school campus provided the necessary frame for me,

working as the school’s organizational change consultant, to

propose to these stakeholders an alternative approach to ad-

dressing their dilemma situation—an approach that thus far

they had not yet considered. This alternative approach would

involve stakeholders becoming immersed in the realities of

school change leadership in a radically new way—as a multi-

media case learning team investigating anew their school com-

munity’s organizational challenges as a “school leadership mo-

vie production crew”. After much further discussion (including

the airing of anxieties about the prospects of embarking on an

“unknown adventure”), these education stakeholders—empo-

wered by their future search meeting efforts and exuding a re-

newed, resolute commitment to look toward the future—de-

cided to take up my challenge.

Embracing a New Focus on Organizational

Learning… Lights, Camera, Action!

Organizational case production efforts completed at this high

school campus followed the design of similar sets of organiza-

tional cases that were developed and produced over a ten-year

period in participating schools and school districts in the West

Texas Permian Basin and Texas Panhandle regions. These case

production activities were part of a decade-long research and

development project to investigate the use of multimedia or-

ganizational case methods as a creative tool to assist school

stakeholders in implementing collaborative change leadership

practices in school communities experiencing tough, real-world

school leadership dilemma challenges. The multi-year project

research and development work conducted at these regional

schools was made possible through initial funding in 1996

through 1998 (totaling US $400,000) provided by the Sid W.

Richardson Foundation (Fort Worth, Texas), the Abell-Hanger

Foundation (Midland, Texas), and the Franklin Charitable

Trusts (Post, Texas). This initial funding provided support for

the creation of a school leadership multimedia case production

research and development lab housed in the College of Educa-

tion at Texas Tech University. This R&D lab was equipped

with sets of betacam SP cameras, audio mixing and dubbing

equipment, and nonlinear digital video and audio editing hard-

ware and software to support multimedia case filming and post-

production work. Researchers and multimedia specialists in

digital video filming, audio mixing, and multimedia post-pro-

duction were key members of a university research team who

worked closely with school stakeholder case development teams

at individual schools participating in the funded project’s over-

arching university—K-12 collaborative partnership design.

A unique feature of the organizational case development pro-

ject work undertaken at the high school profiled in this report

(as well as with similar case development efforts completed at

other schools and districts throughout the region) was in the use

of multimedia case learning as an alternative approach to per-

sonnel staff development and school stakeholder organizational

learning. This approach centered on immersing multiple school

community stakeholders directly in the critical examination and

reflective analysis of their own context-specific organizational

dilemma situation through involving stakeholders as collabora-

tive developers and producers of a “multimedia case” about

their own lived school community dilemma experiences. As

part of production work, school stakeholders participating in

case development activities became immersed together—as mo-

vie production crew collaborators—in developing dynamic

multimedia portrayals of stakeholders’ multiperspectivist con-

flicts surrounding key case issues that were fueling their school

community’s organizational dilemma. This collaborative im-

mersive learning aspect of the project’s organizational case

learning design directly parallels and reflects the intense kind of

“creative immersion” experienced by movie production crews

on location as they are engaged in “scene shoots” and related

scene editing and production act ivities.

Case production work at this high school began in earnest in

the spring of 2008. Beginning in March, campus-based produc-

tion team members (consisting of thirty stakeholders directly

involved with this high school community and its organizatio-

nal and instructional change challenges—teachers, grade-level

department chairpersons, campus administrators, central office

instructional specialists, and parents) worked closely with uni-

versity multimedia production team specialists to begin the pro-

cess of “storyboarding” the organizational case and developing

detailed interactive scripts for individual case scenes. Because

of the intense nature of the perspectivist conflicts existing be-

tween and among various stakeholders and stakeholder groups

regarding the instructional change initiatives taking place at the

high school, university production specialists spent a great deal

of time early-on within initial case development project activi-

ties coaching campus stakeholders on how to adopt a proactive

critical reflective stance toward their case storyboarding and

scene scripting efforts. Campus-based stakeholder team mem-

bers were encouraged to strive for perspectivist accuracy and

detail in the development of their preliminary “case storyboard”

depicting the evolution of important aspects of their “organiza-

tional leadership case”. As stakeholder team members proceed-

ed to work on developing and refining individual case scenes,

campus stakeholders (with assistance from university produc-

tion specialists) spent a great deal of time engaging in open cri-

tical review and discussion of multiple iterative drafts of indi-

vidual case scenes depicting decisive interactive encounters be-

tween various stakeholders holding competing views regarding

case challenges. The goal of these activities was to develop a

set of well-crafted case scenes and scene scripts that accurately

captured the dynamic nature and contextual depth of the mul-

ti-perspectivist organizational dilemma situation which these

campus stakeholders were actively experiencing and were so

directly involved in within their school and district community.

Storyboarding and case scenes development work was com-

pleted by the end of May. The next phase of case production

work involved campus stakeholders directly in the actual stag-

ing and filming of individual case scenes. Case scene filming

was conducted during the summer months of June and July at

the high school campus. Importantly, as a creative way to ex-

pand and deepen stakeholders’ inclination toward sustained

critical reflective thinking during this phase of case production

activities, individual stakeholders were directed by university

production specialists to select and assume different roles than

their “real-life” stakeholder roles for the purposes of case film-

ing. For example, individual stakeholders who were teachers in

their “real-life” organizational roles assumed other stakeholder

roles (such as campus-level administrator or parent) in “acting

out” various case production scenes. Doing this forced stake-

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holders to think deeply and critically about the perspectives and

beliefs of “other” stakeholders regarding the school commu-

nity’s instructional change initiatives. Interestingly, this role-

swapping strategy triggered multiple spontaneous events during

scene film shoots in which one or more of the campus-based

production team “stakeholders-turned-actors” would become

agitated and repeatedly call for time-outs within a particular

shoot in order to coach their fellow actors on the “correct” in-

terpretation and delivery of their own real-life stakeholder per-

spectives—perspectives which they insisted their stakeholder-

actor colleagues were not projecting correctly. These kinds of

impromptu peer coaching sessions occurred throughout the

filming of the case’s multiple scenes and they were recognized

early-on by university production specialists as important or-

ganizational learning opportunities for campus stakeholders

participating in the overall case production immersive experi-

ence.

In addition to the filming of various case scenes, campus

stakeholder production team members were also involved in

developing a number of important multimedia databases that

would become part of the completed multimedia case. These

databases included information files presenting multi-year

overview summaries of such things as: 1) the high school’s

student population demographics; 2) grade-level and school-

level profiles of student academic performance scores; 3) stu-

dent progress monitoring and intervention data; and 4) detailed

descriptions of the instructional improvement initiatives that

were being implemented at the school. Finally, several campus

stakeholder production team members also participated in the

filming of a number of Reflective Decision Making video seg-

ments that were incorporated into the overall organizational

learning design of the multimedia case. These video segments

highlighted conversations among multiple school leadership

experts (regional Education Service Center school improvement

consultants, secondary school association state-wide executives,

seasoned administrative and instructional leaders from school

districts across the state, etc.) who were invited to review the

case scenes and databases and provide their “expert panel per-

spectives” on the context-specific organizational change lead-

ership challenges portrayed in this high school multimedia case.

As part of their case review, these experts were encouraged to

share their real-world insights on potential collaborative lead-

ership strategies that could be adapted and employed by stake-

holders in the case situation to creatively address this high

school’s leadership challenges and help move the school com-

munity forward.

Multimedia Case Design Elements

Project designers and multimedia specialists working over

many years in collaboration with multiple groups of school

stakeholders have developed an interactive navigational design

template for the multimedia cases which have been produced at

the various school campuses involved in the project, including

the high school instructional leadership case highlighted in this

article. The various components of this navigational design

template were developed to create an overall multimedia case

analysis and decision making environment within which school

educators and associated school community stakeholders could

work together as a team to: 1) review the overall dimensions of

their school’s current instructional leadership and organiza-

tional improvement challenges; 2) easily access and examine

case-specific school accountability data and related resource

information pertaining to the campus (including Public Educa-

tion Information Management System [PEIMS] data and Aca-

demic Excellence Indicator System [AEIS] student performance

information from the state-level Texas Education Agency [TEA]

school performance accountability databases); 3) view, criti-

cally analyze, and discuss multiple case scenes depicting inter-

active encounters between key stakeholders and stakeholder

groups harboring conflicting beliefs and perspectives regarding

their school’s improvement challenges; and 4) deliberate on the

merits of possible sets of short- and long-term action strategies

that could be implemented to effectively move their school

community forward.

The project’s multimedia case design template incorporates a

number of interactive elements. These design elements are

illustrated in Figures 1 through 5. The overall multimedia case

design employs a “school leadership office” visual metaphor as

the interactive interface for case users (Figure 1). This school

leadership office serves as the interactive team-learning envi-

ronment and digital portal within and through which school

stakeholders can access and examine multiple school docu-

ments such as curriculum maps, instructional planning summa-

ries, progress monitoring and intervention records, grade- and

school-level student performance files, and other databases

relating to the case dilemma situation. School stakeholder

teams can utilize the interactive links embedded in this school

leadership office environment to: 1) review student demo-

graphic profiles and personnel staffing information for the

campus; 2) examine multi-year school accountability summa-

ries and related database information on aggregated and disag-

gregated student standardized test performance data; 3) view

individual multimedia case scenes; 4) interact online with team

colleagues, district administrators, and Education Service Cen-

ter (ESC) program specialists and consultants about case details;

5) analyze selected video frame segments of individual case

scenes and store their team’s video segment written reflective

analyses in a digital case analysis program archive; and 6) lev-

erage all available case information files and databases in con-

junction with team case scene analysis results to propose, dis-

cuss, and finalize detailed sets of short- and long-term action

Figure 1.

Navigational design template featuring “school leadership office” in-

teractive team-learning environment and multiple resource database

links.

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J. CLAUDET

Figure 2.

Case video scenes database area incorporating “video mark” frame ana-

lysis function.

Figure 3.

Individual “video marked” scene frames and scene frame

sections selected for further case team analysis.

Figure 4.

Case reflective analysis area showing specific examples of school case

team members’ comparative cross-scene “video mark” analyses along

with school leadership perform ance standards sorting functionality.

strategies to address their school community’s specific im-

provement challenges.

Case users can access, load, and view the school leadership

case’s multiple digital video case scenes in the Case Video

Figure 5.

Case reflective decision making area presenting mul-

tiple “expert panel” video segments for case team re-

view.

Scenes Database area (Figure 2). Each scene portrays one or

more critical incidents identified and developed by the educa-

tors and community stakeholders working together as members

of the school-based “multimedia case development team”.

These critical incident scenes take the form of scripted interac-

tive encounters between multiple school stakeholders and stake-

holder groups who hold conflicting beliefs and perspectives

regarding the school’s instructional improvement challenges.

Importantly, through portraying in sharp relief the multiple

beliefs and perspectives of stakeholders within the school situa-

tion and how stakeholders’ beliefs and perspectives clash on

central case issues, these scenes are able to shed light on how

these stakeholder conflicts are contributing directly to expand-

ing and intensifying the sociopolitical turmoil that is fueling the

school community’s instructional leadership dilemma. Stake-

holder team members can utilize the “video mark” frame analy-

sis function incorporated into the multimedia case interactive

design to assist them in identifying and “digitally marking”

specific portions of individual video case scenes for further

team analysis (Figure 2). This “video marking” capability al-

lows users to select specific “scene frames” and “scene frame

sections” within individual case scenes, which users can then

examine and discuss in detail with their case team members

(Figure 3). The “video mark” function is particularly useful in

enabling team members to examine specific nuanced details of

role players’ interactions within individual scene segments, and

how stakeholders’ belief conflicts and related perspectivist

clashes are contributing to the intractable nature of the situation.

Working together as an analysis team, school stakeholders can

then generate written summary critical analyses of their “video

marked” scene frames and scene frame sections and save these

team analyses in the multimedia program’s case analysis ar-

chive files.

School stakeholder teams can further expand their analyses

of the multi-perspectivist, sociopolitical dynamics of the case

situation through engaging in comparative cross-scene analyses

of multiple critical incidents in the multimedia case design’s

Reflective Analysis area (Figure 4). Within this area, team

members can sort and organize their accumulated “video mark-

ed” scenes and accompanying written reflective analyses into

specific “school organizational leadership” domain areas (i.e.,

programmatic, contextual, functional, interpersonal)—critical

areas of school collaborative leadership practice identified in

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state and national school leadership standards. These compara-

tive cross-scene analyses enable school stakeholder teams to

carefully examine observable patterns in stakeholders’ school

community behaviors and actions across the overall timeline

and trajectory of the school case situation, including allowing

team members to engage in standards-informed discussions to

pinpoint strengths and weaknesses in stakeholders’ collabora-

tive organizational leadership and decision making. In addition

to these kinds of reflective analyses of interactive behaviors and

actions that are portrayed within and across multiple case

scenes, school stakeholder teams can also engage in various

advance consequence analyses focused on brainstorming and

discussing multiple “what-if scenarios”—that is, potential al-

ternative (and more positive) situational outcomes that might

have been realizable under different conditions influenced by

different sets of stakeholder beliefs. As case team members

work together to develop their individual scene and compara-

tive cross-scene analyses, school stakeholders have access to

the full array of case-specific digital databases and information

resources available within the overall multimedia case-learning

environment.

Finally, school stakeholder teams can synthesize and lever-

age their collective case scene reflective analysis discussions to

inform their team-centered strategic leadership action planning

within the multimedia case’s Reflective Decision Making area

(Figure 5). Within this area, school stakeholder teams can re-

view several multiple “expert panel” video segments led by

groups of K-12 education consultants and seasoned school

community leaders who share their perspectives and insights on

the school dilemma challenges portrayed in the multimedia case.

Through studying these “expert panel” segments, school case

team members can glean important additional insights from

experienced education leaders regarding specific leadership

dimensions of their case situation, including insights on various

“organizational impact factors and implications” that should be

considered when engaging in collaborative school leadership

decision-making (such as: understanding the importance of

“data-informed, comprehensive planning” to guide school re-

newal; avoiding common school improvement “decision-mak-

ing pitfalls”; managing and optimizing school-community

“multiple stakeholder communications” to positively support

the ongoing school change and improvement process; etc.).

Case team members can leverage the real-world school leader-

ship insights provided in these “expert panel” video segments

to further inform and refine their own collaborative efforts as

they work together to generate detailed sets of short- and long-

term action strategies to move their school community forward.

The above design elements were incorporated into the mul-

timedia case interactive design to enable case users as a school

leadership team to focus directly on: 1) exploring both the

“macro” and “micro” organizational and sociopolitical aspects

of their school leadership dilemma situation, with special atten-

tion to examining the multiple dimensions and underlying root

causes of their school dilemma situation; 2) examining the nu-

anced interactive dynamics of stakeholder belief conflicts and

how these conflicts were contributing to and deepening their

school community’s overall dilemma situation; and 3) utilizing

their own case scene analyses to “reframe” and “recalibrate”

their school leadership and improvement thinking based on new

team-centered insights and shared understandings to generate

realistic, implementable sets of school improvement action stra-

tegies. In combination, the above multimedia case design ele-

ments provided these high school community stakeholders

(turned case production team members) with a new set of case-

specific digital tools and resources to assist them in exploring

how to think differently and work together in new ways to de-

velop their own collaborative teaming and school improvement

decision making capacities.

Discussion

The multimedia case production and analysis project efforts

detailed in this report engaged multiple groups of school com-

munity members, multimedia production specialists, and school

improvement researchers in collaborating together in a unique

way to address the instructional change and improvement di-

lemma challenges confronting educators and other key stake-

holders in this West Texas high school community. The cumu-

lative production team efforts of participants involved in this

project resulted in the generation of a number of key insights

regarding the viability and usefulness of multi-entity, collabo-

rative teaming designs and multimedia-integrated organizatio-

nal case learning tools for assisting school community stake-

holders in: 1) reframing and refocusing their real-world school

leadership dilemma challenges in ways that can facilitate data-

informed, actionable decision-making; and 2) learning how to

work together more creatively and effectively as organizational

leading and learning teams. These insights are highlighted and

discussed below.

The Organizational Case Learning Project’s

Multi-Entity, Collaborative Design Expanded the

Prospects for Meaningful Organization-Wide

Learning and G enera ted Ne w Insights among

Participants Regardin g the Nature of Organiz ational

Change Leadership.

Multimedia case development efforts reported in this article

utilized a funded project “multi-entity cluster design”. This col-

laborative design set the stage for and enabled multiple groups

of stakeholders representing several education entities (a high

school campus and associated school district community, a

state university, and a regional education service center) to

come together to address the real-world “problems of practice”

challenges of K-12 educators and community stakeholders in a

highly immersive and intensive organizational case learning

project environment. Certainly, the high school teachers and

administrators, parents, business leaders, and district central

office personnel involved in this high school campus case deve-

lopment effort were presented with new opportunities for inter-

acting and learning together in a different kind of collaborative

learning enterprise. But, the case development project’s colla-

borative design also enabled the direct involvement of multiple

higher education faculty and specialists working in a number of

different areas within a university (i.e., curriculum and instruc-

tion; school leadership and improvement; adult learning; com-

puter technology; dramatic arts and theatre; sociology; organ-

izational communication), as well as engaging the expertise and

contributions of math and science instructional content and staff

development specialists from a regional education service cen-

ter. The K-12 school district-university-service center multi-en-

tity partnership design of this project was widely perceived

from the very beginning of funded project efforts as a unique

way to bring together diverse educators and researchers with

multiple specializations to collaborate in new ways to investi-

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gate and seek creative solutions to deeply entrenched problems

of K-12 school leadership practice. Similar to the way a Kand-

insky painting brings together many different colors, hues, and

shapes and juxtaposes them in unfamiliar ways to engender in-

triguing new visual insights and meanings, the multi-entity

partnership design of this case development project enabled

project participants to “team together” in non-routine ways that

generated new opportunities for: 1) critically examining multi-

ple sets of relevant school case data; 2) engaging in rich colle-

gial conversations about this high school community’s organi-

zational change and instructional leadership challenges; and 3)

sharing and discussing stakeholders’ multiple case analysis per-

spectives and insights—including collaboratively brainstorming

and deliberating on multiple “best-scenario” school improve-

ment decision making options.

One important insight regarding the “organizational learning

potential” of case production activities that emerged from pro-

ject work was the realization that the quality and depth—as

well as sustainability—of the project’s multimedia case devel-

opment “process” and “products” (and the impact of these on

participants) were magnified significantly as a direct result of

the multidimensional nature of the interactions occurring

among participating stakeholders and organizational entities.

Many of the education stakeholders involved in the project

noted that this was their first experience in collaborating to-

gether so intensively within this kind of multi-entity design.

The diverse kinds of stakeholders and stakeholder groups par-

ticipating together in project activities infused the combined

project teams’ case analysis reflective conversations with an

added richness and depth that would not otherwise have been

possible. These conversations facilitated a cross-pollination of

creative ideas across multiple perspectives and engendered new,

deeper kinds of organizational insights. This kind of involve-

ment in multi-stakeholder, cross-pollinating conversations about

real-world dilemmas of practice and how to solve them became

“infectious” and “exhilarating” for those participating, and be-

came a catalyst for engaging school community team members

in ever-deeper conversations about the nature of organizational

change and instructional leadership in schools. These conversa-

tions challenged and empowered stakeholder participants to ex-

plore new ideas, to investigate new avenues of change agent

thinking, and to push the boundaries of stakeholders’ own be-

liefs and understandings regarding what is possible in terms of

refashioning and rejuvenating a school community’s instruc-

tional leadership cultur e.

A majority of the high school educators and community

stakeholders participating as “case production team members”

in this multimedia case development project were convinced at

the outset of project activities that the entrenched, conflicting

beliefs permeating their school and district communities— con-

flicting beliefs which had stymied change implementation ef-

forts to date at their campus—were intractable and, in effect,

were permanently undermining any real prospect for open col-

legial conversations that could lead to meaningful change.

However, as stakeholders became actively involved in the pro-

ject’s case production activities, the immersive nature and in-

tensity of the collaborative participation necessary to actually

engage in and complete the case development project work

enabled these stakeholders to experience first-hand a new kind

of team-learning environment that challenged and expanded

their organizational thinking. Through their sustained involve-

ment in the project’s case development and analysis activities,

school stakeholders began to discover that they could actually

leverage their belief conflicts to advantage to engage in new

kinds of more open and deeper conversations about those very

belief conflicts—conflicting school community member beliefs

about instructional effectiveness and organizational change that

stakeholders had for so long been convinced were intractable.

And, importantly, stakeholders were developing new under-

standings (as well as new confidence) on how their own per-

spectivist differences, if addressed openly and honestly, could

become a starting-off point for building more multi-dimen-

sioned and nuanced sets of “team-centered” common values

and shared understandings about the nature of organizational

change and the prospects for positive instructional leadership in

their school community. Moreover, these new team-centered

understandings could serve as catalysts for opening up potential

new avenues of creative change leadership thinking and strate-

gic action planning that could help move their school organiza-

tion forward in positive ways. This process of evolving shared

values and reciprocal ways of thinking involved discovering

common ground and developing a sense of collegial agreement

regarding the overall nature and quality of the classroom-based,

grade-level, and school-wide teaching and learning environ-

ments stakeholders desired for students, as well as the kinds of

student progress monitoring and learning intervention and sup-

port mechanisms that should be in place on their campus to

ensure that all students can be successful. These initial team-

centered understandings regarding “standards of quality” relat-

ing to the school’s overall teaching and learning environments

then became an important foundation upon which stakeholders

could begin to build further consensus regarding the desired

focus and direction of their instructional leadership and school

improvement practices.

These critical reflective “team conversations” were an ongo-

ing, integral component of the overall project’s multiple case

development and analysis activities. Collectively, these team

conversations served as an important foundational impetus for

helping stakeholders begin the process of learning how to work

together in new team-oriented ways as school change leaders

(without at first necessarily being consciously aware that they

were doing so)—a process of immersive, collaborative organ-

izational learning in which the teaming process itself becomes a

new way.

Case Development Activities Provided Participants

with an Alternative Organizational Learning

Platform to Explore the Teaming Process in New

Ways and to Reinve nt Themselves as Col l aborative

Learning Communities.

The creative ways that communities of people throughout

history have come together as leading and learning communi-

ties to cope with adversity, to adapt to new environments, and

to deal with the challenges of limited resources have long fas-

cinated cultural anthropologists and organizational sociologists.

There are numerous accounts throughout history of communal

groups of people connected together via tight-knit social and

cultural bonds who have displayed remarkable ingenuity and

resourcefulness in responding effectively to the myriad limita-

tions and challenges of their immediate environments. These

communal groups have also exhibited an intriguing propensity

for learning how to work together creatively in win-win ways

that can benefit the entire group.

The French Acadians (Les Acadiens de France) of south

Louisiana, for example, have evolved a rich and fascinating

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cultural heritage—a heritage hard-won over time as a result of

having to learn how to creatively adapt to the challenges of

surviving in a new hostile land: the unforgiving marsh and

swamp environments of the lower Mississippi River delta re-

gion and surrounding bayous and tributaries. The French Aca-

dians’ rich cultural heritage and collaborative teaming propen-

sities evolved to a large extent as a direct result of the difficult

historical circumstances that befell the Acadians, and through

which they had to both survive and learn how to reinvent

themselves as a people. In the mid-1750s war between the Brit-

ish and the French in North America was imminent. To prevent

the French Acadians from allying with the French forces, the

British decided to expel this entire group of people from their

settlements in Nova Scotia. Deported from Nova Scotia by the

British in 1755, the French Acadians were forced en masse to

board ships and sail south down the Atlantic seaboard, around

the tip of the Florida peninsula, and across the Gulf of Mexico

to eventually find a new homeland in the marshes and bayous

of south Louisiana. Their constant struggles to cope with the

hardships of everyday survival in harsh, semi-tropical environ-

ments, along with the attendant challenges of having to obtain

sustenance through foraging for wild game in dense swamps

and marshes and fishing in muddy bayous, molded these south

Louisiana French immigrants into a tough people with a

fiercely loyal and team-oriented communal culture. The need to

survive in difficult circumstances and an unfamiliar environ-

ment helped to shape the distinctive communal culture of these

French Acadians in unique ways. Notably, these French immi-

grants were compelled early-on as a people to quickly respond

to the challenges of their new south Louisiana surroundings

through: 1) adapting hunting and fishing techniques gleaned

from indigenous Indian tribes in the region; 2) learning how to

creatively extend and maximize available limited resources;

and 3) developing and refining distinctive cultural mores that

focused on the ingenious use of collaborative teaming methods

as a means to extend the quality of life for their families and

enhance the overall prospects for these French Acadians—as a

collective group—of surviving and flourishing in their new

homeland.

The need to find creative ways to extend and maximize their

limited food resources compelled Acadian communities to in-

vent and engage in various kinds of creative communal events

that were designed to ensure the survival of their close-knit

communities. Acadian community members of all ages partici-

pated enthusiastically in these social gatherings that served as a

means for the Acadians to learn and share new cooking tech-

niques and new ways of teaming together to prepare food that

could feed large numbers of families and sustain them, often

through long winter months. The fierce, survivalist mentality of

the French Acadian people—and, in particular, their penchant

for infusing variations of collaborative teaming into all facets

of their everyday lifestyle—was especially evident in their

group-oriented approach to the preparation and sharing of food

within their communities. For example, this emphasis on team-

ing as a fundamental aspect of daily life was clearly evident in

the boucherie—a French Acadian communal event that was

commonly practiced for hundreds of years in Acadian commu-

nities, and continues on as an integral part of Acadian cultural

life to the present day. The boucherie, as developed and prac-

ticed in French Acadian culture, involved families throughout

an Acadian settlement coming together to slaughter and cook a

hog as a means to provide meat for the whole community. One

family would donate the hog, which would then be butchered,

cooked, and prepared for distribution throughout the commu-

nity. The traditional boucherie was (and still is) a day-long

communal event in which multiple groups of community mem-

bers would spontaneously form ad hoc cooking teams to turn

particular segments of the hog into specially prepared delicacies

for consumption. Some of these cooking teams, for example,

would focus on cutting away the backbone meat from the hog

and cooking it in large pots to prepare backbone stew. Other

teams would work on cooking down the head to make hogs-

head cheese. Still other teams would prepare andouille sausage,

and on and on until every bit of the animal (including ears,

snout, brains, feet, and all) was boned-out, carved, cooked, and

consumed. These cooking teams were multi-generational col-

laborative affairs in which older, more experienced family eld-

ers worked side by side with younger adults in the slaughtering

and multiple cooking activities to share their expertise and

time-tested best practices. In addition, community members

participating in the boucherie also engaged in a good deal of

“role swapping”, frequently taking on multiple roles both

within and across various cooking teams during the boucherie

event (e.g., cleaning the hog, chopping firewood and stoking

fires, preparing necessary ingredients to cook different parts of

the hog, etc.). These kinds of multi-generational collaborative

teaming and peer coaching group-oriented behaviors were in-

tegral socio-cultural aspects of Acadian communal events. The

active participation and ad hoc teaming aspects of the boucherie

served to generate an infectious joie de vivre and camaraderie

that was felt by all participants and which helped to define the

overall communal cultural nature of the boucherie event. Col-

lectively, this emphasis on multi-generational collaborative

teaming, in combination with a practical ingenuity in using

available tools and resources, and a pronounced focus on real-

world problem solving were distinctive characteristics of the

French Acadians’ way of life—characteristics which enabled

these immigrants to survive and flourish in their new environ-

ment.

Very much like the French Acadians of south Louisiana who

immersed themselves in culturally rich, communal learning

events as a way to share knowledge and ensure their own con-

tinued survival, the high school educators and school commu-

nity stakeholders participating in the high school campus mul-

timedia case learning project reported in this article were

able—through their direct involvement in case production and

analysis activities—to leverage their project experiences to

develop a more mindful and engaged critical reflective stance

toward their organization and its challenges. As project work

progressed and as school community stakeholders became im-

mersed in case development activities, these “school stakehol-

ders—turned multimedia case developers” were able to move

gradually, but decisively, from simply reacting passively to or-

ganizational change via attempting to cling to old status quo

methods, to becoming more inventive and resourceful in their

organizational thinking and decision making. As a result of

their project-based “team-learning experiences”, these stake-

holders began to engage more consciously and purposefully as

a collaborative production team with their own high school

community’s current challenges with renewed confidence and a

determination to utilize their school organization’s limited re-

sources in new, creative ways (as “resource assets embodying

great potential” rather than as “limiting liabilities”) to benefit

the entire school community. This kind of practical ingenuity

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J. CLAUDET

in the use of limited resources was extended and amplified as

stakeholders began in earnest to collaboratively explore and

reflect on their own school data. As an integral part of case

development and analysis activities, campus stakeholders ac-

tively participated in numerous critical reflective “team con-

versations” about their own school community data. This team-

oriented approach engaged many stakeholders (espousing mul-

tiple individual role perspectives and beliefs) in a dynamic

process of interacting directly with their school’s data and

sharing their individual and group assessments and interpreta-

tions of these data. Acting as members of a collaborative team,

these school community stakeholders then began to look much

more carefully and critically at their own school community

data in new ways—examining their school’s data (e.g., student

population demographics; grade- and school-level content area-

specific student performance profiles; progress monitoring re-

sults; response to instructional intervention data; etc.) with a

new sense of collegial awareness and a new discriminatory at-

tention to details in the data. These ongoing, data-driven team

conversations generated a rich palette of multi-stakeholder

school leadership interactions that served as a dynamic means

to inform the shape and direction of stakeholders’ collaborative

organizational thinking and guide their group instructional de-

cision-making.

For example, during case team “action planning” activities in

which campus stakeholders focused intently on critically ana-

lyzing their school community situational data in order to de-

velop specific short- and long-term action plan strategies to

move their school community forward, several teacher mem-

bers of the campus production team began to openly express

their new-found enthusiasm for the mobile digital technologies

(laptops, ipads, ipods, etc.) and social media resources (e.g.,

blogs, wikis, online pinboards, facebook, twitter) they were us-

ing in their multimedia case production work. These teachers,

some of whom had been decidedly negative in response to re-

cent pressures from the district to integrate technology into

their instructional practices, were beginning to see the potential

of these technologies as “digital tools” that they might be able

to adapt and apply directly to inform the design of their own

ongoing professional development as teachers. During their

case team’s analysis conversations, these teachers began to

reflect openly and positively about the broad application poten-

tial of these digital technologies and to ask some very practical

questions: “If these technologies can work for us in helping us

analyze our overall school situation within this case project,

could they also be potentially useful in assisting us with our

own ongoing professional development as teachers?” and “How

could we leverage these technologies which we are learning

about and employing in our multimedia project case develop-

ment work—in particular, mobile technologies and social me-

dia resources—to directly inform our own daily instructional

planning and classroom teaching practices?” These teachers, in

fact, were beginning to realize that they could actually leverage

digital technology itself (via mobile technologies and social

media) to work smarter and more efficiently. These teachers

were learning that these technologies could be viewed as “help-

ful resources” that these teachers and their colleagues could use

to acquire and share the practical kinds of real-world profes-

sional development knowledge they needed to help them inte-

grate technology effectively into their science and math teach-

ing (for example: through sharing helpful tips among teachers

on how to develop instructional videos or “vodcasts” that stu-

dents could access and download to enhance their individual

content learning). Educators at this high school, in essence,

were discovering new ways, prompted by their own case learn-

ing project experiences, that they—working together as a lead-

ing and learning team—could leverage and apply available

technology resources to create e-learning networks throughout

their school community to benefit both students and teachers.

In effect, stakeholders’ participation in project work enabled

them to experience first-hand—in an intensive, immersive

way—the positive payoffs of collaborative teaming. And, these

payoffs included the experience of learning how to think dif-

ferently and work together in new ways to extend and maximize

their school community’s own available resources to develop

“just-in-time creative solutions” to real-world problems. The

teaming process itself effectively created a new kind of organ-

izational learning environment within which “purposive gains”

in both individual and team-oriented organizational learning

could be achieved. These new learning insights accumulated as

the project progressed and set the stage for the team to generate

sets of practical action strategies that could lead to meaningful

organizational change. These kinds of “incremental gains” in

stakeholder thinking can be very important in building team

confidence as stakeholders embark on the journey of learning

how to work synergistically and effectively as a collaborative

team to deal with complex, and often unforeseen, organiza-

tional challenges. Moreover, these team-acquired insights can

be very beneficial in terms of helping to “institutionalize” the

practice of collaborative learning as an integral part of a culture

of continuous improvement in a school district community. In

recent years, researchers investigating the challenges of man-

aging real-world organizational change have underscored the

significance of these kinds of “incremental gains” for helping

stakeholder teams cope with difficult, unexpected problems and

build organizational resilience: “Small wins have their impact

through the tangible examples they provide for others, through

the allies they attract and the opponents they deter, through

doing something tangible, and through creating a context with-

in which change is now seen as possible [emphasis added]”

(Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007: p. 140).

The multimedia case production project completed at this

high school essentially presented participating educators and

school community stakeholders with an “alternative team-

learning platform” for exploring their organizational change

leadership thinking—using their own school community data to

do so. This team-learning environment enabled participants to

explore and experience first-hand the real pay offs of communal

decision making through learning how to think differently and

work together in new ways. The “teaming itself” became a new

way as stakeholders experimented and discovered together how

to creatively apply their own practical ingenuity and collabora-

tive problem-solving acumen to their school’s real-world chal-

lenges to reinvent themselves as collaborative learning commu-

nities.

Sustained Immersion in Organiz ational Case

Development Ac tivities Became a Powerful

Collabora ti ve L earni ng Catalys t for Changing

Stakeholder Beliefs and Jumpstarting the School

Turnaround Pr ocess.

Through participating in the project’s collective case devel-

opment and refinement activities, campus stakeholder team

members were engaging for the first time in a new kind of or-

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ganizational learning experience that was purposely designed

to expand and deepen their individual and collaborative “lead-

ership thinking” about their own context-specific dilemma

situation. This expansion and deepening of stakeholders’ lead-

ership thinking as the project progressed was fueled by the

emergence of fundamental changes in stakeholders’ core teach-

ing, leading, and learning beliefs. These transformations in

stakeholder beliefs evolved incrementally and coalesced during

the course of project work within three identifiable areas: 1) the

change process itself; 2) the nature of instructional leadership in

their school; and 3) the potential of the instructional improve-

ment initiatives for jumpstarting the school turnaround process

and positively impacting student learning.

The Change Process

School leaders rely on multiple sources of information (in-

formation about programs, personnel, student performance

levels, etc.) to help them make informed decisions relating to

selecting and implementing the most appropriate and poten-

tially effective sets of school improvement strategies. And, all

information (i.e., “data”) in school communities really exists in

its raw form as a gestalt of potentials—“data” that, if engaged

with correctly, can be analyzed and interpreted by school

community stakeholders to generate creative action strategies to

assist them in implementing appropriate change initiatives that

can help move a school forward. The creative action plans gen-

erated might take the form of new “departmental improvement

action strategies” that team members could derive from spend-

ing time reflecting with and on their own data, or perhaps new

“district-wide implementation plans” that stakeholders could

arrive at together regarding the most cost effective and educa-

tionally sound way a district could move forward with a pro-

posed organizational change initiative. In this sense, an organi-

zation’s information (data) is a rich well or resource that must

be continuously tapped by multiple stakeholders throughout the

organization—stakeholders approaching their organization’s

data from multiple directions, perspectives, and departmental

vantage points.

To counteract the negative effects of “information analysis

collapse” (i.e., a phenomenon that often occurs when only one

or a very few administrators and other educational personnel

have access to and analyze available school data) school com-

munity leaders can work proactively to include as many stake-

holders as possible in collegial conversations to “analyze” and

“interpret” their school’s instructional programs and student

performance data to generate “multiple creative ideas” from

teachers and administrators on how to enhance instructional

planning and daily classroom teaching and learning. Research-

ers investigating the leadership challenges associated with en-

acting system-wide change in leading and learning organiza-

tions have noted the advantages of encouraging multiple mem-

bers to interact directly and continuously with their organiza-

tion’s data: “As each observer interacts with the data, he or she

develops their own interpretation. We can expect these inter-

pretations to be different, because people are. Instead of losing

so many of the potentials contained in the data, multiple ob-

servers elicit multiple and varying responses, giving a genuine

richness to the observations. An organization rich with many

interpretations develops a wiser sense of what is going on and

what needs to be done [emphasis added]” (Wheatley, 1999: p.

67). Assisting school stakeholders in learning how to refashion

their “organizational thinking” to embrace the win-win payoffs

of this kind of collaborative team approach to analyzing, inter-

preting, and leveraging their school data in order to expand and

deepen the potential sets of creative action strategies they are

able to generate is a critical element of school organizational

learning support programs that can directly influence the qual-

ity of stakeholders’ “involvement” in the change process, as

well as the overall “effectiveness” of the change initiatives

themselves. Engaging with educators and community stake-

holders in their own organizational setting within the parame-

ters of a context-specific case learning project to help these

stakeholders learn to develop and internalize a collaborative

team approach to mining and analyzing their own school

data—and then using the insights obtained to inform their real-

world instructional decision making—was a central focus of the

multimedia case development project described in this report.

Through participating in case production activities, including

an extended series of team conversations focused on analyzing

their own situational data and critically exploring multiple

school improvement options emanating from these analyses,

these school community stakeholders began to develop a new

appreciation for the rich diversity of leadership perspectives

espoused by individual team members. As campus stakeholders

became immersed in case development work and as the case

analysis component of the project progressed, team members

began to recognize that these different stakeholder perspectives

(considered individually as well as combined in various nu-

anced ways) could be leveraged and applied directly by the

team during their data analysis conversations to generate multi-

ple interpretations of their school data that, in turn, could lead

to a richer array of creative action plan options. School com-

munity stakeholders, in effect, were beginning to look more

carefully and critically at their own school data—examining

their data through the varied lenses of multiple team member

perspectives, causing stakeholders to develop a new sense of

collegial awareness and discriminatory attention to details in

the data. This ability to engage in self-referential communal

conversations through leveraging and applying stakeholders’

multiple perspectives to enhance their analyses and interpreta-

tions of their school data and to then use these conversations as

a springboard to tap into and refine their critical reflective deci-

sion-making potential as a school leadership team was seen by

all involved as an important positive “organizational learning

benefit” emerging from case project activities.

Collectively, these team-oriented attributes and behaviors

which stakeholders developed for engaging with and within the

change process—namely: 1) adopting a critical reflective stance

toward their school’s data; 2) discussing and applying stake-

holders’ varied perspectives to analyze and generate multiple

interpretations of these data; and 3) developing an evolving

collegial awareness and an enhanced discriminatory attention to

identifying details in their school data—were seen as important

latent organizational core competencies that emerged and were

strengthened as a result of stakeholders’ participation in project

activities. Through exploring and developing their own teaming

potential within these core competency areas, these campus

stakeholders gained increased confidence in their ability to

work together effectively—a new collaborative team confi-

dence that enabled them to successfully engage in and complete

their case production and analysis project work and to then fur-

ther leverage and directly apply this newly acquired team con-

fidence as they moved forward with their school community’s

instructional improvement efforts.

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The Nature of Instructional Leadership in Schools

School stakeholders’ continuous involvement in multimedia

case development and analysis activities associated with project

work served as a catalyst for encouraging these stakeholders to

begin to think differently about their own school instructional

data, and to think in new ways about their own responsibilities

as instructional leaders. To facilitate and enhance case project

development work, university multimedia technology special-

ists involved in the multi-entity case effort set up a number of

online discussion boards and chat rooms for campus stake-

holders to use as they collaborated together within the various

case development and analysis activities. While a few of the

teachers on the case production team were already familiar with

these kinds of online information sharing and collaboration

tools, a majority of the teachers and other stakeholder members

of the team were not. Thus, as part of project activities, univer-

sity technology specialists spent some time at the outset of pro-

ject production work providing “on-the-spot training support”

to these campus team members to help them become comfort-

able with using and interacting with these digital tools. These

kinds of digital information sharing and collaboration tools

(e.g., online discussion boards, chat rooms, and the like) proved

invaluable to campus case production team members through-

out the project, enabling school stakeholder team members to

begin to work together in new ways and to forge new collegial

bonds within a safe, mutually agreed upon virtual organiza-

tional learning environment. School stakeholders were able to

effectively utilize this virtual online environment to engage in

numerous dynamic team member interactions on a number of

important issues relating to their school community’s instruc-

tional leadership challenges, including discussions that focused

on: 1) identifying and utilizing appropriate interpersonal com-

munication strategies for managing the difficult “team conver-

sations” that often surfaced during case development and analy-

sis activities; 2) brainstorming creative strategies for interacting

more effectively with multiple school constituencies to enhance

boundary spanning and strengthen school-family-community

partnerships; 3) generating multiple ideas on how to go about

nurturing a positive school educational and social climate in an

era of increasing learner diversity; and 4) reflecting critically on

how campus stakeholders might be able to begin to work to-

gether differently to foster a genuine teaching, leading, and

learning organizational team mentality among all stakeholders

and stakeholder groups throughout their school learning com-

munity.

Intriguingly, as teachers and other stakeholder team members

began to actively use these digital tools during the project’s

case production activities to informally communicate with their

team colleagues (through brainstorming and sharing case de-

velopment ideas; identifying and discussing various features of

team members’ nuanced perspectivist views on case issues,

etc.), these educators began to realize that they might also be

able to leverage and use these very same digital tools more

expansively on their campus on a daily basis to support their

individual grade-level and school-wide instructional leadership

efforts. Moreover, these educators were also discovering that

these digital tools could be used quite effectively to facilitate

teachers’ own ongoing individual and collaborative profes-

sional learning. Through using these digital tools to engage

with their colleagues during case production activities, teachers

began to develop a more informed understanding and apprecia-

tion of the notion that the overall fabric of teaching, leading,

and learning in their school must include their own professional

learning and development as educators, and that they—as edu-

cational leaders—will need to play a committed, proactive

leadership role in shaping the direction and foci of their own

ongoing professional learning and development. These educa-

tors were developing a more informed awareness of the critical

importance of developing a greater sense of responsibility for

and ownership in their own professional learning as a vital

component of instructional leadership in their school—and,

importantly, that these new kinds of digital technologies could

provide them with the kinds of information sharing and infor-

mal communication tools that would enable them to take charge

of their own staff development and professional learning needs.

Teachers and administrators were learning first-hand through

their involvement in multimedia project activities about the

leveraging power of mobile computing technologies and social

media to enhance their own access to high quality, “just-in-

time” informal kinds of professional learning. These newer,

informal professional learning opportunities emphasized the use

of technology-mediated social networking to expand and

deepen educators’ ongoing learning, and included such things

as collegial sharing of instructional best practices and peer

coaching support—professional development opportunities that

were not readily available within the school community and

district before the advent of these kinds of technologies. Most

importantly, through their technology immersion experiences as

part of the multimedia case-learning project these educators

began evolving their own context-specific understandings re-

garding the role and usefulness of technology in enhancing

overall teaching and learning effectiveness. As a result, these

high school educators began to actively embrace a more in-

formed and critically reflective stance regarding the nature and

functions of technology-integrated instructional leadership

within a school and district learning community. Moreover, in

an intriguing way, these high school educators’ involvement

during case analysis project activities in directly using mobile

computing technologies and social media to facilitate their

team’s informal peer coaching and information sharing case

analysis work also served to create a new and powerful kind of

multi-generational communications bridge connecting veteran

teachers’ strong beliefs regarding the importance of traditional

instructional “quality” with other teachers’ interests in engaging

actively in technology-integrated “instructional planning and

teaching”. This evolving technology-mediated communications

bridge became a springboard for opening up new professional

learning insights among school team members on how they

might reconcile their diverse multi-generational instructional

beliefs to explore new ways to work together to meet the needs

of 21st century learners. In connection with this, a key insight

that was widely shared and discussed by campus team members

was their realization that in order to be competent and effective

21st century instructional leaders—that is, to be able to suc-

cessfully integrate technology into their classroom instructional

practices, which of necessity must include being able to effec-

tively model and foster technology-integrated learning in their

students—these teachers would first have to fully embrace,

internalize, and integrate technology into their own ongoing

professional learning practices. This insight regarding the na-

ture, purposes, and scope of instructional leadership in schools

underscores the importance of developing and nurturing a rich

instructional leadership culture in school communities—an

instructional leadership culture that is multi-dimensioned and

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expansive enough to include teachers’ own career-long profes-

sional learning. There is widespread agreement among school

improvement researchers concerning the centrality of teachers’

ongoing professional learning as an essential component of

effective school instructional leadership. As Gordon (2004)

asserts, “Professional development is needed to foster collegial-

ity and professional dialogue, to help teachers develop a com-

mon educational purpose, and to facilitate collaborative plan-

ning, experimentation, and critique of teaching practice.” Addi-

tionally, professional development can help educators “identify

and critically examine aspects of a school’s culture that are

inconsistent with the empowerment of students as life-long

learners, and can lead to both cultural change and changes in

curriculum, instruction, and student assessment” (Gordon, 2004:

p. 7). Moreover, integrating robust and meaningful professional

learning and development experiences directly into teachers’

daily work life can help transform schools into what Roland

Barth (2000) describes as a “community of learners, a culture

of adaptability, and a place of continuous experimentation and

invention” (Barth, 2000: p. 69).

One noteworthy dividend that emerged following completion

of the multimedia case project was that these high school edu-

cators, many of whom were exposed for the first time to the

positive teaching and learning potential of digital communica-

tion tools through participating in project activities, continued

to expand and deepen their interest in utilizing these digital

technologies to enhance their classroom instructional practices

as well as their own professional learning. With ongoing post-

project assistance from university technology integration spe-

cialists, educators in this high school community have contin-

ued to explore ways to creatively leverage available digital

technologies (including mobile technologies such as laptops,

ipads, ipods, and the like) along with widely accessible social

media resources (e.g., facebook, twitter, pinterest, LinkedIn,

blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, shared annotation services,

RSS readers) as new kinds of teaching and learning enabling

tools for building flourishing e-learning communication net-

works for both students and educators in their school and dis-

trict co mmuni ty.

Change Initiatives and School Turnaround Efforts

A unique feature of the multimedia organizational case

learning project reported in this article is that the education

stakeholders (teachers, parents, community members, and cam-

pus- and district-level administrators) who became involved in

project activities were brought together purposefully by the

demands of their own organizational circumstances. These

stakeholders’ involvement in this multimedia case development

and analysis project represented a collaborative attempt on their

part to try to better understand and respond to a complicated set

of instructional and sociopolitical leadership challenges that

had evolved over time and that had come to define a very diffi-

cult and intransigent teaching, leading, and learning impasse

situation within their school community. In this important sense,

the “challenging situation itself” served as the primary catalyst

to bring these people together to work collaboratively to extend

the limits of their organizational leading and learning poten-

tial—in effect, to explore and learn how to think differently and

work together in new ways as a school leading and learning

community.

Robust population growth in the region in recent years re-

sulting in a dramatic expansion of the Hispanic student demo-

graphic profile at this high school (as well as throughout the

district) along with increasing student performance account-

ability demands imposed by the state had converged to create

new sets of instructional leadership challenges for educators

and other stakeholders in this high school community. As a

result of these demographic shifts, the larger regional environ-

ment within which this high school resides had now changed so

dramatically that the school and its educational leaders had

reached a “tipping point” where the status quo instructional

practices of the past (which were developed and employed by

many teachers at this high school over several years) were no

longer as relevant to the learning needs of the school’s pre-

sent—much more culturally diverse—student population. The

reality of the new population diversity in the larger regional

environment within which the school and district were situated

was now necessitating the need to remake or transform the

instructional culture of this high school. However, many ex-

perienced educators in this school community and district were

continuing to display a passionate commitment to their own

well-worn instructional beliefs, including their belief in the

continued usefulness of the “traditional, time-tested instruc-

tional practices” which they had been using for years. Moreover,

these highly entrenched, status quo beliefs were engendering an

openly observable and ultimately counterproductive profes-

sional attitude bordering on “instructional complacency” among

many of these veteran teachers—teachers who, over time, had

become stuck in their own “instructional comfort zones”, and

who were still operating from a traditional set of instructional

beliefs and practices that they were highly committed to and

believed were in the best interests of students and their learning.

These attitudes were shared as well by many parents and other

members of the community who were also supportive of these

same status quo instructional practices. These sets of en-

trenched instructional beliefs were on clear display as many of

these same teachers and other stakeholders participated in case

project team conversations. Additionally, these beliefs clashed

directly with the contrasting, more progressive beliefs of other

educational leaders within the campus and district community

(some of whom were also participants on the case project

team)—particularly those leaders espousing the merits of the

new instructional change initiatives.

What was needed was a “new way of thinking about instruc-

tional effectiveness”—a new, creative way of reframing in-

structional leadership practice in this high school that was

broad and expansive enough to accommodate the school’s new

student diversity as well as focused and rigorous enough to be

able to respond to these students’ learning challenges. Intrigu-

ingly, such a potential “new way of thinking” emerged in a very

spontaneous way during one of the multimedia project team’s

case analysis sessions. As these high school stakeholders were

brainstorming possible practical strategies for dealing with their

instructional improvement challenges, one team member—a

tenth grade teacher of Hispanic descent at this high school who

had been both listening reflectively and participating intently in

the team’s conversations—at one point decided to share with

her fellow project team members a “cultural practice story” she

was very familiar with from her own upbringing. This teacher’s

“story” involved describing to her team colleagues an annual

celebratory event that she indicated was a common practice in

Hispanic communities: dias de fiestas. This teacher explained

to her team colleagues that during dias de fiestas locals typi-

cally show their generosity toward others through welcoming in

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all who come to share in the meals and festivities. Tourists and

visitors to the town are openly embraced and become an inte-

gral part of the dias de fiestas celebrations, as they are viewed

by locals as contributing in very positive ways to the overall

richness and diversity of the fiesta. Furthermore, there is a

widespread understanding among local community members

that displaying generosity and a welcoming spirit to others

actually is a way of giving to oneself—the act of inclusiveness

and cyclical reciprocity actually enriches oneself. This teacher

explained to her team colleagues that these dias de fiestas are

celebratory events in Hispanic culture—community-wide

events that emphasize the value and importance of nurturing

harmonious relationships and inclusiveness. As this teacher

continued sharing her story and reflecting out loud as she spoke,

she indicated that her own personal reflections on the cultural

practice of dias de fiestas were helping her to begin to reevalu-

ate and expand her own thinking about the notion of “instruc-

tional effectiveness” in a high school community. This cultural

practice analogy was helping her come to a new realization that

a “diverse learning culture” can be a source of organizational

strength rather than a liability, and that adopting a proactive

focus on fostering broad community engagement and inclu-

siveness can actually be a positive means for facilitating and

enhancing school-wide instructional improvement. This tea-

cher’s story—highlighting the culturally enriching benefits that

can accrue to both oneself and an entire community through

setting and maintaining a conscious focus on inclusiveness and

relationship building—was one that impressed her fellow team

colleagues and captured the team’s collective imagination. The

story resonated so strongly with team members particularly be-

cause of the rich insights it seemed to offer these stakeholders

in terms of helping them gain a deeper understanding of the po-

tential of their own school district’s change initiatives as crea-

tive celebratory means for: 1) recognizing and valuing the con-

tributions of multiple diverse learners; 2) increasing the level

and quality of overall learner engagement; and 3) nurturing a

broader and more inclusive instructional leadership culture

within their own school community setting.

Project team members continued to discuss and reflect at

length on this teacher’s “cultural practice story” as they pro-

gressed in their case analysis conversations and strategic action

planning sessions. In particular, team members’ ongoing col-

laborative reflections on their colleague’s story began to chal-

lenge and expand their own “team thinking” about instructional

effectiveness. These high school stakeholders, reflecting to-

gether as a leadership team, began to identify and crystallize

multiple school community leadership insights drawn from

their colleague’s story—insights that they were able to inter-

nalize as a leadership team and apply directly to their own si-

tuation to help them better understand their own school’s in-

structional leadership challenges. Indeed, at one point during

their case analysis and strategic planning conversations these

school stakeholders, working together as a case project team,

appeared to arrive at a collective “aha moment”. A growing

“team realization” began to evolve and take shape among team

members during their deliberations: the idea that proactively

embracing the practical strategy of including students and par-

ents directly in the process of collaborative instructional plan-

ning could be both a creative and a realistic way to approach

instructional planning in their school and simultaneously ad-

dress their school change and improvement dilemma challenges.

In essence, these stakeholders were beginning to embrace the

“win-win” organizational leadership insight that instructional

planning in their school could be usefully viewed as a school

community-wide collaborative team and instructional culture-

building endeavor—that is, as a multi-stakeholder, communal

school-family-community partnering enterprise. And, this com-

munal partnering approach to instructional planning, in fact,

could be a potentially very practical, real-world “instructional

team leadership” strategy that school stakeholders could proac-

tively enact together to address the teaching and learning chal-

lenges in their school community. The adoption of this kind of

practical “instructional team leadership” strategy, in fact, would

directly reflect the inclusive celebratory spirit of the dias de

fiestas, in which local community members recognize and ho-

nor all new visitors and guests as important integral partici-

pants in the fiesta, as well as active contributors to defining the

fiesta itself.

Importantly, as a substantive outgrowth of their case project

team deliberations, these educators and school community

stakeholders were developing their own collective team under-

standing that perhaps the very same kind of “leveraging digital

technologies to engage in immersive collaborative learning”

process they were engaging in within their multimedia project

activities could be expanded and applied broadly to their own

daily academic teaming efforts to enhance the quality and ef-

fectiveness of instructional planning and implementation within

their school. These stakeholders would be able to accomplish

this through taking a more inclusive approach to the “idea” of

instructional planning through finding creative ways to include

students and parents more directly in the instructional planning

process. Embracing this communal partnering approach to

instructional planning, educators at this high school began to

incorporate several new school-community outreach strategies

into school improvement action planning, including: 1) utiliz-

ing social media tools (such as twitter and facebook) to enable

teachers at this high school to communicate informally with

each other as well as with teachers in other schools within the

district for the purpose of brainstorming and sharing ideas on

instructional planning and classroom teaching practices; 2)

setting up monthly school-home liaison visits in which teachers

and administrators could meet directly with parents in the fam-

ily-home setting to discuss their child’s learning progress; 3)

staging multiple “school-community education celebrations” in

the evenings and on weekends to nurture a “culture of family-

connected learning” throughout the entire school community; 4)

scheduling bi-weekly teacher/parent meetings to keep parents

informed regarding their child’s teaching and learning class-

room progress; 5) utilizing the school’s classrooms and com-

puter labs in the evenings to provide interested parents with

adult literacy classes and technology training; etc. In actively

embracing this team-centered communal partnering approach

to instructional effectiveness through designing and implement-

ing these new school-community outreach strategies, these high

school educators and community stakeholders were, in fact, de-

monstrating that they had internalized a new, inclusive “com-

munity-wide team mentality” regarding instructional effective-

ness in their school. And, as part of this team mentality, these

stakeholders were beginning to realize that the school and dis-

trict’s instructional planning and technology integration initia-

tives were not simply burdensome initiatives that were at

cross-purposes with their own teaching, leading, and learning

goals for the school. On the contrary, these initiatives could

actually be utilized directly to help these stakeholders engage

Open Access.

278

J. CLAUDET

together dynamically to bring about substantive change in their

school community ’s instructional learning culture. Indeed, these

instructional improvement initiatives could be utilized by these

educators and community stakeholders—working together as a

school community partnering team—as a means to jumpstart

their school’s turnaround process and help them positively im-

pact students’ learning. The positive value of this “synergistic

strategy” of utilizing a communal partnering approach in con-

cert with well-designed, targeted instructional improvement ini-

tiatives to positively impact a school community’s overall “fa-

mily-connected instructional learning culture” has been affirm-

ed by researchers examining the present challenges of enacting

social justice leadership in schools who emphasize the need for

school leaders to make “concerted efforts to reach out to fami-

lies who traditionally may not be active in their school and to

make bridges to the community, [including] making purposeful

positive contact with families of color, families who struggle

financially, and families who are non-native English speakers”

(Theoharis, 2009: p. 138).

These high school stakeholders’ adoption of a new “com-

munal team mentality” focused specifically on expanding and

deepening their school’s instructional planning and learning

culture as a means to turn around their school’s recent lacklus-

ter performance and spur their school community toward posi-

tive organizational change and improvement (i.e., to jumpstart

the “school turnaround” process) resonates well with insights

found in the recent literature on systemic school change. Re-

searchers examining the challenges involved in bringing about

system-wide change in school organizations recognize that to

be able to effect meaningful change in teaching and learning in

a school setting, educators must go beyond simply putting in

place new change structures (i.e., change initiatives of various

kinds). Fullan (1993, 1999, 2001), for example, has repeatedly

made clear that “restructuring (which can be done by fiat) oc-

curs time and time again, whereas reculturing (how teachers

come to question and change their beliefs and habits) is what is

needed” (Fullan, 2001: p. 34). In other words, in order to real-

ize substantive change in teaching and learning attitudes and

performance levels, the entire instructional culture of the school

organization must be changed at a fundamental level. And this

kind of fundamental school reculturing requires that educators

engage directly in intentional experimentation and social dis-

covery. As Elmore (2000) states, “[e]xperimentation and dis-

covery can be harnessed to social learning by connecting peo-

ple with new ideas to each other in an environment in which the

ideas are subjected to scrutiny, measured against the collective

purposes of the organization, and tested by the history of what

has already been learned and is known” (Elmore, 2000: p. 25).

And importantly, as Leithwood et al. (2010) emphasize, the

process of connecting people and ideas must include connecting

the school directly to the home family environment and directly

to parents: “Without doubt, parental engagement in children’s

learning makes a difference and remains one of the most pow-

erful school improvement levers that school leaders have. But

effective parental engagement will not happen without con-

certed effort, time, and commitment from both parents and

schools. It will not happen unless parents know the difference

that they make and unless schools actively reinforce their active

engagement in learning [emphasis added]. Parental engagement

has to be a priority, not a bolt-on extra. It must be embedded in

teaching and learning policies and school improvement policies,

so that parents are seen as an integral part of the student learn-

ing process” (Leithwood et al., 2010: p. 253). Moreover, this

kind of organization-wide cultural change can not be accom-

plished simply through the extraordinary efforts of individual

change agents working in isolation—no matter how dedicated

they may be to their school community or how passionately

they believe in the change initiatives themselves. Enacting sys-

temic cultural change in a school community requires the sus-

tained commitment of a critical mass of education stakeholders

who have developed an appropriate change-oriented “tea m men-

tality” and who are motivated to respond to their school’s im-

provement challenges in action-oriented ways.

As a result of their immersive collaborative learning experi-

ences in this multimedia case project, these high school educa-

tors and school community stakeholders were able to form im-

portant new professional and organizational bonds that cut

across stakeholder roles and personalities. These new relational

connections among stakeholders enabled a new “team mental-

ity” to evolve among these stakeholders—a new collegial way

of thinking that could support the emergence of generative

breakthrough leadership insights and new collaborative under-

standings across the team. This new way of thinking was forged

through the very act of participation in the case learning process

itself. Through the positive organizational leadership insights

these team members realized as a result of their case learning

project experiences (as well as through the sense of collabora-

tive accomplishment these stakeholders felt upon completing

this challenging project together), these educational leaders

were now empowered with a new team confidence and a re-

newed sense of their own collegial leadership efficacy. The

new “team mentality” that emerged was characterized by a

number of distinguishing features, including a shared sense

among these educational stakeholders of: 1) their own organ-

izational capacity as a school leadership team to enact mean-

ingful change; 2) a greater conscious awareness and under-

standing of the power of community engagement as a collabo-

rative partnering tool to facilitate school-wide instructional

improvement; 3) a new appreciation of the role of social net-

working as a means to enhance information sharing and to sup-

port the overall organizational learning vitality of their school

community; and 4) a greater confidence in the distributive lead-

ership potential of the group to design and implement team-

centered, targeted instructional improvement strategies that can

realize demonstrable student learning gains. Collectively, these

newly observed “team characteristics” reflected a set of emerg-

ing school turnaround leadership capabilities that was serving

to reshape and redefine who these educational stakeholders

were as school leaders and what they were capable of accom-

plishing.

At an informal gathering of school stakeholder team mem-

bers and university project specialists following project post-

production work to celebrate the completion of project activi-

ties, these school turnaround leadership capabilities and the

newly minted “team mentality” they reflected were in clear

evidence as the members of the project’s high school case de-

velopment team—teachers, parents, community members, and

the school’s principal—shared some final reflections on their

overall project experiences. One school stakeholder team mem-

ber, a veteran teacher, captured well the sentiments of the group

as she reflected on her own and her team members’ experiences

participating in project activities: “This project was a real

eye-opening experience for many of us. The work was intensive,

and we were challenged to stretch our reflective thinking ca-

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J. CLAUDET

pacities in new ways—to enlarge our perspectives and broaden

our mindsets. But, you know, I think the most important result

of participating in this project is that we’ve developed a new

respect for each other and our differences, and we’ve come to

learn that our differences can be a source of strength. Through

this project we’ve learned to respect and leverage our differ-

ences to build some common understandings as a school com-

munity team. And, I think we now have a new and better sense

of what we are capable of achieving as a leading and learning

team.” This teacher’s remarks echoed the feelings of other

members of this high school stakeholder team and reflected

well the new “team spirit” of the group. Finally, it was the

school’s principal who possibly summed up best the collective

feelings of the entire high school team as she congratulated her

high school case production team on their collective project

efforts: “As a result of this project and the team conversations

we’ve had together, we now know that the school turnaround

process is as much about turning around ourselves as it is

about turning around our school. During our project work

we’ve engaged together in critically examining and turning

around our own thinking and behaviors—and learning from

this self-reflecting process as we go. We ’ve been working con-

scientiously on building our understandings as a team, and

we’ve been reinventing ourselves in the process. However, let’s

be honest—we still have a lot more work to do to realize the

kinds of meaningful improvements we all want in our instruc-

tional programs. But armed with our new ability to think and

work together more effectively as a school community team, I

believe we can now look toward our school’s future—and to-

ward the future learning success of all of our students—with

new confidence.”

Conclusion

The case development and analysis project work reported in

this article is part of a larger, multi-year research and develop-

ment effort that focuses on engaging education researchers,

multimedia production specialists, expert practitioners, and

education stakeholders from multiple education entities (i.e., a

state university, a regional education service center, and multi-

ple regional K-12 schools and school districts) in working to-

gether in collaborative partnership to address and find creative

solutions to vexing, entrenched problems of K-12 school lead-

ership practice. A unique aspect of this project is the use of

available multimedia computer technologies in conjunction

with theatrical production techniques to involve K-12 school

community stakeholders in the development and analysis of

context-specific organizational learning cases about their own

real-world school improvement dilemma situations. The pro-

ject’s collaborative case learning design reflects a convergence

of concepts and tools across three areas of creative activity: 1)

multimedia computer simulations; 2) cinematography; and 3)

dramatic arts. The high school “instructional leadership” case

development project detailed and discussed in this article re-

presents one completed case that has become part of a larger,

continually expanding body of multimedia cases that are being

developed to focus specifically on the context-specific organi-

zational leading and learning challenges of groups of education

stakeholders in multiple campuses and school districts through-

out West Texas.

The organizational case learning methods and design of this

project are grounded in a rich history of research and develop-

ment in computer-based simulations and educational gaming

that has evolved over the past two decades. The success of such

“strategic life simulation” games as The Sims (2000-2008,

2012-present) and its various renditions (The Sims Online, The

Sims Stories, MySi ms, The Sims Carnival, The Sims Medieval,

The Sims Social), “fictional-world graphic adventure” video

games such as Myst (1993-present), “urban planning and de-

velopment/municipal engineering” simulations such as SimCity

(1989-present), and immersive “historical learning/adventure”

educational simulations such as Oregon Trail (1974-present)

and Westward Trail (2013) which are widely used by elemen-

tary and secondary teachers to engage students dynamically in

immersive, multi-disciplinary learning, have served to firmly

anchor online simulations and gaming as both recreational gam-

ing and educational learning tools in the popular imagination.

These individual- and multi-player simulation games offer rich,

interactive digital environments within which users can explore

a variety of social, organizational, engineering, and manage-

ment challenges integrated into multi-dimensional, online “vir-

tual-world” simulations. The direct application and use of these

kinds of computer simulations and video games in elementary

and secondary educational settings have continued to expand in

recent years. In addition, a variety of immersive digital learning

tools and interfaces are now being used in multiple higher edu-

cation learning contexts (e.g., business, economics, political

studies, science and engineering, languages, education) to in-

crease student engagement and retention and to stimulate

learning, including: serious games, multiple role-play, whole-

enterprise simulations, video simulations, augmented reality,

robotics laboratories, and virtual learning environments to en-

hance active learning and encourage interactive reflection (Ny-

gaard et al., 2012). These kinds of virtual worlds, games, and

simulations are being utilized in higher education settings to en-

gage learners within interactive digital environments that are

highly immersive, collaborative, and focused on real-world pro-

blem solving (Shiratori et al., 2005).

The multimedia case learning project efforts profiled in this

article seek to extend and apply these computer simulation/

virtual world development efforts directly to the area of K-12

school leadership practice through involving groups of elemen-

tary and secondary educators and associated school community

stakeholders in immersive, collaborative team-learning project

experiences to develop multimedia cases about their own real-

world, context-specific school improvement challenges. The

overarching goal of these immersive case-learning projects is to

jumpstart school stakeholders’ “team-learning” abilities to fo-

cus on and enhance the overall quality and effectiveness of

these school leaders’ collaborative decision making. This mul-

timedia organizational case learning project work is part of a

larger, decade-long R&D initiative to develop immersive team-

learning designs and attendant sets of school leadership learn-

ing cases that are of practical use for enhancing the organiza-

tional learning and collaborative leadership development of

educators and community stakeholders in K-12 school settings.

Collectively, these multimedia cases (and the larger immersive

team-learning design approach of which these cases are an

integral part) seek to contribute to the literature on the devel-

opment and use of educational games, simulations, and virtual

worlds through direct application of case learning simulations

and collaborative teaming techniques to the real-world chal-

lenges of K-12 school leadership practice. Results of cumula-

tive project efforts to date provide encouraging positive evi-

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Open Access 281

dence in support of the potential of organizational case learning

and immersive, technology-integrated case production methods

as practical means for enhancing school leaders’ collaborative

school improvement practices.

Importantly, through leveraging the power of multimedia

technology and the creative enthusiasm and dedication of the

research teams involved, the collaborative team-building ap-

proach at the heart of this project’s organizational case learning

design provides a unique reflective analysis framework for

school stakeholder collaborative learning. Through immersion

in multimedia project case production and analysis activities,

K-12 educators and school community stakeholders in varied

school contexts can learn how to tap into their collaborative

school leadership potential for reflecting critically on their own

school leadership situations to reexamine, broaden, and deepen

their educational beliefs through transformative team-learning.

In short, through bravely heeding the cinematic call of lights,

camera, action! school stakeholders grappling with tough

school improvement challenges can elect to engage in a new

form of organizational learning—as dedicated teams of rivals

embracing a “collaborative case learning adventure” to develop

and refine their own school leadership capacities for: 1) forging

shared understandings and common organizational purpose;

and 2) engaging in data-informed, team-centered decision mak-

ing that can promote positive and lasting teaching, leading, and

learning improvements within their school communities.

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