Making sense across levels in local school governance

Øyvind Henriksen

doi:10.7577/njcie.2752

Abstract

Dialogues and relations between interdependent leaders working at different hierarchical levels within a given school governance system are crucial for developing shared understandings which are seen as a prerequisite for effective school development. Shared understandings among interdependent actors emerge from productive and dialogical sensemaking processes. The current study provides insight into how sensemaking plays out in dialogue meetings set up by a school superintendent and a team of subordinated school leaders, initiated at the purpose of establishing and maintaining a shared interpretation community working with important areas of pedagogy and schooling. Drawing on action research with observations, reflective conversations, and reflection notes from five key participants in the local school system, and framed within a theory of sensemaking, this issue is addressed by demonstrating how dialogue meetings strengthen the relations between a superintendent and school leadership teams. In such a context of asymmetrical power relations, the current study argues that sensemaking constitutes the pivotal activity in dialogue meetings when ensuring productive relations and bridging the gap between municipalities (as school districts) and schools. In the dialogue meetings subjected to the study, steps were taken towards shared understanding, and the involved leaders set the tone in this process by acting as role models, as facilitators of creating space for reflection.

Highlights

There is today consensus among researchers and practitioners that productive relations between the chains of a given school governance system are vital for the successful adaptation of reform intentions in school districts and schools (Datnow, 2002)
Local school governance systems entail a series of broken chains that potentially may create severe learning interruptions, which hinder sensemaking in the focal organisation (Moos, Nihlfors, & Paulsen, 2016)
The current study follows this line of reasoning with the purpose of exploring sensemaking processes in a community of team leaders, school leaders, and a school superintendent2, bound to the same school district, and participating in dialogue meetings

Summary

Introduction

There is today consensus among researchers and practitioners that productive relations between the chains of a given school governance system are vital for the successful adaptation of reform intentions in school districts and schools (Datnow, 2002). The current study follows this line of reasoning with the purpose of exploring sensemaking processes in a community of team leaders, school leaders, and a school superintendent, bound to the same school district, and participating in dialogue meetings. According to Bukve (2009), this system, which is widely used in Norwegian public administration, stresses collaboration, dialogues and networking in parallel to regulations and external control, with the intention to soften the steering of lower levels Despite this soft rhetoric in policy documents, an inherent challenge of such dialogue meetings might be to tackle the asymmetrical power relations inherent in meetings of actors residing at different hierarchical levels. At the beginning of this century, many Norwegian municipalities pursued school development through dialogue meetings (Berg, 2015, p. 14)

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Discussion

Conclusion