Towards Dissolving the Institutionalization of “Othering”: Organizational Conditions that Support Shared Responsibility

Larger StudyThe larger study examines how district leaders use research in their instructional decision-making in four large urban districts. We focus on organizational routines, which are a central medium through which instructional decisions are made in school districts. Routines may matter for research use because they bring particular people together at particular moments in the decision-making process, shaping what and how decisions are made, and likely the role of research therein. However, organizational routines have received little attention in existing scholarship on research use.For this report, we focused on 140 interviews with district leaders that related to district organizational routines around ELA professional development in four urban school districts. NCRPP Study 1 Technical Report No 5 FINAL Dec 2020Research QuestionsHow, if at all, do organizational routines structure decision-making?What research and other forms of information do district leaders use in their decision-making?How does the structure of organizational routines shape the role of research and other forms of information in decision-making?Key FindingsIn all four districts, district leaders accomplished the complex work of instructional decision-making around ELA professional development by using multiple, interrelated, routines that both divided up decision-making into different tasks and also connected decision-making between individual routines.Districts divided-up the disparate work of decision-making into three different types of routines: design, deployment, and diagnosis.All four districts drew on common sources for information, including data, research, individuals, and organizations. But, each district had distinct portraits of information use in their decision-making. They varied in the number of distinct information sources (range), the relative distribution of information types (balance), and the degree to which a fewer or larger number of district leaders invoked research and other forms of information (spread).The type of the routine, whether it be design, deployment, or diagnosis, influenced what information district leaders used.The presence of connections or lack of connections between routines shaped the degree to which research use in one routine influenced the work in other routines within a district.We uncovered a new form of research use, which we call latent use. Latent use occurred as district leaders in one routine embedded research in artifacts, which then guided the work of leaders in other routines in substantive ways.