3.3 The Public Educational leadership Project Coherence Framework (PELP Framework)
3.3.3 Interdependent district elements
The PELP Framework denotes that five district organisational elements are critical for the successful district leadership efforts of supporting teaching and learning. These elements are culture, structures and systems, resources and stakeholders. As for this study, the PELP Framework highlights how these elements support or hinder DOs’ endeavours of supporting teaching and learning. Discussions for each of these elements follow in the sub-sections below.
3.3.3.1 Culture
One of the five elements is the importance of the district culture. Culture consists of norms, values, attitudes, and beliefs that define and drive behaviour in the district. Whether these are strong or weak, they do not change spontaneously in response to policies or slogans. According to Schein (1992, p. 12), group culture is:
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A pattern of basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration that has worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore, to be taught to new members as a correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.
Moreover, Owens (2004) contends that district culture's quality and characteristics significantly influence the DOs efforts to improve teaching and learning. Childress et al. (2006) argue that public educational organisations have long had a culture that valued effort more than results. They support this assertion by stating that as long as people seem to be working hard, they could remain unaccountable for their students’ performance. However, they also contend that this is no longer acceptable in today’s accountability environment. As a result, districts must establish a culture of collaboration, high expectations, and accountability. Childress et al.
(2007) posit that district leaders often view culture as something fluid that challenges management. However, leaders can upset or modify entrenched counterproductive culture by taking specific actions such as redefining roles or relationships, altering performance expectations, and using job roles in creative ways (Childress et al., 2007). There are some examples of norms and beliefs to consider on the DOs’ understanding of their role in supporting teaching and learning. These include attitudes towards accountability, orientation towards students and staff, conflict resolution methods, reciprocity between the district office and schools, and DOs’ approach to stakeholders. The concept, district culture, helped understand what norms, behaviours, and beliefs held by DOs helped them support teaching and learning and whether the culture in the two district cases hindered or supported the DOs attempts to support schools.
3.3.3.2 Structures and systems
Two additional elements of the district include structures and systems. While structures and systems are separate elements, Childress et al. (2007) contend that these are interdependent and discussed together. Structures help define how the district's work gets done and include how people are organised, responsible and accountable for results and who makes or influences decisions (Childress et al., 2007). Structures can be formal (deliberately established organisational systems) and informal (the way decisions get made or the way people work and interact outside formal hierarchies). School districts manage teaching and learning through a multiplicity of systems, which are the processes in how they undertake the work. The purpose
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of systems is to increase the district’s efficiency in implementing the strategy (Childress et al., 2007). Some can be formally designed by the district, while others could emerge informally in practice. Proponents of PELP suggest that education districts should develop systems to respond and manage a plethora of external demands. For example, recent policies emphasise quality, which exerts pressure on districts to develop complex systems to manage better and improve learner performance.
Childress et al. (2007) concluded that structures and systems include roles and responsibilities, reporting relationships, teams, accountability mechanisms, compensation arrangements, resource allocation methods, organisational learning processes, and training programmes.
These authors contend that historically, districts develop systems and structures arbitrarily to support generations of improvement efforts. Consequently, these systems and structures would persist even when they are no longer relevant and, therefore, would constrain rather than enable improvement efforts and strategies (Childress et al., 2007). The structures and systems often have to be reinvented to effectively support a strategy.
3.3.3.3 Resources
The fourth element of the PELP Framework is resources. Any organisation has a range of different assets to which it has access (Scott, 2003). Childress et al. (2007) posit that managing the flow of financial resources throughout the organisation is important, but resources also include people and physical assets such as technology and data. They contend that when school districts carefully manage their resources, namely, people, physical and financial resources, and invest in technology and data systems to better support teaching and learning, these bring the entire district closer to coherence. Furthermore, district and school leaders must think rigorously about how to deploy the organisation’s most valuable asset, which is its people.
Their skills and knowledge needed to successfully implement the strategy and analysis of gaps between what they know and what the strategy requires of them need serious consideration.
Districts should also strategise how financial resources flow throughout the organisation so that they are more coherent with the strategy and likely to produce the desired outcomes (Childress et al., 2006). While financial resources and people are important, building the technology infrastructure necessary to support demands from external accountability mechanisms is imperative (Childress et al., 2007). Technology is also significant as if
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effectively utilised; it enables the management of learner performance data regularly;
consequently, it supports districts’ processes that require the teachers and DOs to use data to make better instructional decisions. As a result, strategic investments in data systems are necessary to make these more effective instructional decisions that are directly responsive to their students’ learning needs (Childress et al., 2007). As this framework suggests, I needed to ascertain what resources DOs expected to support schools and how they aligned those resources with their strategies of supporting teaching and learning.
3.3.3.4 Stakeholders
Stakeholders are people and groups inside and outside the organisation who have a legitimate interest in the district and can influence the effectiveness of the strategy (Childress et al., 2007).
These stakeholders include teachers’ unions, parents, students, school governing bodies, community and civic groups, and local politicians, municipal constituencies, professional organisations, and policymakers. However, managing stakeholder relationships in a way that is coherent with the strategy is challenging because stakeholders rarely agree on a definition of success. Therefore, district leaders need to persuade a majority of the stakeholder groups to back the strategy or secure the backing of those with enough power to prevent other stakeholders from hindering the strategy (Childress et al., 2007). For this study, this concept helped me ascertain from the DOs’ views which stakeholders they considered significant in driving the strategy of supporting teaching and learning in their districts.