School as Community: From Promise to Practice

4. Contradictions of School Community in Restructuring Elementary Schools: Lessons from a Case Study

CHAPTER 4 Contradictions of School Community in Restructuring Elementary Schools: Lessons from a Case Study Paul Goldman and Gerald Tindal INTRODUCTION From our first day visiting the primary team at Wellington Elementary School (a pseudonym), we realized we were observing unusually rich communication between educational professionals. Five Wellington Grade 1-2 teachers and two special educators sat around a living room circle, talking about their students , deciding which of their one hundred twenty children should be reassigned to faster- or slower-reading groups. Each teacher, it appeared, used a different reading program, with different texts and different approaches. But clearly, all seven teachers knew one another’s curriculum, chapter and verse, virtually by heart. As the team moved children from group to group, they knew just what each student would have to do to catch up to her new group mates. How did these teachers learn so much about one another and about the children (and parents) in their school, and how did that knowledge affect teaching and learning at Wellington? Were we seeing a learning community, and, if so, what were its elements and its limits? We observed Wellington as part of a four-year study of three schools that had initiated primary programs incorporating both multi-age classrooms and 97 This research was supported by Grant #H023R30026, U.S. Department of Education. The authors wish to acknowledge the contributions of the educational professionals at Wellington Elementary School and the many faculty and graduate students in our department who participated at various stages. Don Van Houten and Gail Furman provided critiques that greatly improved the book. inclusion of special needs students as full participants in regular classrooms. Wellington teachers believed strongly in “developmentally appropriate practices ,” a child-centered approach to curriculum and instruction that recognizes individual differences, fosters active learning, and is attuned to holistic development rather than just basic skills. Our original interest, and focus of our funding proposal, was on organizational intelligence, organizational learning, and organizational communication . We were particularly curious about the potential effects of the transition from traditional to inclusive, multi-age classrooms. However, while organizational learning was indeed a recurring issue, the theme of community provided a more powerful interpretive metaphor for what we found at Wellington. While the entire school displayed elements of a community—collegiality, good personal relationships, and commitment to a shared, if general, educational vision—the primary team was a more cohesive, powerful mini-community. Their actions—decisions about how to organize curriculum and instruction, grouping of students, and teacher assignments—made them distinctive. Unlike the rest of the school, their efforts to restructure changed day-to-day practice. Their collective experience, however, created tensions within the school. These tensions contributed to the school’s failure to take either the multi-age, developmentally oriented approach or the primary team’s intense sense of community into the intermediate education level. This chapter uses our case study of Wellington to explore the dynamics of a multigrade minicommunity and the impact of its cohesion on the larger school community. First, we briefly review key issues identified in the sociological and educational literature on community, giving special attention to those studies, Kruse and Louis (1997) for instance, which identify possible dilemmas faced by schools that are strong communities or contain strong communities within their buildings. Next, we discuss methodology and data collection strategies. The narrative describing Wellington has two parts: a description of how the primary program evolved and an attempt to explain why the multi-age structure and collective involvement did not take hold in the intermediate program. The chapter’s interpretive section identifies and discusses five recurring contradictions of minicommunities, attempting to explain how internal dynamics became self-reinforcing. Finally, in the concluding section, we attempt to make qualified generalizations about minicommunities , to suggest how school contexts differ, and to discuss implications for school leadership. SCHOOL COMMUNITIES The literature on community, mostly sociological, is immense, but has retained a remarkable persistency over the past century. We can neither abstract nor 98 Goldman and Tindal distill this vast and diverse literature without oversimplifying. However, three themes recur again and again: (1) inclusivity, implying that everyone within the community is a member and that boundaries defining insiders and outsiders are clear; (2) collective, communal responsibility so that (in schools) children’s success would be a community obligation; (3) personalized relationships , which may compromise formal roles, rules, and status (see Strike, 1999, p...