Abstract
Background and Context
Continuous improvement and networked improvement science have emerged as prominent approaches to improving schools. Although continuous improvement approaches have generated promising results in education, how these efforts come to be enacted remains a crucial question that can generate insight into how these approaches can be improved.
Purpose and Objective
Our study is focused on understanding how improvement is performed by focusing on the process of generating a shared aim statement in a teacher-preparation improvement network. We seek to understand how practitioners within a network a) engage a central tension (between language acquisition and multilingualism), b) negotiate this tension, and c) reach a settlement that results in a shared aim.
Setting
This study takes place in a teacher-preparation improvement network as part of the California Teacher Education Research and Improvement Network (CTERIN). The focus of the network centered on improving the preparation of candidates to build on multilingual students’ strengths.
Participants
The improvement network that is the focus of our research consists of 49 teacher educators across eight teacher preparation programs as well as three facilitators who were part of CTERIN, including the two authors of this study.
Research Design
Our analysis examines the interactions among teacher educators and improvement facilitators to unveil the practices that they engaged in to produce a shared aim. Data for this study include audio and video recordings of three 90-minute videoconference meetings, audio–video of a two-day in-person convening, and improvement artifacts such as fishbone and driver diagrams.
Findings
Our study highlights the range of practices that practitioners engaged in and how those evolved as they negotiated and settled a tension between language acquisition and multilingualism. As the process of generating an aim unfolded, teacher educators engaged in the practices of aspirationalizing, dualizing, recentering, rerouting, clarifying, tuning, and converting.
Conclusions and Recommendations
We argue that these practices make visible that the process of generating an aim statement is a complex and complicated process that requires negotiation and a recognition that some perspectives are foregrounded and others are backgrounded. Understanding this process has implications for how improvement facilitators engage practitioners in the process of doing improvement and generates theory of improvement implementation by highlighting how disparate teams, individuals, and organizations reaching sharedness requires negotiating, foregrounding, and backgrounding.
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