Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Warwick, 6-9 September 2006
Not to be reproduced without permission
Authentic Alignment For Research And Enquiry: Effective Partnerships Between Networked Learning Communities And Higher Education
Colleen McLaughlin, University of Cambridge Faculty of Education
Gillian Plummer, The National College of School Leadership - Networked Learning Communities
Introduction
The Network Learning Communities (NLC) programme was designed to improve learning opportunities for pupils and to support the development of schools as professional learning communities (Jackson & Leo, 2003). Enquiry-based practice within and across networks of schools was identified as being fundamental to bringing this about and the requirement for NLCs to work with external partners with good educational research skills was to underpin this.
This paper explores how successful the programme has been in establishing effective enquiry-based partnerships with Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). The partnerships with other organisations and individuals are not considered in this paper. 'Effectiveness' is looked at (i) in the context of the programme's intentions and (ii) in terms of Gardner et al’s (2001) theory of ‘authentic alignment’, a concept derived from studying ‘good work’. Using this framework, analytical models and case studies illustrating alignment are explored and the features contributing to alignment and mis-alignment are teased out. The paper concludes by examining the dynamics of the partnerships and how successful they were in working towards the programme’s aims.
Non-negotiable Principles: What? Why?
Networks wishing to be part of the programme were asked to complete a submission form for assessment and therefore funding, which explicitly required them to link up with external partners who could offer educational research skills and accreditation opportunities.
Each NLC should involve non-school partners such as an HEI
and / or LEA Partners with good educational research skills and
accreditation provision would be an advantage
` (NLC Submission Guidelines, September 2003)
The high level of importance attached to these links was reinforced albeit implicitly in other in-built requirements. For example, having a Consultant to offer advice and support and to provide expertise and access to the wider knowledge-base: ‘Characteristically, they might come from an HEI or independent consultancy background’ {ibid}. However, the real commitment is perhaps best reflected in the fact that, funding was being made available for buying-in the services of external partners.
The rationale behind the requirement to work with external partners (modelled and piloted in the Teacher Training Agency Research Consortia and other earlier government initiatives), lay in two (of four) core principles of the programme:
(i) enquiry-based practice underpinned by
(ii) systematic engagement with the three fields of knowledge (parity being attached to all three fields)
Figure 1. Three fields of knowledge
These elements are at the heart of the NLC programme and hence were non-negotiable.
Enquiry-based practice (evidence and data-driven learning) refers to the development of collaborative approaches to enquiry which involve fields of knowledge coming together: The supportive and facilitative roles of external partners were seen as being central to this model of learning.
The Director of the NLC programme, David Jackson (2006) in recalling the reasoning behind this rationale made the following points, in the context of HEI partnerships:
· 'The gulf between public knowledge in universities and practice has historically been considerable in the British education system.
· Networks provide a ‘unit of engagement’ which makes it economical for universities to directly connect with the practitioner base.
· HEI connections are useful to networked learning practices:
- as direct access to external knowledge
- as support for disciplined practitioner enquiry
- for the design of customised learning programmes to support network priorities
- as support for leadership learning across the network
- for accreditation for programmes of activity (both learning and enquiry)
- access to knowledge about best practice elsewhere
- University personnel have a detachment from the network which enables them to be effective facilitators, brokers and critical friends
· The three fields of knowledge make explicit that publicly available knowledge (theory, research and best practice elsewhere) are, in combination, vital elements of powerful learning.
· The third field of knowledge – the development of new knowledge through collaborative processes and enquiry – requires the coming together of practice knowledge and public knowledge, something that HEI personnel are well equipped to broker.
· Networks should model system connectivity. A more networked-based system requires partnerships. The permeability of networks to external knowledge and the sustaining of partnerships with HEI’s is one feature of this.'
There was some strong evidence to support elements of this rationale; some of it was developmental or aspirational. There had been a longstanding debate in the UK (cf. Hillage, 1998) about the quality and conduct of educational research. In particular, the notion of increased partnership and increased practitioner involvement were proposed as a way forward in addressing these issues (Hargreaves, 1999). There had been examples in the UK (Dadds, 1995 ; Hopkins et al, 1994), the USA (Cochran Smith and Lytle, 1993) and Australia (Groundwater Smith, 2004) of very profitable partnerships between outside bodies (often HEIs or LEAs) and schools or groups of schools. The Teacher Training Agency had engaged in supporting consortia of schools with HEI partners that were centred on practitioner research and enquiry (Simons et al, 2003). So there were good grounds for suggesting that partnerships should be a central element of the NLC programme. There had also been much discussion about the desirability of networks (Hopkins, 2000: Liebermann, 1999). Whether HEIs or other external partners could work with networks was in many cases untested but this was the natural progression from work already undertaken.
There has been, and continues to be, research that suggests that external agents are central to school based learning and knowledge creation. The EPPI review (2003) on the impact of Continual Professional Development (CPD) concluded that, ‘the use of external expertise linked to school-based activity’ was identified as being a core feature of CPD linked with positive outcomes (p.4). The 2004 review stated that the principal feature of effective CPD was ‘the contribution to the CPD of external experts and specialist expertise coupled with peer support’ (p.12). Stringfield (1998) also acknowledged there is evidence that school development benefits from external facilitations. At the same time, other researchers have provided useful evidence in the context of enquiry: ‘Some of the valuable research is coming from teacher-led, school-based research, supported by scholarly expertise and methodological protocols provided by academics’, reported Saunders (2002).
The rest of this paper explores the rationale outlined above and examines how far these assertions can be confirmed and what has been learnt about such partnerships.
Partnerships And Partnership Alignment
The concept of 'partnerships' encompasses a broad range of different types of relationships and inter-agency interactions concerning funding, commitment, cooperation, coordination, collaboration, as is implicit in the following definitions:
… a partnership refers to participating in a relationship that usually involves close cooperation between parties having specified and joint rights and responsibilities. (Saskatchewan Government Relations, 2006)
It is 'an undertaking to do something together …, a relationship that consists of shared and/or compatible objectives and an acknowledged distribution of specific roles and responsibilities among the participants which can be formal, contractual, or voluntary, between two or more parties' (Skage,1996, Chapter III)
The way participants define, interpret and understand the concept of 'partnership' is crucial to the partnerships success, as interpretations of terms such as cooperation and coordination impact on the way people interact with one another.
The Concept Of Alignment
Gardner et al (2001) researched the following question: how do we go about understanding why some people do 'good work' while others achieve merely adequate or 'compromised work'? They concluded that it was a combination of personal standards, social controls, cultural controls and outcome controls. But what was key was how ‘aligned’ these elements were. Alignment is not a permanent state and can be both superficial and authentic. Gardner et al (2001) define authentic alignment in the following way:
'A professional realm is healthiest when the values of the culture are in line with those of the domain, when the expectations of stakeholders match those of the field and when domain and field are themselves in sync. When these conditions exist, individual practitioners are free to operate at their best, morale is high and the professional realm flourishes. We term this a situation of authentic alignment.' (Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi and Damon, 2001: 27)
The 'field' refers to the group of people working in the same domain. If everything is going well, the requirements issuing from field (social controls) and domain (cultural controls) will reinforce each other in authentic alignment. When a profession is misaligned, the various interest groups emerge as being at cross-purposes with one another. ‘Good work’ is easier to carry out when the sector is well aligned‘ (The GoodWork Project, 2006:25). This notion of authentic alignment underlies the need for the values, the expectations and the processes to be in sync. This can be a useful concept to examine what seems to facilitate authentic alignment in NLC/HEI partnerships and which in turns leads to good work in terms of research and enquiry.
Figure 2. Moving towards authentic alignment
An emphasis on partnerships making 'active commitment to changing the internal operations of each agent' in order to improve the system overall is essential to our interpretation of authentic alignment.
'Beyond simple networks, partnerships require the commitment of the agents to work fully together to address problems and opportunities. This means they must accept long term structures that work toward sustained commitment to change and the achievement of quality. They must also accept an active commitment to changing the internal operations of each agent and helping other agents to achieve an improved system overall. ' (Danson & Whittam, 1999)
Inter-agency support, cooperation and collaboration within the world of education are generally seen as desirable politically, economically and socially. In the context of NLC/HEI partnerships, authentic alignment could provide a real opportunity for an integrated, holistic approach to school development and improvement.
What Does The Data Tell Us About NLC And HEI Partnerships?
A review of data across the NLC programme to date (Appendix 1) shows that, most NLC/HEI partnership interactions fall within the context of continual professional development (CPD), interpreted in its widest sense: research/enquiry, CPD, CPD plus knowledge creation. Taking this and using a bi-polar approach (NLCs looking to HEIs: HEIs looking to NLCs, see Fig. 3) existing network data was analysed/re-analysed and the following questions were asked: What was the nature of the relationship? What could be offered? What could be gained? What are the desired outcomes? How much alignment is there? Is there evidence of 'active commitment to changing the internal operations of each agent' (Danson & Whittam, 1999)?
Figure 3. Model for looking at NLC/HEI Partnerships
WIDER CPD FRAMEWORK
Nature of relationship
What was offered?
What was gained?
In using this framework to analyse case studies and interviews of complex and extremely varied NLC/HEI relationships, a number of features of interest emerged.
The Nature Of The Partnership Relationships
Where strong partnerships had formed, they were likely to have established working relationships prior to NLCs involvement. In these there is 'greater potential to generate new ideas' (TTA Research Consortium 1997 onwards, Black-Hawkins, 2005, p. 60). These relationships and many newer ones tended to have been formed through personal contacts or personal initiatives: formal and informal,
I was lucky because … [university professor] was a friend of mine and she’d said ‘if you want any support for research …’
(N283 External Evaluation Phase 2 interview)
One could argue that a long history of working together gives people space and time to work out certain key elements of collaboration, that is, the purpose and whether it is shared; the roles each will play in the activity; the degree of engagement and way of interacting. NCSL funded research on NLCs and HEI partnerships, by Campbell et al., 2005, had also highlighted the importance of interpersonal elements, 'personality' was seen as being dominant in successful partnerships: people trusted and respected each other (p. 51). This may not be a matter of personality alone but the time to work on issues of power, values and purposes - all of which contribute to the development of mutual respect and partnership.
Across the networks, there was a wide range of practices from cooperation (autonomous agencies sharing at a relatively superficial level of interaction but working towards an identified goal), to coordination (deliberate joint relations, shared decisions making, coordination of service delivery for the purpose of achieving shared goals and improving interventions), through to collaboration (agencies working together in all stages of the program: planning, implementation, evaluation).
The vast majority of the partnerships were based on educational economic alliances, that is, they operated on a consultancy model. Relationships were based largely on NLCs 'buying in services' and HEIs 'selling services'. This is not surprising given that, this element was built into the original NLC programme submission.
What is of significance though in the case studies and interview scripts is the effect that this kind of relationship had when NLCs talked about their partnerships with HEIs, that is, how they conceived the relationship. In their conversations the 'direction of flow' was one way, i.e. from the HEI to the NLC (See Model 1).
Model 1 Consultancy: NLCs buy in HEI services (e.g. N265, N298, N267, N224)
NOTE: The flow tends to be one way
The discussions focused on the services offered or negotiated, which range from the one-off course to those which met identified NLC needs, through to long-term collaborative support. Activities and their value to the network were central themes while the changes these activities brought about remained elusive. Most NLC’s talked about the perceived benefits they received, set out in Table. 1 below, and it was clear that, for some, HEIs partnerships were highly valued: