Exploring Leaders' Conceptualizations of Instruction, Leadership Practice, and School Organization amid Schoolwide Implementation of Project Based Learning

Abstract

One policy ambition of education reform in the last thirty years has been to push public education beyond didactic pedagogies, basic facts, and rote skills toward ambitious instructional experiences and outcomes not only for students of privilege, but also for students of poverty and color. As U.S. education policy and reform have pressed for the pursuit of excellence and equity, Project Based Learning (PBL) has emerged as one approach to ambitious instruction with potential to advance these goals. However, research suggests that implementing PBL in ways that have a significant impact on learning and outcomes for all students requires the challenging work of whole-school intervention and reform. Much early educational research surrounding PBL has focused on the design of curricular materials. Further research has focused on how to prepare and support teachers to enact these curricula. However, in addition to the study of these classroom-level factors, the implementation of PBL school-wide raises questions about the work of school leaders in establishing school and system contexts that can support PBL. One challenge of school-wide implementation of an instructional innovation such as PBL is that it can require leaders to operate in ways that vary greatly from typical leadership in schools. Historically, much of the work of school leadership has been political and administrative, and less of the work has been instructional. The school-wide implementation of PBL potentially requires dramatic changes across a school, from the organization of classrooms to the organization of the school as a whole, in addition to a shift in how leaders carry out their roles. The magnitude of change required in the school-wide implementation of an innovation such as PBL can also limit its long-term sustainability due to the necessary investment in human capital, new structures, and establishing and maintaining alignment within a reorganized system. Therefore this study examines whether and how the school-wide implementation of PBL bears on leaders’ understandings of the changes PBL will require in classroom instruction, in their own identity and work as leaders, and in school organization. Analysis suggests that with regards to instructional dynamics within a classroom, leaders focused on the role of the teacher when considering conventional instruction, and focused on the role of the student in PBL instruction. Leaders (all of whom were hired to do primarily instructional work in their contexts) focused on the instructional elements of their systems, such as teacher professional development and curriculum, when envisioning how to shift their systems. When considering their work as instructional leaders, they were focused on the instructional elements of leadership (as compared to administrative and political elements) and saw this as a key factor in promoting PBL implementation in their settings. Analysis also uncovered a theory of the learner, which describes the influences on learners’ perspectives that affected the development of their perspectives on PBL implementation. These influences were: individual background, applied context, and program content.