Organizing to learn while managing transition : BPE's path to designing and supporting teaching academies

Abstract

Transforming American K-12 education in order to advance student learning and meet the challenges of a complex world will require a reconceptualization of how schools are organized and a simultaneous focus on the learning of adults and children (Wagner et al, 2006). BPE is creating such organizations: Teaching Academies, designed to be sites of deep teaching, learning, and improvement for both students and adults, characterized by collaborative, common practices, shared responsibilities for student outcomes, and continuous systems of improvement. During 2013-14, BPE began a significant organizational transition to create Teaching Academies and to develop the “home office” that will support them, while also attending to its existing commitments: running the Boston Teacher Residency and its first charter school in the Dudley neighborhood of Boston. The work of my residency was to support the leadership team during this transition, contributing to the design of the Teaching Academy model and the creation of the conditions for staff engagement. This capstone suggests that for BPE to implement and support the teaching academy model successfully, its central support function will need to operate as a learning organization, as “in any effort to foster schools that learn, changes will make a difference only if they take place at all levels” (Senge, 2000, p. 11). An analysis of my strategic project reveals the ways in which BPE’s organizational transition was made more complex by the ambitious goal of transforming to a learning organization in support of this new model of schooling, and examines the external and internal conditions that hindered and helped the movement toward its desired organizational form.