HELEN S. TIMPERLEY and VIVIANE M.J.

ROBINSON

ACHIEVING SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT THROUGH CHALLENGING AND CHANGING TEACHERS SCHEMA

ABSTRACT. The importance of changing teachers beliefs and practices in school improvement efforts is well accepted but little empirical work has been reported on the micro-processes involved. In this paper, we use schema theory to examine how the teachers in three schools changed their beliefs about the causes of low academic achievement from external factors, such as the parents and childrens decits, to internal factors, such as the contribution of their own teaching practices. These change processes are contrasted briey with those in a fourth school in which the teachers continued to blame external factors. The three conditions identied as critical for schema revision included the salience of discrepant data, the presence of an external agent to assist with the interpretation of those data, and the availability of information on alternative practices.

Dissatisfaction with the impact of restructuring on school improvement efforts has led to a focus on school culture as the mechanism for change (van den Berg, Vandenberghe & Sleegers, 1999). The essence of culture is usually considered to be the basic assumptions shared by the organizations members that shape their decisions and practices (Leithwood & Jantzi, 1999). The rationale for this shift in focus from restructuring to examining the role of these basic assumptions is probably best articulated by Fullan (1988) in his well-known statement that any attempt to improve a school that neglects school culture is doomed to tinkering. Although considerable advances have been made in identifying the inuences of culture on the success of school improvement efforts, little has been written about the micro-processes involved in changing the basic assumptions that underpin a particular culture. In this paper, we focus on these micro-processes in four schools that were part of a major reform initiative in two school districts in New Zealand. Nearly half of the schools in the two low-income districts were identied as offering an inadequate education by an independent audit and review agency (New Zealand Education Review Ofce, 1996). The prevailing assumptions in many of the schools about the causes of low student achievement were counterproductive to improving the quality of the instruction offered. The causes of the problem were externalized and focused on student and family deprivation with little attention given to school-based factors. During the
Journal of Educational Change 2: 281300, 2001. 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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intervention, the teachers in three of the four schools that are the focus of this paper demonstrated substantive changes in both their assumptions and their associated practices. We focused on school professionals because they are central to the success of reform efforts (Creemers, 1994; D. Reynolds et al., 1996) and their beliefs and practices form the essence of an organizations culture (Leithwood & Jantzi, 1999). Their beliefs about academic failure, their own role in that failure and their capacity to make a difference is crucial to any improvement effort. By adopting this focus, however, we do not wish to imply that school professionals beliefs are independent of the wider context. As Rosenholtz (1989) has articulated, moving schools tend to be located in moving districts and stuck schools in stuck districts. Our analysis of the four schools is based on schema theory because it offers explanations for the persistence of the beliefs and of the social processes needed to change them. According to schema theory, schema are organized knowledge structures representing concepts such as situations, objects, events and actions, and the relationships between them. They are dynamic rather than static and exist in a hierarchy that represents various levels of abstraction (Lipman, 1991). Schema properties are represented symbolically, usually in the form of language that serves as the device to organize meaning (Cossette, 1998). In the schools in this study, schema about the causes of low achievement were articulated as sayings which appeared to be treated as accepted wisdom. These sayings included, The children arrive at school with no skills, With their backgrounds, we cannot expect much progress in the rst year and The parents dont want to be involved in the school. The central functions of schema are to assist with the comprehension of new data and to predict future events. They serve as recognition devices that allow new data to be processed according to the goodness of t with current schema. Existing schema strongly inuence how the new data might be perceived, so that to a great extent, we perceive what we expect to perceive (Lipman, 1991). While this process allows for fast processing of information, it can also lead to inaccurate interpretation of new data if the structure of the schema used for their interpretation is inadequate. The most extreme example is the way our prejudices control our perceptions by convincing us that what we have just observed ts with a whole class of behaviors associated with a particular group (Lipman, 1991). In many of the schools in the two districts, data on low achievement were interpreted in terms of schema about how low-income families and poor communities produced student skill levels that were inadequate for the task of engaging

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with an academic curriculum. School-based causes of low achievement were not part of the schema. Schema theory also offers some insights into possibilities for school intervention when the prevailing schema are counterproductive to teachers enquiring about how their practice may contribute to low academic standards. The key process that has been identied in laboratory settings as contributing to schema revision is creating surprise through exposure to discrepant data (Reynolds, Sinatra & Jetton, 1996; Schutzwohl, 1998). The discrepant data must be sufciently salient to prevent their ready incorporation into existing schema. In the school intervention context, this is a particularly challenging task because the complexity of educational phenomena means that data can usually be explained in a variety of ways. There is little doubt that poverty creates special educational challenges for children and their teachers. To shift teacher beliefs from attributing all educational failure to this one explanation to include more self-critical explanations is a difcult task. In this paper, we examine the particular conditions under which discrepant data became sufciently salient to lead to this shift. Schema theory usually provides the framework for examining the cognition of individuals rather than of groups. The schema we discuss in this paper, however, were shared by many teachers both within each school and within the two districts. The shared qualities of these schema can be explained by developments in learning theory that have identied the social origins of individual cognitions (Vygotsky, 1978) which, in turn, contribute to collective learning (Fiol & Lyles, 1985). Given the inuence of the wider context on teachers and schools (Stoll & Fink, 1996), we discuss how the revision of individual schema was disseminated throughout the two districts and the impact this had in changing the two districts from being stuck to moving. T HE R ESEARCH C ONTEXT AND A PPROACH In 1996, 45 percent of the 35 schools in two suburban low-income districts in New Zealand were identied as inadequate (New Zealand Education Review Ofce, 1996). Student achievement levels were low and weaknesses were identied with school governance, management and teaching quality. In response to this report, the New Zealand Ministry of Education undertook a major initiative to strengthen the education offered in the schools in the two districts. This initiative became the responsibility of the national level administration because since 1989, New Zealand schools have been governed by parent-elected Boards of Trustees, and

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no administrative structure exists between the individual school and the central Ministry of Education. The initiative was undertaken by an intervention team and evolved through two phases. In the rst, the two communities and the schools were consulted about the causes of low student achievement. This phase resulted in the formulation of a generic project that provided the framework for each school to apply for additional funding to improve its students literacy levels. In the second, the schools submitted individual project proposals, obtained the funding and implemented their self-identied projects. The authors were contracted by the New Zealand Ministry of Education to undertake a process evaluation of these initiatives. The study reported in this paper was a part of the larger evaluation project that has extended over a two and a half year period. The data on all the schools were gathered through a number of different methods. Observations were made and eld notes taken of discussions at six of the district meetings called to determine how to address the issues around low student achievement. Similar observations and eld notes were made of ten district-wide principals meetings at which the Ministrys initiatives were discussed. All nal submission documents for each schools project proposals were analyzed to determine levels of reported student achievement, explanations for poor performance and the links between those explanations and the proposed projects. Meetings between the coordinator of the initiatives and school staff were tape recorded and transcribed in nine schools as each school formulated its projects to improve student literacy. Additional interviews were held with management and teaching staff to determine the progress of their particular projects and the nature of any changes in teachers schema about student achievement. Staff in twelve of the schools who participated in a professional development program in literacy completed a questionnaire before and after the course asking about their satisfaction with the reading levels in the class, their beliefs about the causes of low achievement and changes in their expectations of what children could learn in their rst year at school. Interviews with management and staff were repeated over the two and a half year period at a minimum of six-month intervals. The personnel involved and the exact questions asked depended on the particular issue that was the focus of the schools project. The generic questions on which the individual questions were based were: Why did the staff prioritize the particular project identied by the school? What was their analysis of the current situation in relation to the particular project? On what data did they base their analysis? What did they believe caused the current situation?

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The interview data were analyzed using Q.S.R. Nudist (1997) to assist with identication of the factors that impacted on each schools previously held schema about the causes of student achievement. The analysis of each of the four schools described in this paper was checked with relevant staff for accuracy and validity of interpretation before inclusion. Since our evaluation role was a formative one, data on the progress of the initiatives were fed back to both the Ministry of Education and the schools as soon as they became available. In some instances, the researchers challenged the schools to collect data on their own practices by asking them how they knew that the claims they made were accurate. For example, when one senior manager claimed that the children arrived at school with no skills, the researchers asked for data to substantiate these claims and suggested that she test the children on entry. The four schools described in this paper were selected because their change process illustrated issues of theoretical interest. In three of the four schools, the teachers revised their schema about the causes of low student achievement. The fourth school was selected to provide a contrast, because it led to a deeper analysis of the conditions required to help teachers revise their schema about the causes of low student achievement. The average income status of the parents in the four schools was categorized as being in the lowest 10% in the country. The schools varied in size from 350 to 750 and catered to Years 16 or Years 18. The two larger schools included Years 7 and 8. The children were predominantly Maori (New Zealands indigenous people) or from one of the Pacic Nations including Samoa, Tonga, and the Cook Islands. These families were typically rst- or second-generation immigrants who had come to New Zealand to seek a better education for their children. Unfortunately, as the New Zealand Education Review Ofce Report (1996) identied, many of their hopes had not been realized. T HE S CHEMA AND A SSOCIATED C HALLENGES In the examples used to illustrate schema revision, the schema themselves had similar qualities in that they focused on the decits of the children or their parents. In the rst example, the teachers explained the childrens poor academic achievement in terms of low-level entry skills. Data on entry skills, however, revealed that the childrens skill levels were much higher than the teachers believed them to be. In the second example, the parents were believed to be uncommitted to their childrens education. Data discrepant with this belief, and a number of other assumptions

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about the causes of low achievement, led the teachers to test many of their previously held beliefs and to develop a different understanding of their responsibilities and contribution. In the third example, the teachers believed that children could not be expected to learn to read in their rst year at school and so taught a curriculum that delayed literacy acquisition. Data collection prompted by a professional development program demonstrated that the childrens progress could be accelerated beyond levels they previously believed possible. In all these examples, discrepant data were a necessary but not sufcient condition for schema revision and changed practice. Additional conditions, including the presence of an external agent to assist with data collection and interpretation and the availability of alternative practice (in two cases), were required for the discrepant data to become sufciently salient to result in schema revision. Discrepant Data and Childrens Entry Skills Assumptions about the inadequacy of childrens preparation for the academic challenges of school were frequently expressed in the district as, the children arrive at school with no skills. This assumption underlay the teachers diagnosis of a problem that became apparent in a schoolwide review at Viscount School.1 The teachers discovered that by Year 3, 50% percent of the students were achieving between one and a half to two years below national norms in literacy. The data revealed that this delay in achievement continued throughout the childrens primary schooling. The teachers attributed the results at Year 3 to the childrens low school entry skills and the consequent amount of time they had to spend teaching these early skills. Staff could cite many examples of inadequate and inappropriate early skills; for example, children who ate crayons because they were hungry and were unfamiliar with crayons as a writing tool. Given that the problem was believed to be the childrens school entry skill level, the staff decided that the key to raising literacy was a focus on improving these early skills. They intended to develop an early learning curriculum, but when the researchers asked about the data on which they were basing their assumptions about entry skills, they decided to test what skills the students had on entry. They developed a list of 25 skills that they believed to be critical for the students to master before they could begin school-level instruction. These skills were divided into ve groups, comprising early reading (e.g., realize that print and pictures carry a message), writing (e.g., tell others what to write), language (e.g., follow an instruction), social (e.g., work independently for a short time), and motor skills (e.g., use a pair of scissors). New Entrant teachers tested the next 40 new entrant children on their mastery of the 25 skills. After

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completing the assessment, the individual results were given to the deputy principal for collation. The teachers who had completed the assessments also estimated the aggregated results, with all but one predicting that the children they had tested had mastered, on average, between 30% and 40% of the skills on the list. The remaining teacher estimated a much higher 70% to 80% level of skill acquisition. The aggregated results revealed a very different picture from that anticipated by most of the teachers. On average, the percentage of skills mastered by the students was 74% with a median of 84%. Only seven children scored less than 50%, with 15 children scoring above 90%. Closer analysis of the reading achievement scores revealed that the one teacher who accurately estimated higher skill levels, achieved the best reading outcomes for the children. After exploring a range of possible explanations, the deputy principal stated unequivocally, We must conclude from this survey that the veyear-olds entering the school bring with them a very sound foundation for learning. These entry-level skills data had led to substantive schema revision. The problem was not one of student skill level so much as one of teacher expectations which, of course, are a well-established inuence on student achievement (Lumsden, 1998; Watt, 1996). The management and teaching staff agreed that they needed to change their focus from entry skills to more effective literacy teaching. An intensive professional development program with a literacy expert was undertaken subsequently. Although discrepant data were crucial to schema revision, they were not sufcient on their own. Initially, when the deputy principal collated the data, she discussed their meaning with a group of colleagues who were involved in similar data-collection activities in their schools. Together, they made various attempts to explain the data away. One, for example, raised the possibility that the children tested may have been different from other new entrant groups and that the teachers judgments were based on perceptions that had arisen as a result of their previous experience with other groups. They did not question these alternatives until challenged to do so by the researchers who asked how the different explanations tted with the data. In this example, the researchers asked the deputy principal for reasons why the new intake would be so very different from previous intakes given that there was no wider demographic change in the district. Recent school improvement research has identied the importance of increasing the capacity of teachers to engage in activities that promote continuous learning about ways of enhancing student achievement as the teachers at Viscount had begun to do (Newmann, King & Rigdon, 1997; Stoll, 1999). Stoll, for example, identied eight interacting inuences on

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teachers capacity to engage in and sustain learning. These include the morale of teachers and the relationships between them, together with the history, culture, structure and leadership of the school. Although Stoll advises on 13 action-oriented principles to address issues of teacher learning, including challenging teachers low expectations of students, how this sort of challenge might be achieved is not so clear. The example from Viscount School indicates that data are a key ingredient, but that data are more likely to be explained in terms of current schema unless discrepancies are challenged and alternative possibilities raised. There were two points in this example at which external input was needed to challenge the teachers assumptions. The rst was near the beginning of the process with the suggestion that skill levels should be tested rather than assumed, and the second occurred at the time of data interpretation. Ongoing Schema Revision and Parent Involvement Parental attitudes, skill levels and lack of involvement in their childrens education were also perceived by many in the district to be a major factor contributing to the childrens low academic achievement. At the beginning of the Ministrys intervention, many schools reported low levels of parental involvement and much of the Ministry of Educations efforts in the reform initiatives were focused on increasing this involvement (Annan, 1999). Pleasant Roads interpretation of this situation was typical of other schools in that they believed it related to a cultural acceptance that schools are responsible for the formal education of children. Many of the parents own experience of schooling was in the Pacic Islands where the traditional education system primarily left schooling to the teachers. The Ministry intervention team believed that reasons for the lack of parental and community involvement were more complex than the beliefs expressed by many of those in schools. Some members of the intervention team had information that parents felt unwelcome by the predominantly white staff who could be patronizing and critical, and held untested assumptions about what parents wanted. As a result, one requirement placed on the additional funding was that schools demonstrate how they would increase parental involvement in the school. Pleasant Road School initially framed the parental involvement part of its application for additional funding in terms of getting reluctant and illinformed parents to take more responsibility for their childrens education. As the associate principal stated, My long term goal is to end up with these guys being committed parents. The school decided to spend some of the additional funding on buying instructional reading books to send home with the children each afternoon so they could practice their reading with

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their parents. This is a common practice in most New Zealand schools, but did not occur in this school because the loss rate for the books was predicted to be too great for the school to accommodate in its budget. For this reason, the proposed budget in the application for additional funding from the Ministry of Education included a 40% replacement rate for books each year. In addition, low expectations were held about the parents actually hearing their children read, as the associate principal explained:
It will be the children that were having to train because their parents probably wont interact with them a lot. Well buy them [the books] and well replace them because when youre ve and six, its your parents that make you return your books and these parents forget, or theyre still asleep when they come to school or whatever. But I still want the children to have them. Were prepared to stand the loss of the books that we lose at this level . . . [the children] know that they dont have to go and read it to Mum and Dad. They can go into their bed and read it to their teddy bear. They can go outside and read it to their cat. As long as they read the book and bring it back the next day.

As part of the initiative to get the parents involved, the staff also organized several parent education evenings. They were surprised at the number of parents attending and at their interest in these meetings. As the associate principal explained:
A lot of these parents want to help but they dont know how to. And I think that math evening we had, opened my eyes to that. Weve sort of sat back and said, Oh, its no good sending home readers home, no, no. But when you meet 130 parents here [at the math evening], and they were so enthused and they were so grateful and they wanted to give us money. How much has this cost us tonight? Nothing. But weve learnt so much. And it made me realize that there is a real need. They want to help.

This experience prompted the staff to approach the task of getting books read and returned from home differently. With the encouragement of the Ministry intervention team they held parent meetings where they explained the purpose of the activity and expectations about book return. At the end of the year, the associate principal was surprised to nd a very low loss rate of 4.5% over the six months the program was operating, rather than the 40% anticipated. In addition, a family member signed eighty percent of the reading records every night indicating that the book had been read to someone at home. Part of the surprise was the number of written comments parents made about the books and their childrens reading. Establishing schema testing processes Up to this point, the process of challenging the teachers causal schema was similar to that at Viscount School. An external agent suggested that the assumptions about the parents may not be accurate and that a different approach may produce different results. In addition, data discrepant with previously held schema led to schema revision about parent involvement in

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their childrens learning. What is interesting about Pleasant Road School is not so much the change in particular assumptions about the parents, but the way the teachers began to test the fundamental properties of their whole schema on the causes of poor academic achievement. Through the intervention, a number of their assumptions were challenged in different ways. Over an 18-month period, they began to test if the professionals were also contributing to the problem. This testing process became an integral part of any diagnosis of achievement problems. The associate principal described the process as like a stone in a pond in that each challenge to their causal schema led to the testing of other assumptions that were part of the schema. She illustrated the process by describing an incident at a recent meeting. The teacher responsible for Years 5 and 6 expressed a concern that ve children were reading more than two years below their chronological age. The associate principal explained the difference in her reaction to this information from that before the intervention:
A year ago I would have assumed that they were transient or irregular attenders. This time, I got their records, hoping that they were either recent arrivals or had poor attendance. I found that they had all been at Pleasant Road since the beginning, two had been poor attenders in the junior school, but they had been OK for the last few years. It meant we had to look at what we were doing.

It appears that when particular assumptions supporting a larger schema are demonstrated to be faulty on several occasions, the framework of the schema itself comes under revision. The difference between the initial and revised schema at Pleasant Road School is illustrated in Figure 1. Establishing this ongoing testing process, however, required more than the occasional intervention of an external agent and some discrepant data. Alongside these challenges was an intensive professional development contract involving one third of the schools staff with dissemination structures and strategies designed to inform the rest of the staff. The professional development program not only encouraged the teachers to test their beliefs but also showed them how to do so. This is how the associate principal explained the process:
She [the professional development contractor] showed us how to test the children but our teachers said I havent got time for diagnostic testing and she said, Well, just test two children at each year level. And then she said, Right, what did you nd out from that? They [the staff] said it was just incredible, what they learned about those two children whom they thought they knew very well. She made us time ourselves and asked, How long did that one take you, and that one? And we realized that if you did two per week, look what youve learned about them . . . . Teachers said in the past, and I would have defended this to the death, when they were asked, How do you know? [what children know] and we say Oh, we know in here [pointing to her heart]. As those senior classes found out when they did that [diagnostic test], it was very scary.

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Figure 1. Initial and revised schema testing at Pleasant Road School.

Part of the scariness was taken away, however, with the provision of alternative practice through the professional development contract. When faulty schema became evident, the contractor was able to provide teachers with suggestions for alternative ways to teach. As one of the teachers graphically put it, Now we know how to teach them. The associate principal explained it in more generic terms:
We had to get over our defensive attitude . . . . We identied that the children didnt have the deep understanding in their reading. We had tried everything to increase their understanding. When we got into the [professional development] contract, there were the answers . . . . We couldnt have done it on our own.

It is likely that in the absence of alternative ways to practice, the psychological costs of acknowledging faulty schema in the face of discrepant data will be high. As it was, the associate principal stated, I think we have really grown in condence as the staff became more adept at both recognizing faulty schema and addressing the practice issues that arose with the support of the professional development contractor. This increase in condence was reected in their decision to visit other schools of higher socio-economic status and to benchmark their childrens achievement against the children in these schools. Their condence in themselves extended to increased condence in the childrens capabilities to reach high literacy standards. Pleasant Road staff moved from blaming poor academic achievement on the parents and the childrens decits, to engaging in the kind of internal accountability processes that Newmann, King and Rigdon (1997)

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found linked to organizational capacity. . . . [The] school staff developed explicit school-wide standards that focused on student performance, mechanisms for collecting and reviewing relevant information, and a culture of peer pressure among teachers that served as potentially important consequences (p. 63). To move from the initial point to the latter point involved three different mechanisms. Firstly, an initial challenge to their schema came from an external agent (the Ministry intervention team) and continued through the contractor for the professional development program. Secondly, the challenge took the form of assisting the school to collect data that were then used to test the causal schema. The professional development contractor both gave them the tools to undertake the diagnostic testing, and challenged the teachers to use them. Repeated challenges and new knowledge about how to test assumptions, led to the teachers initiating their own testing processes with decreasing reliance on external agents. Thirdly, schema revision was assisted by the availability of alternative practice. When faulty assumptions were revealed, the professional development contractor was able to provide the teachers with ideas about new ways of teaching. As one of the teachers said, We couldnt have done it on our own. Issues of professional development provision and the way in which the availability of alternative practices may impact on schema revision are further explored in the next example. Alternative Practice and Expected Progress At Pleasant Road, engagement with professional development arose as a result of dissatisfaction with existing practice and a search for alternatives. In the next case, the sequence was slightly different. Exposure to alternative practices and the data that arose from them actually triggered the revision of the counterproductive schema themselves. The Ministry offered a professional development program in early literacy to all schools in the two areas. This program was different from the one at Pleasant Road. It had been extensively researched and shown to have a signicant impact on the literacy levels of children from low socio-economic areas in their rst year of schooling. The ve staff at Kingsland School who participated in the professional development were not particularly dissatised with their literacy program. At the beginning of the course they gave an average rating of four on a seven-point scale in a questionnaire asking how satised they were with reading levels in their class. This rating matched the descriptor neither satised nor dissatised. The senior teacher, however, had concerns about some of their practices. Of particular concern to her was the delay in beginning

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text reading that resulted from teacher beliefs about sequential skill acquisition. She explained it this way: Senior Teacher: We had lowered our expectations to accommodate things, lack of experience, no books in their homes etc . . . . [The childrens] vocabulary appears to be limited. Because that is so obvious the teachers think, thats what Ive got to tackle rst . . . . [Then] the emphasis is on letter identication, they think that you cant teach reading until you have the letters . . . . Researcher: If you have a belief that rst you need the language and then letters before they [the children] can read, when do you start teaching reading? Senior Teacher: Im quite sure they werent starting until a year after they [the children] started school and thats putting them back another year. Her beliefs differed from those of her staff. She believed that greater progress could be achieved when text reading was developed alongside language and letter identication. She was aware that the philosophy of the literacy program offered through the professional development was compatible with her beliefs. Rather than challenge her staffs assumptions directly, she advocated that all Year 1 teachers attend the training. During the rst session they were shown a video of the professional development contractor teaching a child. The senior teacher described how,
We looked at some videos and they were quite powerful. All of them [the staff] came back and said, Yes, wed like to see more of those. We talked about it among ourselves and claried what it is that we need to go away and do.

Without this prior exposure, the senior teacher believed that challenging current practice would only create defensiveness:
I think that if you want to break a bad habit, it actually leaves a vacuum and youve got to have something in place to take that place. You have to have something to put in there, before you take it away.

Exposure to alternative practice on its own, however, was insufcient to challenge the assumptions supporting the old schema. This required the impact of discrepant data. Under the guidance of the professional development contractor, the staff volunteered to complete a task in which they tested how many letters the children could record from a sentence the teacher dictated. The senior teacher explained the impact of this exercise on some of her teachers:

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Some of them were surprised at what the children could actually write. They had not realized how much they could. One teacher in particular was really blown away and said, How do they know that, I havent got round to that letter yet. And so that raised the question that they [the children] knew a lot more than the teacher gave them credit for. They [the teachers] could see that quite clearly. It was unexpected . . . . [the teachers think] that the children dont know more than is directly taught. And that has been verbalized in lots of ways. Oh, I didnt know she knew that, isnt that amazing . . . . If the child can show you what they can do, it sharpens up the teaching.

At the end of the course, the teachers were asked to indicate on a scale of 110 the extent to which their expectations about what progress children can make in their rst year of school had changed. A rating of 1 represented no change and a rating of 10 represented changed a lot. The average rating for teachers at Kingsland was 7.4 indicating that their expectations had shifted considerably. The teachers were also asked to give three reasons why children in the district were falling below national levels in literacy. Prior to the course 87% of the reasons focused on children and family decits. After the course, this percentage had decreased to 13%. By this time, 87% of the reasons were school-based, including one which stated fairly graphically, Because we dont know how to teach them. While the starting point was different for Pleasant Road and Kingsland Schools, the ongoing process was very similar. An iterative process of data collection, schema testing and new practices developed. Each process built on the other. We have introduced this example, however, to examine further the conditions under which the introduction of alternative practice, through professional development, is likely to result in schema revision. Unlike the situation at Pleasant Road, Kingsland teachers did not begin with being dissatised with their practice. Their interest was captured through the teaching examples when the alternative practice was introduced. Once their interest was aroused, they began to test their existing assumptions under the guidance of an external agent. Participation in the professional development program far from guaranteed its adoption or the testing of long-held assumptions about childrens learning. In some schools, like our next school, Paterson, the process of exposure to alternative practice before discrepant data had created dissatisfaction with current practice was insufcient to motivate investigation of the alternative in ways that challenged current schema. At the beginning of the professional development, the four participating teachers from Paterson gave an average satisfaction rating for the reading levels in their class of 3 (on the 17 scale) which matched the descriptor slightly satised.

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Paterson decided to adapt rather than adopt the reading approach advocated in the professional development. The senior teacher explained her reasons:
She [the professional development contractor] said that we had to change everything we did. We wanted a few ideas we could use in our individualized program, but no, we were told we had to change everything. It [the program] would only suit a few of our children. It wouldnt suit most of them . . . . In our individualized program the children go at their own pace. You cant push them because of their backgrounds. There are no books in the homes, we have to teach them everything. Its not like in other schools.

This teacher had no reason to revise her schema about teaching or learning. The alternative approach suggested in the professional development program conicted with her belief that children need to move at their own pace and to push them was counterproductive to making longterm progress. She was satised that the schools reading program met the needs of her students whom she believed to be different from those for whom the program was developed. Although she was aware that children from schools with the same ethnic and socio-economic composition had experienced signicant improvements in their reading levels, this information was insufcient to motivate schema testing or revision. The failure of the professional development program to impact on the teachers schemas was reected in the lack of change in the reasons given for low literacy levels in the district. Unlike the teachers at Kingsland, the percentage of reasons that described children and family decits rose from 75% prior to the professional development to 83% after its completion. The principal supported the teachers decision to withdraw. As he said:
Theres probably nothing wrong with the program but people have got to be comfortable using it. Its a simple fact that Paterson School has been around for 35 years. Now you cant change Paterson so quickly.

The availability of alternative practice may reduce the psychological costs of examining data discrepant with existing schema because it allows the practitioner to perceive how he or she might improve practice. The availability of the alternative in the absence of dissatisfaction with current practice, however, may not be sufcient to motivate data collection and schema testing. The teachers at Paterson School did not implement the program as intended so failed to test if the alternative was better than what they offered already. They rejected rather than tested the alternative because it did not t with their current schema of the slow and gradual acquisition of literacy skills. The schools that adopted the program implemented it with sufcient integrity to accelerate their childrens text reading. Part of the requirement of the professional development was to collect data on that achievement. As the principal in another school said as

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she produced graphed data on the childrens progress, This gives us the evidence that the children can learn to read in their rst year at school. Collectively-Held Schemas The causal schema about low academic achievement were not restricted to the four schools, but rather were beliefs held by many in the two districts. For example, each school was asked to collect data on student achievement and identify reasons for the levels of achievement documented as part of the project submission process. Only two of the thirty-ve schools gave any indication in their documentation that school-related factors might have played some role in the students low achievement levels. In addition to these written statements, there were many verbal comments about the virtual inevitability of academic failure in the face of student transience, limited early childhood education and second language difculties. Each case of schema revision in the individual schools had wider district impact through both formal and informal dissemination of the relevant information. Individual schools helped to change the district from being stuck to moving (Rosenholtz, 1989). The data from Viscount School was formally presented in the researchers evaluation report (Timperley, Robinson & Bullard, 1999) and to the local principals association. While some principals reacted defensively and criticized the data as being insufciently precise, others welcomed the openness of Viscount staff and commented that the principals association could do well to discuss signicant educational issues at their meetings instead of the things we usually discuss. This principal together with three others, agreed to continue to meet to discuss educational issues of mutual interest. No more public claims were made about children arriving with no skills at these meetings and what happened at Viscount became known locally as the Viscount Story. Dissemination of Pleasant Roads learning was more informal, but the associate principal described how she shared what was happening at the school at her association meetings. Over half the schools were participating in the professional development contract on early literacy. While a few, such as Paterson School, rejected the program most were taking steps to implement it. Perhaps most indicative of the change in the collectively-held schema about the causes of childrens low achievement is the willingness of 24 of 26 eligible schools to take part in a professional development program in the collation, use and reporting of student achievement data. At the time of the release of the initial New Zealand Education Review Ofce Report (1996) many of the schools in the two districts reacted with data-

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free claims about how successful their schools were in promoting high levels of literacy achievement. Advertisements were placed in newspapers proclaiming the high quality of education offered. Early in the intervention, the researchers conducted a district-wide interview survey of 26 schools on their student achievement data collection, collation and interpretation. This survey established that most schools did not have the capacity to collect and analyze student achievement data to test their claims (Robinson et al., 1999). Public presentations of the data from this survey initially met with protestations about the irrelevance of the task, insufcient time available within a school day to complete it and inaccuracies in the researchers interpretation of the data. Now, nearly all schools eligible for involvement in the contract designed to address this issue have requested inclusion.

C ONCLUSION Attributions that the problems of low student achievement are solely caused by external circumstances are a perennial issue for school improvement. The issue becomes particularly difcult when the surrounding schools support these attributions rather than challenge claimants to examine the contribution of their own practices (Stoll & Fink, 1996). Schema theory offers both explanations for the persistence of beliefs about the causes of poor performance and insights into the social processes needed to change them. Poverty undoubtedly makes the teaching and learning task more difcult, but in all the schools we have described in this paper, there was evidence that the teachers underestimated the knowledge and skills of the children they taught. Their schema about the causes of poor performance were so powerful that they did not search for discrepant data, and when it was available it was insufciently salient to trigger revision of existing schema. Data on the occasional child who engaged in activities like eating crayons at Viscount School, for example, were much more salient than data on the majority of the children who had sufcient skills to begin formal literacy instruction. In each school, creating sufcient salience for the discrepant data to result in schema revision required the intervention of an external agent. In the three schools, this intervention comprised challenges to collect data or to interpret it in ways that differed from the dominant schema. Initially, none of the schools were able to provide these challenges for themselves. Those schools that demonstrated sufcient capacity to test their own schema experienced repeated challenges to their existing schema and were supported in their change efforts.

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Support is one of those generic terms that are often assumed to be of value for those experiencing the stress of change. In the schools described in this paper, the support was of a very specic kind. It provided possibilities for alternative practices that were consistent with the revised rather than the original schema. In those cases where this support was successful in assisting the teachers to revise their schema, it was combined with databased challenges to the original schema. An iterative process developed in which the challenge, the data and the support through provision of alternative practices built on each other and resulted in schema revision. The implications for school improvement are that if external agents are to be effective, they must take the teachers beyond their understandings and analysis of current situations and challenge accepted schema through data-based intervention processes. The development of the sorts of processes that became evident in three of the four schools described in this paper has been identied as the school improvement ideal (Newmann, King & Rigdon, 1997; Stoll, 1999). What is more difcult to specify is the process for shifting teachers schema from one that discounts their own responsibility and contribution to one that tests it. By using schema theory to analyze the research data, we have begun to identify some of those processes that lead to that elusive ideal. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors wish to acknowledge the openness of the schools in sharing their beliefs and ndings and the funding received from the New Zealand Ministry of Education for this research. We are also very grateful to Irene Fung for her editing and referencing work on this manuscript. N OTES
1 Viscount staff chose to use their own name because they considered that their beliefs about New Entrant children were a generic problem in the district and wished to promote a district-wide debate about the issue. The Viscount story was rst published in a report to the New Zealand Ministry of Education (Timperley, Robinson & Bullard, 1999). All other names are pseudonyms.

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AUTHORS B IO
Dr Helen Timperley is a senior lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. She has been intensively involved in an evaluation of the New Zealand Ministry of Educations intervention in 35 schools over the last three years. This evaluation has had a signicant impact on national policy for school support. She teaches in the graduate program in educational management and co-ordinates the program for training mentor teachers in consortium schools for the Universitys pre-service teacher education program. Viviane Robinson is Associate Professor in the School of Education of the University of Auckland, New Zealand, where she coordinates the graduate program in educational management. Her research interests include the analysis and promotion of organizational and interpersonal effectiveness, and the contribution of educational research to the improvement of educational practice. Recent publications include ProblemBased Methodology: Research for the Improvement of Practice (Pergamon, 1993); Critical Theory and the Social Psychology of Change (International Handbook for Educational Leadership and Administration, Kluwer, 1996) and Methodology and the Research-Practice Gap (Educational Researcher, 1998).

School of Education University of Auckland Private Bag 92019 Auckland E-mail: h.timperley@auckland.ac.nz E-mail: vmj.robinson@auckland.ac.nz