Mary Metz also discussed the physical space. And she discussed the school's location in a downtown area, which lent itself to field trips in businesses, museums, and the like. The building was small, and it actually lacked sufficient space for a gym, and its heating wasn't always certain. In spite of this, they did not want to move to another building. Mary Metz argues the context, this physical context, put everyone into shared spaces and created more of a warm atmosphere. All the teachers reported that the school's small size and partitioning into three units, or small schools, enabled the teachers to know students individually and to have a healthy report with one another. Mary Metz makes a lot of discussion about the school culture and ethos, or the deep social structure. Faculty regarded good relations with students and with one another as an end in itself and helpful to learning. In some ways, this kind of culture, this set of principles became the basis for a new goal or a shared mission. With few exceptions, the teachers viewed all students as essentially good, and they regarded the mutual rapport as normal. The teachers didn't misidentify with their students. They had strong, solid, professional relationships with them that were kind of personal. A lot of the faculty felt like and practiced various activities that help rebuild and pass on this culture that enable it to be renewed. And this occurred in several ways during team meetings and faculty lounge conversations. Teachers tended to interject positive comments into their conversations. If they were ever spun in negative directions, they would redirect them toward positive kinds of things. And new recruits got socialized through these experiences, so the culture was passed on. Even informal leaders respectfully sanction new teachers, adopting a negative view of teachers. They redirected them to be one of respect and building up students, as opposed to tearing them down. That said, few cultures are uniform. There were exceptions and Metz remarks on how five teachers angrily confronted students. These teachers tended not to use group instruction, but rather whole class instruction and recitation. In addition, students knew who they were and responded to them negatively. Metz is quick to point out that these teachers were relatively negative, but not noticeably so in comparison to say, traditional school teachers that taught in other context and schools. Her point is that the school culture is a fragile construction that needed to be reproduced, and was far from a sure thing. Mary Metz spent some time also on the administrator, or the, kind of the leader of the organization, or the principle's influence. The principle, Mrs. Michael, influenced the tone of inter-personal relationship by indirect and informal means. But she also controlled the individually guided education curriculum, and its instruction, by a direct and formal means. So on the one hand, the culture was kind of a natural system in way in which she managed it with informal, kind of emergent relationships and efforts. Whereas, the actual curriculum itself was something that she managed more via direct and rational system means. Now, it wasn't official doctrine to have positive relationships with students, but the principal encouraged it in a variety of ways. So she used indirect means to do this. In her speeches, she valued building up students. She wanted relative assessments to occur over, say, objective universal test scores. She wanted teachers to do field trips. She encouraged ethnic pride, and was involved in many of those groups. She also sought out integration, where she could. She publicly appreciated teachers who led extra curricula, and made it a point of giving them institutional resources they needed for those endeavors. In short, the principals relationships with faculty and with the students mirrored that of the school culture. Whether one influenced the other isn't clear, but they reinforced each other for certain. The principal's relation with faculty over the individually guided education program was a different matter. The individually guided education program was imposed from the district, and the faculty felt they had no choice or discussion over it, and felt a degree of resistance. This is Michaels kind of resorted to formal hierarchical authority to implement this program. And the faculty meetings in the first two years, she reminded teachers they had to implement individually guided education or they would have to find a job in another school or district. At the end of the first year, she even demanded three teachers transfer and this led to a lot of conflict. Eventually, two were persuaded to leave and the third filed a grievance. That means, they went to court in order to kind of figure out who's right or wrong in this case. The faculty were upset some, because they felt the involuntary transfer wasn't too fair and many didn't know how to implement the individually guided education in their first year. So they felt like it might not be that individuals fault. Anyhow, by the third year, teachers were more comfortable with individually guided education program and they resisted less than the principal resorted to more positive reinforcement and lessen her use of official powers. Now, the last thing to talk about here is teacher resistance. A minority of teachers criticize the principal for alliance on hierarchical forms of authority to push through the individually guided education program. The minority's anger was recognized by the majority of teachers, but it did not diffuse. So we have kind of a natural system in many ways, where some of the teachers had a resistant view that differed from the main culture. So we had, perhaps even ambiguous goals or multiple kinds of perspectives within this organization was held together as a collation. And the administrator or principle try to guide this in various means through whether a natural system of informal relations or through the formal organizational kind of chart. And in summary, the distinctive features of Adams Avenue School was the constructive relationships. The school implemented the formal individually guided education program to a moderate degree. And the positive relationships seem to reinforce the elements of the individually guided education program that seemed consistent with it. For example, the aspects of individually guided education that rendered negative judgement private were reinforced. The focus on the individual or relative performance of a student was reinforced. And the effort to nurture individuals and relationships via a supportive skills groups was reinforced. As such, the pride of the slow learners was protected and special activities built a sense of fun and camaraderie. The technological or task arrangement of the school did not work alone. It required a faculty culture and a school character that assumed respect would breed further respect. And this kind of culture led to the kind of observed relationships. So we have deep culture, guiding the kind of observed social structure and that social structure reinforced the implementation of a particular technology or task. The lack of training and rush to get individually guided education going, led the principal to use her formal authority and to push individually guided education through. The principal believed it was her choice to do this in response, it was not a pressure from the district office, per se. This pressure from the principal led the faculty to be resistant and upset at first. A minority remained somewhat angry, even, but the faculty and principal did find ways to work respectfully and productively together. And again, this was partly a result of the small schools and the positive collegial ethos that led to positive relationships. The teachers at Adams Avenue believed the small schools contributed to their getting to know the students individually as well as each other and this was their secret to their success. The teachers did not recognize or notice the contribution of their culture, nor did the students on the technology or task of individually guided education. The benign belief or even unconscious belief seemed natural to them. The belief that we should respect each other, that we should diminish this kind of achievement culture and whatnot. But that seemed natural to them, and the culture operated at it's best effect because of it. So what I'm going to do at this point in the case is relate a summary table of where we start to apply the concepts from the course or from our theoretical frameworks to the case. And the first thing to keep in mind is when you think about a case is to consider is what's the main storyline that this author is portraying. In this case, Mary Metz main story line is characterizing a dominant pattern of inference or how something comes about in this organization. In particular, she is saying technology. Was imposed in this organization. And that the structure, social structure, was such that it enabled the kind of technology to be implemented. So that's her general story-line. If we look at the actual actors and participants, we see that it's a racially heterogeneous population. There's more minority students, and poor, and they're a little bit less prepared than the rest of the city. We have a principle named Miss Michaels, who's the leader. We have teachers who are relatively young and inexperienced. We have a teacher union that is for and against this kind of individually guided education program, and we have essential administration that controls money. We even have aggressive parents that want gifted students to excel, and we have local parents that reflect more of the composition of the community. If we look at goals, we have a general goal, which is to treat discipline and achievement problems. To deal with overcrowding, to create a new kind of experience that solves a lot of the kind of goals of schooling. Right? And here we have a social structure, which has various elements like teacher principal relations which are mostly positive with feedback and support from the principal. We have some cases where teachers are pushed out in year one and some resist and complain about individually guided education's pressure. So there's some conflict but mostly, there isn't. They're pretty collegial. Now the teacher's relations with each other are also collegial. There's frequent interaction in the faculty lounge, they have an instructional improvement committee, there is kind of a norm to focus on student relations and having positive ones with them. Third, we have friendly teacher-student interactions. So, and this seems to be a norm as well. Students and teacher share rapport and positive expectations and beliefs of one another. The teachers have a deeper structure of belief which is that kids will have good points. Now this isn't to say that all teachers are successful, some struggle to do well in this kind of relating. Now, students also had positive relations with one another. So, again we have all these patterns of relations, right, with different network populations or roles. And the students relations with each other were also pretty positive, and they were desegregated for the most part. In part, the argument is that all of these kinds of relationships that manifest were the result of a positive organizational culture that people pushed forward these norms and values and principles of relating, okay? Now the technology and task of this organization, there's multiple technologies and tasks. One is that, it was a multi unit processing organization. The school was divided up into several schools, right? So you had three sets of four teachers that focused on 100 students. And the other part was that you had this particular curriculum, the individually guided education. And it had particular discreet objectives, it assessed performance individually, it grouped students by their skill not by their age. The curriculum, grading, and classroom organization was all very different than traditional means in the sense that it was individually guided. The students themselves guided how the education went. They got to decide their progress, the rate they wanted to go and the goal was that they would've improve from moment to moment on. The principal also evaluated teacher progress. So, here we have a technology or a task by which the principal could kind of Alter, teacher input outputs, right? And so, we have multiple kinds of tasks and technologies going on in this school. And the main story line to this point is that, you have this culture within the school, an ethos that creates these kinds of positive relationships. That seem to be coterminous or at least aligned with the kinds of tasks and technologies that are being implemented. And that's the general narrative of Metz for this whole story. Now the environment itself also has effects on this whole narrative, which you'll have these vocal parents in year one. By year three, we have more typical parents of the community. The elites start leaving the district for some reason. And then, the school district has various demands upon the principal. There are press releases, courts, there's a gifted program. It's small and crowded and it's a for the physical setting of the school itself Kind of induces some of this kind of, association that we observe that's kind of cozy, close, kind of experience that's personalized. So the story about Adams Avenue school isn't just about how this steep culture leads to these positive relations, that then facilitates the technology, it's also about the story of how the technology itself. The curriculum and the actual way in which the school was organized to process students and to socialize them actually shaped the social structure. So this individually guided education program set conditions. From which these positive relations, norms, and beliefs could arise. So, for example, the small groupings of students in the small schools, where they had the same sets of teachers and move from one class to the next, enabled them to have familiarity with each other and a uniform experience. The same students saw each other all day, and the teachers coordinated as a unit. The individually guided education really didn't have Global objective standards, it had local results that weren't standardized and the honor roll wasn't based on achievement test but was based on effort. And this kind of, these kind rules of the curriculum, the technology in the way in which people had to do work and were judged on their work led to changes in their social structure. It actually facilitated, improved teacher student relations because it lowered pressure, achievement pressures and judgment, and this gave more trust and pride relations. I protected the students' self-esteem. In addition, it improves student-student relationships by equalizing the prestige of say, academic achievement. Elite students were less competitive. And lower performing students did a little bit better. The individually guided education curriculum also influenced the teachers' beliefs. It seemed to generally work and improve teacher-student relations. And by year two, the teachers had more training and resources. So that actual effort to train teachers, their exposure to this curriculum led them to implement it better. It's difficult to change the heart and mind of some teachers though, that are set in the old ways. They're going to re-frame any reform as nothing new and they'll use past practices or implement these new things half heartedly. So the principals efforts to actually fire teachers and force through the policy. Kind of altered the faculty's social structure, creating a drop in this kind of positive principle faculty relations. There was some resistance. But ultimately, the result that they were unaware of was that this faculty culture, it's benign view of human nature and a belief that respect builds respect. That this kind of was generated part by the individually guided education, all the efforts of the curriculum and technologies that were put in place and conversely, that the actual implementation of the social structure through a variety of emergent practices that reinforced it and reproduced it, had positive feedback back on the curriculum itself, enabling it to be enacted. So this is the general story of the Adam's Avenue school. So in sum, the case application of Adam's Avenue school is really a natural system perspective. The technology of small schools and individually guided education, and the social structure of norms, and valuing students coalesced. It formed a more personable context. And that's kind of the story of this organization and its reform. The plan wasn't explicitly this, to form a nurturing climate of rapport that built rapport. But it happened. And that's why it's a natural system of sorts. It's a count of a natural system, because it had emergent kinds of processes. And moreover the reform or culture wasn't ever fully embraced. It wasn't uniform for everybody, so it doesn't fit a rational system. It was more of a natural system because it was an accomplishment. There was some degree of ambiguity at times and had to be completely reproduced from moment to moment it seemed. Now it was in an open system either perspective, because the environment itself and all of the organizations in it are dependencies with them weren't extremely relevant to this account. So in sum, here we have from our first case an example of a variety of the organizational elements in play. And in addition, we have some kind of explication of a natural system perspective. Mind you, this wasn't what the authors intention was for the beginning, but we can apply these concepts and theories to further elaborate meaning and depth to this organizational phenomenon. So we better see why the changes happened the way they did and come up with some kind of deeper explanation that helps us understand how these organizations work and how the complexity has some kind of rhyme or reason to it.
