beyond decoupling: rethinking the relationship … decoupling: rethinking the relationship between...

Sociology of Education 2004, Vol. 77 (July): 211–244 211

Beyond Decoupling: Rethinking the Relationship Between the

Institutional Environment and theClassroom

Cynthia E. CoburnUniversity of Pittsburgh

The decoupling argument—that schools respond to pressures from the institutional environ-

ment by decoupling changes in structures from classroom instruction—has been a central fea-

ture of institutional theory since the early 1970s. This study suggests the need to rethink this

argument. Drawing on a study of the relationship between changing ideas about reading

instruction in California from 1983 to 1999 and teachers’ classroom practice, the study pro-

vides evidence that messages about instruction in the environment influence classroom prac-

tice in a process that is framed by teachers’ preexisting beliefs and practices and the nature of

the messages themselves. Implications are drawn for theories of teachers’ autonomy and

methodological approaches to studying macro-micro linkages.

One of the most enduring images frominstitutional studies of public school-ing is that of the classroom decoupled

from changes in the institutional environ-ment. Since the late 1970s, researchers haveargued that schools respond to pressures inthe institutional environment by making sym-bolic changes in structure and procedures butdecouple these changes from classroom prac-tice, buffering the classroom from environ-mental pressures (Deal and Celotti 1980;Driscoll 1995; Firestone 1985; Malen, Ogawa,and Kranz 1990; Meyer and Rowan 1977,1978). This perspective suggests that theinstitutional environment has little influenceon teachers’ classroom work. The image ofthe decoupled classroom is powerful. It pro-vides an explanation for the legion of studiesthat have recounted the failure of schoolreform efforts to reach classroom practice(Cohen 1988; Cuban 1993; Elmore 1996;Sarason 1990). It supports research on theoccupational norm of autonomy in teachers’

work (Goodlad 1984; Little 1990; Lortie1975). And it echoes conventional wisdomthat teachers simply close their classroomdoors to unwanted pressures and priorities.

In spite of this argument’s pervasiveness,few studies have directly examined the rela-tionship between the institutional environ-ment and teachers’ work (Rowan and Miskel1999; Scott 2001). Furthermore, recent theo-retical advances in institutional theory havebegun to raise questions about decoupling,suggesting that pressures from the institu-tional environment penetrate schools andclassrooms in more substantial ways. In thisarticle, I revisit the relationship between theinstitutional environment and teachers’ class-room practice, specifically teachers’ approachto reading instruction. In doing so, I draw ona larger study of the relationship betweenchanging ideas about reading instruction inCalifornia from 1983 to 1999 and teachers’classroom practice, arguing that conceptionsof appropriate instruction in the institutional

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212 Coburn

environment do reach within organizationalstructures to influence classroom practice, attimes in consequential ways. But teachersactively mediate these pressures in a processthat is framed by their preexisting beliefs andpractices, which, in turn, are rooted in pastencounters with institutional pressures. Thisprocess is influenced by the nature of theinstitutional pressure—its congruence withteachers’ preexisting beliefs and practices, itsintensity, its pervasiveness, and its voluntari-ness.

Reading instruction provides a fertile con-text for such research. During the period cov-ered by this study, California experienced atleast three major shifts in conceptions ofappropriate reading instruction in the institu-tional environment. In the mid-1980s, statepolicy moved away from its long emphasis onbasic skills to promote an approach called lit-erature-based instruction. Shortly thereafter,in the early 1990s, a second movement,which I call “early literacy,” moved from dis-trict to district and ultimately into state poli-cy, putting forth an alternative vision ofappropriate instruction. Finally, in 1995, thestate began a period of active policy makingto promote a “balance” between literature-based and basic-skills approaches. The inten-sity and temporal proximity of these changes,as well as the differences in fundamentalassumptions about teaching and learningthat they imply, rendered visible the dynam-ics of macro-micro linkages that otherwisemight have been masked during periods ofenvironmental stability or more subtle, incre-mental change. Thus, reading instruction inCalifornia provides a strategic opportunity toexamine the relationship between the institu-tional environment and teachers’ classroompractice over time.

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

Institutional theory seeks to understand thepersistence of or change in structures, norms,and patterns of social relationships in organi-zations by highlighting the ways in whichthey are linked to organizations’ broadersocial and cultural environment. In this con-ception, similarities in school structures, roles,

and organization are shaped by systems ofcultural rules, shared norms, and taken-for-granted understandings about such things asthe nature of subject matter, students’ andteachers’ roles, and what it means to be aschool (Metz 1989; Meyer and Rowan 1977,1978; Meyer, Scott, and Deal 1981). Mostinstitutional theorists have located the sourceor origin of these common cultural concep-tions about schooling in the institutional envi-ronment outside the school. They haveexplored how norms and cultural concep-tions are constructed and reconstructed overtime as they are carried by individual and col-lective actors and are embedded within poli-cy and governance structures (Scott 2001;Scott, Mendel, and Pollack 1996).

Since institutional theory reemerged as aninfluential branch of organizational theory inthe late 1970s, the decoupling argument hasbeen at its core. In their seminal 1977 essay,Meyer and Rowan argued that schools decou-ple structural or procedural changes in schoolorganization from classroom instruction tobuffer the technical core from scrutiny (seealso Meyer and Rowan 1978) or to allowschools simultaneously to meet multiple andconflicting demands from the multilayeredenvironment (Meyer et al. 1981).1 This theo-retical work has received some empirical sup-port (see, e.g., Deal and Celotti 1980;Firestone 1985; Malen et al. 1990; Malen andOgawa 1988). However, most studies thathave invoked the decoupling argument havenot investigated the relationship betweenclassrooms and the environment directly.Rather, they have focused on the relationshipbetween school administration and classroompractice (see, e.g., Deal and Celotti 1980;Firestone 1985; Gamoran and Dreeben 1985)or on schools’ responses to governancereforms (see, e.g., Malen et al. 1990; Malenand Ogawa 1988), strategies that assumethat the relationship between the classroomand the environment is largely mediated byschool leadership or organizational structures.

Theoretical developments in institutionaltheory have raised questions about the viewof the environment’s influence on organiza-tions’ core technology offered by the decou-pling argument. First, Meyer and Rowan’s(1977, 1978) formulation depends on a

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Beyond Decoupling 213

model of the environment that consists oftwo dichotomous parts: the technical envi-ronment, which puts demands on organiza-tions for efficiency, and the institutional envi-ronment, which puts demands for conformi-ty to institutional rules and taken-for-grantedunderstandings. Meyer and Rowan arguedthat the decoupling strategy allowed educa-tional organizations to be responsive to bothkinds of pressures: schools could respond tothe institutional environment symbolicallywhile classrooms continued to be responsiveto the technical environment (see also Rowanand Miskel 1999). Yet there is evidence thatthe institutional and technical environmentsare not separate but mutually interactive(Goodrick and Salancik 1996; Orru, Biggart,and Hamilton 1991; Powell 1991; Scott 2001;Scott et al. 2000) and that the institutionalenvironment influences core organizationalprocesses (Barley 1986; D’Aunno, Sutton,and Price 1991; Goodrick and Salancik 1996).If the institutional environment influences thetechnical environment and the classroomoccupies the technical core of educationalorganizations, then it seems possible that theinstitutional environment could shape theclassroom in direct and indirect ways. Thispoint raises the possibility that schools aresubject to institutional pressures regardingnot only organizational structure, but con-ceptions of appropriate pedagogy.

Second, theorists outside education haveargued that there is a range of possible orga-nizational responses to pressures from theinstitutional environment that include but gomuch beyond decoupling (Oliver 1991;Powell 1991; Scott 2001). For example,Oliver proposed a typology of possibleresponses, ranging from acquiescence tocompromise, avoidance (including decou-pling), and defiance.

Some studies of public schools have lentpreliminary support to these arguments. Theyhave provided evidence that norms of appro-priate instruction from the institutional envi-ronment do reach within organizational struc-ture to influence teaching and learning andthat teachers do respond to these pressures inmultiple ways. Several studies have highlight-ed the way in which institutionalized concep-tions of the nature of knowledge, learning,

and teaching in the environment tend to holdteachers’ classroom practice in place (Bidwell2001; Cuban 1993; Rowan and Miskel 1999),accounting for the widespread “sameness” ofteachers’ classroom practice. This view sug-gests that teachers have little autonomy inthe face of institutional pressures from theenvironment, challenging research that hashighlighted the occupational norm of auton-omy in teachers’ work (Goodlad 1984; Little1990; Lortie 1975).

Other studies have moved away fromassumptions of a unitary environment, argu-ing that teachers are often faced with multi-ple conceptions of appropriate pedagogy. Inthese situations, teachers respond in differentways: They favor one conception over anoth-er (Hemmings and Metz 1990; McLaughlinand Talbert 2001; Popkewitz, Tabachnick,and Wehlage 1982; Talbert and McLaughlin1994), respond symbolically (Metz 1989), orcombine multiple approaches to createhybrid practices (Cuban 1993; EEPA 1990;Hemmings and Metz 1990; Tyack and Cuban1995). Finally, work by McLaughlin andTalbert (2001) and Talbert and McLaughlin(1994) has suggested that teachers exerciseagency and autonomy in response to institu-tional pressures, constructing and recon-structing institutional pressures in the contextof their professional communities.

However, these studies leave many ques-tions unanswered. First, little is known aboutwhen and under what conditions teachersrespond to pressures from the institutionalenvironment in one way, rather than another.Second, studies have explored the relation-ship between the institutional environmentand the classroom during a single moment intime, and thus little is known about the wayin which teachers respond to changes in theenvironment diachronically.2 Finally, althoughseveral studies have provided evidence thatteachers reconstruct pressures from the envi-ronment as they put them in place in theirclassrooms, little is known about the process-es by which this reconstruction occurs.

To gain insight into these intraorganiza-tional processes associated with teachers’response to institutional pressures, I drew ontheoretical and empirical work from sense-making theory. Sensemaking theorists are

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214 Coburn

concerned with the ways in which the socialstructure and culture of organizations devel-op and change. They have argued that cog-nitive understandings (“the way things are”),norms (“the way things should be”), and rou-tines (“the way things are done”) are sociallyconstructed over time through interpersonalinteraction (Berger and Luckmann 1966;Weick 1995) and in dialogue with messagesfrom the environment (Dutton and Dukerich1991; Porac, Thomas, and Baden-Fuller1989). The approach thus positions teachers’sensemaking as a key mediating link betweenshifting logics in the environment and class-room change.

Sensemaking theorists have suggested thatschool and classroom culture, structure, androutines result, in part, from “micro-momen-tary actions” by teachers and other actors inthe school (Porac et al. 1989). Action is basedon how people notice or select informationfrom the environment, make meaning of thatinformation, and then act on those interpre-tations, developing culture, social structures,and routines over time (Porac et al. 1989;Weick 1995). The meaning of information orevents—in this case, messages about readingthat are associated with institutional pres-sures—is not given, but is inherently prob-lematic; individuals and groups must activelyconstruct understandings and interpretations.They do so by placing new information intotheir existing cognitive frameworks, alsocalled “worldviews” by some theorists (Poracet al. 1989; Vaughan 1996; Weick 1995).Thus, teachers notice new messages and con-struct understandings of them through thelens of their existing practices and worldviews(EEPA 1990; Jennings 1996; Spillane 1999;Spillane and Jennings 1997; Spillane, Reiser,and Reimer 2002).

As teachers enact interpretations in theirclassrooms, they create new practices, pat-terns of interaction, and ways of thinking thatmay become institutionalized over time(Barley 1986; Orlikowski 1996; Vaughan1996). In this way, aspects of messages fromthe environment become embedded in cul-ture and routines of the classroom and arecarried by teachers as part of their world-views. These new worldviews and practices,in turn, become the lens through which

teachers make sense of new messages.Because of the recursive, incremental natureof sensemaking, chronology plays an impor-tant role. Teachers’ responses to pressuresfrom the institutional environment in the pastset the stage for later responses to messages(Vaughan 1996).

This article, then, extends institutional the-ory by reconceptualizing the relationshipbetween macrosocial processes of shiftingideas in the institutional environment andmicrosocial processes of classroom change.This reconceptualization, grounded in anaccount of the process by which teachersactively mediate messages about appropriateinstruction from the environment, suggeststhat the environment influences classroompractice in ways that are shaped by teachers’preexisting worldviews and practices. Thesebeliefs and practices, in turn, are rooted in ateacher’s history of connections with andresponses to past messages from the environ-ment. Thus, this study contributes to theoriesof teachers’ autonomy by exploring howteachers’ connections to the institutionalenvironment create a powerful frameworkwithin which teachers exercise agency. I fur-ther argue that the nature of the messagesthemselves—their congruence, intensity, per-vasiveness, and voluntariness—influences thedegree to which teachers respond to pres-sures in ways that influence classroom prac-tice in consequential ways. Finally, the studycontributes methodologically, highlightingthe importance of historical designs thatallow researchers to understand the dynamicsof macro-micro linkages as they unfold overtime.

METHODS

To study the relationship between changingideas about reading in the environment andteachers’ classroom practice, I used a qualita-tive cross-case design (Yin 1984), since this isa primary strategy for documenting organiza-tional processes as they unfold. I focused onthe experiences of three teachers in twourban elementary schools in California.Limiting the investigation to three teachersallowed for the depth of inquiry necessary to

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capture the subtle and iterative process bywhich the teachers constructed and recon-structed messages from the environment overtime. I focused on two schools because priorresearch and theory suggested that schoolsmay play a key role in mediating teachers’access to messages, a key question for thelarger study of which data for this article werea part. In this article, however, I pay primaryattention to how teachers respond to themessages they encounter from the institu-tional environment; the role of school contextin shaping teachers’ access to messages istreated more fully elsewhere (see Coburn2002).

The study was both historical and crosssectional. A historical focus was crucial to cap-ture the ways in which teachers responded todifferent movements in reading instructionand to document the process by which thisoccurred over time. Toward that end, at themacrolevel, I investigated changes in concep-tions of appropriate reading instruction in theenvironment from 1983 until 1999 by inter-viewing 35 key informants at the state anddistrict levels, analyzing documents, andreviewing secondary sources. At the microlev-el, I developed oral histories of focal teachers’practice throughout this period, supplement-ing them with an analysis of classroom docu-ments and artifacts. In addition to historicaldata, I investigated the relationship betweenthe environment and the classroom in realtime during the 1998–99 school year, relyingprimarily on in-depth interviews (Spradley1979) and sustained observation (Barley1990).

I used purposive sampling to select twourban elementary schools that representedstrategic contrasts along dimensions thatprior research and theory suggested played arole in how schools mediate teachers’ accessto messages from the environment: the orga-nizations’ connections to the environment(D’Aunno et al. 1991; Popkewitz et al. 1982;Scott 2001) and history of practice (Vaughan1996; Weick 1995). Thus, I selected twoschools—Stadele Elementary and BaldwinElementary3—that had contrasting connec-tions to the environment (in different districtsand involved in different reform efforts) andschools with contrasting histories of involve-

ment in reform efforts on reading. SeeAppendix Table A1 for information on theschools’ connections to the reform environ-ment from 1983 to 1999.

I also used purposive sampling to selectfocal teachers. First, I focused the investiga-tion on teachers in the first and secondgrades because reading instruction in theearly grades was the focus of controversy inthe environment during the time covered bythe study. Second, research on organizationalimprinting (Stinchcombe 1965) and politicalgenerations (Mannheim 1952; Whittier 1997)has suggested that the social and historicalconditions at the time of entry into a domainof activity are likely to shape organizationaland individual actions and interpretive frame-works in ways that persist even when thesocial conditions change. Thus, teachers’worldviews and practices are likely to beinfluenced by the nature of their connectionsto particular movements in reading instruc-tion at the time they entered the profession.Ideas about appropriate reading instructionhave shifted markedly over the past 30 yearsas three major movements that have soughtto change the way reading is taught in theearly grades have emerged, spread, and beenchallenged by subsequent approaches (seethe next section for further details). Thus, Isought to choose teachers who entered theprofession during these different movements:prior to 1987, 1987–93, and 1994–99.However, the demographics of teachers inthe schools did not cooperate. There was abimodal distribution of teachers’ entry intothe profession among the early-grades teach-ers whereby most teachers in both schoolsstarted either prior to 1983 or after 1994,with virtually no teachers in the middlegroup. Thus, I focused instead on selectingteachers who started teaching before 1987and after 1994.

To select focal teachers, I conducted semi-structured interviews with nearly all the first-and second-grade teachers in both schools,as well as resource teachers, members of theleadership teams, current and former princi-pals, and select other teachers. At Stadele, Iinterviewed 12 current classroom teachers, 4current resource teachers, 2 retired teachers,and 1 retired principal. At Baldwin, I inter-

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viewed 9 current classroom teachers, 1 cur-rent resource teacher, and 1 retired teacher. Ialso conducted classroom observations with 8teachers at Stadele and 6 at Baldwin to gain abetter understanding of the nature of theirreading instruction. Using information gar-nered from the initial round of interviews andobservations, I selected for in-depth study 3teachers—Sharon and Marisa at Stadele andDeanna at Baldwin—whose approach toreading instruction and responses to contem-porary policy messages represented the gen-eral trends of other teachers who entered theprofession during the same period. SeeAppendix Table A2 for a summary of theearly-grades teachers’ approaches to readinginstruction in both schools.

I interviewed Sharon, Marisa, and Deanna28 times in interviews that lasted from 45minutes to three hours. A significant propor-tion of these interviews was devoted to devel-oping oral histories of teachers’ classroompractice and connections to the environment.There are, of course, limits inherent in the ret-rospective interviewing that is necessary todevelop oral histories; accounts of events maybe smoothed by the passage of time, andless-salient events may be forgotten (Flodenand Huberman 1989; Goodson 1992;Hoffman and Hoffman 1994). I used twostrategies to address these limitations. First, Irooted the oral history interviews in discus-sions of artifacts. I searched school archivesand teachers’ filing cabinets and bookshelvesfor records of prior policy, professional devel-opment, curricular materials, students’ worksamples, and other relevant materials. Theseartifacts, some of which involved teachers’written reflections from when they participat-ed in professional development, became bothan additional source of information fromwhich to triangulate and the basis for furtherinterviews. Second, I interviewed the focalteachers’ close colleagues about events thatthey experienced together. This approachserved both to provide an additional sourceof information about messages about readingthat was highlighted by the focal teachersand to identify additional messages that thefocal teachers may not have remembered.

I also conducted classroom observations,spending 89 hours observing the focal teach-

ers’ classrooms. Finally, to capture the teach-ers’ connections to messages about appropri-ate instruction during the study year, I spentmore than 130 hours at Stadele and 21.5hours at Baldwin observing teachers’ conver-sations during formal meetings and profes-sional development4 in addition to countlesshours of informal conversations during lunch,before and after school, and in the hallways.

To analyze data at the macrolevel, I induc-tively developed a history of changing ideasabout reading in the environment, drawingon interviews with key informants, writingsby key proponents of particular approachesto reading instruction, and evidence fromdocuments to chart the ways in which certainsets of assumptions, practices, and approach-es became bundled at particular moments ofhistory, gained legitimacy, and becameembedded in policy and governance struc-tures. Through this process, I identified thethree major movements in reading.5 I thenrecoded interviews, policy documents, andsecondary sources for the presence andabsence of the assumptions, practices, andapproaches that were associated with themovements to understand the ways in whichmovements moved in and through the envi-ronment and into schools over time.

To analyze macro-micro connections andteachers’ microlevel responses, I usedNUD.IST qualitative data analysis software toanalyze documents, observations at meetingsand in classrooms, and interviews. First, I ana-lyzed each focal teacher’s connections withand responses to institutional pressures thatwere related to reading instruction chrono-logically, creating holistic portraits of theteachers as they developed and changed theirreading program over time (see Coburn2001b; Coburn and Kim 2003). In the courseof this analysis, several broad patternsemerged. In particular, it appeared that thenature of the teacher’s interaction with theinstitutional message influenced her responsein ways that were conditioned by her historyof interaction with messages from the envi-ronment. To investigate these patterns fur-ther, I reanalyzed the data, coding each indi-vidual encounter that the three teachers hadwith institutional pressures and the resultingchange in practice. It is this more focused and

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specific analysis that I present in this article. To facilitate the analysis, I identified what I

called key “messages” about reading instruc-tion from the environment. The messagesincluded specific statements or exhortationsabout how teachers should or must teachreading that were carried by such things asprofessional development, new classroommaterials, policy documents, statements fromprincipals or district officials about what theyexpected to see in reading instruction, orreports in the mass media on the “reading cri-sis.” To identify messages, I analyzed docu-ments (e.g., professional development mate-rials, curriculum materials, policy docu-ments), supplementing this strategy withdata from interviews with the focal teachers,their colleagues, principals, and district- andstate-level informants. Thus, the identificationof relevant messages was not contingent onthe focal teachers’ recollections. Among thethree focal teachers, I identified 223 encoun-ters with messages from the environment.While each teacher encountered a similarnumber of messages (79 for Sharon, 70 forMarisa, and 74 for Deanna),6 they were notnecessarily the same messages, even forteachers in the same school.7 (See AppendixTable A3 for further information about thesources of the messages.)

Once I identified the messages, I createdlongitudinal records of the teachers’ interac-tion with a given message over time, whichbecame the key analytic unit for the study. Tocapture microlevel changes in classroompractice, I coded a teacher’s response to themessage, using a coding scheme that wasrooted in earlier theoretical work in institu-tional theory in nonschool settings and elab-orating the codes through an iterativeprocess of coding and recoding (Miles andHuberman 1994). In this way, I used a strate-gy of theory elaboration whereby existingtheory is challenged, refined, amended, andfurther specified through an iterative dialoguewith data from a contrasting case (Vaughan1992).

To capture macro-micro links, I coded thefactors that characterized the nature of ateacher’s interaction with a message from theinstitutional environment. In the absence oftheory in this domain, I used a more emer-

gent process to identify and code these fac-tors. As I mentioned earlier, during the firstround of data analysis, several factorsemerged as potentially influential. I used iter-ative coding to define factors more sharplyand to interrogate these patterns further. Thatis, I began with codes that described, with lit-tle interpretation, the factors that character-ized the interaction between teachers andinstitutional pressures. By grouping cate-gories and using systematic comparison(Strauss and Corbin 1990), I moved to pro-gressively higher levels of abstraction until Iended up with the following codes: degree ofcongruence, intensity, pervasiveness, and vol-untariness. I then coded each response high,medium, or low along each dimension (seeTable 1 for the definitions used in the cod-ing).

Codes for these factors did not dependsolely on the message or the teacher, but onthe interaction between the two. For exam-ple, degree of congruence refers to teachers’perceptions of the extent to which the con-tent of messages corresponded with theirpreexisting worldviews or practices. Since thethree teachers had contrasting beliefs andpractices, different teachers could and didhave different perceptions of the congruenceof the same message. In another example,the degree of pervasiveness of a message—the degree to which the teachers were con-nected to a message in multiple, overlapping,or interlocking ways—could also vary by theteachers. How a message was coded depend-ed on an individual teacher’s history of inter-action with similar messages. The first time ateacher encountered a message, the messagewas coded with a low degree of pervasive-ness, but as that teacher encountered themessage with greater frequency, the degreeof pervasiveness increased. Thus, because theteachers were connected to messages in dif-ferent ways, different teachers experiencedthe same message as being more pervasive orless pervasive.

Finally, I used descriptive statistics to ana-lyze the relationships between these factorsand the teachers’ responses. Because nearlyall patterns of response to factors were similarfor all three teachers, I report findings acrossthe teachers, noting and explaining the one

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Tab

le 1

. D

efin

itio

ns

Use

d i

n C

od

ing

th

e Fa

cto

rs t

hat

In

flu

ence

Tea

cher

s’ R

esp

on

ses

Fact

or

Def

initi

on

Deg

ree

of C

ongr

uenc

eTe

ache

rs’ p

erce

ptio

n of

the

exte

nt to

whi

ch th

e co

nten

t of a

mes

sage

abo

ut r

eadi

ng c

orre

spon

ds to

thei

r pr

eexi

stin

g w

orld

view

s or

pr

actic

es.

Low

Teac

hers

cha

ract

eriz

ed m

essa

ges

as in

appr

opria

te, i

ncon

ceiv

able

, pot

entia

lly in

effe

ctiv

e, o

r no

t fitt

ing

with

wha

t the

y w

ere

alre

ady

doin

g.

Med

ium

Teac

hers

cha

ract

eriz

ed m

essa

ges

as u

nfam

iliar

but

pla

usib

le, a

ppro

pria

te in

som

e re

spec

ts b

ut n

ot o

ther

s, fi

ttin

g w

ith s

ome

aspe

cts

of

clas

sroo

m in

stru

ctio

n bu

t not

oth

ers.

Hig

hTe

ache

rs c

hara

cter

ized

mes

sage

s as

som

ethi

ng t

hey

wer

e al

read

y do

ing,

as

fittin

g w

ith p

reex

istin

g pr

actic

es, o

r as

con

siste

nt w

ith t

heir

belie

fs a

bout

app

ropr

iate

rea

ding

inst

ruct

ion.

Deg

ree

of In

tens

ityTh

e de

gree

to w

hich

teac

hers

had

opp

ortu

nitie

s to

eng

age

with

a m

essa

ge in

sus

tain

ed, i

tera

tive

way

s.

Low

Brie

f or

fleet

ing

inte

ract

ions

, inc

ludi

ng m

entio

ns in

facu

lty m

eetin

gs o

r pr

ofes

siona

l dev

elop

men

t, ca

sual

con

vers

atio

ns w

ith c

olle

ague

s,qu

ick

look

thro

ugh

docu

men

ts o

r m

ater

ials,

or

part

icip

atin

g in

a s

ingl

e w

orks

hop

or e

vent

.

Med

ium

Inte

ract

ion

was

sus

tain

ed o

ver

a br

ief p

erio

d or

was

inte

rmitt

ent o

ver

a lo

ng p

erio

d, in

clud

ing

prof

essio

nal d

evel

opm

ent e

xper

ienc

es

that

wer

e in

dep

th b

ut s

hort

term

, cur

ricul

ar m

ater

ials

that

teac

hers

use

d fo

r sh

ort p

erio

ds in

cla

ss, p

ress

ures

for

stan

dard

ized

test

s re

curr

ing

year

afte

r ye

ar b

ut (

in th

ese

scho

ols)

con

fined

to a

sin

gle

seas

on o

f the

yea

r, an

d in

tera

ctio

n w

ith a

key

car

rier

on a

n oc

ca-

siona

l bas

is.

Hig

hIn

tera

ctio

n w

as s

usta

ined

ove

r a

long

per

iod,

incl

udin

g da

ily c

onta

ct w

ith c

urric

ular

mat

eria

ls, in

tens

ive

prof

essio

nal d

evel

opm

ent t

hat

stre

tche

d ov

er a

t le

ast

a ye

ar a

nd in

volv

ed o

ppor

tuni

ties

for

dial

ogue

bet

wee

n id

eas

and

expe

rimen

tatio

n in

the

cla

ssro

om, i

nter

actio

nw

ith a

key

car

rier o

n a

daily

bas

is, o

r inc

orpo

ratio

n of

mes

sage

s fro

m p

rofe

ssio

nal d

evel

opm

ent i

nto

ongo

ing

dial

ogue

or p

lann

ing

with

colle

ague

s in

the

wor

kpla

ce.

Deg

ree

of P

erva

siven

ess

The

degr

ee to

whi

ch te

ache

rs e

ncou

nter

ed a

par

ticul

ar s

et o

f pre

ssur

es o

r m

essa

ges

in m

ultip

le, i

nter

lock

ing,

and

/or

over

lapp

ing

way

s.

Low

At th

e tim

e a

teac

her

enco

unte

red

the

mes

sage

, it w

as th

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02. Coburn 6/9/04 2:20 PM Page 218


factor in which one teacher’s pattern ofresponse differed from the others’. Theaggregation of responses more clearly showsthe regularities in the environmental influ-ences on the microprocesses of teacherchange.

READING INSTRUCTION IN CALIFORNIA

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Californiaschools were the site of tremendous reformenergy that was focused on changing howchildren were taught to read. Three succes-sive movements that sought to redefine whatconstitutes “good” reading instructiongained prominence in the profession, becamepart of state policy, and were carried intoschools by providers of professional develop-ment and instructional materials. These shiftscan be seen as a series of attempts to bringabout institutional change. Deeply institu-tionalized approaches to teaching readingwere challenged by a series of approachesthat gained legitimacy, spread, and becameinstitutionalized to various degrees, only tobe challenged by the emergence of a subse-quent approach.

At the start of the period in this study, anapproach to early reading instruction, knownas the basic-skills approach, was deeply insti-tutionalized throughout the country(Goodlad 1984; Pearson 2000). After emerg-ing from conflict during the 1960s, thisapproach was carried by textbooks, assess-ment systems, and preservice education forthe next two decades. By the early 1980s, atthe start of this study, large-scale studies ofclassroom practice documented the wide-spread use of this approach (Cuban 1984;Goodlad 1984). The basic-skills approach hadattained a taken-for-granted status as the nat-ural or commonsense way to teach reading(Pearson 2000).

The first major shift began in the early1980s, when a movement within universities,the teaching profession, and the policy com-munity began to challenge the basic-skillsapproach. Advocates of what would beknown as literature-based instruction put

forth a vision of reading instruction that wasrooted in epistemological assumptions aboutthe nature of teaching and learning that werefundamentally different from conventionalwisdom. The movement for literature-basedinstruction gained a particularly high profilein California in 1987, when it becameembedded in the state-level English-LanguageArts Framework (California State Departmentof Education 1987), which, in turn, waslinked to the state’s adoption of textbooks,professional development contracts, andstandardized testing (Brandt 1989). Shortlyafter literature-based approaches began togain prominence in the professional and pol-icy world, a second movement—what I call“early literacy”—quietly began to put forthyet another vision of early reading instruction.Rooted in the pedagogical principles of anearly intervention program called ReadingRecovery (Askew et al. 1998; Breneman andParker 1991), this set of approaches spreadfrom district to district throughout the state,ultimately making its way into state policyand spawning a host of professional develop-ment providers who were focused on apply-ing Reading Recovery principles to early-grades classrooms.

But in the mid-1990s, questions aboutwhat constituted good reading instructionexploded onto the public stage after therelease of test scores that placed Californialast in the country in reading, tied withLouisiana and Guam (Carlos and Kirst 1997).In what was dubbed “the reading wars” bythe popular press, controversy raged aboutthe root causes of low test scores. Criticsbegan to call for the end of literature-basedapproaches and a return to “basic skills.” In1995, the state responded by publishing thereport of a task force that called for a “bal-ance” between literature-based approachesand the basic-skills approach (California StateDepartment of Education 1996), launchingthe third policy shift in two decades. For thenext several years, different groups of actorsput forth different constructions of just whata “balanced approach” is or should be, con-structions that were rooted in divergentassumptions about teaching and learning.Over time, a coalition of state actors andresearchers was able to define and embed in

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220 Coburn

state policy a conception of “balanced”instruction. Throughout the second half ofthe 1990s, the state legislature passed 12 billsallocating nearly half a billion dollars towardreform efforts that promoted what I call the“balanced basic-skills” approach (CaliforniaState Board of Education 1999). With this leg-islation, the state systematically undid link-ages between state policy and literature-based and early-literacy approaches, puttingin their place policies that defined good read-ing instruction in terms of this new construc-tion of balance.

These large-scale movements in readinginstruction penetrated classrooms to variousdegrees. Teachers in the study were bom-barded with multiple, changing, and at timesconflicting messages about what constitutedgood reading instruction through regulativemeans, as ideas about what constitutedappropriate reading instruction were mandat-ed through rule setting, monitoring, or sanc-tioning; through normative means, as teach-ers were pressured (but not required) toadopt certain approaches to maintain legiti-macy; and through cognitive means, whenreading beliefs and practices attained taken-for-granted status as the natural or common-sense way to do things (Scott 2001).Messages about reading were thus “carried”into classrooms by policy at all levels of thesystem, through reform programs, assess-ment systems, textbooks and other materials,professional development, communityexpectations, and individual and collectiveactors. Hence, formal policy (at the state, dis-trict, and school levels) was only one of manymechanisms by which messages about read-ing came into schools. And the messages var-ied greatly in the degree of latitude thatteachers were afforded in responding.

THE INSTITUTIONAL ENVIRONMENT AND THE CLASSROOM

In sharp contrast to the image of the class-room decoupled from the institutional envi-ronment, shifting ideas about what constitut-ed “good” reading instruction in the environ-

ment did reach within organizational struc-tures to influence the technical core—class-room routines, materials, organization, andteachers’ worldviews—at times in consequen-tial ways.8 Moreover, the process by whichthey did so differed substantially from themodel of institutional demands and actors’responses posited by most institutional stud-ies (Scott 2001). Rather, pressures from theenvironment became occasions for socialnegotiation and interpretation in an iterativeprocess that unfolded over time.

As suggested by sensemaking theorists,the teachers mediated pressures from theenvironment, constructing responses bydrawing on their preexisting worldviews andpractices. That is, the teachers used theirbeliefs about the nature of reading instructionand how students learn, as well as taken-for-granted understandings in their workgroupsor schools, to select, interpret, and enact newapproaches in the context of their existingreading program in ways that were shaped bythe social and structural conditions in theirschool.9 Yet there was considerable variationin the teachers’ responses to institutionalpressures. The teachers responded to somenew messages in ways that reified their pre-existing worldviews and practices. But othermessages caused them to question theirassumptions or reconfigure the organizationof instruction leading to incremental change.When they did so, these new worldviews andpractices became the lens through which theteachers engaged in making sense of subse-quent messages. As Vaughan (1996) suggest-ed, chronology played an important role:How the teachers responded to ideas aboutreading instruction that they encounteredearlier in the study influenced how theyresponded to the messages they encounteredlater.

Each teacher’s history was shaped by thisprocess. Sharon started teaching in 1964after she attended preservice training insouthern California. She entered teaching atthe beginning of the era of basic skills, anapproach that was deeply institutionalized inthe environment for the next 20 years of hercareer and provided a powerful frame forhow she understood subsequent approaches.When Sharon encountered literature-based

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instruction in the mid-1980s—an approachthat contrasted sharply with her preexistingbeliefs and practices—she filtered it through abasic-skills lens, often enacting messages inher classroom in ways that transformed themso they reinforced or only slightly altered herapproach. Sharon initially had a similarresponse to messages about early literacy inthe mid-1990s, although over time she con-structed responses in ways that altered herteaching practices more substantially. Finally,when she encountered messages that wereassociated with balanced basic skills, shefound them highly congruent with her funda-mental (basic-skills) assumptions and drewthe new approaches and ideas into the centerof her reading program.

Marisa entered teaching in 1994 on anemergency credential as literature-basedinstruction waned and a period of great con-troversy in reading instruction was beginningto unfold. She attended classes throughouther first year of teaching and earned her cre-dential at the end of her first year. Her cre-dential program emphasized literature-basedinstruction, and Marisa initially drew heavilyon this set of approaches when she puttogether her reading program. She subse-quently participated in professional develop-ment across the spectrum of approaches thatwere available during this turbulent period.Unlike Sharon, she eventually embraced most(but not all) aspects of the early-literacyapproaches she encountered, slowly shiftingfrom a literature-based classroom to one thatwas a hybrid of literature-based and early-lit-erature approaches. However, she rejectedmost (but not all) messages that were associ-ated with balanced basic skills as unsuitable.

Finally, Deanna began teaching in the late1960s and early 1970s on the East Coast. Sheentered teaching right out of school, whereshe was trained in a basic-skills approach.During her first years of teaching, Deannamade a brief foray into individualized instruc-tion as part of a school-university partnership.She subsequently took off 19 years to raiseher children, relocated to California, andreturned to teaching in 1990 during theheight of the literature-based approaches toreading instruction. Like Sharon, Deannafound literature-based approaches difficult to

understand and implement. Although sheattempted to integrate these approaches inher classroom, she tended to return incre-mentally to basic-skills approaches over time.However, Deanna had a different response tomessages about early literacy that she beganto encounter in the mid-1990s. As sheengaged with these ideas, she slowly shiftedher approach to teaching reading in funda-mental ways. Thus, when she encounteredsubsequent messages about literature-basedapproaches in the late 1990s, she interpretedand enacted them in the context of herencounter with early literacy, responding inmore favorable ways. Finally, Deanna had asomewhat mixed response to the fewencounters she had with balanced basic skills,bringing only small aspects of the approachinto her classroom. Figure 1 plots the teach-ers’ career trajectories against key changes inthe reading environment.

On the surface, each teacher’s experienceseems idiosyncratic. But while each teachertraversed a unique pathway as she engagedwith pressures related to changes in the insti-tutional environment, there are clear patternsof response across the three. More specifical-ly, the teachers tended to respond to encoun-ters with messages in similar ways when thecircumstances of their interaction with mes-sages were similar. To illustrate this point, Ifirst develop a typology of teachers’ respons-es to messages, illustrating the range of pos-sibilities, which include but go beyonddecoupling. Next, to explain variation inresponses, I highlight the way in which thenature of a teacher’s interaction with the mes-sage—its congruence, intensity, pervasive-ness, and voluntariness (e.g., the degree towhich messages were accompanied by nor-mative or regulative pressure)—influencedhow the teachers responded to changingideas about reading instruction in the envi-ronment.

Responses to InstitutionalPressures

When confronted with shifting institutionalpressures, Sharon, Marisa, and Deannaemployed a full range of responses; indeed,decoupling accounted for only a small per-

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222 Coburn

Figu

re 1. H

istory o

f Read

ing

Instru

ction

in C

aliforn

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Teachers’ En

try Dates in

to th

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Note: This figure m

aps teachers’ entry against key developments in the history of reading instruction in C

alifornia. Shifting movem

ents in the environment are

indicated at the bottom of the tim

eline. For a detailed discussion, see Coburn (2001b).

02. Coburn 6/9/04 2:20 PM Page 222


centage of their responses. Here, I present atypology of teachers’ responses that capturesthis range, drawing on Oliver’s (1991) typol-ogy of organizational responses to institution-al pressures but modifying it to address twolimitations that were highlighted by myresearch. First, the language Oliver used forher categories—words, such as defiance,acquiescence, and manipulation—implies atop-down unidirectionality of institutionalpressures and an oppositional attitude towardthese pressures by people in organizations.However, the relationship between institu-tional pressures and classrooms was muchmore interactive and nonlinear than that por-trayed by Oliver. The teachers were connect-ed to messages from the environment via aweb of interactive linkages through whichmessages about reading moved in, out, andaround schools through multiple routes.Messages pressed in, but teachers alsoreached out for materials and professionaldevelopment. Furthermore, although theteachers adopted an oppositional stancetoward some institutional pressures, it was byno means the sole or even predominantstance. Second, Oliver hypothesized only onepossible way in which organizations respondto institutional pressures that bring rules ornorms into the organization in a substantive

fashion, a category she called “acquies-cence.” In this study, however, the teachersincorporated messages in their classrooms inways that varied substantially in degree, vari-ation that would be lost in Oliver’s typology.

Next, I describe five ways in which theteachers responded to institutional pressuresrelated to reading instruction during the peri-od covered by the study: rejection, decou-pling/symbolic response, parallel structures,assimilation, and accommodation.

Rejection Given the extensive reform activi-ty related to reading instruction from 1983 to1999, the teachers were connected with mul-tiple messages about appropriate instruction.Once they constructed an understanding ofwhat a given message was about, they eitherengaged with the idea or approach or dis-missed it. In this way, the teachers selectedsome messages in and selected others out.They tended to reject approaches that werenot congruent with their beliefs about read-ing instruction or that did not “fit” with theirpreexisting approach to reading instruction.For example, after participating in profession-al development on early-literacy approachesin her second year of teaching, Marisa reject-ed the suggestion that she should incorporateongoing assessments into her classroom,

Figure 2. Teachers’ Responses to Messages About Reading: 1983–99Note: N = 223. The analysis includes messages that three teachers encountered over time. The messagesvaried by teacher because of different entry points and different contextual conditions. However, eachteacher encountered a substantial number of messages. N for Sharon = 79, n for Marisa = 70, and n forDeanna = 74.

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224 Coburn

including an assessment called a runningrecord. For Marisa, running records and otherone-on-one assessment tools were cumber-some and did not fit into her ongoing rou-tines for instruction. Furthermore, they didnot fit with her sense of what was importantin reading instruction. She explained:“Assessment is weird. It’s like, do I really needto know all those little things about this child?How valuable is this?” As Figure 2 shows,rejection was a relatively widespreadresponse, accounting for 27 percent of the223 responses to messages.

Decoupling/Symbolic Response At times,the teachers responded to pressures from theenvironment with symbolic responses thatwere decoupled from the instructional core,as suggested by early institutional theorists.For example, in response to pressure from thedistrict to use a district rubric to score assess-ments of performance, Deanna and the otherteachers at Baldwin posted the rubrics ontheir classroom walls but did not use them intheir assessment practice. Sharon and someof her colleagues at Stadele had a similarresponse to word walls, an instructionalapproach that engages students in interactiveword play that is intended to help them learnhigh-frequency words and letter-sound corre-spondence (Cunningham 1995). Sharon putlists of words up on the wall, but neitherreferred to them in class nor used them ininstructional activities with her students. Inthese instances, the teachers responded topressures symbolically, rather than in waysthat influenced classroom routines, organiza-tion, use of materials, or approaches toinstruction. It is important to note that theyresponded to institutional pressures symboli-cally much less frequently than is suggestedby the decoupling argument. Rather thanbeing the sole or even predominant response,only 7 percent of teachers’ responses involveddecoupling (see Figure 2).

Parallel Structures As anticipated by Oliver’s(1991) framework, when faced with multipleand conflicting priorities, the teachersresponded by creating classroom structuresand approaches that balanced the differentpriorities. Often, they did so by creating two

or more parallel approaches to readinginstruction that corresponded with differentpressures or priorities. For example, duringthe 1998–99 school year, the teachers atBaldwin were faced with pressures from thedistrict to follow the new district-adoptedreading textbook and pressure from the prin-cipal to implement a new structure for read-ing groups called guided reading instruction.These two pressures were incongruent inmany ways. For instance, guided readingemphasized the use of texts that were at thestudents’ instructional reading level, while thetextbook series included stories that tendedto be at a reading level that was too high formost of the students in the school. The teach-ers at Baldwin balanced these twin pressuresby creating two parallel structures for readinginstruction using two instructional approach-es that were premised on different assump-tions about teaching and learning. Deannataught using the textbook for whole-classinstruction during one part of the day to besure to “expose all children to the curriculumand what they need to know” and did guid-ed reading groups at another point in the dayto provide opportunities for the students tolearn “at their level.” Eight percent of the 223teachers’ responses involved creating parallelstructures to balance competing pressuresand priorities.

Assimilation Because the teachers drew ontheir tacit worldviews and assumptions toconstruct their understanding of the contentand implications of messages, they ofteninterpreted and enacted messages in waysthat transformed them to fit their underlyingassumptions. In the language of cognitivelearning theorists, they assimilated newknowledge or experiences into existingschemas or ways of doing things (Fosnot1996; Piaget 1978).10 In this way, the teach-ers often came to understand messages inways that differed, at times substantially, fromwhat was intended by the policy maker, pub-lisher, or reformer.11 This phenomenon hap-pened as they constructed what Spillane andCallahan (2000) called “form-focused”understandings of messages. That is, theteachers understood messages in terms ofchanges in instructional routines, materials,

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or classroom organization, rather than interms of the underlying pedagogical or epis-temological assumptions of the approach.

For example, in the late 1980s, during theera of literature-based instruction, Stadelebecame involved in a reform effort thatsought to promote thematic approaches toliteracy instruction. This approach, whichinvolved organizing instruction aroundthemes that integrated different subject mat-ter into literacy, was rooted in a vision oflearning as an active process of making con-nections across subject matter in a holisticmanner. It contrasted sharply with Sharon’sassumptions about learning. At this point inher career, Sharon’s reading instruction con-tinued to be heavily influenced by the basic-skills approach in which she was trained.Sharon embraced behaviorist assumptionsabout learning that were associated with theapproach, viewing learning to read as mas-tering a sequence of skills that moved fromless to more complex. She organized readinginstruction to teach discrete reading skills in aparticular sequence in reading groups andthen to have the children practice these skillsusing worksheets in learning centers (an orga-nizational structure that she adopted duringher connection with the movement towardindividualized instruction in the early 1970s).

Although thematic instruction waspremised on sharply different assumptionsabout teaching and learning, Sharon and theother teachers at Stadele embraced theapproach. After they participated in school-wide professional development, Sharon andher grade-level colleagues decided to reorga-nize the work they asked their students to doin learning centers. Rather than have studentswork on a series of unrelated activities,Sharon purchased or created worksheets thatwere related to a theme, often linked to sto-ries the students were working on in readinggroups. In implementing thematic approach-es to literacy in this way, Sharon did not shifther fundamental ideas about teaching andlearning away from an emphasis on skills insequence, as intended by the reform. Instead,she constructed an understanding of themat-ic teaching as a way to make her preexistingapproach—skills-based worksheets—“moreinteresting.” Thus, while Sharon used differ-

ent materials in her learning centers (thoselinked to stories or themes) that enabled herto make greater connections between activi-ties in the learning centers and readinggroups, the learning centers continued tofunction as an opportunity for the students topractice the skills that Sharon introduced inreading groups using worksheets thatemphasized the mastery of discrete skills.

Thus, Sharon and the other teachersbrought new approaches and materials intotheir classrooms in ways that altered the tech-nical core, especially classroom routines andmaterials. But they did so by assimilating theapproach into their preexisting framework forreading instruction, rather than by challeng-ing the framework itself. Echoing findingsfrom the broader literature on school reformand teacher change (EEPA 1990; Jennings1996; Spillane 1999; Spillane and Jennings1997; Spillane and Zeuli 1999), assimilationwas widespread in my study. Of the 223teachers’ responses, 48 percent resulted inassimilation (see Figure 2).

Accommodation In other cases, the teachersengaged with pressures from the environ-ment in ways that caused them to restructuretheir fundamental assumptions about thenature of reading instruction or students’learning, or in the language of cognitivelearning theorists, they transformed their pre-existing knowledge structures to accommo-date new information or experiences (Fosnot1996; Piaget 1978; Smith 2000). They oftendid so as they constructed understandingsthat were “function focused” (Spillane andCallahan 2000). That is, rather than focus onsurface-level features of the message, theteachers focused on underlying epistemolog-ical or pedagogical assumptions.

For example, in the mid-1990s, Deannabegan to participate in professional develop-ment, at school and through a local universi-ty, that was related to early-literacy approach-es to reading instruction. This professionaldevelopment offered a model of readinginstruction that differed significantly fromDeanna’s underlying beliefs about how chil-dren learn to decode, which remained firmlysituated in the basic-skills approach in whichshe had been trained. Deanna taught decod-

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ing by using a structured phonics programthat taught skills in a systematic and largelydecontextualized way. She also worked ondecoding when she listened to children readin round-robin reading groups, taking care tocorrect them when they made mistakes.

The early-literacy approach to decodingdiffered significantly from Deanna’s approachalong a number of dimensions. First, it putforth a model of decoding that emphasizedusing multiple sources of information (orcuing systems) to decode, rather than a soleor predominant focus on phonics. Second, itemphasized teaching decoding in the contextof stories, rather than teaching it separately.Finally, it emphasized a facilitative approachto teaching. Rather than correcting childrenwhen they made mistakes, the professionaldevelopment encouraged teachers to askchildren questions about their reading (Doesthis look right? Does it sound right? Does thatmake sense?), so the children would developthe ability to be self-monitoring and self-cor-recting readers (Fountas and Pinnell 1996;Neal et al. 1997).

After participating in the professionaldevelopment and experimenting with this setof messages in her classroom, Deanna cameto reconstruct her assumptions about thereading process and shifted the way shetaught decoding. She began to see decodingas a complex process involving more than justattention to phonics, prompting children topay attention to semantic and syntactic cuesin addition to phonemic information. Shebegan to do most (although not all) of herdecoding instruction in the context of stories.And, perhaps more significant, she reportedthat she learned a more facilitative way tointeract with students while they were read-ing stories. Rather than interrupt the studentswhen they made mistakes and correct them,she began to ask questions to help the chil-dren figure out words on their own. ForDeanna, this change represented a funda-mental shift in pedagogical strategy from atransmission model, in which teachers tellstudents the answer, to a teacher-as-coachmodel, in which teachers ask students ques-tions to help them develop strategies ofmetacognition and self-correction.

Thus, Deanna responded to this set of

messages in ways that went much beyondthe introduction of new materials or organi-zational structures. Instead, the messageschallenged and restructured the underlyingassumptions about teaching and learningthat guided the way she taught decoding. AsFigure 2 indicates, only 9 percent of theteachers’ responses involved accommoda-tion.

Hence, decoupling was only one of severaloptions, and not the most prevalent one.Many of the responses—parallel structures,assimilation, and accommodation—broughtpressures from the institutional environmentinto the technical core in ways that influ-enced the teachers’ worldviews and practices,albeit at various levels of depth. The teachersoften constructed understandings and enact-ed messages in ways that combined the newwith the old, leading to a pattern of incre-mental change. But at times, they respondedby rethinking assumptions and reorganizingroutines in more fundamental ways.

Factors that Influence Teachers’Responses

How the teachers responded to pressuresfrom the environment was influenced, inpart, by the nature of their interaction withmessages from the environment. Here, I iden-tify four dimensions along which teachers’interactions with messages from the environ-ment varied—degree of congruence, degreeof intensity, degree of pervasiveness, anddegree of voluntariness (normative versusregulative pressures)—and argue that thesedimensions shaped how and when the teach-ers responded to messages in one way versusanother. With only one exception, when thenature of their interaction with messages wassimilar, the teachers responded in similarways.

Degree of Congruence The nature of theteachers’ response to messages from the insti-tutional environment was influenced by thecontent of the messages. In particular, theteachers’ perceptions of the degree of con-gruence between the institutional pressuresand their preexisting beliefs and practiceswere crucial. Here, the teachers’ generations

02. Coburn 6/9/04 2:20 PM Page 226


played a role. All three teachers had beliefsand practices that were substantially influ-enced by the sets of beliefs that were domi-nant at the time they entered the profession.Thus, they came to messages associated withreform movements in the 1990s with sub-stantively different preexisting beliefs andpractices.

Congruence was important along at leastthree dimensions. First, the teachers weremore likely to engage with new ideas orapproaches, depending on the degree towhich they could find ways to connect themwith their preexisting beliefs. At times, themessages seemed so distant that they couldfind no ways to connect with them at all. Inthese cases, the teachers rejected the mes-sages as inconceivable or incomprehensible,reporting that they just “didn’t make sense.”For example, given Sharon’s strong belief inreading groups as the essential organizationalstructure for teaching reading, suggestionsthat she use an approach to reading thatinvolved one-on-one conferencing with stu-dents seemed inconceivable and thus had alow degree of congruence. Second, congru-ence was important in normative terms. Theteachers were more likely to respond to pres-sures to teach a particular way if they saw theapproach as linked with their sense of valuedends for reading instruction. They had multi-dimensional goals for reading instruction,ranging from student achievement to motiva-tion, social justice, and relevance to the chil-dren’s lives. Third, congruence was importantin terms of the degree of “fit” with the teach-ers’ preexisting classroom practice. All threeteachers had well-developed and complicat-ed structures for teaching reading—ways oforganizing time, children, and materials andtypes of activity structures they used. As isillustrated by Marisa’s encounter with assess-ment tools discussed earlier, the teachersrejected new approaches when they couldnot find ways to work them into their estab-lished programs.

In this way, the teachers’ responses to insti-tutional pressures were both constrained andenabled by their worldviews and practices.Beliefs and practices constrained theirresponses by bounding the range of compre-hensibility and appropriateness, often circum-

scribing the domain within which the teach-ers experimented and adapted new messagesfrom the environment. But they also enabledthe teachers’ responses by providing whatZucker (1991) referred to as conceptual “han-dles” on which teachers could connect newideas and approaches with what they alreadyunderstood and did.

Of the 223 responses with messages fromthe environment that the teachers encoun-tered in this study, 42 percent were to mes-sages with a low degree of congruence, 30percent were to messages with a mediumlevel of congruence, and 27 percent were tomessages with a high degree of congruence.Of the three teachers, Sharon experienced amuch higher percentage of messages at a lowdegree of congruence (53 percent) than didDeanna (31 percent) or Marisa (41 percent).Yet all three teachers had a similar pattern ofresponses to messages at greater or lessercongruence. The greater the congruence ofinstitutional pressures with the teachers’ pre-existing beliefs and practices, the more likelythe teachers were to incorporate newapproaches and influences into their class-room practice in some manner. Thus, as canbe seen in Table 2, just over 90 percent of theteachers’ responses to messages with a highdegree of congruence resulted in the incor-poration of the messages into the classroomin some fashion (parallel structures, assimila-tion, or accommodation). In contrast, therate of incorporation dropped to 82 percentat a medium level of congruence and to 38percent when congruence was low.

However, although the teachers weremore likely to respond to messages with ahigher degree of congruence by makingchanges in their practice, they were also morelikely to incorporate the messages by assimi-lating them into their preexisting practice,rather than by making more substantiveadjustments.12 For example, when the teach-ers incorporated messages at a high degree ofcongruence, they responded in 82 percent ofthe cases with assimilation. Yet they assimilat-ed only 53 percent of the medium-level mes-sages and 23 percent of the low-level mes-sages. In contrast, although the teachers wereless likely to respond to messages with a lowor medium degree of congruence by incor-

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porating them into their classrooms, whenthey did, they were more likely to do so inways that pushed their thinking or causedthem to reorganize their practice in moresubstantial ways. Just over 16 percent of thetimes that the teachers incorporated mes-sages at a medium level of congruence andnearly 9 percent at a low level of congruence,they did so in ways that led to accommoda-tion. Messages with a high level of congru-ence led to accommodation in only just over3 percent of the teachers’ responses.

It is important to note that the teachers’worldviews and practices—and thus their per-ceptions of the degree to which messageswere congruent—evolved throughout theyears covered by the study. The teachers’connection with and responses to messagesfrom the environment earlier in the studyshaped the worldviews and practices thatthey subsequently used to make sense of themessages they encountered later. For this rea-son, the teachers sometimes made differentdeterminations of the congruence of thesame message at different points in theircareers. For example, when Marisa participat-ed in professional development that promot-ed the principles of an early-literacy approach

to reading instruction in her first year ofteaching, she found many of the approachesinconceivable. Marisa was trained in a cre-dential program that emphasized literature-based approaches to teaching reading,including an emphasis on grouping childrenheterogeneously (often as a whole class),using children’s literature for instruction, anddeemphasizing instruction in skills. The early-literacy professional development, in con-trast, emphasized grouping children homo-geneously for reading instruction, using sto-ries that were at children’s instructional read-ing levels (which, when the reading level waslow, tended to be predictable and contrived),and emphasizing skills and strategies, albeit inthe context of the stories. At the time, Marisareacted negatively to the professional devel-opment. She recalled, “I just couldn’t relateto how the kids [in the promotional videos]were managing with that program comparedto what my kids would have done.”Determining that this program had a lowdegree of congruence, Marisa rejected allaspects of it out of hand.

Over the next few years, however, Marisacame into contact with smaller aspects of theapproach and integrated them into her class-

Table 2. Teachers’ Response to Institutional Messages About Reading, by Degreeof Congruence, Intensity, Pervasiveness, and Voluntariness (percentage)

Nonincorporation Incorporation

ParallelRejection Decoupling Structures Assimilation Accommodation

Degree of CongruenceLow 44.7 17.0 6.4 23.4 8.5Medium 17.6 0 13.2 52.9 16.2High 9.8 0 4.9 82.0 3.3

Degree of IntensityLow 48.0 4.2 1.4 43.7 2.8Medium 23.7 10.3 6.2 47.4 12.4High 5.4 5.4 20.0 56.4 12.7

Degree of PervasivenessLow 33.9 15.3 1.7 35.6 13.6Medium 26.9 4.8 3.8 51.9 12.5High 20.0 3.3 21.7 55.0 0

Degree of VoluntarinessNormative 28.6 4.0 5.0 51.8 10.6Regulative 12.5 33.3 33.3 20.8 0

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room. On the advice of other teachers atStadele, she began to move away fromwhole-class instruction to small groups, butcontinued to group the students heteroge-neously because she believed that childrenlearned from their more advanced classmatesin groups. She participated in professionaldevelopment that emphasized systematicinstruction in skills and added a separate skillscomponent to her literature-based classroom,shifting her orientation to instruction in skills.She began to question the wisdom of hetero-geneous grouping after she attendedrequired professional development for sec-ond-year teachers and became aware thatmany other teachers were grouping their stu-dents homogeneously. After she made theseincremental changes in practice, Marisa par-ticipated in professional development thatonce again put forth the full early-literacymodel. This time, she came to the experiencewith somewhat different worldviews andpractices and found the approach to have ahigher degree of congruence. After observingthe professional developer teach a class,Marisa remarked: “I was like, ‘Oh my God thisis it! Right away I knew as I watched herinstruct that lower literacy developmentgroup and how she could integrate scienceinto the other groups. . . . So I was like, allright. This is really cool!” Marisa subsequent-ly reorganized her classroom into homoge-neous groups so that she could use stories atthe students’ instructional levels. She movedaway from literature to predictable texts forchildren with lower reading levels. And sheshifted from teaching skills separately toteaching skills in the context of stories. In thisway, her responses to past messages set thestage for her responses in the present.

Marisa was not alone in the degree towhich her worldviews and practices shiftedover time as she encountered and respondedto messages from the environment. As is illus-trated in Figure 3, as the teachers encoun-tered messages about reading associated witha given movement, they often responded inways that shifted their beliefs and practicesand therefore their view of the congruence ofsubsequent messages associated with anapproach. Thus, although Sharon maintainedstrong assumptions related to basic-skills

approaches throughout the years covered bythe study (and hence continued to experi-ence basic-skills messages as being highlycongruent), encounters with messages influ-enced her beliefs and practices such that shefound early-literacy and balanced basic-skillsapproaches to be more and more congruentover time. From 1990 to 1999, Deannaincreasingly came to see messages that wererelated to early literacy and, to a lesser extent,literature-based instruction as having a high-er degree of congruence. Finally, as Marisa’sbeliefs and practices changed in interactionwith institutional pressures, messages thatwere related to literature-based instructionbecame less congruent and messages thatwere related to early literacy became morecongruent over time.

Degree of Intensity The teachers were alsoinfluenced by the degree of intensity of theirconnection to a particular message. By inten-sity of connection, I mean the degree towhich the teachers had opportunities toengage with a message in sustained, iterativeways. The teachers’ connections to pressuresfrom the environment varied widely in theirintensity, from momentary mentions in staffmeetings or a vague awareness of a policychange to in-depth study as part of profes-sional development or a school-reform effort.

The teachers were more likely to respond topressures from the environment when theirconnections with these pressures had a greaterdegree of intensity. Of the 223 responses tomessages, just under 25 percent were to mes-sages with a high degree of intensity, 44 per-cent were to messages with a medium degreeof intensity, and just over 30 percent were tomessages at a low degree of intensity. Deannawas somewhat more likely to encounter mes-sages at a high degree of intensity (39 percent)than was Sharon (20 percent) or Marisa (16percent). It is striking that nearly 90 percent ofall three teachers’ responses to messages with ahigh degree of intensity involved incorporationinto the classroom in some fashion and justover 12 percent resulted in accommodation. Ata medium level of intensity, only 66 percent ofthe messages resulted in incorporation into theclassroom. As with messages with a highdegree of intensity, 12 percent of the medium-

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level resulted in accommodation. Finally, theteachers were much less likely to respond tomessages with a low degree of intensity in waysthat brought the messages into the classroomin consequential ways and were more likely torespond with rejection or symbolic response.Thus, 48 percent of the teachers’ responses tolow-intensity messages involved makingchanges in classroom practice, of which only 3percent resulted in accommodation. In con-trast, 48 percent of the teachers’ responses tolow-intensity messages involved outright rejec-tion, while only 24 percent of the teachers’responses to medium-intensity messages and 5percent of the teachers’ responses to high-intensity messages involved rejection.

The teachers tended to experience pres-

sures from the institutional environment witha high degree of intensity when they encoun-tered them through sustained professionaldevelopment, close interaction with col-leagues, or one-on-one interaction with a keycarrier. Deanna’s experience with professionaldevelopment on early-literacy ideas aboutdecoding discussed earlier provides an exam-ple of messages with a high degree of inten-sity. Deanna participated with her colleaguesin 18 months of on-site professional develop-ment on early-literacy approaches from a uni-versity-based service provider who providedworkshops, demonstrated lessons, andobserved and provided feedback to individualteachers who were experimenting with newpractices in their classrooms. Greater intensi-

Figure 3. Teachers’ Assessment of the Degree of Congruence of the Messages TheyEncountered over Time

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ty of connection seemed to lead to more sub-stantive and consequential responses becauseit allowed the teachers to work with messagesin an iterative fashion, constructing under-standings of new ideas and approaches thatoften started with assimilation but ultimatelypushed toward accommodation over time.

High- and medium-intensity connection—especially to the degree that it involved inter-action with colleagues—provided the oppor-tunity for the teachers to engage in a dia-logue between experimentation with practicein their classroom and reflection that allowedthem to continue to experiment and shiftpractice over time. For example, in Deanna’scase, this structure of professional develop-ment allowed her to try new approaches, dis-cuss her experiences with colleagues, and getongoing feedback from the professionaldeveloper that guided her experimentationtoward a deeper and more substantiveresponse. In fact, this experimentation andconversations with colleagues continued longafter the professional developers left, andDeanna continued to refine and deepen theapproach over the course of several years.When messages were of a lower degree ofintensity, Deanna and other teachers some-times did not even notice them or rememberthem later. And when the teachers did exper-iment with an approach accompanied by alow degree of intensity, they often rejected itwhen they encountered difficulty in theabsence of ongoing support.

Degree of Pervasiveness This dimensionrefers to the degree to which teachers areconnected to particular sets of pressures ormessages in multiple, interlocking, and over-lapping ways. For example, the teachers inboth schools repeatedly encountered mes-sages that promoted the use of runningrecords. It was part of the newly adoptedtextbook series, played a prominent role inthe district’s policy documents on assess-ment, was featured in several professionaldevelopment opportunities, and became thecenterpiece of Stadele’s reform effort. Thus,running records, and the conception of thereading process and approach to assessmentthat they imply, had a high degree of perva-siveness for Sharon, Marisa, and Deanna.

These teachers’ responses to running recordswere part of the 27 percent of all responses tomessages that had a high degree of perva-siveness. Just over 46 percent of the respons-es were to messages that were characterizedby a medium degree of pervasiveness and 27percent were to messages that were charac-terized by a low degree of pervasiveness. Ofthe three teachers, Marisa was more likely toencounter messages with low and mediumdegrees of pervasiveness and was less likely toencounter messages with a high degree ofpervasiveness than were the other two teach-ers, perhaps because of her short tenure inthe profession.

Although the pattern is not as strong aswith the degree of intensity, the teacherswere also more likely to respond to pressuresfrom the environment in more substantiveways the greater the degree of pervasiveness.As Table 2 shows, 77 percent of the teachers’responses to messages with a high degree ofpervasiveness, 68 percent of the responses tothose with a medium degree of pervasive-ness, and 51 percent of the responses tothose with a low degree of pervasivenessinvolved making changes in classroom prac-tice (parallel structures, assimilation, andaccommodation).

Observational data suggest the mecha-nism here. As the degree of pervasivenessincreased over time, Sharon, Marisa, andDeanna became increasingly likely to experi-ment with or try out a particular practice.Running records provide a good example ofthis phenomenon. All three teachers rejectedrunning records in their early encounters withthem because of concerns about manage-ment issues and because the structured, for-mal approach to ongoing assessment was dis-tant from their more informal and intuitiveapproaches. But multiple encounters withrunning records brought this assessment totheir attention and created greater normativepressure to try them. For example, as I dis-cussed earlier, Marisa rejected runningrecords, along with other forms of ongoingassessment, the first time she encounteredthem during her second year of teaching. Shesubsequently rejected them several moretimes, even after she briefly tried them out,when she had two more training sessions and

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encountered them as the major assessmentinstrument in the new reading series. Duringher fourth year of teaching, however, Stadelebecame involved in another training sessionon running records. This time, Marisa felt thatshe really should give them another try. Sheexplained, “I didn’t like doing [runningrecords]. I didn’t like them at all . . . findingthe time to sort of sit there with each kid. Sowhen it was incorporated into our [reformwork], it was more like, OK, I really should dothis.” Marisa began to experiment with run-ning records once again. She began to usethem on a more and more regular basis andultimately worked them into the fabric of herreading program.

However, although a high degree of per-vasiveness often encouraged the teachers toexperiment with a particular approach, theteachers were less likely to sustain a new prac-tice or incorporate the practice in ways thatcaused them to restructure their assumptionsor reorganize their program unless pervasive-ness was accompanied by a high or mediumdegree of intensity. For example, while thepervasiveness of the approach created nor-mative pressure for Marisa to try runningrecords in the classroom, the in-depth profes-sional development she attended and ongo-ing support from her colleagues seemed toprovide the knowledge and assistance thatshe needed to use the challenging approachin an ongoing and substantive way. But notall teachers had this support with messages,and there was a pattern whereby the teachersinitially responded to pervasive institutionalpressure that was not accompanied by inten-sity by incorporating new approaches or reor-ganizing classroom instruction only later tocut back, winnow down, or abandon thepractice over time. For example, Sharon andDeanna responded to what they experiencedas pervasive pressure to use whole-classinstruction during the era of literature-basedinstruction in the early 1990s by completelyreorganizing their reading program fromhomogeneous reading groups into whole-group heterogeneous instruction. However,they had virtually no professional develop-ment on how to teach reading using thisorganizational structure. Sharon later aban-doned the practice when she could not figure

out a way to make it work with the pedagog-ical approaches she used. Deanna successive-ly modified the approach over a number ofyears in ways that moved it back toward heroriginal approach. Thus, Sharon moved fromaccommodation to rejection and Deannamoved from accommodation to assimilation.

Degree of Voluntariness Finally, the degreeof voluntariness influenced the teachers’responses to messages from the environment.As I discussed earlier, institutional theoristshave emphasized the ways in which pressuresin the institutional environment are carriedthrough regulative, normative, and cognitivemeans (Scott 2001; Scott et al. 2000). Here, Ifocus on just two of these kinds of pressure:normative and regulative.13 Messages thatare accompanied by normative pressure putforth ideas about what teachers should do,specifying valued ends for instruction and/orthe appropriate means to get to them (Scott2001). Thus, while teachers are encouragedto change their practice in a certain direction,ultimately their decisions are voluntary. Incontrast, messages that are accompanied byregulative pressures involve rule setting, mon-itoring, or sanctioning (Scott 2001). Withregulative pressures, teachers are mandatedto teach in a particular way, toward particularends, or using particular curricular materials,and, as a result, messages are experienced asinvoluntary.

In this study, the teachers were far morelikely to be connected with normative thanwith regulative pressure. Just over 90 percentof Marisa’s and Sharon’s encounters and justover 85 percent of Deanna’s encounters withmessages involved normative pressures. Thisphenomenon stems, in part, from the factthat both district and state policy makerstended to rely on normative, rather than reg-ulative, means to influence teachers’ readinginstruction. Thus, instead of mandating a par-ticular approach, these policy bodies tendedto develop position papers and, in morerecent years, standards that put forth a posi-tion on appropriate instruction, adopted text-books that carried particular kinds of messageabout instruction, or provided funding forprofessional development that was support-ive of particular approaches to reading

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instruction. Although the state attempted toincrease accountability to standards (and thusregulative pressures) by linking them withstandardized tests, the mechanisms that heldteachers accountable for students’ perfor-mance on these tests were comparativelyweak throughout the years covered by thestudy (1983–99).14

The teachers did experience some state,district, and school-level mandates. For exam-ple, Baldwin’s district mandated that teachersuse a battery of curriculum-embedded assess-ments to assess students’ progress three timesa year. Furthermore, the teachers were man-dated to “reflect” on the results of theseassessments in conversations with their col-leagues. Both schools also had policies andpractices that the teachers were required tofollow that could be characterized as regula-tive pressure. For example, as I mentionedearlier, teachers at Baldwin were required touse the district-adopted textbook for theirinstruction (the teachers at Stadele were not).

On average, the teachers were more likelyto respond to normative messages than toregulative messages by incorporating theminto their classroom and doing so in ways thataltered their preexisting practice. As Table 2shows, two thirds of the teachers’ responsesto normative pressure involved changes inclassroom practice, compared to over halfthe teachers’ responses to regulative pres-sures. However, there was significant varia-tion among the teachers along this dimen-sion. Deanna was almost equally likely toincorporate messages that were accompa-nied by regulative pressure as those accom-panied by normative pressure, while Marisaand Sharon each incorporated close to twothirds of the normative messages versus closeto one third of the regulative ones.

This variation may be attributable, in part,to the fact that Deanna was more likely toencounter regulative messages with a medi-um or high degree of congruence than wasSharon or Marisa. The teachers’ responses toregulative messages were conditioned by thedegree of congruence between the messagesand their preexisting beliefs, values, and prac-tices. All three teachers tended to respond toregulative messages that were congruentwith preexisting practice by incorporating

them into their practice in ways that led toassimilation or parallel structures, but tendedto respond to regulative pressure that wasincongruent either by rejection or decou-pling. Eight of the 10 regulative messagesthat Deanna encountered versus only 2 out of7 that Marisa encountered and 3 out of 7 thatSharon encountered were at a medium orhigh level of congruence. Because Deannaencountered a greater percentage of regula-tive messages with a medium or high degreeof congruence, she was more likely torespond to them by making changes in herpractice.

In spite of the difference in their responsesto regulative pressure, all three teachers werestill substantially more likely to alter preexist-ing practices in consequential ways whenthey incorporated normative pressures thanwhen they incorporated regulative messages.When they incorporated normative mes-sages, just over 10 percent of the time theydid so in ways that led to accommodation. Incontrast, no teacher ever responded withaccommodation to regulative messages.However, even though the teachers weremore likely to incorporate normative mes-sages in consequential ways, they were alsomore likely to respond to normative messagesby rejecting them than regulative ones. Justover 20 percent of Deanna’s responses andjust over 30 percent of Sharon’s and Marisa’sresponses to normative messages involvedrejection. In contrast, only 10 percent ofDeanna’s responses and just under 15 percentof Marisa and Sharon’s responses to regula-tive messages involved rejection.

Taken together, these findings begin tounpack the conditions that influence theprocess by which teachers respond to pres-sures from the institutional environment.They suggest that teachers are more likely torespond to messages by bringing ideas orapproaches into their classrooms in a sub-stantive way when these messages have ahigh degree of congruence with preexistingpractice, a high degree of intensity, or a highdegree of pervasiveness or are accompaniedby normative pressures. The degree of inten-sity is especially influential, since it provides amechanism for teachers to engage with mes-sages over time, allowing them to draw con-

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nections with messages that may at first seemincongruent; to experiment with and adjustnew practices in ways that may allow them toshift classroom routines and regularities inmore substantial ways; and to interact withknowledgeable others in ways that encouragethem to surface, question, and possiblyrethink their tacit assumptions. Yet, whilemessages with a high degree of intensityseemed to provide the conditions for moresubstantial change in classroom practice, theywere the least common way that the teachersencountered messages. And even when theteachers experienced institutional pressureswith favorable conditions for change, theywere still more likely to respond in ways thatassimilated messages into preexisting frame-works than to alter their frameworks forteaching reading itself.

DISCUSSION

The decoupling argument—that schoolsrespond to pressures from the institutionalenvironment by decoupling changes in struc-tures and procedures from classroom instruc-tion—has been a central feature of institu-tional theory as applied to public schoolssince the 1970s. However, this study has sug-gested the need to rethink this argument.Building on theoretical advances in thebroader institutional literature (see, e.g.,Oliver 1991; Scott 2001), the study has pro-vided empirical evidence that the environ-ment penetrates schools in substantial ways,reaching within structures to influence teach-ers’ worldviews and practices. Furthermore, ithas extended institutional theory by drawingon theoretical work in sensemaking theory todevelop an account of the process by whichthis phenomenon occurs. The study has pro-vided evidence that teachers’ classroomdoors are permeable as messages from theenvironment provide the raw materials forconstruction, set bounds for what is evenconceivable through taken-for-grantedassumptions about the nature of teachingand learning, and pressure teachers to movein certain directions and not others. But it hasalso provided evidence that teachers mediatelogics in the institutional environment, con-

structing and reconstructing them throughthe lens of their preexisting practices andworldviews and making key gatekeepingdecisions.

This reconceptualization of the relation-ship between the environment and teachers’classrooms has implications for the ways inwhich both institutional theory and the soci-ology of teachers’ work have conceptualizedteachers’ agency and autonomy. Traditionally,institutional theorists and sociologists of edu-cation have portrayed teachers’ agency in dif-ferent ways. On the one hand, sociologists ofeducation have documented the occupation-al norm of autonomy that grants teachers ahigh degree of control in making decisionsabout classroom practice (Goodlad 1984;Little 1990; Lortie 1975). This approach por-trays teachers as having a high degree ofagency in constructing their approach toteaching and learning. In contrast, institu-tional theory more broadly has tended toemphasize the limited agency of individualactors in organizations, instead emphasizingthe ways in which environments shape indi-vidual and collective action. Many scholarshave criticized institutional theory for whatthey see as an overly deterministic view of theenvironment and the “overly socialized”(Scott et al. 2000:32) view of actors(DiMaggio 1988; Powell 1991; Scott et al.2000).

This study has suggested something of amiddle ground between these two positions.By emphasizing teachers’ role in mediatingpressures from the institutional environment,it has portrayed teachers as agents, con-structing their practice by combining the ele-ments available to them in the environmentwith their preexisting practice in a processthat Campbell (1997:22) characterized as“dynamic innovation.” But it has conditional-ized this agency by highlighting the ways inwhich decision making about instruction isshaped by broader social and historical con-texts. Thus, it suggests to sociologists ofteachers’ work that rather than an occupa-tional norm of autonomy, teachers haveinstead what I characterize as boundedautonomy. Deep-seated assumptions aboutthe nature of teaching and learning that arelinked to broader movements in the environ-

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ment guide decision making often in precon-scious ways, framing the range of appropriateaction and guiding what “makes sense” toteachers. Regulative pressures place technicallimits on decision making, creating pressuresand priorities that teachers feel they mustrespond to in some fashion. And teachers’preexisting regularities, developed over time,constitute a strong framework into whichteachers tend to try to “fit” new approachesand ideas.

To institutional theorists, this conceptual-ization of teachers’ agency adds to the grow-ing body of work in institutional theory thathas begun to move away from the determin-ism that characterized early work, imagininga greater role for agency in the dynamics ofinstitutional persistence and change (see,e.g., Campbell 1997; Goodrick and Salancik1996; Oliver 1991; Powell 1991; Scott et al.2000). However, to date, most of the work onagency in institutional theory has focused onthe agency of organizations, not individuals.Studies that have addressed individualagency have been focused on understandingchanges in the environment (rather thanorganizational responses to changes in theenvironment) and have been limited to lead-ers of professional organizations, high-levelmanagers, and key political figures. Here, Ipushed this line of thinking further by high-lighting the agency of workers inside organi-zations, who, given the social organization oftheir work, exercise bounded autonomy asthey actively mediate messages about whatconstitutes “good” practice.

This study has also extended understand-ing of the relationship between the institu-tional environment and the classroom by sug-gesting not only that pressures from the envi-ronment influence classroom practice, butthat various mechanisms by which pressuresare carried influence classroom practice in dif-ferent ways. Few institutional studies of pub-lic schooling have investigated schools’ andteachers’ connections to the environment.Yet this study has provided evidence that thenature of teachers’ interaction with messagesplays a crucial role in the degree to whichpressures from the environment influenceclassroom practice. Messages that are associ-ated with changing ideas about instruction in

the environment are carried in ways that varyconsiderably in their congruence, intensity,pervasiveness, and voluntariness. These differ-ent mechanisms influence the degree towhich teachers are inclined to notice andengage with new ideas or approaches in thefirst place. But they also provide different con-ditions for teachers to interact with messagesin ways that have the potential to encourageteachers to rethink their assumptions andalter their routines. Future investigations ofthe relationship between the environmentand classrooms must pay explicit attentionnot only to the content of the messages, butto the mechanisms by which teachers areconnected to the multiple and shifting pres-sures in the institutional environment.

Finally, this study has highlighted the utili-ty of exploring these questions historically.Nearly all studies of the relationship betweenthe environment and the classroom to datehave explored this question at a single pointin time. And while diachronic designs areincreasingly commonplace in the broaderinstitutional literature (see, e.g., DiMaggio1991; Fligstein 1991; Scott et al. 2000), mostof these studies have been primarily con-cerned with investigating change in the envi-ronment, rather than the dynamics of macro-micro linkages (Scott et al. 2000 is an excep-tion). This study has demonstrated that therelationship between the institutional envi-ronment and the classroom unfolds over along period. Teachers’ responses to messagesare not static. Rather, teachers’ response to asingle message may emerge and change overa number of years as teachers repeatedlyencounter messages, shifting their orientationor inclination to respond. But it also occurs asteachers engage with a set of ideas orapproaches in an iterative fashion in waysthat sometimes broaden and deepen theirresponse and sometimes lead to the winnow-ing down or even subsequent rejection of anapproach. A study conducted at one momentin this process is likely to come to differentconclusions about the nature of teachers’responses to messages than would the samestudy done a few years later.

A historical design is also important in thechronological sense (Scott 2001; Vaughan1996). Teachers’ responses to institutional

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pressures earlier shape the beliefs and prac-tices that teachers subsequently use torespond to new pressures in the environmentlater. Creating a design that captures thischronology can highlight such findings as therole of path dependence in institutional per-sistence and change. But capturing thisprocess over time also provides a way tounderstand the relationship between theinstitutional environment and the classroom

as interactive and recursive, rather than themore typical vision of a top-down relationshippresent in most institutional studies of publicschooling. All this suggests that a historicalapproach is crucial for gaining insights intothe complex relationship between the envi-ronment and the classroom, as well as thebroader project of understanding the dynam-ics of institutional persistence and change inclassroom instruction.

APPENDIX

Table A1. Degree of Connection of Stadele Elementary and Baldwin Elementary toDifferent Movements in the Reading Environment

Movement Stadele Elementary Baldwin Elementary

Basic Skills1983–87 High High1988–94 Low High1995–99 Low Low

Literature-Based Instruction1983–87 Low Low1988–94 High Low1995–99 Medium Low

Early Literacy1983–87 Low Low1988–94 Low Low1995–99 Medium High

Balanced Basic Skills1983–87 Low Low1988–94 Low Low1995–99 Low Low

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Table A2. Summary of Early-Grades Teachers’ Approaches to ReadingInstruction at Stadele and Baldwin Elementary Schools

Date Entered Approach to

the ReadingName School Profession Role Instruction

Evie Stadele 1962 1st grade Primarily basic skills with elements of liter-ature-based and early literacy

Sharon Stadele 1964 1st grade Primarily basic skills with elements of lit-erature-based and early literacy

Helen Stadele 1969 2nd grade Primarily basic skillsTom Stadele 1991 2nd grade Primarily literature-basedStephanie Stadele 1994 2nd grade Primarily literature-based and early literacy

with elements of balanced basic skillsMarisa Stadele 1995 2nd grade Primarily literature-based and early liter-

acy with elements of balanced basic skills

Yumi Stadele 1996 1st grade Primarily literature-based and early literacy with elements of balanced basic skills

Francine Stadele 1996 1st grade Primarily early literacy and basic skillsMargaret Stadele 1996 1st grade Primarily literature-based and early literacy

with elements of basic skillsTalia Stadele 1997 1st grade Primarily literature-based and early literacy

with elements of basic skillsElise Stadele 1998 1st grade Primarily literature-based and early literacy

with elements of balanced basic skillsSylvia Baldwin 1967 2nd grade Primarily basic skills and early literacy with

elements of literature-based instructionDeanna Baldwin 1968 2nd grade Primarily basic skills and early literacy with

elements of literature-based instructionVivian Baldwin 1973 1st/2nd Primarily basic skills with elements of early lit-

grade eracySally Baldwin 1978 2nd grade Primarily basic skills and early literacyCherise Baldwin 1985 1st grade Primarily basic skillsStephen Baldwin 1994 1st grade Primarily early literacy and literature-based

with elements of basic skills Chloe Baldwin 1996 1st/2nd Primarily early literacy with elements of liter-

grade ature-based and basic skillsErminda Baldwin 1997 1st/2nd Primarily early literacy and literature-based

grade with elements of basic skillsJeff Baldwin 1997 2nd grade Primarily early literacy with elements of basic

skillsBettina Baldwin 1998 1st grade Primarily early literacy and literature-based

instruction

Note: Teachers’ names are pseudonyms. Focal teachers are indicated in bold.

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238 Coburn

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NOTES

1. In putting forth the argument that orga-nizations, in general, and schools, in particu-lar, decouple administrative change fromtheir core technology in response to pressuresfrom the institutional environment, Meyerand Rowan (1977, 1978) provided an expla-nation for the phenomenon of loose couplingbetween levels of the system and organiza-tional subunits (especially school administra-tion and classrooms) noted by Weick (1976)and Bidwell (1965). This explanation, in turn,suggested that the institutional environmenthad little influence on classroom practice(Rowan and Miskel 1999). The decouplingargument and its corresponding assumptionsabout the relationship between the environ-ment and organizations’ core technologyhave been influential, not only in studies ofpublic schools, but in institutional studies oforganizations more broadly (Scott 2001). It isthis set of arguments about the relationshipbetween the institutional environment andthe classroom that is the focus of this article,rather than the broader phenomenon ofloose coupling.

2. Cuban’s (1984, 1993) study of the his-tory of classroom practice investigated therelationship between the environment andthe classroom historically. However, Cuban’sstudy did not follow particular teachers orschools over time; rather, it looked at differentgroups of schools at different historical peri-ods and thus is unable to provide guidanceon the ways in which schools or teachersrespond to changing pressures from the envi-ronment over time.

3. The names of schools are pseudonyms.4. The difference in observation time in

Stadele versus Baldwin reflects the fact thatBaldwin had significantly fewer structuredopportunities for teachers to meet than didStadele.

5. Typically, commentators have identifiedonly two major shifts in reading policy duringthis period: the move to literature-basedinstruction in 1987 and the call for the “bal-anced approach” to instruction starting in1995. However, my historical research sug-gests that there was a third shift in policystarting in the early 1990s, which I identify as

the move toward early-literacy instruction.Although not as high profile, this shift wasnonetheless tremendously influential in manydistricts in the state, including the two dis-tricts in this study. For a more in-depth analy-sis of changes in reading policy in Californiafrom 1983 to 1999, see Coburn (2001b).

6. All three focal teachers encounteredroughly the same number of messages. Thisfinding is somewhat surprising becauseMarisa, a beginning teacher, taught for onlyfour years of the study. However, this dispari-ty can be attributed to the fact that Marisawas connected to messages about readingthrough multiple state and district programsand professional development that was tar-geted to new teachers, programs that did notexist when the other two teachers enteredthe profession.

7. Teachers were connected to messagesabout reading both when they pressed inthrough policy and school- or district-spon-sored professional development and whenthey themselves reached out to newresources, training, and materials in theirproximal environment. Connections to mes-sages varied greatly among the teachers.State policy was often reinterpreted andreshaped at every level as it worked its waythrough the system to schools (McLaughlin1991; Pressman and Wildavsky 1984; Spillane1996). Therefore, teachers in different dis-tricts and different schools were often con-nected to substantively different messages.For example, as can be seen in AppendixTable A3, Deanna had virtually no connectionto state policy during the era of balancedbasic skills, in spite of extensive policy makingand activity at the state level. She did notbecause her district used state funds for pro-fessional development to promote early liter-acy, rather than balanced basic skills, and didnot, as in Sharon and Marisa’s district, distrib-ute state task-force documents and frame-works outlining approaches promoted bystate policy. Similarly, school leaders alsomediated connections as they buffered teach-ers from pressures, on the one hand, andbrought in and intensified messages via cur-ricular materials, on the other hand. However,teachers’ connections to messages also variedwithin schools for two reasons: Teachers in

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240 Coburn

different microcommunities were connectedto messages through their colleagues, andteachers reached out on their own to profes-sional development and other resources inthe environment. For more detail on thesemechanisms and pathways, see Coburn(2002).

8. Organizational theorists have tradition-ally defined the technical core of an organiza-tion as the set of “arrangements” that aredeveloped to perform the central tasks of anorganization (Scott 1992; Thompson 1967).These arrangements include work processes,knowledge and skills, and the materials thatare used to carry out these central tasks (Scott1992). Here, I follow previous organizationalresearchers in defining the technical core ofschooling as classroom instruction (Rowan1990; Scott 1992; Spillane and Zeuli 1999).In particular, a message from the environ-ment has influenced the core technology ofthe schools if it has influenced classroominstructional routines, the use of materials,organizational arrangements, or the teachers’knowledge or worldviews about readinginstruction.

9. Among the social and structural condi-tions in the school that influenced teachers’sensemaking, teachers’ patterns of interactionwith their peers were particularly influential.For further discussion, see Coburn (2001a).

10. This analysis is consistent with cogni-tive dissonance theory (Fazio & Cooper,1983; Festinger, 1957), which suggests thatto minimize cognitive dissonance, individualsselectively interpret new information in waysthat are consistent with existing cognitiveschemas (see Fiske and Taylor 1991 for areview).

11. This was especially likely to occur ifmessages differed or even challenged teach-ers’ preexisting beliefs. If messages were con-gruent, teachers assimilated them withoutnecessarily transforming them from what thepolicy maker intended.

12. Given that accommodation involves amajor reconstruction of fundamental beliefs,it is not surprising that it was unlikely thatteachers responded to messages that had ahigh degree of congruence by restructuringtheir beliefs in substantive ways.

13. This is not to say that cognitive aspects

did not play a role. On the contrary, theteachers’ tacit worldviews and taken-for-granted assumptions played a crucial role inholding things in place in the face of newpressures from the institutional environment(Bidwell 2000; Cuban 1993; Rowan andMiskel 1999). The teachers used theseassumptions and already-institutionalizedpractices to make sense of new approachesand ideas that they encountered. In this way,institutionalized notions of appropriate, nat-ural, or legitimate teaching defined the limitsof or provided a framework for possibleresponses in the form of taken-for-grantednotions about roles, rules, or ways of doingthings. However, these cognitive elementswere largely a characteristic of preexistingbeliefs and practices, not characteristics of thenew pressures that the teachers were experi-encing from the environment, because thesemovements in reading instruction were at arelatively early stage and were not yet widelyinstitutionalized. Ideas associated with themovement, therefore, had not yet becometaken for granted either in the environmentor in teachers’ practice. Given that the focusof analysis is on teachers’ responses to thesenew movements in the environment, it wasnot appropriate to look at cognitive pres-sures.

14. In the last two years of the study,California initiated a system that rankedschools on the basis of their performance onthe state’s standardized tests (called theAcademic Performance Index). Althoughthere were plans to link this ranking withrewards and sanctions, which would theoret-ically increase the strength of regulatory pres-sure, this linkage did not occur until the yearafter the study ended.

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Cynthia E. Coburn, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Administrative and Policy Studies, School ofEducation, and Research Scientist, Learning Research and Development Center, University ofPittsburgh. Her research uses organizational sociology to understand the relationship betweeninstructional policy and teachers’ classroom practice. The research reported here was awarded theDissertation Award from Division L (policy and politics) of the American Educational ResearchAssociation.

The author thanks Charles Bidwell, Meredith Honig, Nathan MacBrien, Aaron Pallas, W. RichardScott, and Joan Talbert for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. Support for datacollection was provided by the Center for Research on the Context of Teaching at StanfordUniversity. Data analysis and writing were supported by a dissertation fellowship from the SpencerFoundation and by support from the School of Education and the Learning Research andDevelopment Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Address correspondence to Cynthia E. Coburn,University of Pittsburgh, 808 Learning Research and Development Center, 3939 O’Hara Street,Pittsburgh, PA 15260; e-mail: [email protected].

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