Virginie März

Stability and Change of Mentoring Practices in a Capricious Policy Environment: Opening the “Black Box of Institutionalization”

This article addresses how institutional logics are translated, maintained, or disrupted by actors and their (inter)actions within schools. The changing policy environment for mentoring beginning teachers in Flanders (Belgium) provides a fertile context for answering this question. Combining neoinstitutional and sensemaking lenses and analyzing the mentoring practices in one school, we investigated the role of mentors’ sensemaking in shaping responses to changes in the broader institutional environment. Based on semistructured interviews, observations, and document analyses, the study identifies how the introduction, and later withdrawal, of direct financial support for mentoring installed a new logic of mentoring as a professionalized job and how mentors creatively employed elements of this new logic in their daily interactions. The study contributes to the recent research on inhabited institutionalism by demonstrating that organizations are not only the instantiation of institutional logics, but are sites where people and groups make sense of and creatively use institutional logics.

Understanding How Structure and Agency Influence Education Policy Implementation and Organizational Change

Policy implementation is a daily event in schools and districts. Educators engage with policies in many forms and must consider how to implement their multiple ideas in a coordinated manner. Take a classroom teacher who manages the following policies for one child identified with a disability: the federal policy on disability (IDEA), state policies around curriculum standards, her district’s policy on access to assistive technology, her school’s policy on inclusion, and her individual classroom policy on homework. Ample implementation research demonstrates that policies are rarely implemented as written nor necessarily as intended (e.g., Cohen and Hill 2001; Correnti and Rowan 2007; Kennedy 2005; Rowan and Miller 2007; Rowan et al. 2004; Stein et al. 1996). Yet while the policies rarely dictate exactly what happens in districts and schools, they do shape the daily work of the actors in these organizations (Coburn 2004; Drori and Honig 2013; Sherer and Spillane 2011). Across the United States, and internationally, reforms are both delivered to schools and districts at an