Implementing along a Continuum: Comparing the Embedded Agency of Leaders and the Coupling Orientation of Educational Systems
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose: In the wake of interlocking pandemics, educational systems are resetting in important ways, pursuing aims that are not exclusively instructional (e.g., social justice, well-being). As systems (re)build, they may vary in how they manage their institutional and policy environments, which may or may not be reorienting toward these same expanded aims and at a similar pace. Drawing on theoretical lenses related to coupling and the embedded agency of leaders, this article compares the work of system and school leaders as they reconcile system-level policies with their environments, and with teaching and learning in classrooms. Research Methods/Approach: Drawing on data from four elementary schools, situated across two educational systems (i.e., Montessori and International Baccalaureate) and two national contexts (i.e., United States and Canada), I highlight differences—between and within systems—in implementation of system-level policies. Findings: I find an educational system’s “coupling orientation” provides context for the embedded agency of leaders and for the nature of their work as implementation agents. By orienting its leaders toward a certain coupling arrangement between macro (i.e., environment), meso (i.e., system), and micro (i.e., classroom) levels, a system can shape the type of work leaders do, and the degree of structure and agency they experience. Implications: In detailing differences in implementation between and within systems, this research helps scholars frame loose and tight coupling, structure and agency, along a continuum. For educational leaders, this article highlights necessary system knowledge for managing interactions between the environment, their system, and teaching and learning in classrooms.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it