School staff-centered school development by communicative action: Working methods for creating collective responsibility-from the idea to action

Abstract

School development is often seen as a concerted (re-)action to educational policies, curriculum development, and change in education laws or regulations, and sometimes, as stakeholders’ reactions to low school performance. Generally, school development incorporates organizational, managerial, and educational activities and measures. This is done to adapt to the new situation to achieve the desired changes and goals initiated by a given curriculum reform. In contrast, this paper focuses on school staff–driven development: It describes how teachers together with paraprofessionals contribute to school-development. Using collective responsibility creating working methods of communication, the enactment of staff’s self-chosen measures will be possible. This school staff–driven school development approach makes use of the Dialogue Café and the Reflection Cycle. The combined use of these working methods is seen as appropriate support for school staff–centered development of the School-In project based on the idea of collective responsibility. The paper presents by the application of a qualitative content and visualization analysis, how the communicative action according Habermas took place. This is the process from the individual participant’s ideas, through individual and group reflections to finally formulated measures that result in the school’s staff joint actions.