Schools are complex and exciting observational settings. Over the past few months, I have begun to look at the school organization as a “pooled interdependent structure” that draws on a standard set of resources (Thompson, 1967) that required a collection of coordination games. The interdependence creates a situation in classrooms/grade levels coordination failure between teacher/student or administration/teacher can jeopardize the outcomes of a school. In this particular case, leadership and a teachers’ professional/classroom practice can be considered school resources.
In particular, classrooms require careful coordination of instructional planning that includes a mix of pedagogical and classroom routines to motivate students. Co-ordinational failure results when either the teacher or both the students fail to meet learning expectations or receive partial success meeting established learning criteria. Reaped learning deficits can signal that classrooms are “stuck” in an endless loop of sub-performance levels.
Classroom performance is attributable to the independent interaction between students and teachers. Each classroom exhibits a ranked level of performance expectations that result from these interactions—complete coordination results in strategic complements that increase the improvement and success of all classroom participants. Positive spillovers occur when both teacher and students can increase the effectiveness of instruction across all agents within the classroom. These results are positive spillovers that increase the efficacy across all agents within the classroom. On the other hand, the inability of teachers and students to act independently to coordinate instructional activity results in sub-optimal levels of success. These actions can be intertemporal in nature.
As a set of coordinated outcomes, a classroom can be viewed as a situated coordination game. High learning rates are a central target but are determined by how teachers and students see the rewards of learning. Learning rates are then a result of learning shocks that can be either positive or negative. These educational shocks can affect a single individual or an entire classroom setting. In either case, shocks affect the classroom setting with uncertainty for teachers and students. This uncertainty creates myopic and mutational learning dynamics. Myopic classrooms can be described as ones in which both teacher and student can not ascertain the effect of these strategic actions. Mutational classrooms are those in which neither teacher nor student put their best response forward, with these responses interfering with the required learning.
References
Cooper, R. (1999). Coordination games. Cambridge University Press.
Thompson, J. P. (1967). Organizations in Action. McGraw-Hill Book Company.
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