2.3 Towards the virtual k-12 educational organization: an emerging  (Page 8/11)

In this school district there was an incubation period that helped parents, teachers, principals, board members, and other community leaders gain a positive perspective before an implementation decision was made.

Christensen, Horn, and Johnson (2008) described the inability of present day schools to innovate and change because they have a “structure that mirrors the architecture of their product” (p. 207). The fundamental problem with bringing about innovation and change is that the adults in the typical school district do not have the knowledge or capacity to make the dramatic changes in that traditional bureaucratic architecture.

"Whether there’s a piece of technology involved or not, I think that the space has to change to reflect what’s going on more and more with teaching and learning and that is that people are realizing that it is a social activity and it is something that we do in a variety of modes, that we don’t just “sit and get” but that we gather together and we reflect quietly and we work on projects in small groups and we collaborate and we build and . . . I mean so I need space that allows me the flexibility to jump from a lecture."

"An architectural change for a school entails combining subjects, reordering who does what and how, imagining new roles for computers, instituting project-based work, altering the hours, and so forth. Combining the study of history and literature into a single course in which each discipline is used to examine the other is an example of an architectural innovation." (p. 208)

This study surfaced the divide between how one educational organization recognized the impact of technology/software innovation upon teaching, with a lagging but growing awareness of the disruptive nature of this innovation upon the entire school system. Yet, this divide did not keep the district from moving forward with implementation.

A theory of virtual educational organization

Drawing from the work of Mishra and Koehler (2006) who outlined the emerging digital pedagogy (Berry&Staub, 2010) it was evident that the evolution of digital teaching was being supported by the parallel development of a nascent digital school structure. Although the K-12 educational organization was encountering implementation angst caused by the disruptive innovation of emerging digital structures, it was apparent that the school district was realigning resources and shifting priorities to support digital teaching and digital learning. Structure, according to Thompson (1961) “refers to the persistent qualities or given elements in the environmental conditions of choice or action which make it possible to explain and perhaps to predict action” (p. 8). As the traditional organization of brick and mortar teaching and learning blended with the virtual structure of teaching and learning, a hybrid educational organization began to emerge (see Figure 1). The structure for digital teaching and learning is the collective use of software that is supported by servers, routers, wires, and technical knowledge that will “explain and predict the action” of teachers as they teach and students as they learn.