About this Research Topic

Background

This Research Topic focuses on the concept of organizational resilience--defined as the “maintenance of positive adjustment under challenging conditions such that the organization emerges from those conditions strengthened and more resourceful” (Vogus & Sutcliffe, 2007, p. 3418)--with respect to improvement efforts in underperforming schools around the world.

Each year, schools in many countries continue to be labeled “underperforming” based on various measures. Many of these schools, though, face a greater number of challenges compared to their higher-performing counterparts, such as higher rates of turnover among teachers and educational leaders, lower rates of daily student attendance, and lower-resourced surrounding communities.

Such circumstances raise a question: How can underperforming schools make strategic adjustments in response to their challenging conditions to provide students with the safe, rigorous, and equitable learning opportunities that they deserve?

Continuing to serve students enrolled in underperforming schools calls for those underperforming schools to be resilient organizations.

--> Vogus, T. J., & Sutcliffe, K. M. (2007). Organizational resilience: Towards a theory and research agenda. IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 3418-3422.

The purpose of this Research Topic is to learn more about how today’s underperforming schools around the world are anticipating, coping with, and adapting to internal and external challenges. Organizational resilience is a concept with roots outside of education and suggests that organizations like schools and school systems participate in a three-stage process of anticipating, coping, and adapting to enhance their organizational knowledge base, which, in turn, enhances the organization's resilience because the enhanced knowledge base permits the organization to better anticipate, cope with, and adapt to future challenges.

Anticipation relates to underperforming schools enhancing their abilities to observe and chronicle their surroundings to prepare to identify and address challenges. Coping sees educators working in underperforming schools accept current realities and devise and implement solutions to chronic (and/or unexpected) challenges in real time. Adaptation sees underperforming schools build up their abilities to reflect and learn so they can change in the future. Moreover, educators in underperforming schools promote individual and collective reflection about how an organization coped with a challenge and the extent to which the anticipatory foundation (i.e., preparation) enabled or hindered coping abilities.

Despite considerable bodies of research on organizational resilience in the organizational sciences and regular efforts to study the sustainment of good educational practices and programs in many countries, the body of scholarship and research on organizational resilience with respect to education--and, for this research topic, how underperforming schools around the world adapt and respond to challenging circumstances--remains thin.

With this Research Topic, we seek contributions from around the world that leverage an array of methodologies, such as qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods, conceptual, or evaluation studies. All contributions must focus on P-12 underperforming schools, and we envision a collection of manuscripts of international research about organizational resilience in underperforming schools. Moreover, we are particularly interested in studies that leverage data from persistently underperforming schools (i.e., two or more years labeled as underperforming).

Select topics of contributions may align with, but are not limited to, one or more of the following foci:

--> Examinations of school improvement efforts aimed at helping underperforming schools build, implement, and sustain systems, structures, routines, and practices aimed at ensuring school improvement efforts gain momentum and have staying power over time.

--> Examinations of the efforts of educators working in underperforming schools, including the specific challenges faced by these educators and what they did to contend with those challenges in the moment and to reduce the potential that those challenges arise in the future.

--> Examinations of innovative programs and/or partnerships leveraged to (a) better position underperforming schools to jumpstart and sustain improvement efforts and/or (b) actively aid underperforming schools in jump starting and sustaining those improvement efforts. Such partners may include, but are not limited to, education departments or ministries, state education agencies, local educational agencies, local school governance boards, colleges and universities, parents/guardians, caregivers, youth, students, and/or non-profit and non-governmental community organizations.

Interested authors are suggested to email Dr. Bryan A. VanGronigen at bvg@udel.edu to discuss possible contributions, including study design and fit with this Research Topic.

Keywords: educational leadership, school improvement, organizational resilience, systems leadership, underperforming schools, sustainability

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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