Two trends have increased the importance of cross-boundary teaming in schools. School educators face more interdisciplinary tasks and problems. They are also further required to include diverse voices derived from students’ greater demographic diversity toward creating culturally inclusive school education.
In light of this, cross-boundary teaming—where members share, leverage, and integrate divergent knowledge derived from different functional and demographic backgrounds to resolve shared tasks and problems—becomes an important form of collaboration for school members and especially School Leadership Teams (SLTs). Yet few studies in education leadership have directly informed the actual practice of SLTs’ cross-boundary teaming, which is largely defined from the cultural and political perspectives that mainly stress the team/organization’s structural conditions.
Therefore, by employing Edmondson and Harvey’s (2018) model highlighting the functional and agency perspective, I explored one SLT’s cross-boundary teaming practice in depth. To achieve this goal, I selected one teacher leadership team (TLT) in one New York City public middle school and conducted a single case study with various coding techniques. I found that the TLT engaged in the five cross-boundary teaming practices by differentiating its team dynamics to address five challenging situation types derived from different patterns of knowledge boundary types in connection with their team contexts.
The five cross-boundary teaming practices included (a) developing shared pools of meanings, (b) mixed use of deep-knowledge sharing and rapid knowledge co-construction, (c) distributing team leadership, (d) managing external boundary with their administrators, and (e) activating different challenging situations at the team level. The five cross-teaming practices overall suggested that TLT’s team dynamics—which I conceptualized as two learning layers—were varied, depending on the five knowledge boundary types along with their team contexts.
I believe that by suggesting one TLT’s specific team-learning interactions and mindsets through two learning layers, my findings contribute to complementing the limitations of the existing literature on SLTs to further help SLTs work effectively. Furthermore, by empirically demonstrating one TLT’s cross-boundary teaming, I believe my findings contribute to extending Edmondson and Harvey’s (2018) conceptual model—which illuminates knowledge boundaries as another important factor navigating team dynamics and increasing team effectiveness in the context of interdisciplinary teams.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/kpr2-ge83 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Choi, Hyunjin |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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