Tensions in Literacy Coaching in School Organizations: An Activity Theoretical Perspective on Organizational Learning

With the reform of the Danish public primary and lower secondary school (2014), the expectations of using data to improve school has increased. This reflects a belief among government and municipalities that use of data will qualify teaching and learning in school (EVA, 2017). Literacy coaches have a central role coordinating, analyzing and transforming test and other learning-related data into didactic to increase the quality of teaching and learning (Marsh et al. 2015), and they are prioritized in all Danish schools (N=1200) (Pøhler & Kledal, 2011). Literacy coaches enact different organizational routines using data (Kiær & Albrechtsen, 2020). However, very little is known about how literacy coaches use different kinds of assessment data in practice together with teachers and how this influences organizational learning (Lesley, Beach & Smit, 2020; Elkjær & Huysman, 2008, Argote, Lee & Park, 2020). Tensions are viewed as ways of transforming activities and learning in organizations (Engeström, 2019), and there are different tensions both inside the schools’ activity system and between activity systems (Kiær, 2020). In this paper we focus on tensions inside the school. The tensions occur in school, when the literacy coach tries to transform assessment data into didactics. The tensions are 1) different kinds of collegial resistance to what they do (Jacobs et al., 2017), 2) not having enough time to act like experts and lacking legitimation, 3) a lack of organizational routines supporting their coaching of colleagues and 4) difficulties transforming teachers teaching e.g. regarding learning materials. Though research shows that instructional coaches can improve the professional development of in-service teachers (Gibbons & Cobb, 2017; Woulfin & Rigby, 2017) we still have limited knowledge on the tensions involved in this activity and how it influences organizational learning.
The purpose of the study is to contribute with new knowledge on tensions that the literacy coaches experience in their work as experts supporting colleagues in their instructional decision making with data. Thereby we shed a light on tensions that challenge the organizational learning. The research question is as follows:

Which tensions do literacy coaches experience when supporting colleagues’ use of data in order to qualify their decision-making regarding teaching?