This book has explored how K-16 educators’ use of inferential thinking about their students’ cultural differences is critical for their capacities to effectively engage in learning about and from those cultural differences at work. I began by identifying a knowing–doing gap in the literature on K-16 educators who work with students from low-income and other minoritized cultural communities, and applied the ladder of inference framework as an analytic lens to a systematic review of research on K-12 urban teacher thinking. I then explored the working hypothesis that it is single-loop learning that perpetuates an important human capital challenge across K-16 contexts serving students from LIMCCs: the recruitment of well-intentioned, yet underprepared urban teachers who are at risk of burnout, leaving schools serving students from LIMCCs, or quitting the profession altogether where they do not have the organizational and professional supports needed to effectively manage cultural differences between themselves and their students. In conclusion, this chapter combines insights from across the three literatures that informed the book’s development – cultural psychology, organizational behavior, and organizational psychology – to explore how these disciplines speak to a common set of recommendations for future research on how Model O-I and Model O-II learning systems are established, maintained, and dismantled in K-16 schools serving students from LIMCCs. I focus this discussion on three lingering questions in particular:

1. (1) What keeps urban schools and MSIs from developing Model O-II learning systems even as they profess commitment to supporting the academic success and social mobility of students from LIMCCs?

2. (2) How does fear-based management contribute to K-16 educators’ coerced complicity with Model O-I learning systems in their schools’ organizational environments?

3. (3) How might cross-sector professional learning opportunities for K-12 teachers in urban schools and college faculty in MSIs support the resolution of their shared knowing–doing gap?

Common Challenges to Establishing O-II Learning Systems in Urban Schools and MSIs

Urban schools and MSIs have in common that both types of school organizations possess an organizational memory that sets precedent for teacher behavior and performance. In their chapter on how organizational memory can inhibit original thinking and preserve knowing–doing gaps by trapping organizational members in the past, Pfeffer and Sutton (Reference Pfeffer and Sutton2000) explain:

Pfeffer and Sutton further elaborated that managers use organizational memory to reaffirm their commitments to the cultural norms and values that distinguish their organization from its competitors, and to maintain a sense of stability across the organization’s history. Organizational memory helps individuals make efficient choices from action strategies already available for use in their behavioral worlds, but it can also compel people to keep quiet rather than confront persistent organizational challenges. In this way, organizational memory can threaten the organization’s effectiveness at learning to prevent recurring errors over time. The indelible influence of organizational memory is a common feature K-16 educators working with students from LIMCCs experience that has presents common challenges for establishing Model O-II learning systems across K-16 contexts.

Pfeffer and Sutton’s discussion of how organizational memory perpetuates knowing–doing gaps is reminiscent of what we have discussed at length from an action science perspective throughout this book. We have seen that urban schools and MSIs alike possess organizational memories that include longstanding theories of action about how to work with students from LIMCCs. Integrating Pfeffer and Sutton’s work on the knowing–doing gap provides insights as to how the memory of these theories of action can produce defensive interpersonal norms, intergroup relations, and group dynamics in school organizations that espouse Model I theories-in-use. For example, their research suggests that organizational memory is facilitated by the concept of “social proof,” which compels individuals in the same organizational environment to automatically imitate others when they are unsure about how they or the organization should act. This concept is analogous to the concepts of ritual stance (Chapter 7) and ritual nature (Chapter 12), as well as the earlier review of Tomasello?s research on cultural learning which demonstrated that new members of a cultural group will overimitate trusted demonstrators to fit in with others – even to the point of bypassing previously successful strategies - in order to copy seemingly irrelevant actions.

Tomasello’s (Reference Tomasello2016a) research also suggests that social pressures amongst an organization’s members are a critical mechanism for preserving organizational memory. His work demonstrated that new members of a culture do not just act like others in the same cultural group, they learn to conform to the group’s expectations, and later to “contribute themselves to the creation of such shared expectations” (p. 650; Tomasello, Reference Tomasello, Kruger and Ratner1993). These social pressures contribute to the practice shock many teachers experience in the encounter phase of organizational socialization. Across K-16 contexts, teacher tendencies to fall back on their limited cultural understandings under pressure evoke what Pfeffer and Sutton discussed in their work as “permanence tendency, [or] the inclination of most human beings [to] seek closure, to freeze on past knowledge, and [to] avoid evidence that disconfirms what they believe” (p. 88). Pfeffer and Sutton identified four conditions in which permanence tendency is likely to be activated that contribute to Model I learning conditions for individuals in the same organizational environment: (1) when they need to make a decision under time constraints; (2) when they are tired and lack the energy for processing new information; (3) when they are in any conditions that reduce their abilities to process information (e.g., experiencing fear or anxiety); and (4) when significant others in their organization are seeking closure.

A second challenge urban schools and MSIs have in common that keep them from establishing Model O-II learning systems concerns their organizational defensive routines. Argyris (Reference Argyris1993) explained:

Argyris explained that organizational defensive routines are facilitated by processes of camouflage and protection. Furthermore, organizational defensive routines facilitate coerced complicity with dysfunctional organizational norms, intergroup relations, and group dynamics by making it so that not only do individuals work to cover up undiscussable inconsistencies, they also come to expect that others will collude with them to keep these inconsistencies undiscoverable. These policies and actions are considered routines because they recur continually regardless of individual personalities that come and go from the organization.

Similarly, Pfeffer and Sutton (Reference Pfeffer and Sutton2000) observed that most behavior within organizations is “rooted in a set of theoretical assumptions about organizations and people that are implicit and, as a consequence, not directly examined or questioned” (p. 89). They also alluded to the influence organizational defensive routines have on thinking and action in Model O-I learning systems in a brief discussion of a case study of New York City public schools in their book:

Next, I provide some recommendations for future research on how to reconcile the challenges organizational memory and defensive routines pose to achieving alignment between an organization’s theories of action and theories-in-use in urban schools and MSIs based on implications of both constructs from the knowing–doing gap literature.

Recommendations for Future Research on Organizational Memory and Defensive Routines

Pfeffer and Sutton (Reference Pfeffer and Sutton2000) identified five ways that organizations stay stuck in the past that are facilitated by defensive routines (pp. 91–92). Here I build upon insights from the knowing–doing gap literature to adapt those criteria for use in developing some general recommendations for school organizations serving LIMCCs that feature Model O-I learning systems:

1. (1) Schools need new identities as learning organizations that actively work to integrate the cultural norms, values, and knowledge students from LIMCCs bring to the classroom. Whether starting a new organization or a new subdivision within a preexisting school organization, urban schools and MSIs need clean breaks from their reputations as social institutions that train students to conform to dominant mainstream cultural norms. New school organizations or subdivisions working on implementing Model O-II learning systems might use the same or different practices for designing organizations as traditional school systems, but they need new rules, policies, practices, and procedures that take into account that there is no longer a typical American student.

2. (2) Schools must recognize that adapting organizational policies, practices, and procedures to demographic changes in the student population is a more urgent priority than remaining consistent with what has worked in the past. School organizations should be seeking to develop and implement new rules, policies, and procedures that feel inconsistent with previous ways of managing cultural differences between students and their teachers.

3. (3) School leaders must tend to the psychological well-being of their employees in order to retain them over time, particularly to the dimensions of their work with students from LIMCCs that increase their perceptions of role ambiguity and job stress. School leaders can increase teacher retention rates by taking into account that organizational members have strong needs to avoid ambiguity and seek cognitive closure in their environments. For example, Pfeffer and Sutton’s research found that the need for cognitive closure facilitates the permanence tendency discussed earlier, which ultimately reduces their propensities for taking effective action.

4. (4) School leaders must critically reflect on and challenge the extent to which organizational decision-making processes are based on implicit and untested models of behavior and performance (for both students and teachers). Reconciling the dissonance between an organization’s espoused theories and theories-in-use about their students’ cultures requires a clear acknowledgement from school leaders that their decisions in the past have been based on untested mental models of behavior and performance.

5. (5) Schools must work to challenge and disrupt faculty and staff expectations that the past informs what is and is not possible, or what can and cannot be done in the present and future. This is a primary goal of framebreaking and deuterolearning, and a critical precondition for establishing the cross-sector partnerships between urban teachers and college faculty working with students from LIMCCs that I envision later in this chapter might produce more professional learning opportunities for educators working with students from LIMCCs across K-16 contexts.

Accounting for K-16 Educators’ Coerced Complicity with Model O-I Learning Systems in Urban Schools and MSIs

Just as Argyris reasoned that people avoid risk-taking within organizations because they do not want to offend or upset others, Pfeffer and Sutton similarly argued that knowing–doing gaps are maintained in organizations run by fear-based management, which are characterized by defensive norms, intergroup relationships, and group dynamics:

They also argue that fear-based management encourages data falsification and inhibits the organization’s ability to learn, because people who are afraid to take risks or make mistakes have more reason to lie about or blame others for organizational failures in order to avoid punishment or upsetting their bosses. Employees managed by fear are thus said to be more likely to work at outdoing or undermining others, since there are few clear organizational incentives for doing working collectively in an environment that places stronger emphasis on short-term outcomes at the individual level than organizational effectiveness in the long run. This discussion is consistent with Argyris’s argument that individuals within organizations will engage in “fancy footwork” (Chapter 4) to avoid accounting for inconsistencies in their actions, to deny these inconsistencies even exist, or to blame other people for the inconsistencies, as well as the Model I governing values of maximizing winning and minimizing losing, and minimizing eliciting negative feelings.

Pfeffer and Sutton (Reference Pfeffer and Sutton2000) defined fear-based management approaches as those in which:

Fear-based approaches generate organizational conditions in which people are punished for pointing out what is going wrong and rewarded for sticking to the status quo. Describing Model O-I–like conditions in a discussion of how individuals incur negative consequences at work, Pfeffer and Sutton explained, “Even when people are courageous enough to question old ways of doing things, and provide good reasons why these practices should be discarded and replaced, they are often ignored or rebuked” (p. 70). Their work also highlighted a psychological concept called the MUM effect, “which means that people try to distance themselves from bad news. People don’t want to deliver bad news to others because they fear they will be blamed by association, a worry that numerous psychological experiments demonstrate is well-founded” (pp. 121–122). Pfeffer and Sutton’s description of environments managed by fear mirrors the Model I governing values of being rational and minimizing emotionality and achieving a purpose as the actor perceives it, as well as action strategies taken to unilaterally protect oneself in Model I behavioral worlds.

Next, I provide some recommendations for future research on how to combat fear-based inaction in urban schools and MSIs based on implications from the knowing–doing gap literature.

Recommendations for Combatting Fear-Based Inaction in Urban Schools and MSIs

Pfeffer and Sutton recommended seven ways organizations can drive fear-based inaction out of their environments (pp. 132–133). Here I adapt three of them for use in generating further insights from the knowing–doing gap literature for combatting fear-based inaction in urban schools and MSIs:

1. (1) School leaders should publicly praise and promote teachers who point out the organizational actions, policies, procedures, and rules that are incongruent with a commitment to promoting academic success and well-being for students from LIMCCs. School leaders can facilitate a shift from Model O-I to Model O-II learning systems by making it normal for teachers to surface incongruities between the organization’s espoused theories and theories-in-use about students from LIMCCs. This is critically important for surfacing the ways in which those incongruities inhibit the organization’s capability to learn about how it learns (deuterolearning) – particularly how it has learned from the past to enact standardized practices that are less effective in school environments featuring more diverse students.

2. (2) School leaders should clearly communicate that the only way to fail at learning across student–teacher cultural differences is by avoiding information that does not align with prior thinking about students’ cultures. Pfeffer and Sutton encouraged leaders to invest resources in creating opportunities to facilitate framebreaking (albeit with different language): “One of the most powerful interventions we have uncovered to free people from the unconscious power of implicit theory: making people think carefully about the assumptions implicit in the practices and interventions they are advocating” (p. 92). School leaders can explore teachers’ cultural frames of reference for working with students from LIMCCs (as well as their own) by actively encouraging them to first identify those cultural frames of reference, and to be open to adjusting them when necessary to accommodate sources of cultural knowledge from within those communities that they may not have previously considered.

3. (3) School leaders should openly talk about what they have learned from their own failures, and encourage others to share their failures by cultivating a workplace environment in which people receive second and third chances. School leaders can combat the MUM effect – as well as the effects of fancy footwork and organizational defensive routines – by acting intentionally to encourage open communication about dimensions of students’ lived experiences outside the classroom that teachers do not fully understand. In creating such space for open dialogue, the leader might consider establishing clear guidelines for engaging in open dialogue, to help teachers avoid blaming or shaming one another for what they do not know.

Next, I expand on the recommendations presented in this chapter to conclude with some final thoughts on the behavioral worlds K-16 educators working with students from LIMCCs share in common.

Bridging the Behavioral Worlds of K-16 Educators Working with Students from LIMCCs

As noted in the previous section, Pfeffer and Sutton identified some processes quite similar to Argyris’s descriptions of framebreaking and deuterolearning as mechanisms for reconciling a knowing–doing gap:

Framebreaking can enable deuterolearning about how school faculty and staff learn about their students’ cultures in urban schools and minority serving institutions as leaders reflect upon how fear-based management practices foster dysfunctional norms, intergroup relations, and group dynamics that prohibit teachers from engaging double-loop learning about the limitations of their cultural lenses. In this final section, I argue that this work depends on bridging the behavioral worlds of K-12 urban teachers and college faculty in MSIs to facilitate cross-sector professional learning opportunities that reflect their common challenges supporting students from LIMCCs in diverse classrooms.

In this book I have argued that urban teachers and college faculty working with students from LIMCCs work in very different institutional contexts, but in very similar behavioral worlds. K-12 and college faculty receive a societal curriculum on how to interpret cultural differences between their students that is rife with deficit assumptions and narratives about students from LIMCCs; by the time they get to teacher education and training programs, they possess fully formed cultural beliefs and worldviews acquired over the course of a lifespan. Hiring criteria in K-12 and higher education contexts alike do not assess for teachers’ cultural worldviews. In K-12 contexts, teachers’ good intentions are mistaken for indicators of their readiness to support student success for all students in multicultural classrooms, and college faculty are typically not evaluated by their readiness to manage differences between themselves and their students in a culturally responsive manner. As a result, the majority of K-16 educators working with student from LIMCCs are directly exposed to their students’ cultural worldviews for the first time in the classroom – at which time it can be alarming to the teacher to realize that they do not know enough about their students’ lives outside the classroom. Furthermore, the good intentions they enter the profession with are tested immediately as they learn through the experience of practice shock that the work of managing multicultural classrooms requires developing skilled cultural competencies. Thereafter, good intentions are tested as often as teachers realize they have very little time or opportunity to develop those competencies, and that even when they do possess these skills, they are generally unable to use them in their roles due to environmental constraints on their agency and autonomy at work.

Just as K-12 urban teachers realize they are expected to prioritize meeting accountability-oriented standards over students’ well-being in practice, their college faculty counterparts are evaluated on the basis of their abilities to produce scholarly output and maintain high grade-point averages in their courses. Across both sectors, K-16 educators working with students from LIMCCs are interpreting their workplace experiences using mental models of their students’ lives outside the classroom that are rarely discussed, but which surface in how they talk about and act in response to their students. In both contexts, educators lack professional learning opportunities for discussing how their own cultural lenses shape their thinking and actions at work, and are actually incentivized to ignore their feelings at work altogether by pressures to meet work standards tied to external accountability and stakeholder systems. School leaders and college administrators are focused on meeting the expectations of external stakeholders to the extent that they ignore dysfunctional norms, intergroup relations, and group dynamics within a school system - often without realizing that doing so ultimately diminishes the organization’s effectiveness at learning from errors made in the long run. I have developed an interdisciplinary argument for why this human capital challenge – instructors who know that culturally responsive teaching and pedagogy exist but are unable to enact it in practice – is attributable to an interaction between the instructor’s personal characteristics and the organizational dynamics of their school workplace environments.

Throughout the book, I have highlighted ways in which these organizational dynamics are influenced by top-down pressures from leaders and administrators in K-16 school contexts. Future research might explore how these top-down pressures school leaders and administrators exert on teachers working in urban schools and MSIs mirror those that leaders and administrators themselves receive from external stakeholders. Such an inquiry would serve to determine how school leaders and administrators might moderate the strength of those pressures such that K-16 educators working with students from LIMCCs have increased cognitive capacity for cultural learning at work. In the meantime, I conclude by elaborating on two of three interrelated processes that Pfeffer and Sutton argued explain why poor management persists to maintain knowing–doing gaps in organizations that are particularly relevant to themes explored in this book.

The first explanation Pfeffer and Sutton identified is that organizations use oversimplified or inaccurate models of behavior in developing measurement and managerial practices. In this book, we have seen that beginning in their preservice teacher education programs, K-12 teachers in urban schools are introduced to models of teaching and learning that are difficult to adapt to the culturally specific needs of students from LIMCCS, and that their peers in higher education similarly work with mental models of “traditional students” that do not reflect the reality of student demographics in American society today. As a result, students from LIMCCs are considered nontraditional because they do not reflect the middle-class and white cultural values embedded in the societal, hidden, and formal curricula urban teachers reference when making sense of cultural communities with whom they otherwise have very little direct contact. Similarly, college faculty are hired on the basis of their content knowledge and scholarly output, not their abilities to establish classroom environments characterized by minimally defensive interpersonal norms and group dynamics.

Across K-12 and higher education contexts, educators working with students from LIMCCs are checked for good intentions on the way in - but little else is required of them to demonstrate cultural competencies for managing multicultural classrooms in ways that promote success for all students equitably. Neither sector has designed tools for assessing the extent to which educators of students from LIMCCs have knowledge of their cultural realities beyond deficit stereotypes and other misrepresentations of LIMCCs in the societal curriculum.

Oversimplified models of human behavior in urban schools and MSIs are harmful to both instructors and students; teachers are characterized as well-intentioned do-gooders who can do no wrong as long as they are trying to help disadvantaged students, and students from LIMCCs are seen as a monolithic group of “others” who must assimilate into dominant cultural norms in order to be successful in school and society. As Pfeffer and Sutton (Reference Pfeffer and Sutton2000) note:

Here, Pfeffer and Sutton’s work suggests that oversimplified models of human behavior may be linked to the perpetuation of Model I theories-in-use and Model O-I learning systems in urban schools and MSIs, where school leaders and administrators can purport to be effective managers so long as they do not check for recurring errors in how teachers manage student–teacher cultural differences. Instead, school leaders socialize educators in urban schools and MSIs to measure their effectiveness in terms of their abilities to produce student progress in the form of quantifiable measures such as accountability-oriented testing standards and high grade-point averages in their courses.

Such measures speak to the second explanation Pfeffer and Sutton provided for how poor management practices persist to maintain knowing–doing gaps: measuring the wrong indicators of organizational effectiveness. They explain: “[S]hareholder concerns create pressures for measurement practices that are relevant to shareholders’ interests but may be irrelevant or even counterproductive for the ultimate success of the [organization]” (p. 157). Though speaking to external shareholder concerns is beyond the scope of this book, there was substantial evidence across both the systematic review and the empirical data that K-16 educators working with LIMCCs often experience a tension between taking actions they believe to be in the student’s best interests and those they must take to fulfill their formally assigned role responsibilities. Future research on teacher thinking in urban schools and MSIs might explore in more depth the extent to which the informal indicators effective teachers of students from LIMCCs use to measure their effectiveness at work align with measurement practices that are relevant to various stakeholders in the institutional contexts surrounding K-12 and higher education sectors respectively. Furthermore, it might explore the argument that there is inherent bias in teacher evaluation standards used across K-16 contexts that inherently disadvantages students from LIMCCS, because these standards do not account for whether or not educators are equipped to support the culturally specific instructional and classroom management needs of students from LIMCCs in diverse classrooms.

Since 1988, the Core Knowledge Sequence developed by education researcher E. D. Hirsch has provided guidance to parents, teachers, school leaders, and district leaders across the country on essential curricular and instructional standards for K-12 schools. Given what we know of how students from LIMCCs experience challenges acclimating to the dominant cultural norms in K-12 spaces that persist across the high school-to-college transition, we might ask ourselves in a similar fashion to the style of that series: What do educators of students from LIMCCs need to know? Developing this answer would require collaborative, cross-sector partnerships between educators who know firsthand that they have more in common than not when it comes to managing diverse classrooms. A key facilitator in creating cultural knowledge standards could be developing collaborative, cross-sector partnerships between the K-16 educators who work with them across the lifespan in the classroom. If the goal is to support students from LIMCCs to achieve their highest academic potential, K-12 urban teachers and college faculty in MSIs need one another to develop practical solutions for providing culturally repsonsive care for students from LIMCCs through their teaching and classroom management styles. K-12 urban teachers can learn from college faculty working in MSIs about how to prepare their students proactively for navigating academic spaces that often fail to recognize students’ cultural capital as assets that support their long-term success, and college faculty have much to learn from their K-12 counterparts on the social and systemic origins of what may appear to the untrained eye as disruptive student incivility. Even as these groups begin learning from one another, the question remains: will their institutions permit them to put their good intentions to work in practice?