Big Ideas related to the Internal Coherence Project

The Internal Coherence project draws heavily from the work of Harvard University Professor Richard Hackman, whose book Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances (Harvard Business School Press, 2002), identifies specific structural features that foster work team effectiveness. His book is designed to help leaders maximize the likelihood that teams in the organization will perform well, by drawing attention to five high-impact conditions for them to focus on as they design and support the work of teams.

According to the social cognitive theory popularized by Albert Bandura (1997), efficacy beliefs are the key mechanism of individual and organizational agency, or the choices individuals and groups make to engage in activities in pursuit of specific goals. The stronger a teacher or a faculty’s perception of their capability to attain a given goal, the more likely they are to pursue that goal and put forth the effort necessary to achieve success (Goddard, Logerfo et al., 2004; Bandura, 1997).

According to Harvard Business School Professor Amy Emondson (2002), the notion of organizational learning has been explored in the management literature for decades. In this field, the emphasis is on an organization’s ability to adapt to a constantly shifting environment more quickly than its competitors. To remain viable, the logic goes, organizations require flexibility, responsiveness, and the ability to create new capabilities among their employees.

The notion of Internal Accountability was developed shortly before the authorization of the No Child Left Behind policy in 2001, when external accountability environments were on the rise. The theory driving the research was that external accountability systems operate on the margins of powerful factors operating inside schools, and that understanding these internal factors would be a precondition to understanding how and why schools responded the way they did to external pressures for accountability. In other words, Richard Elmore and his research team were interested in understanding the internal variables responsible for the school-site variation in response to state and local accountability structures.