Lecture Hall: Ebony Bridwell-Mitchell

She's interested in understanding how organizations work — their internal processes and how they produce the outcomes they do. And schools, as organizations, are her specialty. For Assistant Professor Ebony Bridwell- Mitchell, this means looking at three big external forces, or institutional pressures, that influence organizations: regulatory pressure, normative pressure, and mimetic pressure. In August, not long after she arrived on campus from Brown University, where she had been teaching since 2008, the Cambridge-raised Bridwell-Mitchell explained to Ed. what these pressures mean, the influences that led her to do this work, and why she sometimes lets her "research brain" chill out.

Explain what you mean by these three "big pressures." Regulatory pressure refers to the laws and policies that schools have to follow as well as the cultural values that shape laws and policies. Normative pressure concerns the norms and values that come from the professions, the pressures from the field that determine what organizations should be doing. And mimetic pressure is not the law or the profession's way of doing things; it's looking around at what other organizations are doing.

What's an example of how these pressures work in school? Say I'm a teacher. I really want to do great things for my students. I put every piece of energy out there to get these 32 kids to reach their potentials, but try as I might, I can't reach all of the outcomes I was hoping for. There could be many reasons for this, and not all of them are within a teacher's control. Some of them are the result of organizational dynamics, such as the way the organization might be constrained by laws and policies, or the way professionals, like school leaders, are trained to do their jobs, or the access that teachers do or do not have to best practices.

In your research, you talk about how most examinations of schools are focused on the "technical core." What do you mean? The technical core is the learning and teaching that goes on in the classroom. This is important, of course, and at the core of what happens at a school, but classroom learning and teaching is only one component that determines how effective a school, as an organization, will actually be. There are other factors like the leadership style of the principal, how teachers work together, understanding how teachers are motivated, and understanding how activities in the classroom are constrained by external factors, such as institutional pressures.

Why are people sometimes reluctant to think of schools as organizations? Because people hear the word organization and think business, and many educators resist the influence of business logics and practices in the education sector.

Why the personal interest in schools and education? The study of schools is imprinted on me. Both of my parents are committed to human development. My mom is a professor of education at Cambridge College. My dad is director of a community action agency. So there's a nurturing environment that takes my focus toward schools and their ability to help young people fulfill their potentials.

That focus includes teaching in a public school after getting your master's at the Harvard Kennedy School. I ended up at a public middle school in Brooklyn, N.Y. I taught for three years; one of those years I was an instructional lead teacher. One thing I learned: Policy gets lost when you're on the ground. Organizational dynamics come to take precedence. That's how I became fascinated with what was happening in organizations.

Do you miss the classroom? There are days when I really, really miss it, mostly because there is really no other professional experience, at least for me, where the amount you invest multiplies so quickly. The 10 minutes I spend talking to this child, teaching her how to read this sentence, is so immediate and so rewarding. The way you experience human development, there's nothing like it.

What kind of students do you hope to see in your classes here? Students who say, "I want to improve education, either at the building level, state level, or national level, but I have to understand how schools work." Being able to recognize the importance of organizational dynamics is critical.

You love reading trashy fantasy novels because the … Trolls and wizards let me use an entirely different part of my brain than that required by my research. It's like letting my research brain take a nap without actually going to sleep.