MAKING SENSE OF AN UNCOORDINATED APPROACH TO CURRICULAR TRANSITIONS AND STANDARDISATION BETWEEN TWO MODERN LANGUAGES DEPARTMENTS, A CASE STUDY

Th is case study begins by identifying a need for empirical studies in the fi eld of psychodynamics, namely empirical studies on basic-assumption behaviour in schools. It proceeds to explore the causes behind an uncoordinated approach to curricular transitions and standardisation practices between two modern language departments using a psychodynamic approach. By drawing on data provided by focus groups, evidence is provided for the existence of basic-assumption behaviour, which stifl es cooperation and eff ective curricular transitions across two divisions. A range of aff ective containment strategies are suggested to address the basic-assumption behaviour and change the organisational culture.


Introduction
One of the roles of educational organisations is that of managing or smoothening transitions; Others may even suggest that this is indeed their primary task, as suggested by the popular adage that schools should prepare students for university and real life.
From a social interactionist lens, the many transitions of young learners across their educational trajectories constitute a very complex subject as personal agency, biographical elements, and ethnic and socioeconomic realities interface with societal, institutional, and cultural factors (Cuconato & Walther, 2015, p. 286). In the European context, ample research exists on this subject as many in the eld of Educational Research recognise the importance of transitions to ward o against loss of motivation (Pohl & Walther, 2007;Walther, 2009 as cited by Cuconato and Walther).
In the age of lifelong learning, with many young learners and adults prolonging their academic journeys in response to a progressively more competitive job market (Tang, Zhang, & Youyi, 2023, p. 18), the role of e ective transitions becomes paramount. is is especially true regarding the transition between middle school and high school; customarily, when more accountability is placed upon students while it is also expected that students take ownership of their learning process.
Careful planning should thus go into transitions, especially between middle school and high school, as these are critical periods that can forever alter the course of a student's life. Such a transition can be de ned as "[a] passage [which] confronts young people with new [adult] expectations, status, and practices, and contributes to their positioning in a segmented labour market and an unequal society. " (Cuconato & Walther, 2015, p. 286) Although this study does focus on individual student trajectories, it preoccupies itself with the role that organisational cultures and the underlying group dynamics can encourage or sti e meaningful organisational change. In its forty years of existence, the international school that is the object of study has not fully smoothened curricular transitions between its three divisions Vítor Manuel Oliveira de Passos Vítor Manuel Oliveira de Passos Making Sense of an Uncoordinated Approach Making Sense of an Uncoordinated Approach 143 142 and many departmental iterations. e reasons behind such incoordination will be theorised by critically analysing the unconscious responses and defences within two of their most well-established workgroups, the high school (HS) and middle school (MS) modern languages departments. A Tavistock/psychodynamic approach is the foremost methodology for analysing unconscious processes within workgroups. Clinicians and scholars within this eld have produced voluminous literature revealing that organisations and the groups that constitute them operate within conscious and unconscious realms that negatively in uence their constituents' stress and happiness levels (Obholzer & Roberts, 2019, p. 17).
We begin by providing a contextual basis for this study, followed by a literature review on the main tenants and methodological tools of psychodynamics and important ontological considerations. Finally, the data gathered from two focus group sessions across both modern language departments are critically analysed, followed by the nal section, which preoccupies itself with providing a ective containment (Bion,1961) strategies and opportunities for further research.

One School Three Divisions
e international school in question is in central Europe in a Germanspeaking country. It caters to upper-class and upper-middle-class children and the children of foreign nationals with international postings. e school has three divisions: the middle school shares a building with the high school, and the elementary school operates in a separate building.
One director oversees three vice-principals, each being the de facto leader of their respective division, operating relatively independently from each other. e senior leadership team, including the director, answers to a board of governors formed by parents of students or notable alumni.

Hierarchy
Although this study focusses on the group dynamics of two modern Setting a di erent course from her predecessor, who prioritised bureaucratic aspects including curriculum, the newly appointed Dean of Curriculum sought to bridge the gaps between divisions and department areas and establish a more comprehensive collaboration agenda as well as standardisation and moderation habits. Some faculty perceived this new appointment as an alteration to the organisation's external sphere. e conditions were set for anxiety and fear to take hold, emotions known to lead to basic assumption behaviour, a counter-productive form of group behaviour which sti es productivity (Dale & James, 2015, p. 43

Psychodynamics as a Methodology
Psychodynamics o ers unique insight into some of the unconscious reasons promoting positive, meaningful mindsets that promote rather than sti e optimal mental health (Bion, 1961). Similarly, for meaningful change to occur at an organisational level, researchers should intersect social analysis with psychodynamic research and draw generalisations from their ndings (Obhlozer & Roberts, 1994) while also considering how racism, homophobia, and chauvinism may in uence the outcome of the research.
One of the main critiques against clinicians employing the psychodynamic method is a tendency to xate on falsi ability, testability, and validity whilst disregarding the importance of re exivity, and the aforementioned systemic elements and how these may a ect research ndings (Meyers, 2015, p. 18 within an organisation. In Experiences in Groups (1961), Bion provides evidence of neurotic, irrational and contradicting behaviour of individuals operating in groups which stems, to a great extent, from unconscious processes (p. 53). He remains the most cited author in psychoanalytic scholarship, second only to Freud (Levine and Brown, 2013, p. 1) and his intersubjective theory of thinking helped psychologists understand that trauma originates from the mother-child dyad (p. 245). Roberts and Oblozher (2019), who suggested a ective containment strategies as a deterrence to basic assumption behaviour within organisations.

Psychodynamic Studies on School Organizational Cultures
Despite the re-emergence of Psychodynamics in the eld of education during the last twenty years, empirical studies on the opportunities and challenges that psychodynamics poses for research on teachers are scant (Storey, Nimroody, Prout, Rice, & Ho man, 2023, p. 14).
is contrasts with a backdrop of growing studies highlighting the enormous potential that the psychodynamics methodology o ers to promote optimal mental health in schools. Ryan & Jenkins (2020), for instance, looked at how partnerships between health professionals and schools help combat basic exclusionary practices and in the school communities and allow for generalised bene ts. at study also concludes that schools are organisations where sta are particularly prone to exhibit paranoid-schizoid states and defences given that many of these institutions are understa ed, underfunded, and overcrowded as is the case in many schools across the England (p.58).
Storey, Nimroody, Prout, Rice & Ho man (2023) identi ed schools in the U.S. as the primary institution for mental health for a staggering three out of four children (p.14). According to that study, there is a growing discrepancy between school managers and teachers; the former tend to prioritise the mental health of children more so than the latter (p.27). However, most educators see the promotion of mental health of a child as part of their role and are the most privileged in spotting potential mental health issues among students. It is, however, important to determine the extent to which teachers, especially in secondary schools, o en portrayed as conveyors of knowledge, are appropriately equipped to handle the growing number of students with socio-emotional issues among students in their care (Dietrich, 2021, p. 323).
Psychodynamic studies over the last three years address mainly teacher preparedness in the social-emotional eld (Dietrich, 2021;Williams & Moser, 2021;Martin et al.,2022), o en disregarding organisational and psychological challenges faced by teachers (de Passos, 2021). is study thusly seeks to address this gap in knowledge by looking at the way that basicassumption behaviour (Bion, 1961) among teachers acts as a deterrence for important curricular and classroom reforms to take place.

Basic Assumption Group Mentality vs Work Group Mentality
It is important to establish what is group mentality, namely the machinery of intercommunication designed to ensure that group life is in accordance with basic assumptions (Bion, 1961, p. 66). It is o en at odds with the individual's motivations and desires. Whenever the individual behaves in a way that challenges the basic assumptions of the group, this will impact them negatively in the eyes of the group.
A basic assumption group (BAG) is phenomena that take place when a group (a band of individuals sharing a common goal) nd themselves under stress caused by external realities which, in turn, leads to the group's primary task going ignored while group dynamics prevail. BAGs are the opposite of work groups, consisting of groups which operate more regularly and e ectively, focussed on completing the main reason for their existence, their primary task. In the case of the basic-assumption group, however, the primary task is subverted by basic assumption behaviour and group survival replaces the primary task. Bion (1961) provides a suite of mechanisms for clinicians and researchers to identify basic assumption mentality and how it manifests within a group. ese will be the primary instruments operationalised in this study to help understand the reasons for the uncoordinated approach between both departments. e premise for BAG is that a single basic assumption is prevalent at each given time, although these can change within years, months, or hours depending on the BAG (Bion, 1961, p. 154). Another important prerequisite is that every BAG has a leader even if, in the case of pairing groups, this leader is unborn or yet to appear; An inanimate object or the very history of the group can act as its leader if no group member rises to assume the leadership role. is will be especially pertinent to help understand the manifest resistance to change that was so manifest in both modern language departments.

Pairing/Dependency
Pairing happens when BAG is convinced that problems can only be adequately addressed by a messiah-like gure from which the group obtains a sense of security (Bion, 1961, p. 67).
Groups experiencing a stage of pairing have the absence of a leader as a prerequisite. Pairing groups exist and function around messianic hope (p. 152), depositing blind faith upon an unborn leader who will solve every problem at some unknown point in the future and protect the group from external threats. is leader does not necessarily need to be a person but can also be an object, existing policy, or simply falling back to the "this is the way we have always done things" prerogative.
An example of pairing was when the HS department functioned without a department head for an entire academic year. e absence of a leader allowed for important planning tasks to be set aside, especially tasks aimed at promoting better coordination across divisions.
is is interpreted by some adopting the Tavistock tradition as forestalling (Bion, 1961, p. 153), albeit such an interpretation of hope is reductive. Authors following a Freudian school of thought are prone to reduce hope to simple wishful lment (Groarke, 2018, p. 365 as cited by Passos, 2021, p.1), leaving out many kinds of hope exist, and that leaders can operationalise the concept itself as a powerful instrument to refocus their sta .

Fight/Flight
When a group identi es a common enemy, they enter a stage of unity that manifests into ght or ight (p. 67). When the leader of such a group passes on decisions that do not fall under aggression ( ght) or escaping from a commonly accepted enemy ( ight), their requests go unanswered. During his eldwork as a clinician, Bion (1961) provoked one of his therapy groups into a state of ght-ight by simply remaining silent for most of the session, thusly inciting group participants to unite against him as a threat against the group and going so far as attempting to nd a new leader (p. 71).
A practical example was when the new department head, under request from the senior leadership team, requested that high school teachers create a simpler version of a given scheme of work to facilitate planning for middle school ML teachers. Only two out of seven department members produced the overviews in three months despite repeated requests. Such behaviour reinforces the theory that unwelcome change, spurred by the senior management team, was seen as the enemy, leading to the department head's multiple requests and reminders going unanswered.
ere seems to be little consensus on the de nitions of transference, introjection, projection and splitting. e descriptions of these unconscious defences have evolved signi cantly over time. Introjection was initially de ned as the absorbing of positive experiences into oneself, while projection was once labelled as the process of wishing bad experiences away (De Board, 1978, p. 18).
Within the context of this study, introjection is the process of incorporating someone else's feelings as our own, while projection is the transmission of our own feelings to someone else (Dale & James, 2015, p. 94). ese processes are essential mechanisms of personality-building, studied in the eld of psychodynamics to explain both group and organisational behaviours while remaining exceptionally relevant to measure the e cacy of leadership approaches.
Melanie Klein (1964) identi ed a fourth phenomenon: splitting which reduces a range of di erent emotions to the categories of good/right or bad/ wrong (Obholzer & Roberts, 1994, p. 13). Splitting is of particular interest within organisational settings during periods of change/crisis as employees tend to use splitting as subconscious responses to new expectations or unwelcomed change as is the case in this study with the introduction of new, increased, curricular expectations for faculty members.
Processes of denial and avoidance stand as common characteristics of the basic assumption group (Obholzer & Roberts, 1994); In such groups, leaders tend to focus on trivial subjects or resort to narcissistic displays that o en favour quick e ortless solutions to external threats over carefully thought, long term solutions. Demoralised employees remain doubtful of their own agency and ability to enact meaningful change which helps BAG mentality proliferate (p. 43).
In organisational settings, formal and informal work contexts interface to create the lived experience of employees. Authors such as Dejours (2009 as cited by Czander, 2017, p. 19) tell us that work is at the very core of our lives and a ective experiences; Work can provide pleasure, subjective expansion, and freedom while also being able to in ict wounds to the ego and induce pathological su ering. Our own psychic needs will ultimately in uence our experiences at work. O en it is not possible for an employee to achieve ful lment at work due to several reasons be they systemic or individual. e resulting, frustrated expectations can lead to narcissistic wounds and unintended behavioural responses. According to scholars in the eld of psychodynamics, when facing psychic con icts, the individual is le with two choices: either to seek a di erent source of psychic grati cation or resort to the psychological defences (Czander, 1993, p. 7).
Groups are generally averse to change, and external threats that might jeopardise the status quo. Such resistance is especially salient in educational organisations, conservative in nature (Dale & James, 2015, p. 93).

Symbolic Interactionism
A symbolic interactionist approach is at the core of this study, and one of its main tenants is that the active construction of meaning, that our interpretations of truth are socially constructed and that we negotiate our own versions of truth with others living as social beings (Hammersley, 2019, p. 4).
Researchers must be prepared for surprises that may even change the course of the research itself. is concept was rst coined by Blumer (as cited by Hammersley, 2019), who postulates that purely quantitative methods are not ideal in sociology as these o en fail to take context and systemic elements into account.
One of the most salient criticisms faced by symbolic interactionist approaches is how they o en fail to place hypotheses through rigorous testing (Gouldner, 1971, p. 498), as most interpretations hold a fair share of truth and falsehood.
is is an outdated, positivistic perspective that no longer holds merit in a modern, complex world where mental health issues can hardly be addressed with a one-size-ts-all approach, especially in sociological research. e primary data-gathering method employed in this study is the focus group method which directly derives from symbolic interactionism, nding purchase on the assumption that understanding social phenomena is not undertaken by the individual in isolation but through social interactions (Bryman, 2012, p. 504). In the context of group dynamics, focus groups are bene cial. is method o ers an opportunity to gauge the individual's tendency to forego their personality and personal needs over the needs Within the context of this study, some participants tended to control the narrative and course of the session, whilst others were more prone to go silent and avoided di cult questions. It was also quite challenging to divorce my role of department head from my role as moderator, as I believe some participants could have perhaps contributed further had I been an external researcher.
Focus groups provide participants with an opportunity to re ect on their own agency in enacting or sti ing A ective Change within the organization.
Incidentally, and despite the social nature of focus groups, very few studies operationalising this method draw inferences from the group dynamics of participants. Kitzinger (1994, as cited by Bryman, 2012) reviewed over two hundred studies across ve decades and concluded that most data were reported no di erently than had the method been individual interviews (p. 514).
Incidentally, a common expectation of the focus group moderator is to help the conversation stay its course, providing every participant with the opportunity to voice their opinions. e most powerful argument for adopting focus groups is the method's suitability for action-research-oriented projects, which is what this pilot research enquiry proposes. As Crabtree et al. (1993, p. 146, as cited by Barbour, 2008, pg.33) suggest that it is possible to simultaneously use focus groups as a data collection tool and intervention (p. 33). is is essential in the context of this study, as it is its long-term goal to propose solutions to rectify such basic assumption behaviour.

Ethical and Ontological Considerations:
As a researcher working for the same organisation that is the object of this study, it was pivotal for me to re ect on conscious and unconscious biases and how they may a ect this study's development and outcomes. When conducting participatory research, there is a risk of aligning one's research outcomes with the political interests of the researched group. Barbour (2008) demarcates the critical di erence between researching 'with' and researching 'on' a given group (p. 26), highlighting the ethical need for researchers to re ect on responsibility and inherent biases, which may hamper the credibility of one's ndings.
Major studies rely on multiple researchers or co-researchers to avoid being overly constrained by biases to deter emotionally led assumptions or conclusions based on past experiences (Meyers, 2015, p. 6). Given that this is not logistically possible in this study, I will strive for self-disclosure (p. 20), aiming to provide a more natural narrative of the organisation. By informing the reader regarding methodological gaps and ideological biases, I aim to achieve a robust ontological and phenomenological platform that will provide credibility to the data and interpretations resulting from this study. Meyers (2015, p. 39) warns against countertransference, a common event within the eld of clinical psychology, whereby the researcher, guided by memories and fears, projects onto the subject and thus a ects the outcome and interpretation of the events and research. roughout this study, I re ected on such questions, including how answers from my participants a ected me personally.

Sampling
To reduce potential biases, focus groups will also become the basis used for purposeful sampling (Meyers, 2015, p. 102), also known as 'snowball sampling' , which consists in asking participants whom they believe to be the relevant key stakeholders to interview as opposed to having the researcher choosing the sampling. is is particularly poignant given that I was relatively new to the institution and am sure to have missed critical incidents that have contributed to the organisation's current state. is allows for a chain of enquiry whereby participants set the direction of the In this study, all focus groups were capped at a maximum of six participants as experts in the eld recommended a number between six and ten (Morgan, 1998 as cited by Bryman, 2012, p. 507). Smaller focus groups are encouraged when dealing with controversial matters, as is discovering the underlying reasons for the lack of coordination between two departments. e small group size helps prevent the discussion ow from going o -topic or group dynamics from taking over while permitting salient issues to be raised by the moderator and preventing logistical issues such as the inability to identify who said what in audio recordings and subsequent transcripts.
Finally, all group members were given a chance to speak, which was only possible given the small number of participants and attentive moderation.
To reduce potential biases, snowball sampling (Meyers, 2015, p. 102) was employed, asking participants whom they believe to be the relevant key stakeholders to interview as opposed to having the researcher choose.

High School Department Focus Group
Before I o cially started the session, the most senior teacher in the group in years of service at the school, Mr A, noted a couple of late arrivals, leading other participants to agree and speculate on the reasons for the others' lateness. e conversation diverted at that point for around seven minutes. Such behaviour is not uncommon in groups and seems to validate the thesis that BAGs exist primarily to maintain and preserve themselves (Bion, 1961, p. 63) and that participating to the group is an outcome of itself.
Absenteeism is a perceived existential threat to the group, which explains why the participant mentioned this early in the session. e tone quickly shi ed to an accusatory one; One teacher, Ms Z, raised her hand to point out the school's lack of support and time provided in facilitating transitions. She was indicating that the SLT were responsible for this. e instinct to nd a common enemy instead of answering the question led me to believe that the group was transitioning to a di erent basic assumption, whereby participants identi ed a common enemy to unite the group.
At the same time, Mr X and Ms Y, who had kept to themselves until that point, began pairing off (Bion, 1961, p. 72) into a private conversation, scarcely engaging with the questions despite being asked. Pairing is a common way for individuals to handle anxiety when tension rises, as was the case with this challenging conversation. And although some authors advocate that casual social interactions lead to a healthy environment among workgroups (Obholzer and Roberts, 1994), this particular group would o en go on side conversations risking the primary task of the session going unful lled.
When asked about what decisions relating to transitions were taken in the past, Ms Y provided her rst contribution to the discussion, pointing out that she had taught German classes to middle school groups before and therefore had always used the American standards when planning, and failed to see the point in transitioning to ECFL standards despite all other participants using these, and this being an expectation from HS language teachers. Here lies a salient example of bible-making (Bion, 1961, p. 155), or holding on to older precedents to resist change; BAG participants experience and voice their emotional opposition to any new idea that challenges the status quo. In the context of a mental health institution, Bion provides an example of bible-making when during a session with fellow clinicians, one participant refers to minutes of prior meetings to counteract the employment of a new approach.
Another critical incident was when one of the participants, a faculty member of longstanding, Ms Z, pointed out that in her subject area, German, transitions worked well, mainly taking place through informal At this stage, it was necessary to mention that it had been precisely Ms Z's counterpart in middle school who' d reached out to both department heads two months prior asking for more time for divisional vertical planning.
is was done intentionally to determine which basic assumption the group would revert to and thus avoid the projecting of blame onto the Spanish and e group quickly turned to splitting feelings between 'right' and 'wrong' (Obhlozer and Roberts, 2019, p. 131), a common defence from groups experiencing heightened anxiety levels. What followed was e ectively a contradiction insofar the majority of the group either shi ed blame / projected to SLT or argued against the premise that the need ever existed for a more coordinated approach among departments (denial).
It was evident that the prompt I had used had led to some sta members of longstanding resorting to defences a er being confronted with the reality that poorly designed transitions negatively a ected students. e basic assumption had changed to one of ght-ight, and I had become the target as the outsider who couldn't possibly understand the real issue or what was at stake.

Middle School Department Focus Group
e prompts and questions used for this focus group session were identical to those used during the High School department. is was a purposeful attempt to identify di erences in answers, which could indicate the existence and maintenance of basic assumptions preventing better communication and collaboration between the two divisions.
is session proved challenging almost from the o set; some department members were familiar to me, although I had had few interactions with them in a professional and social capacity. e group seemed suspicious of the purpose of the session and pressed on this despite the goal having been explained both by email and individually to each participant.
A er an awkward silence that lasted around two minutes, the MS department head started by listing the many reasons why the American standards curriculum and the standard-based assessments used in middle school served middle school students better than the letter grade approach used in high school. is was the main narrative heard amongst middle school sta and, in fact, the exact words of the middle school principal, who allegedly did not get along with his high school counterpart. us leading me to consider whether this was a pertinent example of introjection, whereby the Vítor Manuel Oliveira de Passos Vítor Manuel Oliveira de Passos Making Sense of an Uncoordinated Approach Making Sense of an Uncoordinated Approach 159 158 department head and the rest of the MS department faculty introjected the middle school principal's expectations. It could also be argued that this was a case of adherence to the dominant norms in the sta group or another case of splitting whereby all decisions made in MS were seen as right and the opposite applied to HS decisions. I had heard those exact words from the MS principal very many times. ere was nothing new to the argument resulting in a di erent perspective being suggested: many middle school students transitioning to high school found themselves at odds with the di erences between the academic language and standards in middle school to those used in high school.
At this point, the MS department head pivoted to his original argument, expressing disapproval toward the high school grading system, where numerical grades prevailed over criteria ones. In this early stage of the session, the group seemed to be experiencing a state of dependency on the department head to speak in their stead. e group e ectively saw the department head as a good object (Czander, Jacobsberg, Mersky, & Nunberg, 2002, p. 370). A shield from the unwelcome change that the dean of curriculum seemed to represent in the eyes of the participants. e relative listlessness of the group during the rst half of the session also suggested a case of projective identi cation (Likierman, 2002 as cited by Dale and James, 2015, p. 95) whereby the MS head of department's suspicions toward high school practices were actively projected and introjected; leaving little room for an honest debate about how the lack of coordination was a ecting rising high school students. e question relating to common planning time among departments divided the group and invited further discussion. At this point, Ms W, herself married to a high school modern languages teacher, pointed out that during the previous academic year, only a single meeting had been dispensed for joint curricular planning and moderation across both departments. is provides evidence of an absence of dialogue and lack of opportunities for change to be contained but also that this is not a priority for the management team.
e Middle school modern languages department followed a similar pattern to their HS counterparts; Instead of projecting their frustration and anxiety toward me, as their HS colleagues had, the group's negative emotions were directed at the school's leadership team and especially at individuals who had already departed, In what case of projective identi cation (Dale and James, 2015).
e negative feelings toward the organisation were projected onto a bad object and apparently introjected and wished away when the individual eventually le . e previous head of school was scapegoated, gaining quite a bad reputation for himself, with rumours of incompetence and oating in corridors.
I proceeded to point out that an entire academic year had passed since the departure of this individual. is was primarily an attempt at a ective containment as I attempted to readdress the poor coordination between departments while showing participants that their agency was instrumental in enacting change. Indeed, the lack of awareness among work groups of their role and personal agency in driving meaningful change is a common feature of BAGs (Oblozher & Roberts, 1994).
When asked about potential stakeholders to interview next regarding the lack of coordination issue, the group suggested the name of the former Dean of Curriculum. One participant volunteered that she' d been the opposite of her successor, a fl exible and spirited individual, which could be seen as an view among the group that joint meeting time among both departments was scarce and ine ective. Humour and sarcasm are also defences used to prevent e ective change (Contu and Willmott, 2006 as cited by (Dashtipour and Vidaillet, 2017, p. 32).

What Obstacles Remain for Effective cross-departmental collaboration from an Organisation-Wide Perspective?
e role of the psychodynamically-informed organisational researcher is twofold: to nd the root causes for the projection of negative emotions that sti e e ciency within the organisation whilst also to train the groups that make up the organisation to become more aware of these and other unconscious processes. Such an approach guards the individual against paranoid-schizoid tendencies that sti e e ective collaboration (Bion, 1961, p. 14).
In addition to recognising both written and unwritten norms and the role that systemic limitations, including race, gender, and sexuality, play in group dynamics, structural organisation-wide limitations must also be considered.
In previous sections, the root causes of the (o en cyclical) basic-assumption behaviour from the High School department were explained. Still, it is just as essential to provide context from an organisation-wide level, exposing the impediments to a group working towards its primary task.
Data from both focus groups group revealed three main obstacles at an organisation-wide level for a more balanced approach to curriculum: -e signi cant di erences between grading systems used in high school (letter grades/percentiles) and middle school (criteria/ standard-based grades) and how such di erences are misleading the perception of grades from incoming middle school students In addition, di erences in formative assessment policies include mandatory test retakes and no homework to be assigned during holiday breaks in MS versus professional judgment in HS.
e complexity of the grading so ware and marrying the percentages of external course rubrics and numerical grades to Leaders must pay attention to the emotions of their subordinates and make them active parties to institutional change by, for example, providing forums and other means for individuals to express their minds before taking signi cant decisions. Wilfred Bion (1961) dubs these strategies as a ective containment. e pandemic acted as a catalyser for basic assumption behaviour within many educational organisations. Fraser and Horden (2021)  e alternative approach, pioneered by Bion (1961) and further developed by sociologist Yiannis Gabriel (1999), is a ective containment; the process of accepting that situations of heightened stress and anxiety inevitable happen and that a talking culture within an organisation is paramount to maintaining a healthy working environment.
Any member of a group can facilitate a ective containment, but leaders are undoubtedly better equipped to introduce this strategy. In the context of the HS modern languages department, the absence of a departmental leader explains the high levels of distrust towards the SLT and the indi erence shown by some department members towards the new professional expectations.
During periods of a ective intensity in educational organisations, such as during the introduction of di erent curricular or pedagogical expectations, providing the adequate means, time, and venues, for emotions and feelings both to be expressed and experienced, is a powerful means for such emotions and feelings to be used productively (Dale and James,p. 93).
Groups within educational organisations o en do not welcome change and project negative emotions towards other faculty members or students.
Bion and Winnicot (as cited by Dale and James, p. 104) refer to two kinds of a ective containment. e original theory is that of the container, whereby an individual volunteers to become a container for negative emotions, thus helping the group at large with the handling of unwelcomed change. e alternative approach is the one proposed by Obholzer (1994) in which systems, processes, and the organisational structure itself allows for di cult feelings and emotions to be experienced, accepted, transformed, and reexperienced by employees in a more constructive way.
A ective containment is one of the many strategies that school administrators can use in times of great anxiety and stress; Providing forums for educators and the school community at large exemplify trust in middle managers and educators to maintain a high degree of professionalism among other strategies are in the administration's toolkit (de Passos, 2021).

Conclusion
is study has contributed to the eld of psychodynamics insofar it demonstrates how group dynamics operate and shape teachers' a ective and subjective lived experiences across two divisions of an international school. It further shows how anxiety and defences sti e communication and collaboration by driving invisible walls between basic assumption groups and perpetuating practices that prevent meaningful organisational change from taking place. Some of the limitations of using the psychodynamic approach in the context of this study include the assumption that most behaviours are determined by unconscious processes (Bion, 1961) and therefore very di cult to change. Such an assumption makes nding the root causes behind the incoordination between departments challenging and prolonged. e same applying to the adoption of an a ective containment culture within the school. Further research is warranted on schools using psychodynamic frameworks to identify and address basic assumption behaviour.