the challenges of innovation
Recently I looked back through previous publications of trends in education reports. I found myself vaguely remembering some of the ideas and strategies for use in the classroom – and plenty of buzzwords that were offered as a way of revolutionising education throughout the world. I reflected on several professional development cycles or workshops where some of these trends were in focus and thought about the significant budget expenses to update technology that didn’t ultimately affect how teachers taught in the schools I have worked in. I don’t think this experience is rare. (Don’t buy smartboards). There is an understandable reluctance when staff and stakeholders consider the prospect of education reform or initiatives to improve educational practice. Frequently, the next big thing in education comes and goes without moving the needle in terms of impacts on student learning or motivation.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about why the education profession is slow to adapt to change. More precisely, I’m wondering why the profession seems to lack internal mechanisms for continuous development. Even in schools which offer in-service training, workshops and professional development, these initiatives seldom seem to inspire broader change. They are often met with a certain amount of cynicism from the teaching and instructional staff. When curriculum frameworks or innovative ideas have value for student development – what are the limiting factors for introducing these innovations into broader teaching practice? Are other industries similarly slow to adapt and view the prospect of change with similar levels of scepticism?
Leaving aside the specifics of the change or development project, continuous improvement mechanisms are fundamental to a business's ability to adapt and thrive under rapidly changing external circumstances. Why should the educational system be any different?
The concept of education and what constitutes a quality education is deeply complex. It is challenging to develop professionally unless the institution has articulated a clear and compelling strategy. Perhaps this is easier in a business setting where end measures are more quantifiable – profit margins are not constructs like " education “. And although there must undoubtedly be a robust debate about the ways and means within a corporate setting, I suppose the end goals are more mutually understood than in an educational environment with conflicting perspectives about what constitutes quality education. What is it that we are trying to achieve? In most settings, the consensus in a school building is out of reach, let alone a local or national system. Why should this be so? Since education operates in complexity and throughout various domains, change initiatives can seldom simultaneously hold and account for all these domains simultaneously. Reimers writes about the multidimensional nature of the educational system in his exploration of government reform projects:
In undertaking [these] reforms, governments have followed strategies that reflect a cultural, psychological, professional, institutional or political understanding of the change process, often depending on more than one perspective but seldom with a fully multidimensional view of the process. In some ways, these reforms have seen the process of change through one eye, sometimes two, but seldom accessing the kaleidoscopic perspective. (Reimers, 2020, p. 43)
With this perspective, it is no wonder why many educational initiatives fail to fundamentally change the experience and outcomes for the students these initiatives serve. I can think specifically of my project, where the inherent aims of the reform and its value for students were, for me, self-evident, but did my colleagues (or indeed the students) agree? Maybe. But I failed to establish the environment which might facilitate dialogue and consensus building. This same failure is abundant in local, regional and national reform initiatives. These reform initiatives almost inevitably fail to account for all simultaneously, leading to a lack of strategic coherence, which “is often elusive” (Reimers, 2020, p. 9). I wonder how many policymakers and educational leaders make the mistake of assuming that the benefits of a particular improvement program are self-evident to educators and stakeholders or need supporting data on a specific metric of success to prove the value of the program but are unable to articulate the broader complexities and strategic purpose of the initiatives. This elusive strategic direction must be fundamental to any meaningful reform initiative. What is it that the change is aiming for? And why is it so rare that educational change drivers find it difficult to articulate these aims?
“in complex environments such as education in which a multitude of actors are collaborating through formal and informal channels, the sheer amount of feedback and interactivity can seem impossible to navigate effectively” (Blanchenay, Patrick; Burns, 2016, p. 162)
I think this is a crucial point. Many individual actors in educational changes fail to appreciate the system's complexity and how the processes interact. The educational initiatives operate in so many domains simultaneously – pedagogical, political, organisational – that expertise and capacity for change are distributed in ways that make meaningful reform unwieldy to manage. I am reasonably sure that most teachers are unaware of these competing drivers and nearly as confident that most educational leaders don’t fully account for them. The relative success of the given change project is much less about the idea itself and much more about the ways the initiative is coherently managed and the extent to which the organisation has the mechanics, personnel and will to carry the change project forward.
In the early stages of my teaching career, I was in pursuit of the next big thing in education - something that might revolutionise the ways that students learn and develop. This stage mostly ended – I now understand – with the failed project I discussed at length in an earlier posting. The project was a valuable lesson in that the change process – collaboration, management, feedback and strategic purpose – is far more essential than any one idea or curriculum. It’s more difficult, less romantic and certainly less exciting to admit that educational development doesn’t come with a breakthrough model, brain research, or new technologies. It comes from continuous growth, ongoing reflection and the ability to generate shared visions and collaborative effort. This is far more challenging. Educational innovations and broader reforms require conviction, action, coherence, and strategy across impact domains.
Change knowledge is not a disembodied set of facts but rather a deeply applied phenomenon in the minds of people. Moreover for this knowledge to have an impact it must be actively shared by many people engaged in using the knowledge. There are more examples of such shared use in evidence, and if it continues to spread we may have the breakthrough required for change knowledge to have an enduring place in the field of education reform. As always the route to achieving such a critical mass is not to wait for it to happen but to be among those promoting its use even if those around us seem disinterested or against it. Large scale successful reform occurs in a thousand small ways during the journey. Don’t go on this journey without being equipped with an active and open ended grasp of change knowledge. (Fullan, 2007, pp. 39–40)
Blanchenay, Patrick; Burns, T. (2016). Policy experimentation in complex education systems. In Governing Education in a Complex World (pp. 161–186). https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264255364-10-en
Fullan, M. (2007). Change Theory as a Force for School Improvement. In Intelligent Leadership (Vol. 6, pp. 27–39). Springer Netherlands.
Klinck, P. (2007). Observations on Leadership: Linking Theory, Practice and Lived Experience. In J. M. Burger, C. F. Webber, & P. Klinck (Eds.), Intelligent Leadership: Constructs for Thinking Education Leaders (pp. 13–25). Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6022-9_2
Reimers, F. M. (2020). Audacious education purposes: How governments transform the goals of education systems. In Audacious Education Purposes: How Governments Transform the Goals of Education Systems. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41882-3
a reflection on failure
I was involved in a large student competence development project at an international boarding school a few years ago. I have mentioned this program in passing on a few episodes of the podcasts and in detail with my colleagues. The project – and its challenges – was the core source of motivation for joining the MBA program in Educational Leadership at Tampere University of Applied Sciences. I wanted to understand how to undertake large-scale change and development projects and my leadership capacity. I have had many opportunities to do so throughout the program. I have yet to confront the content of the project itself directly – and how the insights from this project might be better understood from a more comprehensive view of competence development programs in particular and educational leadership more generally. What went wrong, and why didn’t the ideas and research about student skills development on the page have the results I had been working towards? Where was the gap between the vision and the reality? What are the limitations of the current educational reality, and how might it be bridged?
First, a story.
I worked for an ambitious boarding school in the Caucasus region as a teacher for nearly two years. The organisation’s board of governors had the vision and the funding to extend the scope of the school beyond the academic program and towards practical applications and partnerships with NGOs and local service needs. The students themselves had been selected on scholarship based on their motivation and capacity to engage in global change-making projects. Though it sounds like a lofty ideal, it was already happening. Students were creating and developing projects with the local community which had measurable impacts – staff and student teams set up sports camps with participants from throughout the country, started a recycling-based business that led to government funds and broader initiatives and even an art camp that hosted young children from neighbouring nations in conflict to open dialogues and promote peace in the younger generations. It was an exciting place to be. The wider mission of the organisation, the funding and the student and staff motivation were all in place, and the atmosphere was dynamic.
What was missing – and I was not the first to recognise it – was a formal skills development program that would support the students as they engaged in these ambitious projects. Our school had a rigorous academic program, and many competent staff members helped informally train students to manage and prepare for these undertakings. Still, these trainings were not formally organised or planned – and students were learning a lot through trial and error. Since the students were 16-18 years old with only two-year groups at the college at any one time, a great deal of institutional knowledge got lost along the way. Collaborative efforts with local and regional NGO partners were based on personal relationships that students had fostered – so many projects came and went and were replaced as the graduating class left. A new group of students and project initiatives began. This lack of institutional knowledge put a limit on what could be achieved in the real world, and the lack of formalised curriculum meant that the school had no means of ensuring all students had access to learning. There was also no means of measuring what was working and why.
I proposed a “toolkit” of competencies and skills that all graduating students might attain. The proposal was primarily built around 21st-century skills, and a needs assessment that I performed by interviewing students, staff and NGO counterparts to understand what worked in the service programs and what the missing ingredients for these programs were. I created the concept, proposed it to the leadership team and eventually was appointed to lead a project to create a curriculum to support the students in these leadership initiatives and service projects. The idea was that this co-curricular program would be equally important to the academic program and might be a key value added to our college’s educational offerings. It fit within the wider vision to support global change makers and students who have the capacity to manage and lead broad service projects. It was a dream job in every way. I felt that the core focus of the role was to develop a curriculum of what I hoped education could be – its position was fundamentally to support student competencies in soft skills, leadership, project management and personal development. It meant working on all the truly valuable aspects of education. Still, I often lost in the competition for space, time and attention against subject content, assessment and university entrance considerations. I could do the things I loved and felt deeply attached to and build them from contemporary research.
I had never been more dedicated, creative, and in love with the work as I was in that position. Ultimately, the project failed, and I failed. It was painful and humiliating. There is some solace – though not much – in the idea that this experience is not unique.
“Educational change initiatives, whether they involve new policy implementation or school reform, often fail to achieve the desired impact. The reasons are frequently framed in terms of either a poorly designed process on the part of the change initiator, or in terms of problems with the attitudes, skills and/or knowledge of those responsible for implementation” (Timperley & Parr, 2005, p. 227).
The fundamental mistake I made – and I imagine this might be common to other educational leaders as they embark on early career projects – was a misunderstanding of the leadership task. I thought my role as an educational leader was to design a compelling piece of research and a framework for teaching and learning rather than a carefully designed change process. In the early stages of the project, I retreated in research and created a nearly final version before I sought input from colleagues and stakeholders. Partly from a desire to demonstrate some expertise and partially because I didn’t understand that I was leading a change process, this decision meant that colleagues who should have been co-creators in the early stages of the work were left with little to meaningfully contribute.
The size and prettiness of the planning document is inversely related to the amount and quality of action, and in turn to the impact on student learning (Fullan, 2007, p. 34).
For teachers moving into leadership roles, this required shift in thinking from individual performance to facilitating dialogue and managing change is a critical distinction that can get overlooked. Innovations, ideas or improvements go nowhere without a clearly articulated strategy and methodology for change.
After the project launched and I recognised that things were not going according to plan, I made another critical error that I can recognise in too many educational initiatives – when the change project failed to gain widespread support, I spent much of my time and energy building administrative checklists and compliance measure. This was a fear and control move – of course, there are suitable applications for compliance and accountability, but compliance measures do not generate trust and a shared commitment to a common vision - the essential ingredients of any meaningful project.
“Educational change often fails because individual change efforts are poorly designed. The goals of the change may be unrealistic or unclear, so teachers cannot achieve what is expected of them. The perpetrators of change may have low credibility; their reasons may be politically suspect; the intentions regarding real improvement for students may be in doubt. Changes may be too complex and overwhelming, requiring teachers to work on too many fronts at once” (Hargreaves, 2002, p. 189)
The prospect of institutionalising educational reforms is challenging because it operates in the realm of professional identity – that is to say that in order for a change to be accepted there has to be either a consensus about how the reform fits into a faculty’s conceptualisation of the educational act or be compelling enough to demand a revisioning of some element of the teaching and learning process. Timperley and Parr refer to this dynamic as “theories in competition” and suggest that these underlying beliefs too often go unexplored resulting in misaligned goals, frustration and ultimately failed projects. It is too easy to assume alignment or mutual understanding - maybe because it is a challenging prospect to actually build it.
In the following few posts, I aim to explore the broader challenges of educational innovations as they relate to wider policy changes and change project. In particular, I aim to reflect on how educators might reorient themselves toward the prospect of educational change not as end state but rather a process of continuous development.
THEORIES IN COMPETITON
Timperley, H. S., & Parr, J. M. (2005).
Fullan, M. (2007). Change Theory as a Force for School Improvement. In Intelligent Leadership (Vol. 6, pp. 27–39). Springer Netherlands.
Hargreaves, A. (2002). Sustainability of educational change: The role of social geographies. Journal of Educational Change, 3(3/4), 189–214. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021218711015
Timperley, H. S., & Parr, J. M. (2005). Theory competition and the process of change. Journal of Educational Change, 6(3), 227–251. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-005-5065-3