"Lead the Change" Series: An Informal Conversation Within the Field of Educational Change

• In Event: 53.066 - The Past, Present, and Future of Educational Change

Abstract

The field of educational change has grown into a multidisciplinary community that addresses both micro- and macro-level systems, policies, and practices to improve education for all students. One avenue for informally engaging in emerging inquiry explorations has been through the “Lead the Change” series (http://www.aera.net/SIG155/Lead-the-Change-Series). The series features educational change experts from around the globe who have engaged in groundbreaking scholarship. It serves to highlight promising research, to offer insight on small- and large-scale educational change, and to spark collaboration across the educational change community. Launched in 2011, the series has published thought-provoking interviews with 60 scholars from 22 countries. The accessibility of the series in its design, format, and content has enabled individual issues to spread ideas globally.

Methodology

This discussion offers a review of the core cross-cutting themes that have emerged in the series. Applying contextual narrative analysis (Maxwell, 1996), the series’ general themes were captured. The text was then coded for both descriptive and thematic frames. Inductive, categorical data analysis (Creswell, 1998) was applied and emerging themes were illuminated. The iterative process helped to captured thematic dimensions across the issues.

Findings

The themes highlighted in “Lead the Change” point to several pressing issues that educational change scholars are grappling with at present, including:
-Equity of opportunities in education, breaking social determinism, and exploring systemic interventions that close the educational gaps.
-System-level change that recognizes that schools alone cannot overcome the inequities in the broader social context.
-Moving beyond interventions as a unit of analysis and focusing attention on understanding the impact of large scale change.
-Putting students first in educational reform discourse by paying attention to deeper learning, student voice, and engagement in the learning process.
-Strengthening the teaching profession, supporting teachers’ learning and innovation, and building trusting, collaborative networks within the profession.
-Developing learning organizations and leadership orientations focused on distributed practices, reflection, and shared ownership.
-Making sense of research-policy-practice connections.

The series also identifies directions for educational change research, such as:
-How do we broaden the notion of student- and school-level success?
-How do we build collective trust and public engagement around a shared vision and common principles?
-How do we balance system reform to eliminate barriers to learning and increase equity with quality?
-What methodologies need to be developed to better measure and capture complexities of systems change that pay attention to the cultural and social dimensions, in addition to the technical and political elements?

Scholarly Significance

“Lead the Change” series contributors have used empirical evidence to argue for a shift away from presently dominant approaches of quick turnaround reforms, external accountability and standardization as the core drivers of change. They propose a move toward practice-informed approaches to educational change that expand theoretical inquiry toward the purposes of education, and focus on capacity building, collaboration, and systemic efforts toward increasing equity with excellence.

Author

• Helen Janc Malone, Institute for Educational Leadership