This paper deals with why educational changes are challenging for teachers, analyzing from four aspects, and how teacher participants in this research view and cope with educational changes.
To start with, the authors pointed out four aspects that can help understand why educational changes are difficult for teachers:
(1)The technical perspective: “If a teacher isn’t able to do it, it can’t be done!” Successful change in this respect means learning how to master a new and technically complex curriculum or a demanding new set of teaching strategies (P.116, Hargreaves, Earl, Moore, & Manning, 2001).
(2)The cultural perspective: “If a teacher doesn’t know how to do it or doesn’t ultimately feel confident doing it, it can’t be done!”
-The cultural perspective is concerned with the meanings and interpretations teachers assign to change (P.117).
-Elmore (1995) argues that the problem of educational reform is one of “changing the core of educational practice—how teachers understand the nature of knowledge the student’s role in learning, and how these ideas about knowledge and learning are manifested in teaching and class work.”
-Change, in this respect, has its indispensible human side, as well as its technical one (Evans, 1997). This human dimension of understanding educational change is both intellectual and emotional in nature.
-Meaning, motivation (“Whatever the change was, it presented teachers with a problem, need, or sense of dissonance that they felt to be compelling and were motivated to resolve.”), and relationships (i.e. proper supports) are all at the heart of the change process.
(3)The political perspective: “If a teacher won’t do it, it can’t be done!”
-concerned with how power is exercised over others or developed with them, the ways that groups and their interests influence the innovation and reform process, and how the ends of education address, comply with, or challenge the existing distributions of power in society.
-raises questions about who is in charge if change and about whose agenda the change itself serves.
-When the change is educationally or morally suspect, resistance can be a great professional virtue (Maurer, 1996)
(4)The postmodern perspective: “If the teacher has too much to do, it won’t be done well.”
-Postmodern society is synonymous with chaos, uncertainty, paradox, complexity, and ongoing change.
-Changes are opportunities; problems are their friends (Fullan, 1993)
-In the meantime, change in postmodern society can become an obsession rather than an
opportunity.
Followed by the four analyses, the authors presented their research results. This seems to be a qualitative case study, employing interview method to acquire their data. Teachers are their research participants. In this section, the authors, based on their research and data gathered from interviewing their teacher participants, explicated three phases of implementing educational changes.
1.understanding change: meaning and mastery
(1)The intellectual work of educational change involves establishing moral and philosophical clarity and agreement about what the change means (Tom, 1983; Sockett, 1989; Sergiovanni, 1990)
(2)Many teachers found (new) policy documents too “nebulous” and “far too involved,” without “a clear focus.”
(3)Teachers need to decode the language of the policy documents and determine if the policy’s intentions were in line with their own social and educational mission.
(4)Another teacher complained that “we use too much jargon, and we are afraid to decide what it means.”
(5)Some teachers employed “doing it already” approach, which can offer them personal and professional reassurance, but it can sometimes also lead to smugness and complacency, preventing teachers from forging ahead.
(6)Some teachers explored the differences between their own practice and the policy recommendations more actively by pinpointing where the gaps were (i.e. gap analysis). Such deciphering and sense-making process was best undertaken collaboratively with colleagues.
2.Deciding to change: urgency and energy
The power of social relevance was most obvious in teachers’ willingness to integrate curricula and establish relationships across traditional boundaries.
3.Developing capacity to change: agency and opportunity
(1)teachers as learners are at the center of educational change.
(2)Successful implementation requires opportunities to clarify policy initiatives and understand reforms (declarative knowledge), opportunities to develop procedural knowledge associated with the innovation, and opportunities to explore new routines and modify practices (Leithwood, Jantzi, & Steinbach, 1999)
(3)Teachers found many ways to create the conditions for their own learning (for new policy):
-using their own practical knowledge and experience to think through the changes so that they made sense in the classroom
-Teachers grounded learning outcomes in the practical world of their students and in their own accumulated knowledge and experience about what does and does not work with students. They built integrated units on this foundation of practical knowledge before considering how these units connected to the outcomes. Outside-in knowledge made sense only when it was filtered through inside-out experience.
-By engaging in explicit professional learning about new practice and strategies in an embedded way, both within workplace and workshops and other events.
-By coming together to share ideas, engage in problem solving, undertake joint planning, pool expertise and resources, and explore ways of integrating their work more effectively.
Overall, solutions to implement educational changes effectively could be as follows (excerpt from the paper):
(1)more time, more human resources, better professional support
(2)changes in how policymakers present reform: e.g. clear outcome statement
(3)educational reform must become considerably less schizophrenic
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