Enduring Themes in Educational Change

Escobar Arcay

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781532609053
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Potential and novice graduate students, researchers, educators, and reformers may find themselves bewildered and perplexed by the vast changes in public education. They may just want to briefly know the core concepts. They may also need to use the language in order to be able to articulate its major issues. Whatever the case, the work of authorities in the field of educational change facilitates the conceptual landscape that can enable one's entry into the fundamental concepts that sustain this flourishing field. Here is a close and descriptive reading of some of the foundational works of one of these authorities in the field of educational change (the Canadian scholar and theorist of educational change Michael Fullan) who has certainly helped many make sense of the complexity of the educational change process. David A. Escobar Arcay offers here a brief but substantive description of the multiple themes and issues located within a particular and limited time period of the corpus of this authority in the hopes of engaging in an introductory manner the exciting and ever-expanding and unfolding field of educational change. Read it and be equipped to engage in the ongoing and larger discussions about the change process and its core participants, theories, and issues.

1

Stakeholders

The People in Education

“Educational change is a process of coming to grips with the multiple realities of people, who are the main participants in implementing change. . . . Educational change, above all, is a people-related phenomenon for each and every individual.”

—The New Meaning of Educational Change, 96–97; 151.

Students

“Integral to the argument of this chapter is that treating students as people comes very close to ‘living’ the academic, personal, and educational goals that are stated in most official policy documents. But more than that, involving students in constructing their own meaning and learning is fundamentally pedagogically essential—they learn more, and are motivated to go even further.”

—The New Meaning of Educational Change, 162.

Innovations often become ends in themselves. Students become the means. For the most part, students are treated solely as the benefactors of innovations. They are passive, not active, participants in the process of change. The union of cognitive science and sociology may signal a renewed interest in the active role of students in educational changes.1 It is essential to provide students opportunities for cognitive as well as emotional development. This provides the academic dimension plus the social dimension. It is about both motivation and relationships. It is ultimately an excellence and equity issue. A professional learning community is nurtured in ways that integrate the insights of those who seek to redefine schools and change the power relations that sustain the student achievement gap.

Most students report that teachers and principals do not understand their point of view, appreciate their opinions, or listen to them. Students appear to be alienated. Many students are highly passive in terms of the governance of the classroom. They are not considered or listened to when the teacher is making decisions about classroom management, planning, learning, and teaching. Students’ voices, insights, and ideas need to be tapped as a resource to shape learning and teaching for productive educational change to take place.2 An appropriate question here would be to ask to what extent the educational change literature has taken student voice into consideration.

Teachers

“We don’t have a learning profession. Teachers and teacher educators do not know enough about subject matter, they don’t know enough about how to teach, and they don’t know enough about how to understand and influence the conditions around them. Above all, teacher education—from initial preparation to the end of the career—is not geared towards continuous learning.”

—Changing Forces: Probing the Depths of Educational Reform, 108.

“Ultimately, what is important is the capacity of teachers—individually and with others—to manage change continuously. This means the ability to find meaning among an array of innovative possibilities, and to become adept at knowing when to seek change aggressively, and when to back off.”

—Successful School Improvement, 23.

Our society fails teachers because it gives students failing grades and does not improve teachers’ working conditions. The problem begins with teacher preparations programs, which lack internal as well as external coherence. There are insufficient induction programs for beginning teachers. The transitions of becoming a teacher, coupled with their problems in the management of instruction and feelings of loneliness and isolation, are documented as other sources in the poor preparation of teachers. Teaching in the inner city is one of the most stressful occupations. Teaching is not a learning profession yet. It is not geared toward continuous learning.

There is a strong need for teachers to grow through a process of personal development in a social context. There have been several attempts trying to remedy this problem, but they have proven to only scratch the surface. One of them was the Teacher Corps and Trainers of Teacher Trainers program.3 This social change-based effort was described as merely a large-scale tinkering effort. It failed because it was a vague, individualistic, non-systemic, knowledge-less and only school-based program. Others included the strategies of the Education Commission States, which were effective.4 However, in the long term they were doomed to failure because they did not take into account developing the capacity of the school or reculturing. Still, other efforts with an explicit social reconstructionist agenda were also doomed to failure because they were too ambitious. The issue here is that these attempts failed because they did not change schools into learning organizations.

Reforming teacher education requires the convergence of moral purpose and knowledge and skills development. Moral purpose needs to be part of the institutional objectives of teacher education. Teachers need to have the knowledge and skills to change institutions as well as to contend with forces of change in complex environments. There is also a strong need for developing an expanded knowledge and skill base that will allow teachers to not only teach a variety of individuals but also influence their working conditions. This expansion of roles and responsibilities mentioned here will not take place unless teacher knowledge is substantially improved.

Understanding teacher development implies providing opportunities for knowledge and skills development, self-understanding, and ecological change.5 Professional development of educators is about developing habits of learning. The question here is what set of policies provide teachers with opportunities to learn new ways for working while interacting with each other. Purposeful and focused collaboration needs to take place. Reculturing the entire profession means providing corresponding development mechanisms that are grounded in standards of practice, providing strategies embedded in the workplace, and identifying and strengthening leadership practices that focus continuously on the previous two factors.6

Scholars have suggested the following guidelines for teachers: “Locate, listen to and articulate your inner voice; practice reflection in action, on action and about action; develop an at-risk mentality; trust processes as well as people; appreciate the total person in working with orders; commit to working with colleagues; seek variety and avoid balkanization; redefine your role to extend beyond the classroom; balance work and life; push and support principals and other administrators to develop interactive professionalism; commit to continuous improvement and perpetual learning and monitor and strengthen the connection between your development and students’ development.”7

Principals

“To change schools we must change ourselves. More specifically, we must undergo a huge paradigm shift from, as they say in the university, being the dependent variable to becoming the independent variable.”

—What’s Worth Fighting for in the Principalship?, vii.

The conditions that govern the principalship demand radical change.8 First, the principalship appears to be not very attractive due to the multiple demands of the job and the...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Overview
• Chapter 1: Stakeholders
• Chapter 2: Educational Process
• Chapter 3: Dimensions
• Chapter 4: Assumptions
• Chapter 5: Moral Purpose
• Chapter 6: Relationships
• Chapter 7: Knowledge
• Chapter 8: Sustainability
• Chapter 9: Chaos/Complexity and Evolutionary Theories
• Chapter 10: Systems
• Chapter 11: Paradoxes
• Chapter 12: Coherence
• Chapter 13: Theory of Action
• Summary
• References