Written by Dr Timothy O'Leary
Director Educational Data Talks Pty Ltd.
Schools need to change.
Mind you, this is not a criticism of teachers and school leaders, it is a simple truth. Impermanence is one of the fundamental certainties of life. As such, in education, as in all arenas of human endeavor, there is capacity for improvement. And where such capacity exists, we also have an obligation to act. Therefore, as our collective knowledge of what works and what does not work in education increases (see Visible Learning or the What Works Clearing House) there is a remit to reflect on what we do, in service of student learning, and to ensure we provide the most impactful educational experiences for our students. The Japanese call this process kaizen: a process of continual improvement that uses evidence to inform, identify opportunities for improvement through change, and evaluate practice.
Despite the need for change, all too often important change initiatives within schools start with the best intentions, but ultimately fail to achieve their potential. So why exactly is this? There are many reasons why change programs and improvement initiatives struggle to have an impact upon and within schools. Three critical blockers include:
Initiative Overload
A key problem for many schools is an over enthusiasm to change, leading to too many initiatives. The unintended consequence is that those responsible for implementing change- teachers- become overwhelmed, under-prepared and under-resourced. A key element in the problem of initiative overload is that many people (leaders) measure the effectiveness of teachers by the volume of work (quantity) being undertaken, rather than whether there is real tangible value (quality). In these instances, it is the administration of initiatives that is the focus, as opposed to the impact of these interventions. Related to this notion of initiativitis, many change agendas within schools fail to take into the account that sustainable change takes considerable time – it does not happen overnight! Yet many school leaders plan school improvement efforts with time frames that do not allocate sufficient time for the initiative to be successful, or to sufficiently respect the hard work that teachers want and need to dedicate to ensure success.
Lack of contextual knowledge
Often the need for change within a school is not driven by evidence of need, but by an idea that was heard at a conference or read in a journal article. This does not mean that the initiative is not good, but it can mean that it is not the right idea for a school to focus on at that moment in time. I once worked with a school that spent considerable time focused on improving student spelling. After three years of execution, I was engaged to evaluate the program. While we found it to be a solid, evidence informed program, it did not shift student achievement significantly. Further, it was also discovered through looking at historical data that the initiative was not actually necessary. Student achievement and growth in spelling had been better than fine all along; reading comprehension, though, was an area that had required considerable attention (but had been missed). This is a classic example of a good idea with little impact due to bad timing because of poor contextual knowledge.
(Dis)empowerment
Within schools there can often be a perception that big, important, decisions are made without the authentic input of those who will ultimately be responsible for enacting the work – teachers. In larger schools, this can be exacerbated due to increased administrative structures. For teachers, the consequence of such structures can be a sense of disempowerment, combined with a perceived loss of both agency and autonomy. This can negatively impact upon teacher motivation, with teachers completing work because of extrinsic motivation, as opposed to drawing upon intrinsic motivation. Ultimately, the wrong type of motivation reduces the capacity of teachers, reduces the quality of teaching, and leads to teacher burnout.
So, what can we do to address these barriers to school change? Fortunately, there are several cultural enablers that can support school leaders to ameliorate the impacts of the above blockers.
Self-Determination Theory
Richard Ryan and Edward Deci’s work on Self-Determination Theory (SDT) provides an important foundational lens through which school leaders can consider the implementation of change initiatives. SDT provides a broad framework of human motivation that has evolved out of work focused intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and has grown to include research centered on organisations including schools. A key claim of SDT is that employees’ performance and well-being are affected by the type of motivation that drives them. Alongside this is a differentiated continuum of motivations progressing through:
Amotivation, by which individuals demonstrate a lack of motivation;
Extrinsic Motivation, by which individuals demonstrate motivation to attain something because of completing their work. Extrinsic motivation is itself broken into four discrete, incremental, categories related to the source of the motivation progressing from external, introjected, identified and integrated; and
Intrinsic Motivation, by which motivation lies within completing the task itself.
Fundamental to SDT is the importance of a small set of basic psychological needs including competence, relatedness and autonomy. Research has found that social settings including workplaces that support satisfaction of these basic psychological needs facilitate autonomous motivation, psychological and physical wellness, and ultimately, enhanced performance. By cultivating the experience of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, we see outcomes of volition, motivation and engagement, which results in enhanced performance, persistence and creativity.
Social Capital
Social Capital involves social relations and networks, norms of reciprocity, and trust, all of
which have been shown to facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit. In short, the creation of social capital within an organisation pertains to the extent that people feel that they are respected, recognised, valued, and treated as equals at work (rather than being a step on the ladder). In schools, social capital can be fostered through the building of tight-knit relationships with trusted co-workers who share similar values of reciprocity in daily interactions. Leaders benefit from social capital through their ability to influence others, to collect information that is important to them and their teams, and to communicate across organizational barriers. Social capital can also be cultivated in schools in the relationships between people who interact across authority levels. Strong social capital benefits schools by facilitating the flow of information and resources, especially across potential ‘silos’. This can result in schools being more readily able to identify and react to opportunities and threats, facilitate change, and create a more cohesive team that can work through adversity. In contrast, low social capital leads to higher levels of job dissatisfaction, fatigue, stress, burnout, and attrition.
In short, social capital is about both recognition (individual) and relationships (community). Anna Dabrowski’s work on social capital and its connection to teacher wellbeing encourages us to reconsider the importance of social capital in supporting the mental health of teachers and building communities of practice, particularly in the outcomes focused spaces teachers work within. Social capital should be a partnership process between teachers and school leaders, where vision and purpose are shared between institution and community. Thus, while educational institutions and their communities can benefit from building social capital, educational leaders who are committed to lifelong learning and view the community as a resource for the institution also have a key role to play in unlocking social capital.
Collective Teacher Efficacy
Like Social Capital, the concept of Collective Teacher Efficacy (CTE) is readily applicable to schools. Building upon Bandura’s work on self-efficacy and collective efficacy, CTE focuses on the collective belief of staff within a school to positively impact student learning. According to educational research, CTE has an demonstrable impact on student learning. Indeed, with an effect size of 1.39, it is one of the biggest influences on student achievement. What this means, is that schools with higher levels of CTE students tend to learn more, and do better, than students in schools with lower levels of CTE. Yet like Social Capital, CTE is a complex thing that cannot simply be 'bought' or 'implemented'. Rather, for CTE to flourish, school leadership must cultivate a climate which nurtures teachers and empowers them to rise together to meet the challenge of all students. In order to consider ways in which this empowerment may be nurtured, Jenni Donohoo and others have synthesized the literature relating to CTE and highlighted five key enabling conditions for CTE upon which leaders should focus their energies. These include Empowered Teachers, Embedded Reflective Practice, Cohesive Teacher Knowledge, Goal Consensus and Supportive Leadership.
Teacher Agency
Another important consideration for school leaders is the presence, or lack thereof, of a sense of Teacher Agency within their schools. There are various definitions of Teacher Agency but perhaps one of the most eloquent, thanks to Barry Schon, is that it relates to a teacher’s ability or perceived sense of ability, to shape their work in order to successfully progress through the challenges they encounter. Focusing on Teacher Agency is important because it is almost the anti-thesis of often ineffectual top-down reform initiatives as it seeks to approach the question of education from the bottom up by empowering teachers to take greater responsibility for the important work and decisions related to teaching and learning. Teacher Agency does not simply exist or manifest though. It is cultivated through a teacher’s disposition, self-efficacy and the interplay of school-based conditions that support. For example, the types of conditions associated with supporting Teacher Agency structures that facilitate a greater degree of autonomy, a culture of psychological safety, teacher engagement in decision making, teacher empowerment and supportive leadership.
Possibilities for School Leaders
We know that the impact of school leadership upon student outcomes is important. We also know that school leadership is often indirect and largely achieved through focusing strategic efforts on nurturing cultural factors that impact on student learning. As Simon Sinek has said “The role of a leader is not to come up with all the great ideas. The role of a leader is to create an environment in which great ideas can happen”
We also know that there are many reasons why change initiatives often fail. So, what is a leader to do?
In this blog, I have offered four enablers that might just be worth paying attention to. Whist they are distinctly different, there are some underlying commonalties amongst and Self-Determination Theory, Social Capital, Collective Teacher Efficacy, and Teacher Agency that can help school leaders to think about their work. Perhaps the key lesson to take away from considering these concepts is this: to maximize the likelihood of school improvement, it is necessary to nurture empowered, motivated teachers with a sense of agency, autonomy, and belonging.
Understanding and respecting the challenges facing teachers is a good place to start. Ensuring schools have organisational structures that are less top down, and more bottom up, is also key. It’s about embedding collaborative reflective practice as a norm and creating authentic opportunities for staff involvement in identifying potential issues and areas for improvement, goal setting, planning interventions and evaluating their impact. It is also necessary to evaluate policies and practices to ensure teachers are supported to develop confidence and self-efficacy, and the freedom to experiment and initiate their own behaviors as opposed to feeling pressured to behave as directed. Only when we have these structures in place will teachers develop a true sense of belonging to a school culture.
Sounds easy, huh?
At Educational Data Talks Pty Ltd, we love working with schools to help them understand the status of the cultural conditions that need to be nurtured to create the greatest capacity for sustainable improvement.
If you would like to learn more about the ideas discussed in this blog come and check or a virtual professional development session we are running later in the year, Cultural Considerations for School Improvement
If you would like to know more, please contact us at timothy.oleary@educationaldatatalks.com.au.
Thanks to Dr Jenni Donohoo and Dr Anna Dabrowski for their work on Collective Teacher Efficacy and Social Capital, and their ongoing conversations regarding the integration of these theories into educational practice.