This week, IEN features the work of scholars who are exploring avenues for change across many different aspects of education including professional learning communities, community arts and sports education programs, and summer math camps. This post is the third in a series featuring excerpts of interviews with presenters participating in the Educational Change Special Interest Group sessions at the upcoming Annual Conference of the American Educational Research Association in Philadelphia in April. This post includes presenters from the session titled: “Creativity and Localized Change: Teachers and Coaches Supporting Transformation.” For previous posts in this series, see: Practices, Programs and Policies for Instructional Coaching and Transforming Organizational Systems for Educational Equity. These interviews are part of the Lead the Change series produced by AERA’s Educational Change Special Interest Group. The full interviews can be found on the LtC website. The LtC series is currently produced by Alex Lamb (Outgoing Series Editor) and Liz Zumpe (Incoming Series Editor).
Through a Professional Learning Community Lens: Managing Complex Change in the K-8 Setting –Kimiya Sohrab Maghzi, Ph.D., University of Redlands; Marni E. Fisher, Ph.D., Saddleback College; Meredith A. Dorner, Ph.D. Irvine Valley College; Joe A. Petty, M.A.,University of San Diego; Kevin Nguyen-Stockbridge, Ph.D., Chapman University; Paul McDonald, Ed.D., Paul McDonald Consulting; Kelsey Wan, M.A. Ed., Community Roots Academy
Lead the Change: What are some of the ideas you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at AERA can learn from your work related to practice, policy, and scholarship?
Kimiya Sohrab Maghzi, Marni E. Fisher, Meredith A. Dorner, Joe A. Petty, Kevin Nguyen-Stockbridge, Paul McDonald, and Kelsey Wan: Knoster et al. (2000) discuss how change goes through a process of initiation, implementation, and institutionalization. In other words, policy paired with scholarship helps to change practice. In our study, the focal school started the process of changing special education practices by deliberately hiring educators who were open to learning, change, and collaboration. This hiring policy paired with an established professional learning community (DuFour & DuFour, 2012; Van Meeuwen et al., 2020) allowed for centering intervention and support, which breaks from special education’s traditional placement on the outskirts. The shift from an exclusive to an inclusive environment included changes in school structures, hiring a consulting company to establish the school as their own Local Educational Agency (LEA), eventually building their own independent special education team, and integrating the general and special education systems. This policy change also required shifts to align the professional learning communities, implementing intervention systems (OCDE, 2023), regularly revisiting the focus on student success and inclusion, and developing a system to manage change.
The key concept from this research is that the Model for Managing Complex Change can have research-based and practical applications to help a leadership team adapt and manage any type of change over time. This offers a scholarly-practitioner and action research-based approach to supporting changes in policy and practice that focuses on reflection, praxis, and immediate data-driven change. While many reforms are based upon standardized interventions for teachers to implement, research shows that teachers need to see the effectiveness of change in their students to embrace implementation (Payne, 2018), and an adaptive model can provide both immediate visible results and flexibility to pivot when needed (Kuluski et al., 2021). To do this, the Model for Managing Complex Change, which served as the basis for the restorative intervention implemented in the PLC we studied, identifies where a gap in resources or planning can hinder the successful implementation of change (Knoster et al., 2001).
An adaptive model can provide both immediate visible results and flexibility to pivot when needed.
In our study, a survey implemented by the research team helped the team of special educators to target specific gaps where the Model for Managing Complex Change identifies that a resource is missing before confusion, anxiety, resistance, frustration, or stalled action could kill momentum. While the limited available literature offers valuable insights to guide the application of the Model for Complex Change in diverse educational settings, little research has empirically examined a method for using this model in practice to address a particular challenge in a school. This study helps to fill a gap in the literature, adding research-based support for utilizing the Model for Managing Complex Change in K-12.
From Stories to Theories of School-Community Arts Partnership: The Case of Austin’s Creative Learning Initiative — Adam Papendieck, The University of Texas at Austin; Brent Hasty & Jackson Knowles, MINDPOP
Lead the Change: What are some of the ideas you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at AERA can learn from your work related to practice, policy, and scholarship?
Adam Papendieck, Brent Hasty & Jackson Knowles: Our work shows how and why communities and schools come together for change, examining the partnerships that bind together and mobilize the Creative Learning Initiative as a robust and enduring collective impact initiative. We find that community arts partners rely on a rich collection of “useful stories” to make sense of and organize their day-to-day decisions and interactions within the educational sphere.
We find that community arts partners rely on a rich collection of ‘useful stories’ to make sense of and organize their day-to-day decisions and interactions within the educational sphere.
While often created and shared informally, these stories are both influential and instructive in how they draw together authentic histories of partnership experience and link them to partner-specific visions of change. The stories are saturated with valuable local tacit knowledge about learning and change through the arts, and our analysis of them has revealed at least three distinct orientations to partnership that help us understand how and why artists and arts organizations work with schools. In practice-oriented stories of partnership, we see community arts providers making sense of their interactions with schools as an integral aspect of their core artistic practice, approaching partnerships as valuable opportunities to perform, experience, and make art for and with others. In service-oriented stories of partnership, arts organizations make sense of school partnerships as ways of filling gaps in social service ecosystems and supporting systems of education. In change-oriented stories of partnership, artists and arts organizations make sense of their work with schools in terms of how it contributes to social and educational change in the near and long term. Collectively, these stories also reveal how partnership orientations may be integrated and evolve over time, what it means to succeed in partnership, and how change “emerges” in collective impact. Drawing on the scholarship of Drucker (1994), we describe how arts partners might more formally specify their useful stories about partnership as valid and holistic theories of partnership. By integrating key assumptions about 1) the shared goals of partnership, 2) core artistic competencies, and 3) the service environment and educational market in which partnership unfolds, we propose that such theories could more reliably inform the critical and transformative work of school-community arts partnership and contribute to broader learning about community-driven educational change.
The Moderating Effect of Youth Sports Coaches’ Identities on their Professional Knowledge Orientations: A Social Network Perspective — Reut Liraz & Ori Eyal, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Lead the Change: What are some of the ideas you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at AERA can learn from your work related to practice, policy, and scholarship?
Reut Liraz & Ori Eyal: We believe that our findings offer valuable insights that can benefit the field of Educational Change and the audience at AERA in terms of practice, policy, and scholarship. First, our research findings highlight that strong attachment to a single identity can both enhance individuals’ knowledge exploitation and hinder their willingness to experiment with new knowledge, even when it is readily available through their social networks. This understanding is crucial because, while the reuse of existing knowledge can provide short-term benefits for professional development, sustained long-term growth requires individuals to effectively integrate new ideas and routines into their practice (Mom et al., 2007; O’Reilly & Tushman, 2013). In today’s rapidly changing world, new discoveries, technologies, and methodologies emerge frequently in various fields. Staying up to date within a particular field is crucial to remain relevant and competitive. By integrating new ideas and practices into their work, professionals can adapt to evolving trends, address emerging challenges, and seize new opportunities.
Second, we emphasize the importance of diverse and distinct networks that include people from various backgrounds. Such networks play a crucial role in granting access to a wide range of diverse and versatile knowledge sources. This promotes a more balanced approach to knowledge utilization, enhancing professionals’ adaptability and flexibility in navigating the rapidly changing educational landscape (Burt, 1992; O’Reilly & Tushman, 2013).
Third, our study challenges the conventional perspective regarding individuals with multiple sub-identities, suggesting that fostering multiple identities and avoiding a dominant single-salient identity can promote greater professional experimentation and advancement (Ramarajan, 2014). Previous research has linked athletes’ identities to identity foreclosure (Brewer & Petitpas, 2017), which pertains to committing to a specific predetermined identity without critically examining other potential identities or opportunities for personal growth (Marcia, 1980). In line with this, we highlight the obstacles posed by educators’ identity foreclosure within the field of sport. We find that, by embracing different life roles and identities, educators can broaden their range of knowledge and perspectives, opening new avenues for growth. Moreover, when tensions arise among these multiple identities, a dialectical process may unfold, resulting in the integration of old and new knowledge (Marcia, 1980). This dialectical interaction between exploration and exploitation contributes to the development of a more inclusive, complex, and nuanced approach to knowledge utilization, facilitating professionals’ progress.
Overall, our research underscores the importance of cultivating diverse networks and multiple identities for educators’ professional development. By considering these insights, the field of Educational Change and the audience at AERA can enhance their understanding of how identities, social networks, and professional knowledge orientations intersect and impact educators’ educational change.
Overall, our research underscores the importance of cultivating diverse networks and multiple identities for educators’ professional development.
Math Camp: Disrupting Inequities in Summer Math Intervention Programs — Dr. Cat Gaspard, California State University, Northridge
Lead the Change: What are some of the ideas you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at AERA can learn from your work related to practice, policy, and scholarship?
Cat Gaspard: The majority of math summer intervention programs are designed to either provide extra support to students who are struggling with math or enrichment to advance students’ mathematical knowledge (Halpern, 2002). While these programs can be beneficial for some students, they can also perpetuate inequities in education, and we need to rethink their purpose. It is important to explore, research, and design math summer intervention programs, such as Math Camp, that are accessible to all students, that are inclusive of diverse perspectives and interests, and that challenge stereotypes and biases that may exist in current programs and in the larger education system. My research suggests that interventions that foster a welcoming and fun atmosphere and implement a math curriculum that is exploratory and about “noticing” rather than solving for one answer, may be an advantageous equitable approach for long-term student development and success. Practices should build students’ perseverance and collaboration skills, as well as strengthen math skills (Boaler et. Al 2022).
Rethinking the purpose of summer intervention programs has implications for decision-makers in schools and districts, policymakers, and scholars. For school and district decision-makers, preserving promising practices like those I found in Math Camp will require adopting and implementing a dedicated curriculum for all students and funding for teacher professional development to ensure consistent implementation. For teachers and students to benefit from interventions, we need policies that fund and acknowledge the impact of socially constructed knowledge. In scholarship, we need more timely and current evidence on the impacts of inclusive and equitable summer programs on mathematics learning, as well as more analysis of the features which predict stronger student impacts. Research needs to look at more than math scores to uncover the multiple layers of outcomes and investigations for equitable interventions, including attitude surveys for both students and teachers, as well as interviews. By reevaluating the existing models and adopting more innovative interventions like Math Camp, educators can begin to dismantle current inequities and shift to more effective summer math programs.
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