This week, IEN features the work of scholars who are shifting the boundaries of educational change to consider scalability, cross-cultural perspectives, and forms of collaboration. This post is the eighth in a series featuring excerpts of interviews with presenters participating in the Educational Change Special Interest Group sessions at the Annual Conference of the American Educational Research Association in Philadelphia last week. This post includes presenters from the session titled: “(Re)Conceptualization Change at Scale: New Visions for and Models of Educational Change.” For previous posts in this series, see: Practices, Programs and Policies for Instructional Coaching, Transforming Organizational Systems for Educational Equity, Organizational Change and Equity in Professional Learning, Arts and Sports Programs, and Summer Camps, Driving Change in Higher Education, Racial Justice and Educational Equity, Teachers as Agents of Change and Decolonizing Professional Learning. 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 produced by Alex Lamb (Outgoing Series Editor) and Liz Zumpe (Incoming Series Editor).
Catalyzing Innovation: Rethinking Scalability — Seth A. McCall, Jessica Yusaitis-Pike & Ellen B. Meier, Teachers College, Columbia University; Babette Moeller, Education Development Center, Inc.
Lead the Change (LtC): The 2024 AERA theme is Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action. How does your research respond to this call?
Seth A. McCall, Jessica Yusaitis-Pike, Ellen B. Meier & Babette Moeller (SM, JYP, EM & BM): The Math for All (MFA) research project addresses racial justice through the issue of accessibility in mathematics education. The project focuses on supporting teachers in improving the accessibility of high-quality mathematics for all students in their classroom, whether identified for special education services or not. Unjustly, students of color tend to be overrepresented among several disability categories. As a result, they are often doubly marginalized, because of their color and their disability status. So, the larger MFA project is very much engaged with this question of racial and social justice.
In general, MFA is informed by an appreciation of difference. The neurodevelopmental framework guides the work with schools, with the reminder to leave space for different ways of thinking. As a research project working with 32 schools, these ideas about neurodivergence complicated how the research team thought about going to scale. This response to the AERA call-to-action engages with the concept of scale, encouraging a more nuanced conceptual understanding of scale. Tsing (2015) characterized scalability as the “ability to make projects expand without changing their framing assumptions,” or, more specifically, “the ability of a project to change scales smoothly without any change in project frames” (p. 37). In working with schools, the project focused on how the ideas that MFA introduced within schools lived on within those schools. However, the project does not have to look the same in every situation. In fact, the research team increasingly suspected that it should not look the same in each situation. MFA’s work with teachers encourages them to recognize how students learn differently. However, in focusing on going-to-scale, researchers sometimes frame “difference” as a problem. In these cases, the idiosyncrasies of place become an inconvenience, and the natural unfolding of the world becomes a threat. In sticking with MFA’s vision for the classroom, this research project attempts to trouble taken-for-granted assumptions in educational research related to scale.
MFA’s work with teachers encourages them to recognize how students learn differently.
LtC: 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?
SM, JYP, EM & BM: In addition to Tsing’s (2015) troubling of scale, our research draws on other ideas related to the dimensions (Coburn, 2003) and types of scale (Coburn, 2003; Morel et al. 2019). In a sense, these are groups working on different sides of the same mountain. Tsing (2015) primarily addresses anthropology. Coburn (2003) and Morel et al. (2019) primarily address educational researchers and practitioners. While they do not reference each other, they work on the same mountain, the mountain of “scale.” Whereas Tsing (2015) engages with generative worlds beyond conventional notions of scale, Coburn (2003) and Morel et al. (2019) attempt to discern complexity within the concept of scale. Coburn (2003) develops dimensions of change. Educational change efforts might result in changes in depth, sustainability, spread, and shift in ownership. First, depth of change refers to the amount of depth that the change involves for participants.
Second, sustainability refers to the change effort’s ability to last over time. Participants might be forever changed from their experience, or it may wash off Monday morning, or they might move on immediately to competing priorities. Of course, studying the sustainability of an initiative presents methodological challenges, especially in the context of funding mechanisms that make assumptions about the sustainability of “good” ideas. Innovative educational change projects often supply schools with resources during a relatively short period of time before moving on to work with new schools (Coburn, 2003). Coburn examined publications from several reform projects and found only one that returned after the implementation ended. Presumably, for many, the priority shifted to demonstrating success with more schools (2003, p. 6). Perhaps, the implicit assumption is that “good” ideas will prevail within schools or that sustainability beyond a few years is not as important as spreading the reform.
Third, Coburn (2003) addresses “spread” as another dimension of change. Spread involves the degree to which the ideas and practices associated with the endeavor catch on with colleagues. If it makes life easier for participants, the initiative might spread. However, many initiatives strive for more than an easier life. For example, pedagogical change initiatives might envision a better education for children, but they rarely focus on easier lives for teachers. This presents a challenge for the spread of change. Fourth, Coburn (2003) addressed the shift in ownership. This implies that the participants take over responsibility for the work previously completed by others. Of course, ownership involves more than responsibility. It also involves enjoyment. Thus, after taking over ownership, participants might alter the initiative to better fit their own context.
Given these different dimensions, it seems necessary to revisit underlying assumptions related to scale. While Coburn (2003) introduced different ways of thinking about scale, Morel et al. (2019) refined this project. Morel et al. introduced different types of scale: adoption, replication, adaptation, and reinvention. Adoption involves widespread use of an innovation, a sort of extended implementation. More than widespread adoption, replication includes implementation with fidelity that produces the expected outcomes. Adaptation of an innovation involves (or even encourages) local actors adapting the “core principles” of that innovation in their local setting. Finally, reinvention involves experimentation with the original innovation in order to create a new innovation (Morel et al., 2019, pp. 370-372). In the end, more detailed descriptions of scale are needed. Tsing (2015), Coburn (2003), and Morel et al. (2019) provide useful frameworks for thinking about scale. However, further research is needed to both examine how these frameworks apply to specific interventions in specific local contexts and how these frameworks can be refined. Our own study reports findings based on how participants continue to reference ideas and practices from the partnership, how changes within the school affected that process, and how systems of support within these schools sustained and even amplified these ideas and practices.
Imagining Educational Change through Cross-cultural Perspectives on Learning — Heather Reichmuth, Michigan State University; Taeyeon Kim, University of Nebraska – Lincoln
Lead the Change (LtC): The 2024 AERA theme is Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action. How does your research respond to this call?
Heather Reichmuth & Taeyeon Kim (HR & TK): Our collaborative autoethnographic research on our experiences teaching and learning in South Korea (hereafter Korea) and the U.S brought us to the concept of mastery learning in the Korean context. Mastery learning is important to examine today as a mechanism to address learning gaps, promote equity, and promote the transfer of concepts to real-life situations (Guskey, 2010; Wiggins, 2014). However, contemporary research on learning tends to concentrate on theories originating from Western contexts, potentially leading to a disregard of the cultural aspects that significantly influence learning, particularly in educational settings catering to culturally and linguistically diverse students (Kim & Reichmuth, 2021). Our study attempts to bring transnational perspectives into theoretical and practical understandings of learning, by examining learning in the Korean context with a transnational lens as a way to construct new educational possibilities and affect positive change in student learning and teacher development.
Our research challenges epistemic injustice (Boni & Velasco, 2020; Frank, 2013) and calls for action to better serve diverse aspects of learning, aligning with this year’s conference theme of dismantling racial injustice and constructing educational possibilities in schools.
LtC: 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?
HR & TK: There are three aspects of our research that we will highlight for our AERA audience members. First, we hope that through our presentation the audience gains a deeper understanding of how learning is socio-culturally understood and constructed, beyond Euro-centric, linear notions. This means acknowledging multiple and different forms of learning is important for scholars, teachers, and policymakers. For example, as scholars we should consider how we make assumptions about learning and challenge forms of assessment that may not reflect the cultural diversity of students we are assessing and/or writing about. For teachers, the findings suggest that classroom norms and the cultural logic behind learning should be questioned and reframed for the communities they are serving. Finally, our research offers important implications for policymakers by suggesting they revisit contemporary educational policies that prioritize accountability measures within a narrow frame of learning based on the factory model of schooling (Sleeter, 2015).
Classroom norms and the cultural logic behind learning should be questioned and reframed for the communities they are serving.
Second, we want to highlight the impact of our transnational experiences on our conceptualization of learning. In existing studies, mastery learning focuses on specific guidance on elements for mastery and time investment with feedback and formative assessment. We extend the concept of mastery learning informed by Confucian philosophy. Our use of transnational perspectives allowed us to bring Confucian ways of knowing aimed to cultivate the heart, mind, and body as the full self, along with the holistic notion of self being part of and closely related to communities, society, and the world (Wei-Ming, 1985). As global mobility increases, educational stakeholders have to understand how students’ and teachers’ transnational perspectives and lives shape their learning experiences. Thus, our presentation reveals the utility of transnationalism as a theoretical lens as well as embodied life experiences.
Finally, we also want to highlight our methodological approach of using multiple years of collaborative autoethnographic data as a significant tool to explore meaningful change in learning and education. This approach enabled us to bring our onto-epistemological understandings of transnational lived learning experiences, which extends conventional qualitative methods. Our interactive accounts for interpreting and constructing ideas in developing this research can be also seen as part of transformative learning and analysis.
Leading Collaborative Educational Change: Problematizing Conceptualizations of Collaboration in the Context of Educational Change — Paul Campbell, The Education University of Hong Kong
Lead the Change (LtC): The 2024 AERA theme is Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action. How does your research respond to this call?
Paul Campbell (PC): The orientation of this year’s theme for AERA is an important one. The focus on not just imagining but constructing educational possibilities and the action required of this to become a reality are important provocations. My work examining the role of collaboration in the pursuit of educational change, the role of leadership within this, and how we understand the related concepts of power and agency I believe connects well with this year’s theme.
In examining the dominant discursive concepts and ideas that emerge in relation to collaboration and educational change, this work highlights the nuanced implications they have for change to develop and sustain in diverse systems. My work around collaboration found that in recent years, there has actually been quite limited advancement of thinking on the meaning and conceptualization of collaboration, and the related role of leadership (Campbell, 2020; 2021). Limited examination of the conceptual complexity of collaboration as a policy tool and practice, and the role of leadership in this, has implications for what forms of collaboration emerge in and across systems, and imposes limits on what it can achieve for our communities and the complex challenges and crisis we face.
Collaboration requires a complex consideration of the varied political and organizational influences on and drivers of it in its range of forms.
To achieve its intended impact, collaboration requires a complex consideration of the varied political and organizational influences on and drivers of it in its range of forms. Through the articulation of an alternative framework for understanding collaboration within the domains of practice, policy, and research, my research offers a new frame through which the complex forms, drivers, and influences of collaboration can be understood, and the implications this has for those exercising leadership of it from a variety of positions and standpoints within an education system. What remains though is the need for further critical examination of where power is situated within education systems to enable more responsive approaches to collaboration to emerge from within the communities they are intended to impact, and in doing so, more successfully strive towards broader systemic goals, particularly of equity and justice.
How we understand collaboration in relation to educational change often depends on assumptions of shared understanding, while simultaneously relying on established or existing forms of collaboration to bring about something new. I posit that:
- Collaboration is often presented in education policy as the key lynchpin of improvement and change, and this in isolation can be misplaced.
- There is a consistent emphasis on collaboration across policy and practice, exemplified through Scotland’s regional improvement collaboratives (Campbell 2021), or other forms of professional networks that support professional learning and change (Brown, et al., 2023) but its manifestation and utilization are often left to chance, or reliant on specific governance arrangements initiated at the middle tier or national levels of education system, as exemplified in the case of Scotland (Campbell, 2021).
- With this, emerging collaborative mechanisms at the national and regional level matched with alternative forms of governance, result in power to initiate or drive collaboration lying with fewer people; particularly the forms collaboration can take, its purpose, and intended impact.
- Often, the policy context and surrounding discourse in education systems enjoy a shared vocabulary when it comes to collaboration, but without a shared understanding, or operational definition, varied outcomes from collaborative endeavors result.
With this, I see a number of implications for practice, policy and scholarship.
LtC: 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?
PC: Practice: If collaboration in sites of practice, manifested in forms often characterised as professional learning networks or communities (Brown et al., 2023), is to achieve the often-related change or improvement goals associated to it, it is vital for educators and leaders, across spaces of practice and policy, to develop, share, and sustain a common definition of collaboration that accounts for the varied possible influences, drivers, and forms of collaboration. This definition needs to be reflected in the collaboration that emerges through necessity or interest, and the collaboration that is planned to achieve organisational or systemic goals within education systems.
Collaboration is often a characteristic of professional practice that intends to support professional learning, change, and improvement in the pursuit of broader systemic goals, such as addressing the poverty related attainment gap in Scotland (Campbell, 2021), or improvement in student outcomes more generally. If such goals are going to be achieved through collaborative approaches to learning, improvement and change, building a more sophisticated understanding of the professional behaviours, needs, expertise, and experiences required for effective collaboration to take place, and a shared understanding of this amongst those coming together to collaboration, will be essential (Campbell, 2020; 2021).
Policy: Across systems, given the status collaboration has developed as a lynchpin to improvement and change, more meaningful and effective approaches will require systems to map, audit, and critically analyse forms of collaboration that already exist and emerge within the system, and plan for systemic structures and operational mechanisms that enable collaboration to happen in both planned and emerging ways, led at different levels within the system.
Scholarship: The possibilities of collaboration and how this intersects with ideas of leadership and change offer important possibilities across systemic contexts. To do so, further theoretical development of collaboration as a systemic mechanism for change exploring how it is mobilised within different tiers of the system, and the unique influences, drivers, and forms that emerge will help scholars, policy makers, and practitioners develop a more nuanced understanding of how collaboration is mobilised in policy and practice.Acknowledging the knowledge, skills, and shared purpose needed to collaborate, the preparedness of individuals across systems to come together to collaborate, what may drive this preparedness, what influences engagement and success, and how this could relate to the forms of collaboration that emerge is also needed.
Overall: Collaboration that extends beyond more technical conceptualisations of change and improvement is essential for our communities and systems. Across the globe today, systems face health and climate emergencies, constitutional uncertainty, forced migration, national disasters, injustices, and many other challenges and crises. Educators and leaders, often positioned as front-line responders to these crises, continue to focus their thinking and efforts around issues of justice, equity, wellbeing, identity, and community, and with this has come a repositioning of educators and school leaders as key decision makers within their communities. With this in mind, we must continue to examine the visible, yet complex, power structures that enable and constrain forms of collaboration that support educators and leaders in school communities to lead meaningful change reflective of their contextual complexities and needs. This was exemplified, in places, during the COVID-19 pandemic and the suspension of previous decision-making protocols and authority which led some educators and leaders to refocus efforts and attention to other factors affecting student outcomes. This included, for example, an emphasis on wellbeing, rethinking the nature of assessment tools, and establishing support for community sensemaking processes in times of crisis and complexity (Campbell et al., 2023). This can prompt us to continue considering what forms of collaboration lead to change and improvement for student outcomes and the work of educators, and how leaders in education systems should be supported to enable this to happen. As scholars in the field of educational change, never has there been a more important time to continue advancing this work.
Unveiling the Vanguard: Analyzing School Characteristics and Aspirations in a Statewide Education Reform in the United States — Danqing Yin, University of Kansas; Rong Zhang, University of Alabama; Jie Chen, Measurement, Inc.
Lead the Change (LtC): The 2024 AERA theme is Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action. How does your research respond to this call?
Danqing Yin, Rong Zhang & Jie Chen (DY, RZ & JC): Our research, titled “Unveiling the Vanguard: Analyzing School Characteristics and Aspirations in a Statewide Education Reform in the United States,” delves into the progress made through the Kansans Can School Redesign Project (Kansans Can) initiative. Our study addresses the AERA 2024 conference theme by identifying the school and state education reform goal alignment disparity.
Kansans Can is a comprehensive education reform spearheaded by the Kansas Department of Education (KSDE) launched in 2017. This initiative is driven by the overarching goal of assisting schools in accomplishing key objectives regarding student success, encompassing kindergarten readiness, social and emotional growth, personalized learning, civic engagement, high school graduation, and post-secondary success.
Since its inception, public schools and districts in Kansas have embarked on the redesign journey, unfolding in distinct phases. The inaugural “Mercury” stage witnessed schools receiving direct guidance and resources from KSDE. Subsequent schools and districts joined the journey, progressing through participation phases denoted as “Gemini I,” “Gemini II,” “Apollo,” “Apollo II,” and “Apollo III.” As of the present moment, 194 schools across 71 districts in Kansas stand as participants in this initiative. Existing theories and literature offer inconclusive insights into the ramifications of systematic changes and specific strategies within local contexts, with limited empirical studies dissecting the critical components of this change plan.
We harnessed data from Model Schools and report cards for the intricacies of the Kansans Can, and we delved into how schools aligned with the reform goals by different characteristics, such as a school’s socioeconomic status, student racial composition, and location, among a few others. Our findings unveil some progress in reform aspirations. Specifically, through an analysis of data from 24 Mercury schools and 44 Gemini I schools, discernible patterns of the Kansas Can project were revealed with respect to Kansans schools’ goal attainment with Kansans Can as the initiative progresses through subsequent phases.
We delved into how schools aligned with the reform goals by different characteristics.
LtC: 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?
DY, RZ & JC: To understand the impact of systematic reform on student outcomes, our team members, including Danqing Yin and Rong Zhang, previously collaborated with economics scholar Dr. Xiaozhou Ding. We undertook a comprehensive examination of the influence of the Kansans Can initiative on schools’ academic performance in its earliest phases.
Employing a robust methodology, we previously utilized school report cards from 2016 to 2021, drawing data from KSDE’s High School Achievement data, the Elementary Achievement data, and the National Center for Education Statistics Common Core data. Our analytical framework centered around an event-study Difference-in-Difference model, allowing us to explore the impact of the Kansans Can School Redesign project on schools that embraced it early, comparing them with those that did not undergo the reform before and after its implementation. The analysis revealed a noteworthy increase in eighth graders’ science achievement, a promising outcome signaling the potential positive impact of the reform. However, intriguingly, we observed no significant changes in science outcomes for other grades or in math and ELA achievements across all grades before and after the reform. The lack of a significant shift in the high school graduation rate was equally noteworthy. These findings raise pivotal questions for our present study with education scholar and statistician Dr. Jie Chen, with the following question: Why the specific improvement in eighth-grade science achievement, and what factors contributed to the lack of change in other areas?
With this question in mind, we formed another team of three education scholars: Danqing YIN, a mixed-methods researcher in education policy; Rong ZHANG, a mixed-methods researcher in educational leadership; and Jie CHEN, a quantitative researcher in educational measurement. We have followed innovative approaches and education reforms in our fields.
As we contemplate the questions about Kansans Can, our team underscores the need for a deeper exploration into the qualitative and quantitative dimensions surrounding our findings. Unraveling the “why questions” requires additional efforts to provide a more nuanced understanding of the intricacies at play. We sincerely hope that this second study on Kansans Can could start an exploration for policy scholars, school districts, and educational organizations, aiding them in making evidence-based decisions. We invite further collaboration and more education stakeholders to draw upon our research findings and evaluation methods in shaping the trajectory of education reform. We strive to contribute to the collective wisdom that propels educational progress and enhances the pursuit of student success goals in a broader educational reform landscape. Here we extend an open invitation to share your insights and explore potential avenues for future collaboration at AERA 2024. Together, we can enrich the discourse and drive positive change in education.
References
Catalyzing Innovation: Rethinking Scalability
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Imagining Educational Change through Cross-cultural Perspectives on Learning
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Leading Collaborative Educational Change: Problematizing Conceptualizations of Collaboration in the Context of Educational Change
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