What’s changing in the China’s education system? What might change in the future? Those are some of the questions that Thomas Hatch asked Yong Zhao about in preparation for a visit to China last month. Zhao was born in China and now works all over the world, including in China, exploring the implications of globalization and technology on education. In part two of this interview, Zhao offers his impressions of recent changes in addressing students’ mental health and discusses the broader context of the Chinese education system and some of the challenges and opportunities for changes in the future. In the first part of the interview, Zhao shared his observations about some of the educational innovations he’s seen, and he’s been involved in China.
Thomas Hatch (TH): In the first part of our conversation, you shared a number of examples some new schools and educational developments in China. In other places like Finland, the US, and even in places like Vietnam and Singapore, I’ve also seen more attention to students’ mental health. Have you seen any initiatives related to supporting students’ healthy development or mental health and well-being in China?
Yong Zhao (YZ): I think that is happening because they’re adding more psychiatrists, more psychologists or “psychological teachers” to schools. Those never existed in China until recent years. So that’s a beginning. But also, traditionally, teachers of Chinese have had a responsibility for psychological support, though they may not have specific training for it. But the approach in Chinese culture is also different from the western way of constructing psychological and mental well-being. In the West, I think we sometimes misunderstand psychological issues because we just describe them, we measure them, we test them. And we have a handbook that defines what’s considered mental health. I’m quite worried about this. Is this a good thing to do?
It’s similar with what’s considered special education in China. Asian countries definitely have a very different definition. There the term applies primarily to those who have a major disability. But now the Western movement of attending to ADHD and learning differences is slowly spreading, though they are not being addressed in schools.
TH: When you say you think that the approach to psychological well-being and health is different in China, how would you describe it?
YZ: First, I’m not a researcher in that area, so I cannot describe it, but I’m very worried about the Western definition going into China and getting applied in that cultural context. I’ve always worried about what is China and what is the Western way of doing things? I’m struggling with this.
Yong Zhao
But one thing I want to emphasize is people always think I’m critical of China, but I’ve said, “I’m critical of everybody.” This is very important. I don’t think anyone has got it right. If someone had it right, we could retire. And some people say, “you’re pro- America.” And the truth is, I’m more critical of American education than other places. I think there is an interesting question about whether the Western way is the right way of doing this. when you think about well-being, I’m not sure because when you look you can see there is widespread misuse of special education, misuse of mental health issues, and I think there are a lot of problems that arise with psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. Many things are happening
“I’m critical of everybody. This is very important. I don’t think anyone has got it right. If someone had it right, we could retire.“
TH: One of my goals is to understand what’s changing within a Chinese context and to think about the cultural, economic, and geographical conditions or “affordances” and what they can tell us about the possibilities of educational change. Can you give us your sense of the Chinese conception of development overall and the purposes and aims that underlie Chinese education?
YZ: Right now, I think China is quite misunderstood. People are easily influenced by media stories. You and I started this conversation talking about how schools don’t change, but like Larry Cuban has said, changes are like a breath on the window in the wintertime. You breathe on the window, and something happens, but then you’re gone, and it’s gone. We need to keep that in mind. Schools do not change, but they’re always changing. This is what I love about it. It’s happening all the time. Every week, for example, I receive emails from someone who is discussing innovation somewhere. Innovation is still there. But how come most schools don’t change? But schools actually do change because they do little things. When you refer back to the grammar of schooling, the grammar in schools hasn’t changed in a long time. But at the same time, there are activities that are changing. So, we need to consider how big a change is a change. That’s another thing to think about.
“Schools don’t change, but they’re always changing. This is what I love about it. It’s happening all the time. Every week, for example, I receive emails from someone who is discussing innovation somewhere. Innovation is still there. But how come massive schools don’t change?“
We also have to think about the diversity of the student population and who is benefiting from doing what. That’s another thing we normally don’t talk about. We talk about education innovation for all students, but not necessarily everybody benefits from the same allocation of time. I’ve not written this yet, but I’m working on this now. Another reason education doesn’t change is that whenever you change a school, you change the entire school, but the needs of the local community are always diverse. Whatever you change it into becomes a monopoly, so you never meet everyone’s needs. What I’m trying to do is to say schools should build many schools within a school, so you actually have diversity, allowing certain schools to grow within your school to meet the needs of the community. That’s my recent theory; trying to go in that direction.
TH: Your comments about change and the grammar of schooling are fascinating because the “grammar” hasn’t changed, but only if you look back within the modern, industrial era. Because if you think back beyond 100 or 120 years — if you go back far enough – some key aspects of schooling have definitely changed. So, it’s a question of perspective. If today, instead of trying to produce changes that we’re going to see tomorrow, we’re actually looking ahead to 40 or 50 years, we might be much more successful if we can be strategic in terms of enabling schools to shift over the long-term. As you look ahead and think about what could or what might happen in terms of Chinese education, do you see ways that it is changing or that it could change in the future?
YZ: What is going to happen in China? First of all, in any foreseeable future, China will not drop the Gaokao, the national exam to select students for university. The Chinese people value college credentials very much. I used to joke about how much Chinese love credentials. Even if they don’t know how to drive, they want to buy a driver’s license, they just want that damn thing. So that will not change. But the Chinese government has been trying very hard to adjust the numbers of students going to high schools and universities and to vocational high schools. Now, at the end of 9th grade, the students are divided into two groups by the Gaokao. It’s like the German system used to be. The highest scorers on the test go to the general high school and then they go to college. Another group goes to the vocational, technical high school, and then you go to the workforce. There’s a lot of problems with that, and right now they’ve changed the quotas so that more students are supposed to be sent to vocational schools. So, they’re trying to adjust that.
But my view is this. I think I wrote in my book “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon” that in China, the big problem is that no matter what you do, people will think there is always one best college – for example, Tsinghua or Peking University – and you can only take in so many kids no matter what you do. So, no matter how you change the exam, there are only so many kids who can go in. That is a huge problem. So, the Gaokao will dominate for a long time, and you will have a lot of kids dropping out of the education system before 9th grade if they’re not getting on the path to the best universities. It’s just that, basically, there’s no point to stay in the system. So, that’s not going to change.
What is going to change? Is after school, weekends. I also think that because of the access to technology and the quick spread of AI, you will have a group of students who, in a sense, are already pre-selected to get into general high schools and to prepare for the colleges. But you will also have a lot of students who have decided “I’m not going to college. I can’t go to college.” Those places with those students might see some changes, and those schools that have those students are not visited and are not understood by people. You know, if you go to a county level, they have high schools, and those high schools don’t have the best students because the best students have been sent to the provincial capital. I don’t think people understand the experiences of those kids who aren’t going to college, what their life is, and you might see some significant changes in those places.
“If you go to a county level, they have high schools, and those high schools don’t have the best students because the best students have been sent to the provincial capital. I don’t think people understand the experiences of those kids who aren’t going to college, what their life is, and you might see some significant changes in those places.”
TH: That’s fascinating, and it connects with Clayton Christensen’s notion that disruptive innovation emerges when there are people who are unserved, and I think you’re identifying in China that there are students who in a sense are not served by their schools or colleges. It could be fascinating to see what might develop there, particularly given the development of technologies and the spread of internet and AI.
YZ: There’s another thing that will affect China a lot, and that’s the drop-in birth rate. Right now, China is graduating over 11,000,000 college students, but the birth rate last year in China was closer to 9 million. As a result, a lot of elementary schools and kindergartens are closing because they don’t have enough students. But now there are groups of private colleges, smaller colleges, and they’re actually trying very hard to get kids in because that’s how they make money. Imagine what would happen if you opened all those places and take in every kid into college?
Dr. Yong Zhao is a Foundation Distinguished Professor in the School of Education at the University of Kansas and a professor in Educational Leadership at the Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne in Australia. He previously served as the Presidential Chair, Associate Dean, and Director of the Institute for Global and Online Education in the College of Education, University of Oregon, where he was also a Professor in the Department of Educational Measurement, Policy, and Leadership. Prior to Oregon, Yong Zhao was University Distinguished Professor at the College of Education, Michigan State University, where he also served as the founding director of the Center for Teaching and Technology, executive director of the Confucius Institute, as well as the US-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Education and a fellow of the International Academy of Education.
What’s changing in China’s education system? What might change in the future? Those are some of the questions that led Thomas Hatch to spend almost a month in China this spring. In preparation for that visit, he talked with Yong Zhao to get his perspective on what’s been happening in education in China in the past few years. Zhao was born in China and now works all over the world, including in China, exploring the implications of globalization and technology on education. In the first part of this two-part post, Zhao shares his observations about some of the educational innovations he’s seen in China and about some of the work he’s been involved in there. In part two, Zhao offers his impressions of recent changes in addressing students’ mental health and discusses the broader context of the Chinese education system and some of the challenges and opportunities for changes in the future.
Thomas Hatch (TH): You’ve written extensively about China in the past, but I’m particularly interested in what’s happening in the Chinese education system over the last few years. Are you seeing some innovations or changes in classrooms and schools in China since the COVID-19 pandemic and the school closures?
Yong Zhao (YZ): I think there’s a huge hunger for innovation in China. Let me give you an example. I was just talking to a group of school principals and heads of the Education Commission in the Chaoyang District in Beijing. It’s the largest district in Beijing, and it’s where most of the embassies and many foreign companies are located. We were planning to do a summer camp for students from different countries based on my education philosophy, which is very much child-centered, focused on uniqueness, personalization, project-driven instruction, and problem-solving. We wanted to make the camp very big, involving kids from different countries, and they were open to the idea. Alongside the camp, we planned to organize learning festivals to discuss topics like artificial intelligence and what I call “Re-globalization.”
We started this conversation in January, and the issue is that very few schools outside China are willing to send their students and teachers here at the moment, so we’re planning to do it next year. But this kind of summer camp is something I began working on before COVID, in May 2018 in Chongqing. Every year since, we’ve been running similar innovative programs in the summer. Even during COVID, we tried it out. The first year in Chongqing, we had students from US schools, Australian and British schools, with hundreds of students and teachers staying in the same dorms, interacting.
In addition, in the public schools in Chongqing, we have students enrolled in a special course I helped design called ICEE, which stands for innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship education. It’s expanding in the public schools even though students have to pay extra to participate, which shows that parents and schools are interested in it. Beijing Academy is another school that is particularly innovative. I was partially responsible for co-designing that school. We formed a global advisory group, including people like Richard Elmore and Kurt Fischer and Ron Beghetto. It was an international collaboration. They built a brand-new school based on our advice. It just celebrated its 10th anniversary in Beijing. Now they have over 9 or 10 campuses.
I think this shows that many parents and students and teachers actually want change. You cannot make massive changes like, for example, saying, let’s forget about the major policies like the double reduction policy, but many people are still trying to find ways to change. It also shows that working in the Chinese education system might be one of the most difficult things in the world. On the one hand, you have to do this. On the other hand, you have to do that. But ultimately, your school’s reputation matters, and innovation as a school leader in China is crucial.
“I think working in the Chinese education system might be one of the most difficult things in the world. On the one hand, you have to do this. On the other hand, you have to do that. But ultimately, your school’s reputation matters, and innovation as a school leader in China is crucial”
TH: So, on the one hand, you can’t do anything, but on the other hand, you have to do something…
YH: Yes, exactly. It’s fascinating. I’m puzzled by this system, you know? Right now, I’m getting older. When I was younger, I didn’t really think a lot about it, but I cannot think of how human societies can be organized like that. You cannot do anything, but you have to do something. It’s a fascinating way to think about it, isn’t it?
TH: It is! But if we step back for a second and try to characterize what’s happening with educational innovation overall right now, my understanding is that the education ecosystem in China has contracted. There were more innovative schools and smaller schools starting, more tutoring programs, more after-school programs. But now, following the school closures and the double reduction policy, in a sense, this seems to be period of consolidation. People I’ve talked to say it’s not a prime time for innovation. Is that the way you see it? (For more on the double reduction policy see “Surprise, Controversy, and the “Double Reduction Policy” in China” and “China reiterates implementation of ‘double reduction’ policy”)
YZ: Yes, your description is right from a general, outside perspective. You can see the contractions. Even the Gaokao has become more nationalized. It was decentralized, with some differences across regions, but it’s gotten more centralized. Now they’re all saying they are using the national tests and very few provinces use their own. The curriculum has become more centralized too with more centrally required courses and teaching materials. But honestly, I think the beauty of the Chinese ecosystem is that, at the same time, children are children, and parents understand that their children, growing up, need innovative education.
They do see the power of artificial intelligence, and AI is becoming more prevalent. They also see new geopolitical conflicts, or what I call “re-globalization.” China always has this happening, and what’s underground is different. Yes, some international schools have closed, and private schools are becoming public. But at the same time, public schools have to become more innovative. The desire for innovation is always there. It’s bubbling up everywhere, but it’s happening. Many local schools have to think about innovation, and even the government, if you look at the most recent speech by the Minister of Education, talks a lot about AI. They are thinking about it in every part of teaching and teacher training. I don’t know how well it’s been implemented, because it’s still very new, but the same is true in the US. China also issued a call last year for schools that were willing to be part of experiments with AI in education. The central government awarded several hundred of these grants to create pilot sites and to spread the message to other places. So, it’s a lot more complex in China than what many people think. The whole system is evolving.
“Yes, some international schools have closed, and private schools are becoming more public. But at the same time, public schools have to become more innovative. The desire for innovation is always there…it’s a lot more complex in China than what many people think. The whole system is evolving.”
TH: Despite that, have you seen some schools or initiatives or afterschool programs or other things that you think are particularly interesting or innovative in the Chinese context?
YZ: In the book Let the Children Play, Pasi Sahlberg and William Doyle described an approach in the Zhejiang Province near Shanghai that developed genuine playhouses for preschool and kindergarten (Anji Play). It was really play-driven, play-based, and it started in one kindergarten and then it spread around the whole province. It wasn’t country-wide, but it was a model recognized by the Chinese Ministry of Education, and they began to promote it across the country. I don’t know how it’s going now, but that is something that I think it’s definitely worth looking at.
There are also a number of schools that are trying to do something different. The Beijing City International School just had me visit for three days. Their student population is over 90% Chinese students, and they are struggling with the fact that parents have invested significant amounts of money, expecting their children to attend prestigious universities like Harvard and Columbia. But they also want to change, so they had me over to discuss transitioning to personalized education. Whenever someone has me presenting, they are willing to be challenged.
The Beijing National Day School and a couple of other public schools are also known for being innovative. Another interesting school is the one called #80 Secondary School in Beijing. I was just there, and I was impressed. If you are a good student in some areas, then you don’t have to take certain courses. They would allow you to explore on your own, which shocked me. It’s a Chinese government high school, and it’s quite powerful.
Thomas Hatch: Coming from Teachers College, where there’s a history of connection with China through John Dewey’s visits, I’m fascinated to see that there has been a long-term interest in China in progressive education. As I began to get ready for my trip, I’ve realized there are a number of educators in China over the years, who have become very well known for being innovative and supporting innovative education. Can you talk about any of those enduring traditions related to alternative education?
Yong Zhao: It’s a very interesting question. But first of all, let’s not underestimate the power of the Gaokao – the college entrance examination. Similar pressure is widespread, happening not only in China but also in Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. Let’s not forget that the Gaokao and the imperial exam tradition, dominates and controls parents’, students’, and teachers’ minds. But continuously, there has been talk about change in China, and I’ve found that the conversation about needing a different kind of student from the “Gaokao type” has never stopped. It’s always been there.
Even in the 1950s, Mao was very against the Gaokao exam. Regardless of who he was or what he is – I’m not debating that – he was actually very innovative in education. Ideologically, he never really wanted exams. During the Cultural Revolution, people think he destroyed the Chinese education system. But on the other hand, he was basically saying education does not need to be so pedantic, does not need to be traditional and academic in an ivory tower. He started education in my village. That’s how I went to school. He said education needs to be shorter. It only has to be 10 years and it can happen in rural villages or in factories. If you think about that, that’s very much the progressive tradition. But the long tradition of using exams to select government officials has also always stayed in the Communist education philosophy, and the tradition of using exams to select and reward people is a long-standing cultural problem.
Next Week: Schools do not Change, But They’re Always Changing: A Conversation with Yong Zhao on the Evolution of the Chinese Education System (Part 2)
Dr. Yong Zhao is a Foundation Distinguished Professor in the School of Education at the University of Kansas and a professor in Educational Leadership at the Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne in Australia. He previously served as the Presidential Chair, Associate Dean, and Director of the Institute for Global and Online Education in the College of Education, University of Oregon, where he was also a Professor in the Department of Educational Measurement, Policy, and Leadership. Prior to Oregon, Yong Zhao was University Distinguished Professor at the College of Education, Michigan State University, where he also served as the founding director of the Center for Teaching and Technology, executive director of the Confucius Institute, as well as the US-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Education and a fellow of the International Academy of Education.
To look back on some of the key education issues and stories from 2023, Thomas Hatch shares IEN’s annual roundup of the end-of-the-year headlines from many of the sources on education news and research that we follow. For comparison, take a look at IEN’s scans of the headlines looking back in 2021, 2020, 2019 part 1, and 2019 part 2. The next post will look to 2024 by pulling together some of the education predictions for the coming year.
Reviews of education stories in 2023 highlighted:
The continuing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on student achievement, student absences, teacher shortages, and other aspects of student and teachers’ health and well-being
Pandemic recovery initiatives and concerns about a “fiscal cliff” that may cut off funding for those initiatives.
Developments in education technology and particularly the potential impact of artificial intelligence following the launch of ChatGPT in 2022
Advocacy for the “science of reading” and foundational learning in literacy and numeracy
Persistent concerns including inadequate education funding, inequities in educational performance and opportunities, and the challenges of innovation in assessment and instruction.
A Capture of Moments, Danna Ramirez, New York Times
an unusual early childhood experiment up close; wrestling with large datasets to better understand education trends; getting over a fear of math to cover efforts to revolutionize the teaching of calculus; and, yes, talks with professors struggling with adjusting teaching to the presence of AI chatbots
“The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) announced significant changes in 2023, including updated marking-schemes and increased number of exams that candidates can take.”
How effective are tutoring programs likely to be? What kinds of challenges need to be addressed for tutoring to contribute to real improvements in schooling on a large scale? In this extended series of posts, IEN continues to scan the news and research on the emergence of tutoring as a key strategy to help students “recover” from the school closures of the COVID-19 pandemic. The first part of this series describes some of the funding initiatives contributing to the emphasis on “high-dosage” tutoring as a “recovery” strategy, as well as some of the initiatives to expand access to tutoring being pursued in the US in particular. Part 2 of this scan will describe some of the challenges educators are experiencing as they try to develop and implement tutoring approaches, and Part 3 will survey some of the specific new developments and “micro-innovations” that could make tutoring more effective in the future. This series is part of IEN’s ongoing coverage of what is and is not changing in schools and education following the school closures of the pandemic. For more from the series, see “What can change in schools after the pandemic?” and “ We will now resume our regular programming.” For IEN’s previous coverage of news and research on tutoring, see Scanning the News on High Dosage Tutoring, Part 1: A Solution to Pandemic Learning Recovery, and Part 2: Initiatives and Implementation So Far. This post was written by Thomas Hatchand Jonathan Beltran Alvarado.
In the wake of the COVID-19-related school closures, “high dosage” tutoring represents a rare instance of a “recovery” strategy that seems to have wide support, willing funders, and available resources. Under the circumstances, it’s no surprise that over the past two years, tutoring initiatives have taken off around the world, particularly in the US.
Tutoring around the world
The global interest in tutoring has always been reflected in the enormous investments in “shadow education” – often private programs that children attend to supplement and support their schooling. In China, survey estimates suggest that while 65% of families with school-aged children took advantage of private tutoring in 2016, that number may have surged to 92% by 2021. In response, the Chinese government passed regulations designed to ban for-profit companies from tutoring in core curriculum subjects.
In China, survey estimates suggest that while 65% of families with school-aged children took advantage of private tutoring in 2016, that number may have surged to 92% by 2021
Although the size, scale, and pressure of private tutoring are often highlighted in Asian countries, the interest in tutoring is evident across the globe. In England, according to the Sutton Trust’s 2023 report “Tutoring: The New Landscape,” almost 1 in 3 young people aged 11 – 16 report they have had private tutoring, up from 18% in 2005. In Spain, nearly half of families pay for children to get private lessons, with those families spending about 1.8 billion dollars (USD) on classes with languages – particularly English – as the main priority. In Egypt, the New York Times reports, “Students in Egypt are flocking to private tutoring centers as the country’s public schools remain overcrowded and underfunded,” explaining that estimates suggest that Egyptian families are spending over one and a half times more on pre-college education than the government does. A “mind-blowing” amount, as Hania Sobhy, an expert on Egyptian education, described it.
At least for wealthy elites, private tutoring may have no international boundaries or many other constraints. Sarah Thomas, in “My Surreal Years Tutoring the Children of the Super-Rich,” explained: “I wanted a job that allowed me free time, so I registered with a tutoring agency. A few weeks later, I found myself in a speedboat cutting across the Indian Ocean towards a superyacht the size of a ferry.” That job soon led to other tutoring arrangements where her “classrooms would be on yacht decks surrounded by dolphins, in Monaco penthouses with infinity pools, and in Mayfair townhouses with halls full of Mapplethorpes.”
I wanted a job that allowed me free time,” she writes, “so I registered with a tutoring agency. A few weeks later, I found myself in a speedboat cutting across the Indian Ocean towards a superyacht the size of a ferry. – Sarah Thomas, My Surreal Years Tutoring the Children of the Super-Rich
In the US, tutoring has always been a popular strategy for providing “extra help,” but following the school closures, tutoring is emerging as a more integral part of schooling across the US. According to a Education Week survey of school leaders and teachers in 1,287 districts at the end of the 2021-22 school year, almost 90% of those responding said that their school or district was offering some kind of tutoring (interesting, only 75% said that they “somewhat agreed” or “completely agreed” that “tutoring is an effective intervention for students in my district or school”). Backing up those numbers, by the spring of 2022, estimates suggest that districts had dedicated over $1.7 billion in Federal funding to tutoring-related efforts and predicted spending could reach 3.6 billion by 2024. Correspondingly, the Department of Education reported that in the 2023-24 school year, more than four out of five schools reported offering tutoring programs, ranging from traditional after-school homework help to intensive tutoring.
Private funders are also supporting tutoring efforts by establishing Accelerate, a new organization dedicated to developing and scaling affordable “high-impact” tutoring programs across the country. With funding from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Arnold Ventures, and the Overdeck Family Foundation, Accelerate set out to raise at least 100 million dollars to develop a network and make grants to support some of the most innovative tutoring models. According to later reports, Accelerate has provided 10 million dollars to 31 organizations developing “innovative” tutoring models and a million dollars to five different states to establish support and “infrastructure” for integrating tutoring into the regular school day that can serve as a model for other states.
States and cities have also participated in increasing the number of tutoring programs available around the country. New Hampshire’s approach includes offering a Yes, Every Student scholarship providing $1,000 for private tutoring from “state-approved educators” for “any young person whose education was negatively impacted by the pandemic.” New Hampshire Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut described the reaction to the program this way: “When I explain the program to [parents], they become very excited, like, ‘Oh, this is great. In some cases, they’re almost like, ‘It’s too good to be true. How can this possibly be?’”
“When I explain the program to [parents], they become very excited, like, ‘Oh, this is great. In some cases, they’re almost like, ‘It’s too good to be true. How can this possibly be?’”
In Ohio, most families now qualify for $1,000 to pay for tutoring. Through its Afterschool Child Enrichment program, called ACE, the Ohio State Department of Education supports educational activities for students who “experienced learning disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic.” In Ohio’s case, however, families who meet the income restrictions can use those funds for a range of activities, including summer camps, language and music lessons, and after-school programs, in addition to tutoring.
Next week: “Predictable challenges and possibilities for effective tutoring at scale – Scanning the news on the emergence of tutoring programs after the school closures (Part 2)
What is happening in the world of education innovation? HundrED’s report on the latest 100 innovations in education added to their global collection reflects the explosion of work in education technology as well as interest in AI spawned by the release last fall of ChatGPT. The 22 innovations focusing on Ed Tech and 4 on AI make up over 25% of the 2024 collection. Recent concerns about health in the wake of the COVID-19 school closures are also reflected in the collection as 10 different innovations focus on some aspect of wellbeing such as mental health, self-esteem, compassion, physical health, and mindfulness. At the same time, concerns about long-standing issues are also reflected in the inclusion of thirteen innovations designed to support professional development and thirteen dedicated to addressing “future skills” such as critical thinking.
This year’s innovations have been established in 47 different countries, with the most coming from Asia (32%), including more than half from India. 62% of the innovations are in operation in two or more countries, and one, Girl Rising, operates in 144 countries.
Lead the Change (LtC): The 2024 AERA theme is “Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action.” This theme charges researchers and practitioners with confronting racial injustice directly while imagining new possibilities for liberation. The call urges scholars to look critically at our global past and look with hope and radicalism towards the future of education. What specific responsibility do educational change scholars have in this space? What steps are you taking to heed this call?
Justin Reich: I’ve had the great privilege of doing a little bit of work with AERA Past President Rich Milner. In a webinar in 2021, Rich explained that twenty years ago he felt isolated and off the beaten path in his work on advancing racial equity in schools. Then, he expressed his excitement at the current surge of interest in these crucial issues. The field caught up to where Rich had been for many years. His welcoming frame reminds me that some work in educational change and improvement hasn’t always centered these issues, and there are other scholars who have been building in this domain for many years. So, as any of us take up this “call to action” to dismantle injustice and construct possibility, we’d do very well to look back on prior bodies of research to discover what we can learn from folks who have been doing the work for some time.
Justin Reich
When you ask about “steps,” it reminds me of some of the research that I did for Iterate. Over the last decade, human-centered design has developed and become more prevalent, as has the field of “Design Justice,” the name of a book by my colleague Sasha Costanza-Chock. And, of course, human centered design has encountered the same turn to anti-racism/ anti-oppression that education reform and many other humanistic endeavors have in recent years. My question was this: In design models that take design justice seriously, does this entail new “steps” in design processes, or new attitudes, frames, and moves within existing steps? In Plan-Do-Study-Act or Design Based Implementation Research or ideo/d.school style Design Thinking, does design justice show up as a new “step” or as modifications to existing phases? My investigation revealed the near universal consensus is that there isn’t a “justice” step. It’s a set of values, mindsets, and actions that affect all the parts of our work.
All that’s to say, in improvement cycles, there probably isn’t a “justice step” or an “anti-racist step” but rather a commitment to those principles throughout our work.
LtC: In much of your work, you offer strategies for teachers and their organizations to approach educational change in manageable and thoughtful steps that leverage strengths. Across this work, what are some of the major lessons practitioners and scholars of Educational Change can learn from your work and experience?
JR: A distinctive feature about improvement work in schools is that the changes that matter most happen in what Richard Elmore called the instructional core, the place where teachers, students, and the resources for learning connect. Schools have lots of other parts–HVAC systems, busses, cafeterias, parking lots, standardized tests, intercoms, and on and on–but if you are interested in improving learning, the action is in the instructional core.
Schools have lots of other parts–HVAC systems, busses, cafeterias, parking lots, standardized tests, intercoms, and on and on– but if you are interested in improving learning, the action is in the instructional core.
The work that teachers do in this instructional core is astonishingly varied and fine grained. On any given school day, we teach kids to sound out diphthongs, tie their shoes, stand in line, factor polynomials, convert carbohydrates to ATP in the Krebs Cycle, conjugate Spanish verbs, hit a shuttlecock with a badminton racket, how to have sex safely, why they should not have sex until marriage, to obey their government, to challenge their government, and on and on and on. So if you are a superintendent with an idea like, “let’s use formative assessment more frequently to guide our instruction,” and you want the school system to use those assessments weekly, then, functionally, you’ve just placed an order for 45 weeks of assessment multiplied by 13 grades multiplied by the number of subjects that you teach in your district. These are not interchangeable assessments: if someone makes a great formative assessment about factoring polynomials it probably won’t help you in evaluating students sounding out diphthongs. In fact, a formative assessment in your earth science unit on meteorology may not help you much in the next unit on plate tectonics.
The only people in the system numerous enough to generate the variety of specific, contextual innovations needed to implement a straightforward change like “add more formative assessment” are teachers. There are simply not enough coaches, TOSAs, APs, principals, central office people, etc. to do that work. So, this is my first point: teacher leadership is absolutely essential to innovation. The only people who can make the fine-grained modifications to each local classroom context are teachers.
So how do teachers choose to adopt new practice? How do they pick up new innovation? If you ask them, as John Diamond did in his article “Where the Rubber Meets the Road” they will tell you their main source of inspiration is “other teachers.” So, every change leadership or innovation problem is actually a peer learning problem.
When you put these two stylized facts together—that teacher leadership is essential to generating innovation and teacher peer learning is essential to scaling innovation, in my mind, you have the basic model for the conditions of innovation. Want new things? Teachers will have to build and adapt them. Want new things to spread and scale? There need to be time and space for teacher to teacher peer learning. Even when you see things that look top down, like some of the science of reading initiatives going on, look under the hood and you’ll see this same basic process. A small cohort of enthusiastic teachers chooses to adopt a new practice, while the bulk are patient pragmatists–participating in limited compliance until they see results and learn from their peers.
In Iterate, I call this the Cycle of Experiment and Peer Learning, and it’s the core model that I use to explain how schools change, and how we can think about supporting that change.
LtC: In your new book, Iterate, you offer different models for envisioning and enacting change. How do you think about balancing the need for immediate change to more equitably serve students and the iterative processes that quality work requires?
If there were known, immediate, dependable, effective steps to improve educational environments or to make them more equitable, we would do them! Even things that work well in one place, do not easily translate to new spaces. They need to be broken apart, reassembled, and grafted into their new environment.
So, to me, “immediate change to more equitably serve students” is not a realistic option. There is only the slow, steady, shoulder-to-the-wheel work of tinkering and incremental improvement. I happen to think iterative cycles of experiment, testing, feedback, and sharing are great ways of doing this shoulder to the wheel work, but there are other more linear models as well.
Change takes time! Start today!
LtC: Educational Change expects those engaged in and with schools, schooling, and school systems to spearhead deep and often difficult transformation. How might those in the field of Educational Change best support these individuals and groups through these processes?
JR: I have a few thoughts in Iterate about this. One is to take joy seriously, and to cultivate environments where faculty sincerely enjoy working with each other, because it’s fun. With the incentives and career ladders that we have in schools, and with the demands we have on teachers contracted time, work on systems improvement essentially takes place during teacher discretionary time. Maybe they’ll make schools better. Or maybe they’ll grade or go home and play with their kids. In my experience, the schools where faculty effectively collaborate with each other are places where the teachers really enjoy their time working together to make schools better. So, joy, enjoyment, satisfaction matter.
On the flipside, we need to acknowledge that all change involves loss. Doing new things involves saying good-bye to old things. Launching new ideas requires leaving old practice behind. That means experienced teachers needing to grieve as they say goodbye to old practices. Even when there is a certain joy in picking up something new, there needs to be time to mourn what we leave behind. Robert Evans The Human Side of Change has good ideas on this.
Take joy seriously and cultivate environments where faculty sincerely enjoy working with each other because it’s fun...the schools where faculty effectively collaborate with each other are places where the teachers really enjoy their time working together to make schools better. So, joy, enjoyment, satisfaction matter.
I also share some research in Iterate that my colleague Peter Senge did with folks at the MIT Sloan School of Management and others. I like to tell the story this way. Peter and colleagues are trying to figure out how to make firms better. Where does work get done in firms? In teams. What do teams do? Well, fundamentally, they communicate and collaborate. What are some of the best predictors of effective communication? One turns out to be “the quality of listening.” Typically, we listen to hear moments in a conversation where we can break in with our ideas, or we listen to see if people agree or disagree with us. But we can also choose to listen to sincerely understand the perspective of others– not to wait to say our next piece, but to really hear another person out. I love this story because these nerdy MIT guys look at firms and economic success and they identify “the quality of listening” as an essential element of success. But of course, the other thing to do is to pay teachers more, which is probably the best way to show and offer support.
LtC: Where do you perceive the field of Educational Change is going? What excites you about Educational Change now and in the future?
JR: There are many folks who know a lot more about the field than I do; in some respects, I approach it much more like a practitioner than a researcher. As an observer of the field, I’m excited about growing interest in issues of racial injustice. I’m also heartened by a general consensus across multiple models–design based implementation research, networked improvement communities, some of Peter Senge’s work on Learning Organizations, and others– about how schools get better. I don’t think Iterate pushes a whole lot of new ground forward in terms of theory or principles, it’s really about getting these ideas to educators in an accessible format. Put another way, we know a lot about the broad contours of how effective school improvement can work: the core challenges are how to implement these sound ideas in the infinite variety of contexts and specifics. Even if we don’t have a map for every context, we have a pretty good compass.
[W] e know a lot about the broad contours of how effective school improvement can work: the core challenges are how to implement these sound ideas in the infinite variety of contexts and specifics. Even if we don’t have a map for every context, we have a pretty good compass.
To me the most exciting thing about this particular moment for working in school change is this: while the pandemic was devastating in many respects for schools, teachers, and students, it also showed how incredibly malleable schools are. Everything we thought was fixed turned out to be contingent–schedules, buildings, routines, busses, grades. As a teacher in Madison, Wisconsin told me, “We know how to change. We’ve been changing every three weeks for the past 18 months.” Teachers are tired and beaten down, but I think this newfound sense of possibility remains a latent seed that we can cultivate and help grow.
ARC brings together members of education systems and organizations such as Ireland, Iceland, Scotland, Uruguay, Wales, and the Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia, and Saskatchewan, and the International Confederation of Principals (ICP). Summaries and materials from previous ThoughtMeets are available on the ARC Education Project website. This article was written by Mariana Domínguez González, Sarah McGinnis & Trista Hollweck.
Ready or not, advanced technology (like ChatGPT) is part of the educational landscape, Yngve Lindvig declared. Even as the debate continues on the possibilities and consequences for schools and higher education, educational leaders must make policy decisions on artificial intelligence in their systems that take into account key questions like:
• How can we make sure that pedagogy drives technology and not the opposite?
• How do we make AI generated data relevant for teachers and students to support learning?
• How can teachers and students be data generators and critical users?
• How can teachers be their own data managers and have access to effective tools for data informed feedback in real time?
• How do we know the data we use is ethical and complies with General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR)
In this context, Lindvig argued, ChatGTP and advanced technology should be embraced, rather than feared, but in a thoughtful and reflective way. Although many governments and system leaders are concerned about the speed of change and a lack of control over AI, banning its use in schools and higher education is not the answer, he continued. AI has the possibilityto disrupt established instruction and assessment practices tosupport student learning in new and powerful ways, but its threats must not be taken lightly, he warned.
Addressing both threats and opportunities, Lindvig described how data-informed learning can be a critical element of effectiveAI use in schools, where data are generated by the students andare used in the learning situation. Since the origin of content in most data management systems is unknown, however, a number of risks must be considered when using AI generated data in schools. These include lack of diversity in content, creating an echo chamber of self-reinforcing opinions and sources, and promoting content that may not be aligned with priorities in educational systems. The main problem is that when a student uses AI generated data, the output is not derived from the student’s critical thinking, reflection, ideas, or product, but it is outsourced to a machine that disconnects the student from the learning. On the other hand, Lindvig explained, if you are able to make an AI-empowered solution within your system, controlled by your system, linked to the curriculum, tagged with curriculum goals, incorporating student feedback based on the intentions in the curriculum, then we have a system that could actually change something.
For Lindvig, perhaps one of the most powerful changes that AI could bring to education is a shift from more traditional assessment practices (such as essay writing and tests) to production-based formats where students must demonstrate their learning in multiple ways using a variety of multi-modal formats. When AI is assessing multi-modal products aligned with the goals that the teacher sets for the learning experience, then the teacher also gets something in return for using advanced technology. Additionally, AI used for assessment can engagestudent learning and provide immediate feedback within the classroom. Of note, AI implementation guided by teachers’ goals ensures that the feedback provided to students is aligned with the educational system’s curriculum and not “big tech” controlled algorithms. After testing this type of AI implementation in Scandinavian schools in May and June, Lindvig noted that teachers reported that the AI feedback on student work was aligned with the values in the curriculum and that it provided them with more time to communicate with their students.
So where do system leaders start in order to implement an AI-empowered solution that is pedagogically relevant? According to Lindvig, systems should:
• Own the login platform, even if a company runs it for the system.
• Control the student catalog which contains the data.
• Implement very strong General Data Protection Regulations, and decide –at a federal, provincial and/or municipal level- which applications are allowed to be used.
• Own the curriculum by making sure that the applications filter the information so that it includes only the content that is relevant and pertinent to the national/provincial curriculum.
In this month’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview Max Yurkofsky shares his experience as an educational change scholar working to dismantle racial injustice and foster collaborative and equitable approaches to spreading educational change. Yurkofsky is an Assistant Professor at Ranford University in the Doctor of Education program. His research centers on how school systems can organize for continuous improvement toward more ambitious and equitable visions of learning. The LtC series is produced by Alex Lamb and colleagues from the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A pdf of the fully formatted interview is available on the LtC website.
Lead the Change (LtC): The 2024 AERA theme is “Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action.” This theme charges researchers and practitioners with confronting racial injustice directly while imagining new possibilities for liberation. The call urges scholars to look critically at our global past and look with hope and radicalism towards the future of education. What specific responsibility do educational change scholars have in this space? What steps are you taking to heed this call?
Max Yurkofsky (MY): Two responsibilities stand out to me. The first is to involve those whom we are trying to serve (and/or whose behavior or beliefs we want to influence) in all aspects of the research and change processes. I am particularly inspired by the work of Brandi Hinnant-Crawford (2020) who pushes leaders to continuously ask “Who is involved? Who is impacted?” when leading improvement, as well as the work of Sasha Costanza-Chock (2020) who articulated the principle that we must “center the voices of those who are directly impacted by the outcomes” of any design or change process.
I’ve tried to align my research and teaching to this principle in a few ways. As I teach in Radford University’s EdD program, which has students inquire into and address a complex problem of practice in their setting as a central component of their dissertation, I’ve tried to develop much more explicit guidelines, resources, and expectations for how my EdD students will involve those impacted by the problems they are trying to address in the research and change process.
I have also tried to center the perspectives of those I am trying to serve in my research. For me, this involves engaging in research on how students and alumni are experiencing our program—what they do, and do not, end up using in practice and why, and what their perspectives on the strengths and limitations of our program are—with the aim of quickly incorporating what we learn into our teaching.
I also am working to collaborate more with educators in the region to see if there are shared problems we might work to address together. This is complex and messy work that I am finding requires a whole different set of skills than what we are trained for in doctoral programs. For example, how to listen for and draw out the problems that are most energizing to educators, how to convene spaces that are engaging enough to regularly draw in full-time practitioners, and how to balance a respect for educators’ busy lives with a friendly push to keep momentum going on shared projects.
The second responsibility of researchers is to interrogate the theoretical perspectives and theories of change we typically rely on: To what extent do these theories account for structural racism? Who developed these theories, and what roles did these theories play in the maintenance of our current system of schooling? What might it look like to infuse these theories with more critical perspectives that grapple with structural racism and other fundamental critiques of our school system?
“Interrogate the theoretical perspectives and theories of change we typically rely on: To what extent do these theories account for structural racism?”
I’ve been particularly excited by how this work is playing out in the field of organizational theory. Most prominently, Victor Ray (2018) has advanced a theory of racialized organizations, which explores the role organizations play in maintaining or disrupting racism in society and calls out the troubling ways in which organizational theory has been color evasive over its history. Inspired by this work, I’m examining some of my favorite theories and considering how they might be made more relevant by centering issues of race and equity. For example, I’m working with Sarah Woulfin on a project related to how institutional logics perspective can better account for structural racism. And, as part of my teaching in the EdD program—which uses improvement science as a signature methodology—I have also worked with my team (Edwin Bonney and Sarah Capello) to identify places where continuous improvement methods can benefit from taking a more critical approach that centers racial justice.
LtC: In your work, you examine continuous improvement as a mechanism for more equitable teaching, learning, and leading. What are some of the major lessons the field of Educational Change can learn from your work and experience?
MY: One central question I wrestle with in my research and teaching is whether the best approach to leading change depends on the kinds of changes we are trying to achieve. For example, are we trying to increase scores on state assessments or are we seeking something more transformational—like dismantling racial inequities or re-imagining the means and ends of schooling?
A dominant perspective in organizational theory, often referred to as contingency theory, proposes that leading improvement in more complex and uncertain domains (e.g., trying to dismantle racial inequities or reimagine schools) requires fundamentally different approaches than trying to support more incremental improvement. More certain and stable problems are often seen as benefiting from quantitative, systematic, and variation-reducing approaches to change (or “ordered” approaches). Meanwhile, complex and uncertain challenges are often seen as requiring more “emergent” (maree brown, 2017) approaches that emphasize exploration, qualitative inquiry, and social learning. The continuous improvement and design methods I study (e.g., improvement science, design-based implementation research, design thinking, and the Data Wise Improvement Process) are interesting and exciting to me in part because they contain a mix of these ordered and emergent approaches.
In a couple of different studies, my colleagues and I have explored whether educators take different approaches to engaging with continuous improvement and design methods depending on the complexity and uncertainty of the problems they are trying to address. One was a 4-year comparative case study of districts using improvement science, design-based implementation research, design thinking, and the Data Wise Improvement Process (with Jal Mehta, Amelia Peterson, Kim Frumin, Rebecca Horwitz, and James Jack). The other was a smaller study with Candice Bocala of two different schools that were using Data Wise to address a problem related to equity.
In both cases, we found that educators did initially experience more success when enacting these methods in more ordered ways to address known problems and more emergent ways to address more complex or uncertain problems. However, we also noticed an important nuance. Educators often ran into problems when leaning too heavily into an ordered or emergent approach to improvement. Instead, the most successful educators learned to rebalance their use of ordered and emergent approaches over time, as they organized for learning on a larger scale and navigated issues of racial inequity. For example, one team focused for many years on developing a valid and reliable practical measure of whether students’ experienced equitable learning environments in the classroom. The team described how they wished they had devoted more attention to supporting educators in interpreting this often-sensitive data to improve their teaching and hoped to accomplish this over the next year of their work.
My hunch is that all educational change efforts consist of different degrees of ordered and emergent approaches. Contingency theory offers a helpful starting point in leading change: it may be useful to begin by taking a more emergent approach to change when addressing complex and uncertain problems (e.g., dismantling longstanding racial inequities, moving towards a more learner-centered vision of instruction), and a more ordered approach when tackling well-known and measurable problems (e.g., improving reading instruction in early elementary school). However, it is essential that leaders recognize that any equilibrium they achieve will be fleeting—that they will need to continuously rebalance over time, especially as they seek to spread change on a larger scale and as they navigate issues of inequity.
LtC: In some of your recent work, you investigate the pressures schools face both to foster equity and increase accountability all within the context of uncertainty. How might these discussions help scholars and practitioners better support schools in making change?
MY: It turns out that what I was learning about the interdependence of ordered and emergent approaches to improvement was a specific example of a broader trend in organizational theory and management research over the past fifteen years. Scholars in these fields are increasingly arguing that, due to the growing complexity, turbulence, and interdependence of today’s world, leaders must navigate intensive and conflicting expectations that can never be fully resolved; they can only be managed. As a result, leaders cannot get away with asking either/or questions (e.g., should I take an emergent approach to change or an ordered approach to change?). Instead, they must ask both/and questions (e.g., how can I effectively balance ordered and emergent approaches to change over time?). This view is typically called the “paradox” perspective.
“The most successful educators learned to rebalance their use of ordered and emergent approaches over time.”
I was drawn to this perspective both because of the studies described earlier, but also because of my work with leaders in Southwest Virginia in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and a wave of state and local elections that brought into power candidates who ran against mask mandates and addressing racial inequities in schools. Navigating paradox seemed like an apt way of describing the work of my doctoral students who were seeking to lead equity-focused change in this politicized and racialized context.
In a recent paper with Don Peurach (2023), I sought to use a paradox perspective to make sense of the challenges educational leaders today were facing. As you mention, we conceptualized the paradox facing educational leaders today as resulting from a collision between:
A rationalizing press to use technically sophisticated processes to improve measurable outcomes.
A democratic press to involve historically marginalized communities in defining these outcomes and how they might be achieved.
A more reactionary manifestation of this democratic press, which involves protecting the power of more privileged groups in educational decision-making.
“Our task is to support leaders in striking an appropriate balance of these two approaches in a context that favors one over the other.”
We argue further that this collision is exacerbating entrenched uncertainties that pervade schools related the aims of education and how these aims might be achieved or measured.
How might leaders navigate this complexity? We elaborate two dominant perspectives that are rarely in conversation with one another. One focuses on mitigating uncertainty by building systems, establishing routines, improving measurement systems, and more broadly developing an in-depth and coherent infrastructure around a shared vision. The other focuses on leveraging this uncertainty as an opportunity to question taken-for-granted aims, practices, and measures or to amplify the voices of those who have historically been left out.
Both approaches have a logic and an allure, but also significant drawbacks. We show how reframing these two perspectives as a paradox provides leaders with a framework for navigating these limitations. Specifically, a paradox perspective offers different metaphors and strategies for balancing these seemingly conflicting imperatives over time. It also makes visible a deeper challenge—that in most societies and systems, uncertainty mitigation is seen as the more legitimate approach to leadership. Our task then is to support leaders in striking an appropriate balance of these two approaches in a context that favors one over the other.
To briefly illustrate, lets connect this to the prior discussion of ordered and emergent approaches to change. A common trap that can occur is that, drawing on dominant perspectives on educational change and available sources of data, leaders will not view their problem as deeply complex or uncertain, and will reflexively apply more ordered approaches to addressing the problem. A paradox perspective might help intervene in this dynamic in two ways. First, it may prompt leaders to question why they are gravitating towards seeing the problem as certain (versus uncertain) and using ordered (versus more emergent) approaches to addressing that problem. Second, it reminds leaders of the incompleteness of any approach they take, and thus can help alert leaders to evidence that they are not digging deeply enough into the problem to grasp its full complexity.
LtC: Educational Change expects those engaged in and with schools, schooling, and school systems to spearhead deep and often difficult transformation. How might those in the field of Educational Change best support these individuals and groups through these processes?
MY: Supporting leaders in spearheading deep and difficult transformation requires attention to two seemingly contradictory approaches to change.
One approach is more ordered, systematic, quantitative, and focused on reducing and mitigating uncertainty for all stakeholders. We might say it focuses on the technical side of the change process. The other approach is more emergent, social, exploratory, and attentive to ways of leveraging uncertainty to reach deeper insights. This approach focuses on the relational side of the change process.
Both these approaches are essential to leading transformative change. Leaders need the ability to craft a shared vision across multiple different perspectives and then help educators see the connection between this vision and their own values and aspirations. They need to support educators and community members with the sensitive and high-risk work of critically examining how their own beliefs and practices might be contributing to undesirable and inequitable outcomes. At the same time, leaders also need to provide some stability and order for educators who must navigate enough uncertainty as part of their daily work. They need to find ways of effectively coordinating the work of improvement across different organizational contexts and providing some expectations around where this work is headed. As a field committed to deep and transformative change, I fear that we will leave educators astray if we a) focus too much on either one of these approaches at the expense of the other, or b) allow the work in these two camps to remain siloed from one another.
“As a field committed to deep and transformative change, I fear that we will leave educators astray if we focus too much on either one of these approaches at the expense of the other.”
I encourage scholars and leaders to consider how they might bridge these two approaches in their own work. Those who focus on the technical aspects of the change process might explore further the relational work that must take place for these processes to be carried out effectively. Those who focus on the relational side of change might consider where processes or tools that can scaffold this work for leaders or opportunities to build routines and systems that help capture and store the knowledge that arises out of this relational work.
To further complicate matters, I don’t believe these two approaches are on an even playing field. Not only are technical, ordered, and uncertainty-mitigating approaches to change more legitimated by school systems and society but—almost by definition—these approaches are often easier to operationalize in practice. It is much easier to offer leaders routines, change processes, and measurement tools, and much more challenging to provide guidance on the relational work of carrying out change as part of one’s daily work. Considering this, it might be helpful as a field to look inwardly and continuously assess how well we are balancing technical and relational approaches to change. We might also think about further theorizing and investigating the work of balancing relational and technical approaches in a system that tends to privilege the latter.
LtC: Where do you perceive the field of Educational Change is going? What excites you about Educational Change now and in the future?
MY: What excites me about educational change is just how many scholars and leaders in the field I can turn to for inspiration on some of the things I’ve discussed here, like incorporating ideas about structural racism into the theoretical perspectives that guide our work and involving those who we aim to serve through our research.
For example, as a discipline, organizational theory has historically engaged very little with questions of race, equity, and justice. However, over the past few years there has been a tremendous surge of empirical and theoretical work (from prominent scholars, early career scholars, and doctoral students) applying and extending organizational theory to account for, interrogate, and explain racial injustice. Here, I am thinking of the work of Jeannette Colyvas, John Diamond, Joann Golann, Decoteau Irby, Ann Ishimaru, Maya Kaul, Amanda Lewis, Heather McCambly, Jacqueline Pedota, Sola Takahashi, to name just a few (of many) scholars engaged in this work (see references for examples of these scholars’ work).
I see a similar momentum regarding theories of educational change. As an illustrative example from my own experience, around 2018 I began reviewing the research on continuous improvement and design methods in education for the project I described earlier. At the time, racial equity and justice were typically not central to how scholars conceptualized and studied these methods. As I’ve gone back to the literature over the past couple years, I’ve been amazed by how much things have changed. There is now a wealth of guidance about how to engage in these methods that focuses squarely on how to use these methods to advance racial equity and justice (e.g., Biag, 2019; Bocala & Boudett, 2022; Cohen-Vogel et al., 2022; Datnow & Park, 2018; Farrell et al., 2021; Hinnant-Crawford et al., 2023; Peurach et al., 2022; Peterson & Carlile, 2021) as well as empirical scholarship that interrogates these methods from a critical lens that centers racial equity and justice (e.g., Bush-Mecenas, 2022; Farrell et al., 2023; Sandoval, 2023; Valdez et al., 2020). Virtually of this theoretical and empirical work has been carried out in the context of collaborative research, where scholars are working alongside practitioners to understand and address the problems that are most essential to them.
Each reference I cited is teaching the field something unique about how to enact transformative change. This could result in a dazzling but fleeting fireworks display of a thousand insights branching off into their own corner of the sky. My hope is that, instead, scholars participating in this exciting and important work will engage and connect with one another—even if they are using different methods, in different contexts, or using different theoretical frameworks—so that we can build on what we are learning from this diverse (and ever-growing) field, and, I hope, converge upon new and better theories for how to lead transformative and racially just change in this current moment.
References:
Biag, M. (201). “Navigating the improvement journey with an equity compass.” In R. Crow, B. N. Hinnant-Crawford, & D. T. Spaulding (Eds.). The educational leader’s guide to improvement science: Data, design and cases for reflection. Myers Education Press.
Bocala C. & Boudett., K. P. (2022). Looking at data through an equity lens. Educational Leadership, 79(4).
Bush-Mecenas, S. (2022). “The business of teaching and learning”: Institutionalizing equity in educational organizations through continuous improvement. American Educational Research Journal, 59(3), 461-499.
Cohen-Vogel, L., Century, J., & Sherer, D. (2022). A framework for scaling for equity. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. The MIT Press.
Datnow, A., & Park, V. (2018). Opening or closing doors for students? Equity and data use in schools. Journal of Educational Change, 19, 131-152.
Hinnant-Crawford, B. N. (2020). Improvement science in education: A primer. Myers Education Press.
Hinnant-Crawford, B., Lytle Lett, E., & Cromartie, S. (In Press). ImproveCrit: Using Critical Race Theory to guide continuous improvement. In E. Anderson & S. D. Hayes (Eds.), Continuous improvement: A leadership process for school improvement
Farrell, C. C., Singleton, C., Stamatis, K., Riedy, R., Arce-Trigatti, P., & Penuel, W. R. (2022). Conceptions and practices of equity in research-practice partnerships. Educational Policy, 37(1), 200-224. https://doi.org/10.1177/08959048221131566
Golann, J. W., & Jones, A. (2021). How principals balance control and care in urban school discipline. Urban Education, 00420859211046824.
Irby, D. J. (2018). Mo’data, mo’problems: Making sense of racial discipline disparities in a large diversifying suburban high school. Educational Administration Quarterly, 54(5), 693-722.
Ishimaru, A. M., & Takahashi, S. (2017). Disrupting racialized institutional scripts: Toward parent–teacher transformative agency for educational justice. Peabody Journal of Education, 92(3), 343-362.
Ishimaru, A. M., & Galloway, M. K. (2021). Hearts and minds first: Institutional logics in pursuit of educational equity. Educational Administration Quarterly, 57(3), 470-502.
Kaul, M. (2023) Mapping the institutional terrain of teacher education: How institutional logics shape teacher education program design. A Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association.
Lewis, A. E., & Diamond, J. B. (2015). Despite the best intentions: How racial inequality thrives in good schools. Oxford University Press.
McCambly, H., & Colyvas, J. A. (2023). Dismantling or disguising racialization?: Defining racialized change work in the context of postsecondary grantmaking. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 33(2), 203-216.
maree brown, a. (2017). Emergent strategy: Shaping change, changing worlds. AK Press
Pedota, J. (2023). Institutionalization of a campus culture center: Exploring racialized administrative burdens faced by students and staff. A paper presented at the American Educational Research Association.
Peurach, D. J., Russell, J. L., Cohen-Vogel, L., & Penuel, W. R. (2022). The foundational handbook on improvement research in education. Routledge.
Peterson, D. S., & Carlile, S. P. (Eds.). (2021). Improvement science: Promoting equity in schools. Myers Education Press.
Ray, V. (2019). A theory of racialized organizations. American Sociological Review, 84(1), 26-53.
Sandoval Jr, C. (2023). Synthesizing as a power-laden facilitation practice in a networked improvement community. Journal of Professional Capital and Community, 8(1), 47-61.
Valdez, A., Takahashi, S., Krausen, K., Bowman, A., & Gurrola, E. (2020). Getting better at getting more equitable: Opportunities and barriers for using continuous improvement to advance educational equity. WestEd.
Yurkofsky, M. M., & Peurach, D. J. (2023). The paradox of leading amidst uncertainty: maintaining balance on an unstable beam. Journal of Educational Administration, 61(3), 185-204.
This week, Chi Hieu Nguyen talks with Thomas Hatch about the after effects and developments in education in Vietnam following the COVID-19 school closures. Nguyen is the CEO, and co-founder of Innovative Education Group (IEG). Innovative Education Group is an umbrella group of more than 10 education ventures. The interview includes a brief discussion of IEG’s work before Nguyen discusses what happened in Vietnam’s schools following the COVID-19 outbreak, how the education system has responded and what has happened since.
Thomas Hatch: Before we talk about the school closures, can you give us a sense of the kind of work you and your colleagues at IEG do in Vietnam?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: We serve the entire spectrum of the education landscape in Vietnam. We work with policymakers, researchers, school leaders, teachers, parents, and students, and each venture tackles a different problem. We manage education consulting companies but we also run full scale K-12 school systems; we’re involved in publishing, assessment, online learning models, and after school learning models, and even a nonprofit foundation to rebuild public schools in remote areas or provide scholarships and mentorship to underprivileged college students. But the majority of my work focuses on K-12 schools in terms of building new schools, upgrading schools, and transforming old schools. I focus mainly on the academic operation side.
The School Closures in Vietnam
Thomas Hatch: Can you give us a sense of what happened in schools in Vietnam after the COVID-19 outbreak?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: I think Vietnam is a very interesting case. If you look at the data, for example, in South Asia in general, during COVID-19, Vietnam had a longer stretch of lockdown compared to other countries because we were quite late in getting vaccinations going. So the closures started in March 2020, and, in total, we were probably online for a year and a half, and, at least for certain areas, it could be longer.
Thomas Hatch: Was that a government-wide shutdown? Was there any discussion or planning up to it? Or was it one day the schools were open, and the next day they were closed and online?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: In Vietnam it’s usually a top-down decision of the Government to shut down. But this time, it wasn’t uniform across the country. They started shutting things down depending on where the outbreak took place. Shutdowns could also happen based on the district. For example, there are 16 districts, and when a district had an outbreak, that district got shut down, and the others districts could stay open. So the school system operated in a very flexible way, but only in the beginning. Then there was an intense period with the biggest outbreaks in summer and fall of 2020. That’s when pretty much the entire country got shut down, including the schools. Then, as we recovered, opening schools was really based on the city again – which had the highest amount of a percentage of vaccination and things like that. But the Government decided to have a target of 100% vaccination, and that is the reason why when it got back to normal it was pretty much every city and every province that came back to normal schooling. That happened around February–March of 2022. It was almost 2 years or a year and a half on and off, but mostly off.
Thomas Hatch: Who was making the decision about closing down schools? Was it the central government who would essentially say, okay, if you have an outbreak, you need to close? Or was it up to the local officials?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: It was the local authorities. Each province or municipality made those decisions depending on the outbreak. The central government gave a very general directive, but it was the authority of the province or the city that made the decision to shut down.
Thomas Hatch: Is that typical of decision making in the Vietnamese education system? Or is it usually more centrally controlled than that?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: Over time, they have tended to give more leeway for local authorities to make the decisions. In 2018, after many years, we had an entire revamp of the national curriculum. That revamp produced the first competency-based curriculum nationally. But before that there was only a “one textbook” approach. That meant that, before 2018, for the entire public school system, we used the same textbook. From 2018 onwards, there’s a set of textbooks to choose from, so there’s a lot more leeway and flexibility for schools in different districts and different provinces and cities. It’s still a centrally controlled system, but there is increasing flexibility for the local authority to make those decisions. Over the past 5 or 6 years, there’s certainly more loosening of regulations to support the growth of the private sector as well, but it’s more obvious in education.
“Like a Survival Instinct” – The Initial Response to the School Closures
Thomas Hatch: What was the first step, the first reaction in terms of the school closures? Was it that people said, “oh my, we’re going to have to teach online and nobody has broadband access? And nobody has computers?”
Chi Hieu Nguyen: That’s really what it was. It was like a survival instinct. Everyone got online as much as they could. It’s actually accelerated the speed of adoption of technology and the Internet in a lot of schools. Many people and schools got online quickly, within about one or 2 months. But in contrast to many other Asian countries, in Vietnam, most of the new adoption of the Internet and digital devices — almost 75% — were in the metro areas. That means that in terms of the continuity of education, the metro areas did pretty well, but that the gap between the metro areas and rural areas widened because of COVID-19. For the Metro areas, COVID was a big kick that got a lot of people online, and now there are a lot of new digital products and services that are available. But in my work, even now, we still have to provide computers and teachers to teach online for students in the most remote area of Vietnam.
Thomas Hatch: That’s a pretty incredible increase in digital use in the metro areas. How was that response possible? Was it led by the Government? Or by local authorities? Or business?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: For private schools, the schools did it themselves, but I think the local education departments were also very responsive. For example, my province, the leadership of the public schools didn’t even need to wait for the local government or the central government to decide. They got students connected very quickly. I think there’s also that agility in the teachers. It’s a very young generation of teachers in Vietnam, and many of them are technologically enabled in their daily life. I think there’s just this passion in Vietnamese teachers in general that might have helped even in more rural areas where there was less internet penetration and technology is very limited. But, overall, I think the infrastructure was in place except for the very poorest areas. Vietnam is a very fast adopter of technology in general, and we saw that kind of a quick transformation in education. Students at most of the schools I know, both private and public schools, get online very quickly within just about 2 months.
Vietnam is a very fast adopter of technology in general, and we saw that kind of a quick transformation in education. Students at most of the schools I know, both private and public schools, get online very quickly within just about 2 months.
Thomas Hatch: What about devices? Did the schools have to hand out devices or did kids have enough mobile phones?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: Phones are something very common in Vietnam. Vietnam is a very e-commerce economy so the infrastructure is there. Almost every house has a smartphone with a data plan connected with the Internet. I think it’s only with those with the lowest incomes or in the most remote areas where infrastructure is not strong enough. The majority of the country is pretty much connected.
Managing through Remote Instruction
Thomas Hatch: Then what? What were some of the first steps in terms of making sure that remote education would be effective? Was it training teachers in zoom and things like that? Was it creating a curriculum? And was that done centrally at the national level or at the local level?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: For one thing, the Ministry of Education worked together with the national television station to produce learning programs for every subject from grade 1 all the way to grade 12, so that even when students didn’t have internet they could actually watch the TV and learn the programs. But at schools, the effort was focused on just getting kids online and using the internet as a medium to get connected with students within the first, maybe 6 months to 9 months. There was not much of any conversation about teaching methods. But then, towards the end of 2020, and for most of 2021, there were more conversations and conferences about pedagogies, methods, and how to use technology. There was also new explosion of technological products and services in 2021. But for the first 6 months it was pretty much just getting online as much as possible.
Thomas Hatch: That’s very helpful. It’s really interesting the way you describe the COVID-19 response in phases, with an explosion of edtech technologies and things that teachers could use. It wasn’t necessarily focused on pedagogy. Can you give some examples of some of the more interesting edtech developments from your perspective?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: In just about 2 months it seemed like Zoom or Microsoft Teams were in every school. Then in 2021 Microsoft education came in, and suddenly there was an explosion in the number of teachers going for Microsoft education training to become a Microsoft Education Expert or to learn how to use the entire suite of packages and services. Google education followed as well. Vietnamese parents in general are also very keen on learning English with technology, and suddenly there is an explosion of pronunciation apps, reading apps, grammar apps, tons of this. There’s even an investment company translating the entire Khan Academy in Vietnamese.
For me, I also started using ClassIn. It’s a product from China, and it’s a platform that was built for the classroom. It’s different from things like Zoom that were designed as platforms for meetings and were hijacked into the classroom. On Zoom, for example, if you want to us another education tool, you have to ask students to switch platforms: “Okay, let’s go to Padlet” or you have to share a screen. And the moment you share a screen, with limited broadband, you often can’t stream a video or anything. Everything is just disrupted. But ClassIn brought everything together in one platform. You have a blackboard. You have a timer. You can store your video and your lesson plan, or whatever you want to share in ClassIn. Even if the students have very low broadband, they can still watch the video without distraction. It’s called like an online-offline model.
Thomas Hatch: But are schools still using these technologies and online tools?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: There are different aspects. Schools are more aware that something like COVID-19 could happen again and disrupt everything, so they’ve converted from paper-based into more digital resources. Now you see Vietnamese schools are starting to think about learning management systems like Canvas and everything digital lives there.
Schools are more aware that something like COVID-19 could happen again and disrupt everything, so they’ve converted from paper-based into more digital resources.
The second aspect is the way they approach the lessons. There now might be a combination between online activities and in person activities. The students before class, during class, and after class spend a lot of time on the digital platform, and of course, in class, they have discussions and they have in-person activities. The third aspect is that classroom organization may be more flexible. It’s no longer just one teacher and the entire class. You can have the class study from a different location, doing something for a field trip and then have a class study online, for example. You can start to invite teachers from all over the world to teach and start to explore other possibilities. Of course, you see this most at pioneering schools. One I’m involved in is The Olympia Schools, a private K-12 school system that is a part of our school network. They’ve started talking about deeper learning, about virtual reality, how to take advantage of AI and virtual reality. Now they’ve started to bring ChatGPT into daily teaching as well so there is almost no resistance to the wave of technology anymore because of that COVID-19. Now they have that mentality that we have to be very agile with every new technology coming out. I think every city, in every major city in Vietnam, there should be about 4 or 5 schools like that. They are really pushing the boundaries, and they become like model schools that others can learn from.
This week, IEN shares the second in a series of posts featuring presenters from the Educational Change Special Interest Group sessions at the Annual Conference of the American Educational Research Association. This post includes excerpts from Lead the Change (LtC) interviews withthe presenters from the session titled: Conditions Conducive to Learning that Promote Ed Change.The full interviews can be found on the LtC website. The LtC series is produced by Alex Lamb.
Excerpts from the LtC interview with Jennifer R. McGee, Tim Huelsman, Terry McClannon, Appalachian State University, whose presentation is titled: “Examining Teacher Job Satisfaction Through Conversations with Elementary School Teachers”
Lead the Change(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?
Jennifer R. McGee, Tim Huelsman, Terry McClannon: Our work centers on the working conditions of public school (BK-12) teachers. As employees of state and local governments, teachers are directly impacted by educational policy. Policy decisions can impact the classroom, the school, and the public’s view of education as a whole. Our data from multiple studies shows that this influences teacher job satisfaction and burnout, which we believe ultimately has an impact on retention. It is of course difficult to prove this empirically.
None of this is new information to members of AERA. What might be nuanced in our study is that we examined job satisfaction qualitatively, instead of relying on instrumentation. This particular study does have a smaller sample size, but what we found is that teachers were able to share both positive and negative factors that influence their satisfaction. We believe that this leads to the examination of teacher job satisfaction on a continuum instead of a dichotomy. We would urge the field to consider this as we continue to see large numbers of teachers leaving the profession altogether. Our data show that teachers can be satisfied with some parts of their jobs but dissatisfied with others. We feel that our duty is to highlight and elevate the voices of those teachers who are telling us what could be better about their jobs and try to make changes both with policy from the top and logistics within school buildings.
We are excited to be presenting in the Educational Change SIG because we believe that this is the right group to begin having conversations about how to make the lives of teachers better. As educational researchers, we often have ideas about what might work but need to be able to test and evaluate those ideas.
Excerpts from the LtC interview with Chanteliese Watson, Michigan State University, Corrie Stone-Johnson, University of Buffalo, Sheneka Williams, Michigan State University, whose presentation is titled: “Leading through Crisis: School Leadership and Professional Capital During COVID-19”
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?
Chanteliese Watson, Corrie Stone-Johnson, Sheneka Williams: Findings from our study have important implications for school leaders who want to cultivate more professional capital in their schools. Undergirding our study is the relatively underexplored concept of professional capital. Hargreaves and Fullan (2012) describe professional capital as an “investment” that “requires teachers to be highly committed, thoroughly prepared, continuously developed, properly paid, well networked with each other to maximize their own involvement, and able to make effective judgments using all their capabilities and experience” (p. 3). Professional capital includes a mix of three other capitals: human capital, or “the talent of individuals”; social capital, “the collaborative power of the group”; and decisional capital, “the wisdom and expertise to make sound judgments about learners that are cultivated over many years” (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2013, p. 37).
Our findings suggest that professional capital may not be a static concept but rather a fluid one. Understanding the fluid nature of professional capital can lead to strengthening its core components (human, social, and decisional capital), which are associated with better outcomes for schools. Our focus in this paper is on decisional capital, as the pandemic paradoxically allowed leaders to make many decisions about teaching, learning, and communication that are typically more centralized.
We also found that while many schools demonstrate “high” professional capital, they frequently differed in terms of how the three forms of capital were operationalized. For example, one school might have high social and high human capital but low decisional capital, and another might have low social and high human and decisional capital. With our ranking system, these schools rated the same but clearly differ in terms of how capital is operationalized. As such, our findings are somewhat counterintuitive; school leaders may not need to strive simply to increase social capital and create more collaborative relationships between school employees and others working in the education system, for example, in order to strengthen professional capital, but rather to understand what challenges their schools face and which forms of capital will help them reach their goals by devoting more time and resources to these efforts. In continuing with our above example, instead of strengthening its social capital with more relationships, the school may need to focus on strengthening its decisional capital by increasing communication with parents and teachers to provide uniformed school operations. By using the AERA annual meeting as a stage to introduce the importance of identifying professional capital at work in the school context, researchers and practitioners can work together to address these questions and strengthen the bridge between scholarship and practice.
Excerpts from the LtC interview with Dr. Mia Treacy Dr. Margaret Nohilly Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, whose presentation is titled: “New Child Protection Mandatory Reporting Requirements for Irish Teachers: Implementation Challenges and Barriers“
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?
Dr. Mia Treacy Dr. Margaret Nohilly: We hope that our research can reinforce the need for mandated systemic change to be accompanied by thoughtful, incremental, practical support for teachers, if such educational policy change is to be implemented as intended at a practical level in a school context. Specifically, we hope that our research can dispel the myth that a linear relationship exists between the existence of mandated reporting requirements, even when underpinned by legislation, and teachers’ actual reporting of child protection concerns. Whilst protocols and procedures, including mandated reporting, assist in streamlining processes and promote standardization, there is little evidence to suggest that such initiatives in isolation result in increased numbers of children being protected from harm. Any such initiative requires tangible supports including targeted training and mentoring because we know from research that reporting child abuse is a complex process for teachers. Worryingly, there is also international research highlighting teachers’ under-reporting of child protection concerns. Several factors have been found in research to influence reporting of child protection concerns including reporter knowledge; reporter fears and concerns; reporter belief systems; specific case characteristics; compassion fatigue; inadequate training; and secondary traumatic stress.
This research is important because it reports on the experiences of Irish primary schools at a unique point in time, a time in which teachers must adhere to mandatory reporting obligations for child abuse and neglect for the first time. However, this research highlights the many implementation challenges and barriers that teachers face in fulfilling their statutory obligations including DLPs’ unfamiliarity with the procedures, and their dissatisfaction with the training for their role; low levels of teacher preparedness for the mandated reporting role; teacher concerns about the consequences of reporting; and a dearth in quality teacher education. It is recommended that such educational change be supported by quality, sustained support for teachers including improved teacher education that provide opportunities for in-person interaction and meaningful participation.
Excerpts from the LtC interview with Jayson W. Richardson and Sahar Khawaja, University of Denver, whose presentation is titled: “Systematic Review of Leadership for Deeper Learning”
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?
Jayson W. Richardson and Sahar Khawaja: The hope is that the audience will better understand the current body of literature around leading schools for deeper learning which involves giving kids more choice, voice, and agency and initiating systemic changes like project-based learning, competency-based assessments, internship, and graduate profiles. Given that the literature body is not that robust, we hope that the audience will be inspired to pursue new lines of inquiry that focus on inspiring the field around leading schools for deeper learning.
International Education News 