Tag Archives: Educational change

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.