“OECD data shows that Austria is comparatively well-positioned in terms of teacher supply. The proportion of unfilled teaching positions in primary and secondary education is around one percent. Austria also has a lower teacher attrition rate of 5.8 percent, below the OECD average of 6.4 percent and the EU average of 6.9 percent. At the same time, the report shows that Austria needs to focus more on retaining young teachers“
“Colombian teachers teach 955 hours of class per year, while the OECD average is 770. In lower secondary school, the workload reaches 840 hours annually, compared to 710 hours...Colombian spending reached $3,526 per student in primary school and $3,594 in lower secondary school. In OECD countries, the figures were $12,893 and $14,291, respectively.“
“Women make up a clear majority of teachers at lower levels of education, but they remain underrepresented in education leadership positions in almost all OECD countries.” In Finland, women account for 97% of teachers in early childhood education and 53% in tertiary education.”
“Iceland devotes a larger share of its economy to public education than the OECD average. However, the system continues to face teacher shortages and uneven educational attainment.”
“Despite recent talk of teacher shortages, Ireland outperforms most countries in recruiting and retaining qualified staff. Only 0.3 per cent of teachers are not fully qualified, compared with 9.1 per cent across the OECD, and just 2.1 per cent left the profession in 2024/25, a third of the international rate.”
“In Israel, the share of 18- to 24-year-olds who are neither studying nor working rose from 17% in 2015 to 20% in 2025 … Across OECD countries with available data, the average fell from 16% to 13% over the same period.”
“‘lateral entrants’ [second career teachers] represent 8 percent of the teaching staff in primary and secondary education worldwide. That share is more than twice as high in countries such as the Netherlands (16,9 percent), Iceland, Australia, and New Zealand. That is a huge difference compared to Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, countries with a lateral entry rate of less than 1 percent.”
“The data showed that 71.1% of South Koreans ages 25 to 34 had completed higher education in 2025, the highest rate among OECD members and 23.6 percentage points above the OECD average of 47.5%…The employment rate for South Korean university graduates ages 25 to 64 was 80.1%, 5.9 percentage points below the OECD average of 86%.”
“Around 70% of women aged 25 to 34 who have not completed upper secondary education are outside the labour force, one of the highest rates among OECD and partner countries. By contrast, the inactivity rate among women in the same age group who have completed tertiary education is significantly lower, at around 10%.”
“Plunged,” “plummeted,” and cratered are among the terms that media sources, particularly in Europe and the America’s, used to describe the results of the latest reading, math and science scores from OECD’s 2025 PISA tests. The negative headlines reflect the fact that the average performance of OECD countries was the lowest recorded to date in science, reading, and mathematics. At the same time, the depressing headlines mask some more positive findings. In particular, Türkiye and Thailand’s students improved in all three subjects; England and the UK jumped into the top ten for the rankings in all three subjects by maintaining its performance in reading and math and improving in science; and many of the usual high performers like China, Singapore, Japan and South Korea maintained their high scores, though with some small decreases here and there. Slight decreases in Singapore in particular were sufficient for China’s four participating regions — Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang — to take the top spot in math and science. Notably, although the decline in test scores was the steepest ever in OECD countries, the average score decline in reading and math in non-OECD countries was almost half as much as in OECD countries, and non-OECD countries average science scores remained about the same as 2022.
Headlines around the world also highlighted concerns that the drops in scores might be related to the emergence of AI and increases in screen time, cellphone use and other “digital distractions.”As always, assigning blame (or occasionally credit) for changes in average performance is not easy, and there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of any quick conclusions about the factors that may be affecting the changes in scores this time around. At first glance, some correlations seem to support the concerns. For instance, the UK’s strong performance goes along with survey results showing only 19% of UK students in the UK reported that their peers are often distracted by digital devices during science lessons in 2025, compared to the OECD average of 28%. Furthermore, 80% of UK students attend schools where cellphones are banned compared to the OECD average of 49%. However, even the results within the UK are not consistent, with the performance of students in England largely driving the UK’s improvements. In contrast, students performance declined substantially in reading and math in Wales and Scotland even without substantial differences in screen time or cellphone use from their peers in England.
In addition Iceland reported the largest decline in performance in reading and science and nearly the largest in math over the last 10 years; yet, for the most part, Iceland has lower than average reports of “digital distraction” and the OECD report finds that in Iceland digital distraction is not associated with significant differences in student performance. Iceland also serves as an important reminder that the PISA tests are only one way to measure the effectiveness of education systems. Despite low PISA scores, Iceland ranks near the top on many other measures of happiness, health and quality of life. That includes taking the top spot on the Human Development Index, a statistical composite of average income per person, life expectancy, and education (mean years of schooling completed and expected years of schooling upon entering the education system). (For more on Iceland’s education system and the efforts to support immigrant students in particular see Developing national support for immigrants and multilingual learners in Iceland(Part 1 & Part 2) and an upcoming post will discuss why, as a former Education Minister said, it’s still good to be a child in Iceland.)
“Even as they fall further behind in reading and math, the world’s students are turning to artificial intelligence for help with schoolwork. PISA results released this week show average performance in core subjects at the lowest levels ever recorded, with U.S. reading scores plummeting just since 2022. Meanwhile, students across dozens of countries are increasingly using chatbots to research, write and solve problems at school. ‘I see that problem on a micro level and think, ‘My God,’ one researcher said”
All mean-performance estimates are statistically significantly different from the PISA 2025 estimates, except for science in PISA 2022. Source: OECD (2026), PISA 2025 Results (Volume I)
Minister of Education Joseph Nsengimana speaks at the launch of the PISA assessment results at the Kigali Convention Centre on Tuesday, Sep 8, 2026, The News Times Rwanda
“Three percent of Rwandan students who took part in the 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) reached the baseline proficiency level across reading, mathematics and science, according to results released in Kigali on Tuesday, September 8.The results show that 12.7 per cent of students reached the baseline level in science, compared with 7.7 per cent in mathematics and 3.9 per cent in reading.”
“PISA tests are not the problem; they are the mirror. Instead of arguing with the mirror, it is time to deal with what it reflects,” Israel’s National Parents Association said
“Seventeen percent of participating Palestinian students reached Level 2 or above in mathematics, compared with an OECD average of 65%; the corresponding shares were 22% in reading, compared with 69%, and 24% in science, compared with 74%.”
“In Armenia, the assessment was carried out in March-May 2025, in which about 7,000 learners from 295 schools participated. Minister of Education, Science, Culture and Sports Zhanna Andreasyan, during the presentation of the main results of the PISA-2025 international research, said that Armenia’s participation in the research has for many years been one of the important goals of the state policy in the field of education.”
“‘We can certainly say that we have improved,’ two Philippine education scholars wrote. ‘What we cannot reasonably say is that we are already doing well.’ They noted that 21% of Filipino students reached baseline Level 2 proficiency in mathematics, compared with 31% in reading and 32% in science.”
“Thailand was among eight countries and economies to record statistically significant increases across all three core areas compared with 2022.” Thai students’ science score rose 23 points to 432, while mathematics and reading each rose 13 points, to 407 and 392 respectively.
Mean scores adjusted for socio-economic status are predicted science scores obtained from separate regressions of science performance on the frequency of each type of AI use, after accounting for students’ socio-economic status. Source: OECD (2026), PISA 2025 Results (Volume I)
“The Ministry of Education and Training said this was the first time Vietnamese students had switched from paper-based to computer-based testing. As the two formats differ significantly, the score gap is not sufficient to conclude that education quality has improved or declined, it said.”
“In Armenia, the assessment was carried out in March-May 2025, in which about 7,000 learners from 295 schools participated. Minister of Education, Science, Culture and Sports Zhanna Andreasyan, during the presentation of the main results of the PISA-2025 international research, said that Armenia’s participation in the research has for many years been one of the important goals of the state policy in the field of education.”
“We have growth compared not only to 2022, but also in the region, where Albania has the highest results. Specifically in mathematics and science, Albania has the highest level in the Western Balkans region. These indicators reflect the progress that Albania has made in a field such as education and it is not simply historical pride, but especially ambition and intention to move forward. It is not important which country we have surpassed, but to understand how PISA helps us increase the performance of our teachers and how students increase their skills,”
“Socioeconomic status accounted for 7% of the variation in science performance in North Macedonia, compared with 12% on average across OECD countries.”
French Education Minister Édouard Geffray called France’s ranking“concerning, but sadly, it comes as no surprise…[H]e suggested giving schools greater autonomy ‘to strengthen support for struggling students, diversify the curriculum and open up more opportunities for all students’”.
“Icelandic 15-year-olds are performing below both the OECD average and their Nordic peers in reading, mathematics and science, according to the newly released PISA 2025 results. Only 56% of Icelandic pupils reached basic proficiency in reading, down from 78% in 2015. Only 50% of boys reached the basic reading threshold, compared with 62% of girls”
“The deterioration since the previous assessment in 2022 is substantial: Spain lost 23 points in reading, 16 in mathematics and eight in science. Looking further back to 2015, the cumulative decline amounts to 45 points in reading, 30 in mathematics and 16 in science.”
“Catalonia’s PISA 2025 results cannot be compared with other territories or previous cycles because the sample was not representative of the 15-year-old student population. The reported exemption rate reached 23.2%, compared with the OECD guideline of 5%.”
Simple average of science, reading and mathematics scores. Source: OECD, PISA 2025. OECD averages are 482 in science, 461 in reading and 463 in mathematics.
This data shows scores on Computational Problem Solving *Countries shown in gray did not participate in PISA 2025 and have no data available. Source: OECD PISA 2025 Results
In January’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview Dr. Olajumoke Beulah Adigun argues that academia must move away from speed and metric driven cultures and toward slow, engaged, and contextually grounded scholarship that prioritizes sustained transformation over superficial change. Dr. Adigun is an assistant professor of Educational Leadership at Oklahoma State University The LtC series is produced by co-editors Dr. Soobin Choi and Dr. Jackie Pedota and their colleagues at the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A PDF of the fully formatted interview will be available on the LtC website.
Lead the Change (LtC): The 2026 AERA Annual Meeting theme is “Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: Constructing a New Vision for Educational Research.” This theme calls us to consider how to leverage our diverse knowledge and experiences to engage in futuring for education and education research, involving looking back to remember our histories so that we can look forward to imagine better futures. What steps are you taking, or do you plan to take, to heed this call?
Dr. Olajumoke Beulah Adigun (OBA): There was a time when a researcher’s identity was defined not by a multiplicity of publications but by work that formatively altered the quality of life for communities. This is a historical dimension of our work that we need to ‘unforget,’ and it speaks directly to AERA’s 2026 theme. The reason this matters is simple: it is difficult to be preoccupied with hurried scholarship while being present with the slow and often-messy work of transformation. This is a salient point in Amutuhaire’s work (2022), which makes a compelling argument that the ‘publish or perish’ culture is perpetuating inequality in academia while undermining the potential generative impact of scholarship in resource-poor regions, where solutions to development problems matter more than publication counts. We have tried the hurried approach, and while it has produced more motion in the policy and politics of education, it has yielded less progress in sustaining outcomes. In the article “Over-Optimization of Academic Publishing Metrics,” Fire and Guestrin (2019) highlight that although publishing metrics continue to rise, their substantive value has significantly diminished. Drawing on Goodhart’s law, they illustrate how these metrics lose meaning when manipulated through practices such as self-citation and inflated reference lists. Furthermore, data show that in 2023 alone, over 10,000 research papers were retracted globally due to issues related to accuracy and integrity (Tran, 2025), underscoring how an emphasis on speed creates a metaphorical chasm that invites errors and potential gamification.
Olajumoke Beulah Adigun, PhD
Boyer’s (1996) scholarship of engagement offers a useful frame for understanding the gap in the field of educational change: the problem is not a lack of knowledge, but the failure to translate knowledge into lived reality. This perspective resonates with the slow knowledge argument against the counterproductive acceleration of the process of inquiry (Berg & Seeber, 2016). In the realm of slow knowledge, the journey towards knowledge acquisition honors both the process and the outcome. It recognizes that it takes time to master the conditions within which knowledge can be successfully applied (Orr, 1996). When it’s all said and done, knowledge needs to be contextualized, adapted, and sustained long enough to produce enduring change (Adams et al., 2022). We can also think of this as an invitation to recenter the transformative focus of our change work. If transformation is defined by sustained change, we need to come to terms with the fact that sustaining change requires time for it to be tested, to mature, and to develop a life of its own, allowing its sustainability to become more autonomous than forced. This aligns with design-based implementation research, which emphasizes that knowledge should be generated within the contexts where it will be applied (Penuel et al., 2011).
“The problem is not a lack of knowledge, but the failure to translate knowledge into lived reality.”
My response to the AERA 2026 call has been to fundamentally rethink how I prepare educational leaders, challenging both myself and my students to move from propositions to praxis, from eloquent narratives to actual doing. In a recent course, Instructional Strategies for Adults, rather than requiring papers containing propositions of what well-designed adult instruction should be, my students used real data to design a professional development website, which we called a workshop-in-a-box. They spent each week developing sections grounded in scholarly evidence while applying them to real-world adult learning needs in their respective contexts. With this approach, rather than students telling me what they would do, they did it. At the end of this class, students reported feeling more prepared for real-world leadership challenges, with several already sharing their plans for implementing their designs in their districts. They felt proud of their work, saying they designed the kind of professional development they would want to attend, even though they lacked a frame for articulating it before the class.
This andragogical shift also mirrors my research process. My earlier work relied primarily on quantitative, ex post facto data to examine and understand patterns in various constructs of interest in education. This work has yielded important insights and continues to inform my scholarship. Somewhere along the way, as my colleagues and I began working on the Transformative Leadership Conversations framework (Adams et al., 2022), I became increasingly attentive to the value of applied research in the work we do. When I started my appointment as an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University, the invitation to lead the existing ECHO Education Nigeria initiative emerged at a particularly timely moment, offering both a challenge and an opportunity to make my scholarly engagement more expansive through applied inquiry. Working alongside both scholar and practitioner colleagues, we are implementing and learning how sound theoretical propositions about virtual professional development transfer to those serving in under-resourced environments. ECHO Education Nigeria is a virtual professional development platform that supports educator learning and growth, while promoting collaboration among educators across Nigeria and neighboring African countries. This work, though slow, has been productive and has led to a feature on the Project ECHO website highlighting our efforts to expand the applicability of the framework in a new context.
This shift represents my commitment to unforgetting what education and education research once were: embedded processes of learning, doing, unlearning, relearning, and redoing. I am imagining a future where education research is an actual search process, a slow but deeply meaningful engagement with reality that bridges the gap between knowing and transformation.
Lead the Change (LtC): What are some key lessons that practitioners and scholars might take from your work to foster better educational systems for all students?
OBA: Three lessons emerge from this work that I believe can guide practitioners and scholars in the field of educational change. First, we must recalibrate our aim from change to transformation, which simply means enduring change. Educational systems are saturated with change initiatives, yet transformation remains elusive. The distinction matters because change can be episodic and surface-level, but transformation aims at well-saturated and sustained change that produces a new system of outcomes. In my work with teachers in Nigeria, I witnessed how professional development that merely introduced new practices faded quickly, while approaches that allowed time for adaptation, testing, and iteration became the lifeblood of the work. We can think of transformation as the unforced rhythms of change; it must be cultivated with patience and sustained through commitment. This requires us to resist the pressure for quick wins and instead invest in the slow, and often unsensational work.
“We can think of transformation as the unforced rhythms of change; it must be cultivated with patience and sustained through commitment.”
Second, the quality of our work matters more than the quantity. This is particularly challenging in an academic culture that rewards productivity metrics over meaningful impact. Yet when I observe my students designing professional development they themselves would want to attend, or when I see Nigerian teachers responding to our adaptation of the ECHO framework in ways we never imagined, I am reminded that one piece of deeply contextualized, genuinely useful work is worth the time and effort it takes. I see this same pattern in my work with one of the largest fatherhood support organizations in Oklahoma (Birthright Living Legacy), where a simple evidence-based curriculum I developed for a small network of fathers five years ago has now become a flagship programming element providing training and guided action for hundreds of fathers across the state (Adigun, 2020; 2022). I would argue that our institutions, promotion systems, and funding mechanisms need to be reimagined around permission structures that value depth, rigor, and impact over volume and speed.
Third, and most critically, learning is fundamentally reciprocal. As practitioners and scholars, we take learning to people, but we cannot successfully produce transfer without learning from those we serve about what makes knowledge work (or not) in each unique context. They have just as much to teach us as we have to teach them. My Nigerian colleagues taught me more about adaptive leadership, resourcefulness, and instructional creativity than any textbook could convey. They showed me which theoretical propositions held up under resource constraints, and which required radical reimagining. When we noticed a decline in attendance at our virtual sessions, we reached out to participants to understand the reasons behind this trend. We discovered that while interest remained high, many participants struggled with reliable internet connectivity. However, we also learned that connectivity was more affordable and dependable when they used specific platforms, such as WhatsApp. With this insight, we decided to break our live sessions into bite-sized, low-data video segments and upload them to the WhatsApp group. This adjustment led to a reassuring resurgence in participant attendance and engagement, bringing back a much-needed momentum to the work. This example makes clear that reciprocity is not just ethically right; it is methodologically essential. If we approach communities as recipients rather than co-creators of knowledge and the knowledge delivery process, we will continue to produce research that looks elegant on paper but fails in practice. These lessons converge on a call for patience, genuine partnership, and humility as we press towards educational change.
Lead the Change (LtC): What do you see the field of Educational Change heading, and where do you find hope for this field for the future?
OBA: I see the field of educational change heading toward a more transformational stance. What I mean by this is that the field will not only be about changing the formal systems of education, but also about the community-embedded reach of the work. Further, the accelerated pace of knowledge introduced by non-human automation, such as AI, obliges the field to move into innovative ways of doing what we do. With this reality at the forefront, we are compelled to dig deep rather than simply reach wide. We are compelled to rehumanize our work, making it an endeavor by humans, with humans, and for humans. Collaboration will become the new superpower, and contextual applicability will be the new genius.
I find hope in this field for the future because people are beginning to ask the right questions. It is no longer a secret that speed and volume are not producing the kinds of results we want; therefore, we are compelled to be open to other means. It is also no secret that the tyranny of performative scholarship (Fire & Guestrin, 2019) has created much unhealth in our profession. I see funding agencies beginning to value implementation science and community-partnered research. I see perspectives like slow knowledge gaining traction, and I see intentional collaborations that center reciprocity.
My deepest hope lies in the rising generation of scholar-practitioners who refuse to separate knowing from doing, who insist that research be accountable to the communities it claims to serve, and who are willing to do the slow, messy work of transformation. These emerging scholars understand that in an age of AI and information abundance, our unique contribution as humans is not speed, but wisdom. The kind that comes from sustained presence, deep listening, and genuine partnership. If we can create the conditions for this kind of work to flourish, the field of educational change will not only survive but thrive.
As we look back on 2025, we’d like to celebrate some of the extraordinary work in education we learned about this year. In this case, we’re highlighting the work of the Aspire Leadership Fellows of the Africa Leadership Academy. The Aspire Fellowship Programme is a cohort-based program that brings together leaders from across Africa who have started or are leading innovative schools and educational organizations. The Fellows work with global education leaders to expand and sustain their organizations. For those interested in learning more about this work or making a donation, we’re providing the Aspire profiles and websites of several of the Fellows who shared their work with graduate students from Teachers College, Columbia University, in Thomas Hatch’s class on School Change this fall.
Highlight: Running a lean Cambridge model at a community-funded school catering to children from diverse families in rural Lesotho- some facing significant socio-economic challenges and other instabilities
Year Founded: 1990
Grade: Nursery/Pre-Primary, Primary, Secondary, AS & A Level
School Vision: To deliver affordable, globally benchmarked education with a strong emphasis on equity, innovation, and holistic development.
Jayant Vijayakumar is Chief Academic Advisor at Soofia International School in Lesotho, where he leads strategic planning, academic innovation, and AI integration. Under his leadership, Soofia—serving over 1,300 students—has embraced flipped learning, launched coding and robotics programs, and pioneered student-led engagement models. Jayant’s approach blends academic rigour with emotional intelligence, technology, and values-based education, ensuring access and excellence for learners from all backgrounds. He trains educators, drives curriculum reform, and builds partnerships that extend Soofia’s impact across Lesotho and beyond. Passionate about transforming outdated education systems, Jayant’s work is driven by a belief that inclusive, holistic education can empower the next generation of thinkers, leaders, and changemakers in Africa and the world. Donation/Support link
Highlight: Refugee-founded and refugee-led education which started with 26 students in a boardroom, and has grown to serve more than 800 students
Year founded: 2007
Grade Focus: K-12
School vision: A healthy and self-reliant community with knowledge and skills.
Daniel, also known as Khalid, is a Congolese Refugee who has resided in Uganda for the past 26 years. Leveraging the DAFI scholarship, Khalid earned an MS in Environmental Health and a Bachelor of Statistics Degree. He leads this refugee-led youth initiative dedicated to empowering vulnerable refugees and Ugandans towards becoming healthy and self-reliant. P4T Schools delivers comprehensive educational services, including improved teaching methodologies, a school feeding program, engaging children in debate, games, and sports. The overarching goal of these schools is to evolve into centers of excellence, with a focus on nurturing Innovative Leaders and Changemakers.
Kevin is an Education Coordinator and Early Childhood Development project manager at P4T. She attained a BS in Education under MasterCard Foundation Scholarship. She did teaching practice at Mandela Secondary school, taught at the North Green School and had a one-year volunteer experience as a teaching assistant at Lancaster Mennonite School in Pennsylvania, USA. Kevin uses her positive attitude to encourage others to work hard and bring about a positive impact in their communities. She is very passionate about giving back “because in one way or the other it is what made her who she is, a transformative leader.” Donation/Support link
Highlight: Running a school system in Nigerian correctional centers to provide access to formal and informal education as a form of reformation and reintegration for inmates.
Year Founded: 2018
Grade: Nursery/Pre-Primary, Primary, Secondary, National Open University
School Vision: To provide educational opportunities to inmates, empowering them to reintegrate into society and become productive citizens..
Mahfuz Alabidun is the Founder and Executive Director of Inmates Educational Foundation, a nonprofit delivering education in Nigerian correctional centers. With over 500 learners across six states, IEF offers academic, vocational, and reintegration programs that support inmates’ transformation and reintegration into society. Under his leadership, the foundation has received national recognition, including the Governor of Lagos State Social Impact Award. A TEDx speaker and education reform advocate, he is passionate about building inclusive systems that restore dignity and create second chances. Through education, Mahfuz is rewriting the narrative of incarceration in Nigeria—one learner, one center, one future at a time. Cohort 5 Year Founded: 2018 Grade: Nursery/Pre-Primary, Primary, Secondary, National Open University School Vision: To to provide educational opportunities to inmates, empowering them to reintegrate into society and become productive citizens. Donation/Support link
Highlight: Running a school model that not only educates but also heals and empowers children, especially those affected by conflict, displacement, and poverty; with focus on Protection and Integrated Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Services (MHPSS).
Year Founded: 2020
Grade: Nursery/Pre-Primary, Primary
School Vision: To create a new generation of African leaders and change-makers who are self-reliant and capable of lifting others.
Sumi Hamid is a refugee leader and the Founder and Executive Director of Humanitarian Services Action Organisation (HuSA) in Kikuube, Uganda. A survivor of displacement himself, he grew up in Kyangwali Refugee Settlement and now leads community-based initiatives that provide education, mental health support, and protection services to refugee children and families. After overcoming years of interrupted education, Sumi pursued a career in social work and made the bold decision in 2023 to leave formal employment and fully commit to building HuSA. His organization now serves over 130 children with early education and supports women and youth with microgrants, GBV response, and psychosocial care. Rooted in lived experience, his work champions dignity, empowerment, and community-led change—offering vulnerable children and families the opportunity to learn, heal, and thrive. Cohort 5 Year Founded: 2020 Grade: Nursery/Pre-Primary, Primary School Vision: To create a new generation of African leaders and change-makers who are self-reliant and capable of lifting others. Donation/Support link
Highlight: They produce their own play-learning resources which are used to combine play-based learning interventions with life skills development, ensuring that children not only succeed academically but also explore their innate talents and build strong social-emotional and entrepreneurial skills to reach their full potential
Year Founded: 2021
Grade: Nursery/Pre-Primary, Primary, Vocational Training for mothers
School Vision: To create a model Play-Based Learning school in Eastern Uganda where education is focused on academic excellence and skills development so that there’s a clear path for every child to succeed in life.
Timothy David Wambi is the Founder of Ajibu Community Organisation (Ajco) in rural Mayuge, Uganda. Timothy leads grassroots education reform through a dual-impact model: supporting public primary schools and running a vibrant community learning center. Ajco currently educates 77 children aged 3–7 and empowers young women—many of them survivors of early marriage—to become trained educators. Timothy’s model integrates play-based, life-skills learning and develops low-cost teaching materials to improve literacy, numeracy, and STEM outcomes in under-resourced schools. Timothy works to ensure that no child is denied the right to quality education and that local solutions are part of lasting transformation in Uganda’s rural education landscape. Donation/Support link
Highlight: The only inclusive secondary school in Northern Uganda catering to students with diverse abilities such as the blind, low vision, cerebral palsy, intellectual disabilities, and physical challenged, studying alongside their abled peers.
Year Founded: 2024
Grade: Secondary
School Vision: To empower students to thrive, regardless of ability, and promotes a culture of acceptance and inclusion
Acen Kevin (Daniela) is the Founder and Executive Director of the Itinga Charity Education Foundation (ICEF) and Director of St. Mary Goretti Secondary School Ngetta in Northern Uganda. Holding a Bachelor’s degree in Accounting and Finance, Kevin spearheads initiatives that deliver inclusive education to students with and without disabilities, including learners who are blind or physically challenged. Under her leadership, ICEF partnered to establish the region’s first inclusive secondary school, now serving 45 students from across Uganda. She drives accessibility through scholarships, assistive technologies, and inclusive teacher training. As Board Chair of the school’s academic committee, Kevin is dedicated to upholding quality and equity in education. In 2025, she was awarded the MTN Changemaker Grant for her groundbreaking work in assistive learning. Kevin is deeply passionate about creating a future where all learners— regardless of ability—have the opportunity to thrive. Donation/Support link
Highlight: Spearheading the “Recycles Pay” project at Isrina School which empowers parents to offset children’s fees by generating income from recyclable materials
Year founded: 2016
Grades served: K-6
School vision: A world where every child, regardless of their economic background has equal access to quality education
Grace is a fervent champion of inclusive education, dedicating herself to this cause since the age of 15. Fueled by her personal experiences, she remains resolute in her mission to guarantee equitable access to quality education for every child, irrespective of their background. Notably, she advocates for environmental sustainability and spearheads the innovative “Recycles Pay” project, empowering parents to offset their children’s fees through the use of recyclable materials. With her certification as a Microsoft Educator, Grace actively pursues the enhancement of learning experiences and seeks to broaden educational access, aiming to disrupt the cycle of poverty through the delivery of high-quality education. Donation/Support link
ADEOLA TOLULOPE ABAYOMI Tsion Academy Ile-Ife, Osun state, Nigeria
Highlight: Focused on providing free, quality education to out-of-school children in underserved communities using a personal and scalable funding model called the “Big Brother or Sister where each child is matched with a “Big Brother or Sister”—an individual donor who would commit to supporting the child’s education monthly or by term.
Year Founded: 2022
Grade: Nursery/Pre-Primary/Primary/Secondary
School Vision: To restore dignity, build character, and equip each child with the tools they need to thrive academically, emotionally, and socially.
Adeola Tolulope Abayomi is the Founder and Executive Director of Tsion Academy, a free school for out-of-school children in Ile-Ife, Nigeria. A trained lawyer (LLB, BL) and the visionary force behind Evolufy Africa. Tsion Academy currently serves over 140 children aged 4 to 13, delivering quality, inclusive education to underserved communities. Through Evolufy Africa’s two branches—Tsion Academy and Maendeleo Africa— Adeola advances access, equity, and youth empowerment. She is passionate about building sustainable, replicable school models that drive genuine transformation. Her work bridges grassroots action and systemic change, offering hope and opportunity to the next generation of African leaders. Donation/Support link
Highlight: Creating equitable education access to students in second cities.
Year founded: 2022
Grades served: K-6
School vision: All children reach their full-potential and are agents of change in their schools, communities and the world.
With a remarkable 15-year background in supporting social innovations, Tchanlandjou has been instrumental in mapping key actors and organizations within ecosystems for collective systemic impact. Since joining Ashoka in 2013, he has held the pivotal role of Regional Director for the Sahel region, where his strategic vision and ability to inspire and mobilize diverse partners have yielded significant accomplishments. Notably, Tchanlandjou spearheaded the creation of the Education and Youth Clusters, pivotal initiatives that have greatly enhanced Ashoka’s impact in the Sahel. In 2016, he further demonstrated his entrepreneurial spirit by founding ‘SeddoInvest,’ a start-up focused on identifying and preparing a pipeline of young social ventures and attracting investments to accelerate their development. He founded SBA after seeing first-hand the profound disparity between the quality of education available to students in Dakar, and in rural and per-urban areas in Senegal. Donation/Support link
In October’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview Bernardo Feliciano’s discusses his work through the AITeach Co-design Lab at UMass Lowell; this work brings educators, researchers, and technologists together to co-create strategies and tools for teaching in this age of AI. The LtC series is produced by Elizabeth Zumpe and colleagues from the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A PDF of the fully formatted interview will be available on the LtC website.
Lead the Change (LtC): The 2026 AERA Annual Meeting theme is “Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: Constructing a New Vision for Educational Research.” This theme calls us to consider how to leverage our diverse knowledge and experiences to engage in futuring for education and education research, involving looking back to remember our histories so that we can look forward to imagine better futures. What steps are you taking, or do you plan to take, to heed this call?
Bernardo Feliciano (BF): Currently I am working with colleagues to build a co-design lab that brings together educators from very different contexts to develop approaches to teaching and learning in a world where generative AI is a reality. The lab is called the AITeach Co-design Lab @ UMass Lowell. (The hyperlink goes to one of many one-pagers we have been developing for partners representing different disciplines and sectors).
Bernardo A. Feliciano, Ph.D.
In the AITeach Co-design Lab, as collaborators we aim to create a structured space where we as a diverse group of educators, researchers, and technologists co-develop practical tools, strategies, and prototypes that respond to the reality of generative AI in education. The intention is not only to design usable products but also to study how to structure co-design itself to help schools navigate AI’s challenges and opportunities. In our co-design sessions, educators, researchers, and technology build spaces where we can address challenges in education and AI that are too complex for any one actor to solve (Snowden & Boone, 2007; Senge, 1990). The Lab functions as a structured environment where we can bring our problems of practice, iterate on small pilots, and use those cycles to build local capacity rather than waiting for top-down policy.
As an adjunct professor, I am also teaching a class on family and community engagement with schools. These roles constantly remind me that people bring distinct personal, professional, and institutional histories into every space. For me, futuring is less about projecting a single vision of “Education with a capital E” and more about the relational, actor-to-actor work of helping people shape their futures from the personal, professional, and institutional histories they inherit. That’s the direction my work is taking me.
The way I approach this is by convening diverse groups around developing tangible projects. The process matters as much as the specific product, whether it’s a research article, curriculum binder, a chatbot teaching/learning companion prototype, or a strategy for helping parents connect to schools. What is essential is how people can communicate their histories, connecting, adapting, negotiating, and reworking them to address problems in the present into a viable future. The varied personal and institutional histories participants bring are neither external resources to be tapped nor barriers to be overcome, but active materials in our negotiation of effective, situated teaching and learning. Innovation emerges as members work through these histories, adapting them in relation to one another to meet particular needs. I may not care whether my own work is labeled research, practice, or a mix of both, but as co-designers we must respect each other’s perspectives, even as those perspectives shift through negotiation. AI brings this into focus. At its core, AI is an immense bank or reservoir of the past, trained on and providing access to what is already known or has already been done. The future is not contained in the AI itself—nor can it be left to AI to imagine for us. The future comes from how we draw on that past to build something meaningful with and for the people in front of us. We explore generative AI as both a design partner and an object of study. Co-designers prototype tools like tutoring agents or parent communication bots, while also interrogating what it means to teach with, against, or around AI in everyday classrooms.
Of course, I have to use my own history, experience, and learning as a researcher, teacher, administrator, entrepreneur, and non-profit professional to leverage the network of histories that generative AI offers. But more than before, I can inform, contextualize, and connect the convening and teaching I do now with the work of so many more people and peoples (to some extent) who came before.
LtC: What are some key lessons that practitioners and scholars might take from your work to foster better educational systems for all students?
BF: One lesson is that teachers cannot be treated as passive implementers of someone else’s design. Too often, educational change is imagined as developing a curriculum or program in one place and distributing it everywhere. That assumes context does not matter and is peripheral rather than integral to learning and teaching. Our relationship to knowledge is always relational and always contextual.
Education has always lived in the complex space where cause and effect are only clear in hindsight (Snowden & Boone, 2007). Simon (1973) describes these as ill-structured domains existing in a state of dynamic heterogeneity in which diverse elements and relationships continually shift, preventing stable equilibrium and requiring ongoing adaptation (Pickett et al., 2017). Ill-structured problems cannot be solved by importing outside solutions but only by negotiation among those struggling with them. I do not believe that educational change—or improvement—comes from a fixed product or process delivered with fidelity. It is an ongoing process of learning through which people shape what they inherit—choosing what to keep, what to adapt, what to reject, and what to forget. It is a process I have found universally involves dynamics of local alliances, conflicts, and negotiations. The lesson I take from this is that if you want to improve schooling, you have to engage with the people who are doing the teaching and learning.
“We explore generative AI as both a design partner and an object of study . . . If you want to improve schooling, you have to engage with the people who are doing the teaching and learning.”
Working on my dissertation underscored this point. I wrote about using one-on-one meetings in a researcher-practitioner partnership to organize co-designing a computer science (CS) curriculum for middle schools. My experience brought home to me that there is no such thing as “shared understanding.” What emerges is never a single, final agreement but alignment good enough to act together, sustained through negotiation as perspectives shift. For example, teachers and researchers sometimes differed on how much detail a lesson plan should contain. Some wanted highly specified steps, others only broad outlines. Rather than force uniformity, we kept both versions and moved forward. That flexibility allowed the work to continue without pretending the difference had been resolved.
My work with different kinds of organizations has shown me how funding and infrastructure shape what is possible. This point is kind of obvious but still seems to bear repeating. Creativity and goodwill are not enough without sustainable and intentional support. For example, in the CS Pathways partnership, we shifted from MIT App Inventor to Code.org’s App Lab during remote learning. That solved one problem but created new ones around district procurement and accounts, showing how infrastructure shapes outcomes. In our recent Lab kickoff meeting, one participant noted that even when AI-enabled data tools existed, district procurement rules blocked their use — showing how funding and infrastructure filter what is possible.
At the same time, I saw that students’ and teachers’ own histories can be powerful resources for change, if we work out how to support them as they need to be supported. In one part of the CS Pathways project, students framed their app design around civic issues in their community, such as neighborhood safety and access to resources. Their lived experiences pushed the curriculum beyond abstract coding skills into work that mattered locally. This reframed computer science as a civic as well as a technical practice and shaped how we sequenced and supported instruction in those classes.
LtC: What do you see the field of Educational Change heading, and where do you find hope for this field for the future?
BF: In my experience, the field often moves toward building monoliths: “the system,” “the conceptual framework,” “the workforce,” “education technology.” Instead of these monoliths, we need to work with lesson plans and pacing decisions that make up “the system,” the overlapping frameworks that guide practice rather than a single “conceptual framework,” the varied teacher and student histories that constitute “the workforce,” and the specific tools and artifacts, from binders to chatbots, that become “education technology.” Monoliths can make things easier to talk about but also risk obscuring the negotiations and translations that are inseparable from those very systems. These relational dynamics are not add-ons. They are the system itself, as much as the actors are (Latour, 2005). As in the earlier example of teachers’ differing preferences for lesson plan detail, the system took shape through the negotiation itself, not through a fixed agreement imposed from outside.
“Relational dynamics are not add-ons. They are the system itself.”
I would like to see the field shift toward paying closer attention to the actor-to-actor interactions and dimensions. That is where change takes shape: when people with different histories and contexts negotiate how to carry those histories forward. I see promising work moving in this direction: Playlab.ai’s participatory approach to AI tool-building, Victor Lee’s co-design of AI curricula with teachers, Penuel and Gallagher’s (2017) and Coburn et al.’s (2021) and others’ emphasis on research–practice partnerships , and Bryk et al.’s (2015) improvement science cycles. The Cynefin co-design principles we are enacting in AITeach — probe, sense, respond — are themselves evidence of a field moving toward valuing negotiation and adaptation over fixed models (Snowden & Boone, 2007).
This is also where I find hope. In my dissertation research, I have seen how a small change in the structure of a meeting can reshape how colleagues relate to one another. Having a teacher go first in one-on-one meetings shifted the dynamic, allowing their concerns to set also frame a negotiation rather being a response to requirements. I have seen middle school students reframe ideas in ways that exceeded what I could have planned, such as attempting to build an app to help students and teachers share resources more effectively in school. Students translated apps they were familiar with into tools for their own purposes, which required reimagining instruction around their designs rather than trying to make pre-existing apps seem interesting. This approach may cause an instructional headache but least it provided an authentic motivation for learning an aspect of coding.
Some might call this the interest or work “micro-level,” but I avoid that term because it suggests hierarchies and fixed layers. I prefer to describe it as the translational dimension: the ongoing work of shaping futures from inherited histories by deciding what to keep, what to adapt, and what to let go.
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.
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.
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.
In this month’s Lead the Change Interview, Elizabeth Leisy Stosich talks about her work focusing on understanding how district, school, and teacher leaders can work together to strengthen the quality and equity of students’ learning opportunities and outcomes. Stosich is Assistant Professor and Associate Chair of the Division of Educational Leadership, Administration, and Policy at Fordham University. 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 2023 AERA theme is InterrogatingConsequential Education Research in Pursuit of Truth and charges researchers and practitioners with creating and using education research to disrupt institutionalized forms of discrimination. The call urges scholars to challenge traditional methods of inquiry in order to create increasingly useful, responsive, and equity-oriented research that can be used by schools to develop informed policies and practices to better support students. What specific responsibility do educational change scholars have in this space? What steps are you taking to heed this call?
Elizabeth Leisy Stosich (ELS): I appreciate how AERA’s theme this year urges us as scholars to take responsibility for critically considering not simply what we research but how we approach our research and the consequences of these decisions. As educational scholars, we are (hopefully) deeply invested in understanding and supporting meaningful improvements in schools and systems. Yet, as educators and scholars, one challenge we face is that we each bring our own biases to understanding problems in education and, correspondingly, the change that is needed. These biases can lead us to define problems and identify solutions in particular ways, ways that may not reflect the actual problem as experienced by those closest it. For example, as a scholar focused primarily on instructional improvement, I can be quick to identify problems as student learning challenges that require new professional learning for teachers and school leaders. When you’re a hammer, every problem requires a nail. For me and many of the educational leaders I work with, we can be quick to see each problem as simply requiring new or different teacher PD. We can also be slow to give up on ideas that we’ve deeply invested in even when they either are a poor fit for the problem or we see little evidence of authentic improvement.
As educational change scholars, I think a central aspect of centering equity and pursuing truth is to engage as partners with the stakeholders closest to the “change.” In improvement science this is often described as being “user” centered. When we partner with practitioners, we need to take time to carefully understand and define the problems we seek to address with our change efforts. These initial decisions have important implications for the change work we take up. I think we are much more likely to be successful in supporting meaningful change when we engage in shared problem diagnosis and solution identification as partners with educators and the students and communities they serve. Through this collaborative process, we can bring more diverse perspectives to defining the problems we center in our change efforts.
Ltc: In your work, you examine relationships between school leaders on decision-making teams and during policy implementation. What are some of the major lessons the field of Educational Change can learn from your work and experience?
ELS: In my own research (Stosich, 2020, 2021) as well as a number of large survey studies one thing stands out: principals think they are involving teachers in decision-making and teachers do not agree. Looking closely at decision-making in instructional leadership teams (ILTs), I found one explanation for this gap; principals typically involve teachers in decision-making only superficially. For example, principals may ask teachers to decide whether or not to move forward with a proposed initiative (e.g., Should we do lesson study?) rather than engaging them more fully as partners in problem diagnosis and solution identification (e.g., How could we work together to strengthen our instruction?).
This is a big problem for two reasons. First, truly engaging teachers as partners in decision-making is a powerful leadership practice because it allows for teachers to draw on their instructional expertise and knowledge of students and colleagues to inform the decision. Second, when principals and teachers make decisions together, principals gain teachers’ commitment for implementation as part of the decision-making process. When principals only engage teachers superficially in decision-making, they don’t benefit from teachers’ knowledge in shaping the decision and are unlikely to gain their commitment for implementing the proposed solution.
“Through this collaborative process, we can bring more diverse perspectives to defining the problems we center in our change efforts.”
Ltc: In your recent work investigating how educators experience policy shifts in high-accountability contexts, you find that policy alignment, thoughtful sequencing, slower pace, and extensive support can be helpful in creating successful change. How might your findings help scholars and practitioners imagine and implement policy changes more effectively?
ELS: I think we would benefit from paying greater attention to the larger environmental conditions we are creating for policy change. What are the conditions we are creating and what do they feel like for the educators responsible for policy implementation?
In a strategy activity in my book with Michelle Forman and Candice Bocala, The Internal Coherence Framework: Creating the Conditions for Continuous Improvement for Schools, we ask educators to reflect on the question: What does it feel like to be a teacher in this school? I think this question is essential in policy change. Do teachers feel like they are focused and engaged in sustained learning in an effort to implement a change that will result in meaningful benefits for students? Or are they overwhelmed by multiple initiatives with little time to really understand and apply new learning about these ideas in their classroom? We typically pair ambitious policy goals with pretty limited support for learning what changes are necessary to meet these goals. Changing practice is difficult and time-consuming work!
My research looking specifically at principals suggests that when principals acknowledge the challenge presented by new instructional policies and frame this challenge as one that requires learning to work with students and content in new ways, they are more likely to close the gap between current practice and policy goals than when they frame the challenge as one of simply executing new approaches (Stosich, 2017). As research from Amy Edmondson and others suggests, when we frame policy change as a “learning” rather than an “execution” challenge, we acknowledge that we don’t know everything we need to know to meet our goals for policy change and, thus, open ourselves to new learning and change. An execution challenge is more appropriate for routine changes, which are rarely the focus of policy change.
In my research with Emily Hodge on the Common Core (Hodge & Stosich, 2022), we found that when policies are introduced in rapid succession even those that are connected and reinforcing can be experienced by teachers and leaders as overwhelming and incoherent. This is particularly true when you introduce high-stakes accountability. We need a supportive environment for learning and change during policy implementation, one that provides the time and support necessary for learning and change before introducing accountability. This should include sustained, job-embedded opportunities for professional learning about the policy change and systems that reinforce and support this learning, such as aligned curriculum and assessment materials and ongoing, developmental feedback for teachers and school leaders.
“Learning is challenging but also rewarding—something we need to acknowledge and celebrate.”
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?
ELS: Be part of the change yourself! As scholars, we learn and change our thinking all the time (hopefully!) based on new understanding we gain from those with whom we study and work.
We need to share openly with our partners about how we are shifting our beliefs and practice and why. I think this modeling is important for reinforcing the idea that learning and change is an opportunity for growth and not simply an admission of weakness. Just this past fall I really shifted how I think about how people connect and develop relationships through improvement work after a comment from a member of our doctoral program led me to question some of my assumptions. I always assumed that we build the relationships that support our collaborative learning and improvement through working together towards shared goals. A student remarked with some surprise that we seemed to just “get right down to business” working on identifying and addressing problems of practice before really getting to know each other on a more personal level. This comment really struck a chord with me and led me to think more deeply about the very personal nature of change and what relationships could best support our collective change efforts. I tried to reflect openly about this change and how her thinking had changed my own during the course in hopes that this would encourage others to be open to change. I also thanked her—learning is challenging but also rewarding—something we need to acknowledge and celebrate.
Still, change can be personally challenging. Something I read in James Spillane’s (2004) book about standards implementation has stuck with me for a long time: when we ask people to learn new ways of doing familiar things, we risk damaging their self-concept. Essentially, when we ask people to change what they are already doing, we ask them to admit that what they have been doing wasn’t good enough and needs to change. This can feel a lot like telling me that I’m not good enough. I think the change process becomes less daunting when we share openly and model how we are changing our own beliefs and practices. This is important for people in all roles but particularly for leaders—are you asking others to be open to change without being open to change yourself? This creates an inhospitable environment for authentic learning and change, which requires acknowledging the limitations of our current knowledge and being open to new ideas and approaches.
Ltc: Where do you perceive the field of Educational Change is going? What excites you about Educational Change now and in the future?
ELS: I am excited about the more critical lenses educational leaders and scholars are bringing to their work in educational change. In doing so, there has been greater attention to not only issues of achievement and access but also issues of identity and power as part the focus of change. For instance, I’ve had the opportunity to learn from some very exciting work happening in a Bronx Community School District that involves networks of principals working together to address three equity-focused issues: reducing racial disproportionality in chronic absenteeism, strengthening culturally responsive-sustaining education (CRSE), and creating more affirming and inclusive school environments. In my view, chronic absenteeism is an access issue, while the district’s work on strengthening CRSE addresses issues of identity—including ensuring students’ identity is reflected in the curriculum—and power, as they teach students to understand and address systems of oppression. I am energized by the focus on more holistic, student-centered, and culturally responsive discussions of learning and change taking place in so many districts and schools.
My favorite recent book is Decoteau Irby’s Stuck improving: Racial equity and school leadership. One important lesson I took from his research on racial equity improvement is that centering Black and Brown people’s perspectives, what he describes as “Black and Brown people’s influential presence,” is essential for understanding problems and monitoring progress (and setbacks) with attention to the influence of race and racism. This involves much more than simply seeking out the perspectives of Black and Brown youth, educators, and community members on the change work at one point in time. Instead, it involves building the organization—the school or district—in ways that will ensure Black and Brown people are not only present but actively influencing our change work at every step—including the problems we identify, the decisions we make about how to work on them, and all our learning along the way.
References
Forman, M. L., Stosich, E. L., & Bocala, C. (2017). The internal coherence framework: Creating the conditions for continuous improvement in schools. Harvard Education Press.
Hodge, E. & Stosich, E. L. (2022). Accountability, alignment, and coherence: How educators made sense of complex policy environments in the Common Core era. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. https://doi.org/10.3102/01623737221079650
Irby, D. J. (2021). Stuck improving: Racial equity and school leadership. Harvard Education Press.
Spillane, J. P. (2004). Standards deviation: How schools misunderstand educational policy. Harvard University Press.
Stosich, E. L. (2017). Leading in a time of ambitious reform: Principals in high-poverty urban elementary schools frame the challenge of the Common Core State Standards. Elementary School Journal, 117(4), 539-565. https://doi.org/10.1086/691585
Stosich, E. L. (2020). Central office leadership for instructional improvement: Developing collaborative leadership among principals and instructional leadership team members. Teachers College Record, 122(9). https://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentId=23383 Stosich, E. L. (2021). “Are we an advisory board or a decision making entity?”: Teachers’ involvement in decision making in instructional leadership teams. Leadership and Policy in Schools, 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/15700763.2021.1995879
