This week, Mel Ainscow discusses some of the key insights from his new book Reforming Education Systems for Inclusion and Equity. Ainscow is Emeritus Professor, University of Manchester, Professor of Education, University of Glasgow, and Adjunct Professor at Queensland University of Technology.
What’s the greatest challenge facing education systems around the world? Finding ways of including and ensuring the progress of all children in schools. In economically poorer countries this is mainly about the millions of children who are not able to attend formal education. Meanwhile, in wealthier countries many young people leave school with no worthwhile qualifications, whilst others are placed in special provision away from mainstream education and some choose to drop out since the lessons seem irrelevant. Faced with these challenges, there is evidence of an increased interest internationally in the idea of making education more inclusive and equitable. However, the field remains confused as to the actions needed in order to move policy and practice forward.
What’s the greatest challenge facing education systems around the world? Finding ways of including and ensuring the progress of all children in schools.
Reforming education systems
Over the last thirty years or so I have had the privilege of working on projects aimed at the promotion of inclusion and equity within education systems, in my own country and internationally. This leads me to propose a radical way of addressing this important policy challenge. This thinking calls for coordinated and sustained efforts within schools and across education systems, recognising that improving outcomes for vulnerable learners is unlikely to be achieved unless there are changes in the attitudes, beliefs and actions of adults. All of this echoes the views of Michael Fullan, an internationally recognised expert on educational change, who argues: “If you want system change you have to change the system!”
“If you want system change you have to change the system!”
Inclusion and equity should be seen as principles that inform educational policies. These principles should influence all educational policies, particularly those that are concerned with the curriculum, assessment processes, teacher education, accountability and funding.
Barriers to the presence, participation and achievement of learners should be identified and addressed. Progress in relation to inclusion and equity requires a move away from explanations of educational failure that focus on the characteristics of individual children and their families, towards an analysis of contextual barriers to participation and learning experienced by learners within schools. In this way, those students who do not respond to existing arrangements come to be regarded as ‘hidden voices’ who can encourage the improvement of schools.
Schools should become learning communities where the development of all members is encouraged and supported. Reforming education systems in relation to inclusion and equity requires coordinated and sustained efforts within schools. Therefore, the starting point must be with practitioners: enlarging their capacity to imagine what might be achieved and increasing their sense of accountability for bringing this about. The role of school leaders is to create the organisational conditions where all of this can happen.
Partnerships between schools should be developed in order to provide mutual challenge and support. School-to-school collaboration can strengthen improvement processes by adding to the range of expertise made available. In particular, partnerships between schools have an enormous potential for fostering the capacity of education systems to respond to learner diversity. More specifically, they can help to reduce the polarisation of schools, to the particular benefit of those students who are marginalised at the edges of the system, and whose progress and attitudes are a cause for concern.
Families and other community partners should be encouraged to support the work of schools. The development of education systems that are effective for all children will only happen when what happens outside as well as inside a school changes. Area-based partnerships are a means of facilitating these forms of cooperation. School leaders have a crucial role in coordinating such arrangements, although other agencies can have important leadership roles.
Locally coordinated support and challenge should be provided based on the principles of inclusion and equity. The presence of experienced advisers who can support and challenge school-led improvement is crucial. There is an important role for governments in creating the conditions for making such locally led improvements happen and providing the political mandate for ensuring their implementation. This also means that those who administer local education systems have to adjust their priorities and ways of working in response to improvement efforts that are led from within schools.
Evidenceis the life-blood of inclusive educational development. Therefore, deciding what kinds of evidence to collect and how to use it requires considerable care, since, within education systems, what gets measured gets done. This trend is widely recognised as a double-edged sword precisely because it is such a potent lever for change. On the one hand, data are required in order to monitor the progress of children, evaluate the impact of interventions, review the effectiveness of policies, plan new initiatives, and so on. On the other hand, if effectiveness is evaluated on the basis of narrow, even inappropriate, performance indicators, then the impact can be deeply damaging.
The challenge, therefore, is to harness the potential of evidence as a lever for change, whilst avoiding these potential problems. This means that the starting point for making decisions about the evidence to collect should be with agreed definitions of inclusion and equity. In other words, we must measure what we value, rather than valuing what can more easily be measured. Therefore, evidence collected within the education system needs to relate to the presence, participation and achievement of all students.
“[I]nclusion and equity should not be seen as a separate policy. Rather, they should be viewed as principles that inform all national policies”
Implications
These ideas are guided by a belief thatinclusion and equity should not be seen as a separate policy. Rather, they should be viewed as principles that inform all national policies, particularly those that deal with the curriculum, assessment, school evaluation, teacher education and budgets. They must also inform all stages of education, from early years through to higher education. In this way inclusion and equity must not be seen as somebody’s job. Rather, it is reform agenda that must be the responsibility of everyone involved in providing education.
Viewed retrospectively, Vietnam’s recent effort to shift the aims of education and the process of teaching and learning can be seen as part of a long-term, multi-decade, “renovation” effort rather than a recent initiative to transform education in one fell swoop. From this perspective, Vietnam has made substantial improvements in educational access and quality over a period of 30 years while taking incremental steps towards more flexible, student-centered approaches to teaching and learning.
Vietnam has made substantial improvements in educational access and quality over a period of 30 years while taking incremental steps towards more flexible, student-centered approaches to teaching and learning.
Although Finland and Singapore began the journey to systemic educational improvement earlier, they followed a similar trajectory, creating comprehensive education systems with centrally developed curricula or curriculum frameworks, focused on national education goals, aligned with those on international tests like PISA. Singapore continues to top the international educational rankings, but it is also trying to contend with wide-spread concerns about the effects that the competitive, high-pressure, academically focused system has on students’ development, mental health, and wellbeing. Finland, on the other hand, has slipped somewhat in rankings like PISA (though it continues to score at relatively high levels) raising concerns that the autonomy of teachers widely cited as a key ingredient in Finland’s educational success, may also be contributing to growing inequity and an inability to move the whole system to support interdisciplinary learning.
Reflecting on what I’ve learned about the development of all three of these systems leaves me with a number of questions:
Will Vietnam follow the trajectories of Singapore and Finland or will it chart its own course?
What are the chances that Vietnam will be able to expand enrollment to secondary schools, to continue to increase quality overall, and to continue to expand and deepen the use of more powerful pedagogies?
Will Vietnam’s education system develop in ways that are equitable, benefiting ethnic minorities as well as elites, while reducing the pressures on students and continuing to move in more student-centered directions?
Answering these questions depends in turn on how Vietnam deals with some critical challenges:
Can Vietnam maintain the commitment and support for K-12 education and expand support for other aspects of the education system?
The Vietnamese government has already launched major initiatives to support the development of early childhood education. These initiatives aim particularly at creating more equitable access for early childhood education in remote, rural areas for ethnic minority groups. In February of 2025, the government also began gathering feedback on a National Assembly proposal focuses on “modernising the preschool curriculum using a competency-based approach, fostering holistic child development in physical health, emotional well-being, intelligence, language skills and aesthetics. It also aims to lay a solid foundation for personality development, ensuring children are well-prepared for first grade while instilling core Vietnamese values.”
“[A] National Assembly proposal focuses on “modernising the preschool curriculum using a competency-based approach, fostering holistic child development in physical health, emotional well-being, intelligence, language skills and aesthetics.”
At the same time, Vietnam’s higher education system remains under-developed, with the enrollment rate under 30%, one of the lowest among East Asian countries. Increasing expenditures on both early childhood education and higher education could result in a shift in the attention and funding that has been so crucial to the development of K-12 education over the past 30 years.
Can Vietnam continue to develop the education system despite long-standing constraints?
Although there have been efforts to improve teacher education and the quality of the teaching in Vietnam, there are continuing concerns about shortages of teachers and further declines in the quality of the education force. Ironically, the development of other sectors of the economy means that teachers can now find higher paying jobs in other occupations. At the same time, as one of my colleagues described it, many of those who do become teachers have to work multiple jobs often having to hustle side jobs at nights and on weekends just to cover basic expenses for their families. The increasing urbanization and movement of more and more people from rural areas to cities like Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City to find jobs also mean that many urban schools will continue to be overcrowded, with large class sizes. In turn, that urban overcrowding will continue to make it difficult for teachers to adopt many student-centered pedagogies; that urbanization can also make it harder and harder to find educators to staff rural schools.
Can Vietnam promote increased autonomy and flexibility and maintain a focus on equity at the same time?
Over time, Vietnam has tried to increase autonomy and provide more flexibility for schools and education leaders as part of their improvement efforts. In particular, initiatives to increase school-level decision-making include providing some schools with the flexibility to charge higher fees to make up for reductions in public funding. For example, about 20 of the schools in major cities like Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City have been developing investment models in which parents can pay for their child’s full tuition for all 12 grades when they start school in first grade. In return, the school makes the commitment to pay the parents back when their child graduates. In this arrangement, students can get a free public-school education (though they lose their investment if the child leaves the school), and the school gets funds it can use to make improvements in facilities and the quality of education which can help the school to raise more revenue.
In this arrangement, students can get a free public-school education… and the school gets funds it can use to make improvements in facilities and the quality of education which can help the school to raise more revenue.
The hope seems to be that the increased autonomy will drive improvements and might encourage schools to innovate and offer more student-centered instruction. At the same time, these developments also create issues of equity as top-performing schools may be able to charge more and may be able to pay higher salaries to attract effective teachers. In addition, the increased competition for placement in top schools can also intensify the pressure on students and teachers to focus on performing well on conventional tests and exams. That pressure can already be seen in early childhood education, where, as one of my colleagues told me, there is considerable competition to get into some of the top preschools and primary schools. In order to help their children prepare for the application and admission process, which often includes tests, some parents are sending their children to both preschool and “transition programs” that cover the content and skills needed to meet the entrance requirements.
Can Vietnam continue to develop the education system in the face of resistance to changes in conventional instruction?
Even with the efforts to encourage a shift to competencies, the pressures to maintain the conventional instruction remain. Many teachers, students, and parents are reluctant to embrace the changes. That resistance is already showing up as parents and teachers respond to the new textbook policy. Some parents, for example, have complained that having too many textbook options is both too costly for them and too confusing for students. As one of my colleagues explained, textbooks have long been passed down among siblings but that cost-effective practice will have to stop if teachers are choosing different textbooks. That flexibility may also erode the shared experiences and shared understanding of the instructional process that families gain from a common text.
Allowing teachers to choose their textbooks was also supposed to be part of the move to provide them with greater flexibility in how best to help students achieve the new competencies. However, choosing the textbook and designing activities is a significant amount of work, and many schools and teachers may prefer to use more conventional textbooks and even those that use new textbooks may continue to move through them in a rigid, lock-step way. Complicating matters further, the textbook industry – and the corruption in it – has to be a part of this change as well.
Schools in Vietnam have changed and improved, but can schooling be transformed?
Political commitment and funding, shared values, hard work by students, educators and parents, with textbook-based teaching that has provided alignment between what’s taught and what’s measured are all critical contributors to the development of the Vietnamese education system. These factors work in concert with the efforts to make an improved education system a key part of the effort create and sustain a strong nation, with a modern economy, that can defend itself in the face of threats from outsiders. Now the question is whether the textbook-based teaching and shared belief in conventional education will serve as a foundation for — or a barrier to — the development of more student-centered pedagogies and a competency-based system.
On my visit, I talked with educators and visited schools, including private schools, like the Olympia School, that have found ways to prepare Vietnamese students for the Vietnamese national exams and still make room for more student-centered, interdisciplinary learning activities. Of course, the presence of some innovative practices in some places may not have a substantial impact on the rest of the system. But if some steps toward competency-based instruction continue to be taken, and the number of policymakers, educators, parents, and students who have positive experiences with new forms of teaching and learning continues to grow, the forces of generational change may begin to put pressure on the status quo.
Illustrating the complexity and contextual nature of educational change, some of the factors identified as critical in the evolution of other “higher performing” education systems do not apply in Vietnam. Somehow, the Vietnamese education system has improved substantially even though improving the qualifications of teachers and the quality and consistency of teacher preparation have been concerns for some time. At the same time, even as the PISA tests in 2012 were showing the world how much the Vietnamese education system had improved, the government was already developing initiatives to embrace new competency-based goals and student-centered instruction. To that end, among other changes, new competency-based textbooks began to roll-out in Vietnam during the pandemic, even as many other high-performing education systems struggle to make that major systemic shift. Given developments in the Vietnamese education system over the past 30 years, what are the challenges and possibilities for creating a competency-based education system moving forward?
Improvement despite concerns about the teaching force, coherence, and corruption
The improvements in the Vietnamese education system in the 1990’s and 2000’s were made despite a series of persistent concerns about the quality of the teaching force that remain today. These issues include a low cut-off for entrance into teacher education and failure to attract good students into teaching along with substantial numbers of underqualified teachers. Furthermore, despite feeling valued, teachers in Vietnam are not well paid, with wages that are not competitive with those in other sectors. In fact, at the same time that the “Growing Smarter” report from the World Bank highlighted the importance of a highly qualified, well-paid teaching force, it also acknowledged that teachers are paid substantially less in Vietnam than they are in other “high-performing” education systems like Singapore. Teachers are also paid less in Vietnam than they are in other Asian countries like Thailand, which perform much worse on international tests.
Explanations of high education system performance also often highlight the importance of coherence and alignment among goals, strategies, and incentives across all aspects of the education system. In the case of Vietnam, the historical traditions and top-down structure of the bureaucracy fosters a culture of compliance that, for better and worse, can maintain a rigid focus on textbook-based learning and exam performance. At the same time, Vietnam has decentralized control over financing of education in particular, leading one analyst to suggest that Vietnam’s 63 provinces are almost like 63 different education systems, with weak links between financing, information-processing, and accountability. Lê Anh Vinh, Director of the Vietnam National Institute of Educational Sciences, and colleagues also named the fragmentation and poor connections among key aspects of Vietnam’s education system as a critical enduring problem.
“Vietnam’s 63 provinces are almost like 63 different education systems, with weak links between financing, information-processing, and accountability.”
Corruption across sectors in Vietnam also remains a concern. Although measures of corruption show some improvements over the past ten years, Transparency International reports that as of 2023, Vietnam ranks 83rd out of 180 countries in corruption, slightly below the average, and 64% of those surveyed in Vietnam think corruption is a big problem. Transparency International also reported that in Vietnam there has also been “an explosion of competition for admission to ‘desired schools.’…As a result, corruption in enrollment for desired schools – particularly primary and junior secondary schools – has become rampant in Vietnam, threatening the affordability and accessibility of public education.” The textbook industry, central to the efforts to shift to the new focus on competence, has also been embroiled in a major scandal.
Building blocks for a shift to competency-based learning?
In a system long dominated by rote learning and teacher-directed instruction, the implementation of a new curriculum and textbooks in Vietnam that began during the pandemic is not nearly as abrupt as many might expect. There has been a history of interest in and encouragement for the application of knowledge – not just the acquisition of knowledge – and to more active, student-centered pedagogies as far back as the 1980’s. As part of the Do Moi renovation efforts, Vietnam introduced a new set of textbooks and related policies that sought to support “a more practical and learner-centered education which was seen at the time as necessary for post-war social and economic recovery. Those initiatives recognized knowledge acquisition as important, but also advocated for the engagement of students in real-world activities, application of knowledge, and the holistic development of students.
Shortly after the turn of the 21st Century, another reform plan put in place a different set of state-sanctioned textbooks that were to be based on newly developed curriculum frameworks (which Vietnam had never had before). This effort sought to balance knowledge acquisition and application by establishing educational aims in knowledge, skills and attitudes. Skills included those identified as relevant for students’ present and future lives such as conducting experiments, raising questions, and seeking information. In turn, teachers were encouraged to adapt their teaching to students’ needs and to use more active learning methods.
At the same time that the Escuela Nueva initiative was underway, the Vietnamese government was also developing the comprehensive plans to shift the whole system to a focus on competencies. Critical aims of these reforms included altering “the outdated teaching and learning methods – which were formerly structured around the transmission of knowledge and memorization of facts – with technology-based education to equip students with hands on skills necessary for the twenty-first century.” Along with the adoption of the competency-based curriculum in 2018 (with implementation begun in first grade in 2020), the government implemented a “one curriculum – multiple textbooks” policy freeing schools from the requirement to use the single set of state-sanctioned textbooks. This new policy was designed to give schools greater choice in selecting materials relevant for their students and their local context and more flexibility in determining the content to be taught by reducing compulsory subjects and adding optional and integrated subject and theme activities.
In the most recent reforms, the Vietnamese government also made substantial changes in assessment and testing in order to take the focus off academic performance in conventional subjects and reduce the pressure on students. In primary classrooms, along with eliminating homework, the reforms replaced the grade-based evaluation system with oral and written feedback. At the high school level, the reforms created a single standardized exam to replace a long-criticized sequence of a six-subject exit exam followed about a month later by an SAT-like placement exam for college.
Summing up the shift to expand the focus of the system beyond academics, at the end of 2024, the Minister of Education and Training, Nguyen Kim Son, stated that the goals of the systemic education reform efforts include developing “well-rounded individuals who know how to live happily and create happiness for themselves and others.” He went on to say: “When students engage in self-directed exploration, problem-solving, and discovery, they develop enthusiasm and are motivated to delve deeper. This progression – from knowing to understanding, from analyzing to applying and synthesizing – enhances their excitement and happiness as they master each level.”
“[T]he goals of the systemic education reform efforts include developing “well-rounded individuals who know how to live happily and create happiness for themselves and others.”
Signs of a shift in (some) instruction?
As has been the case almost everywhere, the large-scale efforts to transform conventional instruction in Vietnam have encountered considerable resistance and numerous challenges. A review of Escuela Nueva’s expansion to Vietnam by the World Bank, (one of the funders of the project) concluded that the program had a “positive” impact on children’s cognitive and non-cognitive achievement. However, other evaluations suggest that the effects were modest at best. For example, a more recent evaluation acknowledged some short-term positive outcomes, particularly for ethnic minority students, but, over the long-term, those effects appear to have faded away. Furthermore, observers reported that some teachers and students ended up mechanically following the steps in the learning guides – much as they had rigidly followed the textbooks the guides were supposed to replace. In addition, skeptical teachers continued to use traditional methods alongside the new approach, and some parents, concerned that their children were not learning, complained their children came home with “empty minds.” Critics and the press picked up on issues like these, leading to an explosion of negative coverage in the local and national press, with many schools stopping the project as a result.
At the same time, even in the early piloting phase of the implementation of the Escuela Nueva model, there were some provinces where there were reports of “transformative impact.” An evaluation of from the Department of Education in a northern province with a large ethnic minority population was particularly enthusiastic:
“Students who were dependent on teachers are now more independent, bold, confident, and excited to learn, and their learning results are better. Thanks to slower-paced learning, teachers have more time to pay attention to weak students, helping to reduce the percentage of weak students. For ethnic minority students, [the program] offered chances to participate in many activities and communicate (listen and speak) with friends in Vietnamese, and their Vietnamese learning results are more advanced. In particular, the new School Model has fundamentally changed the pedagogical activities of the school in the direction of self-discipline, self-management, democratization, and formation of necessary competencies and qualities of Vietnamese citizens.”
Another review of the comprehensive reforms noted similar challenges but also evidence of progress, stating: “When launched in 2014, the process has been challenged due to concerns about the feasibility by public opinion, schools, and teachers. However, after two years of implementation, there have been obvious changes in primary education. The guiding principles of learning and teaching at primary schools now are what the students learned and what they could do, rather than their grades.”
“[C]conventional instruction continues to dominate but… ‘there may be more competency-focused learning than is often reported in research on Vietnamese education.’”
Most recently, researchers have been analyzing videos of classroom practice in a small set of high schools across 10 provinces. Their preliminary analysis uncovered numerous instances in which teachers were using strategies like questioning, feedback and modeling to support students’ learning of skills like creative thinking and problem solving. They also found that teachers in high-performing classrooms provided more opportunities to discover new concepts and connect them to prior knowledge and experiences. They conclude that conventional instruction continues to dominate but add: “there may be more competency-focused learning than is often reported in research on Vietnamese education, and perhaps more than many policymakers know, given their ardent critiques of the education system that, they think, is tailored to memorization and testing.”
Next Week: Next steps and critical challenges in the development of the Vietnamese education system: Can Vietnam transform the conventional model of schooling (Part 4)?
What does it look like when an entire community supports children’s learning and development? In this 2-part interview, Gregg Behr talks about the origins of Remake Learning and how the expansion of Remake Learning Days has helped to catalyze similar community-wide efforts in several other cities and regions around the world. In 2007, Behr, the executive director of The Grable Foundation, founded Remake Learning as a network of educators, scientists, artists, and makers supporting future-driven learning opportunities for children and youth in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Remake Learning Days began in 2016 as a local learning festival with hands-on learning events for children of all ages at libraries, schools, parks, museums, and other community spaces. Celebrating its 10th edition this month, Remake Learning Days have now expanded to 15 different regions in four countries. Behr is also the author with Ryan Rydzewski of When You Wonder, You’re Learning, sharing the science behind the work and words of Fred Rogers and Mister Rogers Neighborhood, a well-known television show that ran for over thirty years. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Thomas Hatch (TH): What were some of the key developments and “Aha” moments in your early work at the Grable Foundation and with Remake Learning?
Gregg Behr (GB): I joined the Grable Foundation as Executive Director 19 years ago in 2006. I followed on the heels of an exceptional executive director, Susan Brownlee, who had led this organization extraordinarily well. By all accounts, the trustees were incredibly pleased with where the foundation was and where it was going. That meant I came into a position as a leader saying, “How do you build on excellence?” To try to answer that question, I spent time out in the community just connecting with people with whom the Foundation had been working. Meeting with teachers, meeting with librarians, and meeting with others involved in the out-of-school space. I asked them, “What could we do that would be helpful to you?” I heard things like “I’m just not connecting with kids the way that I used to.” This was fall of 2006 and at the time I was 32 years old, and at first, I just thought, “Oh, this is just experienced people saying something like ‘the kids these days…”. But then I began to notice who was saying these things, and I realized I was hearing this from people in different age groups. Some had just started their work, others were 30 years into their careers, and they were all literally saying that kids are different this year than they were last year. I thought that was strange. It was if something was happening seismically in kids’ lives. Sitting here in 2024 it feels naive to say these things, but looking back, in 2006, there were massive changes underway in kids’ lives. They were consuming information differently, producing information differently, seeking affirmation differently, developing identities differently. There was, in fact, something different happening in their lives.
“[T]here were massive changes underway in kids’ lives. They were consuming information differently, producing information differently, seeking affirmation differently, developing identities differently. There was, in fact, something different happening in their lives.“
That recognition sparked something and got me asking questions like, if it’s true that something different is happening, how do we support schools and other sites of learning in different ways? Then, I had a meeting with a colleague at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University, and I began to realize that there were a whole lot of other people asking questions about kids and learning but that weren’t traditional educators. They were designers, artists; they were gamers and what we now call “makers.” I started meeting with those folks and began to wonder what would happen if you brought these people together? So I organized a meeting at a breakfast place called Pamela’s. It was just a dozen people, and I was very purposeful inviting 12 individuals from 12 very different fields, including – as examples – a teacher, a gamer, and someone in museum exhibit design.
It was one of those things where I scheduled it for an hour for, and it ended up going on for 2 or 2 and a half hours. At the end, everyone said, “Oh, my gosh! I can think of 2 or 3 colleagues that ought to be part of this conversation about education locally.” Then I just started convening more of these meetings. I used an email subject line that said “Kids + Creativity,” just giving it a name. Then people started saying “Oh, that’s the Kids and Creativity meeting!” That continued for a couple of years, and it just kept growing and growing. It went from pancakes to bagels, and then we did a “Gong Show” like event in the basement of the Children’s Museum. After that, people at an organization called the Sprout Fund got involved. They were a community foundation-like organization that served as a “think-and-do” tank in our region. They had a 5 C’s model (Convene and Catalyze; Communicate; Coordinate; Champion) that we still use today that they used to organize these meetings and give some coherence to this growing network of people and organizations. They said “It will take the grant maker (me!) out of the center to see if there’s a “there there.”
Gregg Behr presenting about Remake Learning (photo: Howard Lipan)
This story speaks to a number of aha’s. It was an aha recognizing that something different was happening in kid’s lives — that the learning sciences and evidence from neural mapping now tell us was true. It was an aha and realization that we needed to think differently about who ought to be part of the conversation. There was an aha that this 5 C’s model that was originally used to attract and retain talent could be applied to help us build this network of folks involved in education generally and learning innovation in particular. The other aha was the power in shifting from talking about education to talking about learning; a simple thing in some ways, but at the time, it was profound because education conveyed schooling, whereas learning had this much bigger open sense that kids are learning in lots of places. That speaks to the power of words as well. I didn’t come up with the phrase “Remake Learning,” someone at the Sprout Fund came up with it, but, in retrospect, I think the reason that the name Remake Learning has stuck all these years is that using “remake” suggested that we don’t have to transform everything. We don’t have to blow everything up. You don’t have to get rid of everything that you’ve done for your entire professional life or what you studied. There may be some things that are timeless and classic, but we need to remake it for who today’s kids are. That name also wasn’t wedded to any particular thing like STEM or STEAM or maker education or digital learning. It captured all of those things, and it turned out to be a good umbrella for different approaches, different pedagogies, different frameworks, different words that people were using as they thought about innovation and learning in and out of school. That was another important aha.
[T]he reason that the name Remake Learning has stuck all these years is that using “remake” suggested that we don’t have to transform everything. We don’t have to blow everything up…. There may be some things that are timeless and classic, but we need to remake it for who today’s kids are.
TH: What were some of the challenges you encountered and some of the changes you made as things developed from there?
GB: Early on, it was important for this new intermediary – Remake Learning – to build trust and demonstrate this isn’t a zero-sum game. It’s not as if the Grable Foundation or other funders are going to now start funding this to the exclusion of other things. Then the folks at the Sprout Fund, in particular, really learned how to work well with other intermediaries in the early childhood space, the mentoring space, and the out of school time space, to see and recognize the work already going on and build on it. For example, they built on things like the Allegheny Partners for Out of School Time. It meant figuring out how something like Remake Learning builds on that work and doesn’t compete with it or replace it. We use words like “partnership” and “collaboration” pretty freely, but it’s really hard work to build trust among people and organizations.
TH: Yes, it’s really hard work! Do you have any examples, from the work with your partners, that helps to show what worked for you in building partnerships?
GB: I suppose it’s not rocket science, but for one thing, we were really deliberate and very intentional about communications. We took advantage of our position in philanthropy and convened leaders of the key organizations at least quarterly so that there was transparency in our communications. We would always meet with food and other things to build relationships and get to know each other a little better, and we tried to engage in genuine conversations to say, “Here’s what we’re doing” and “How do we really help each other?” Just being really deliberate and reaching out to the Allegheny Partners and others to say “Hey, we’re thinking about an event on September 23rd.” Lots and lots of little ordinary things that would engender trust. Then people feel like, “Oh, I’m being heard.” Being deliberate about inviting leaders of organizations to be part of review committees, to create real, community-based participatory review committees for grant making. All of those simple, ordinary things repeated and done in a rhythm helped the Remake Learning team avoid some key problems. It’s a very human, relational enterprise to build out a network.
“All of those simple, ordinary things repeated and done in a rhythm helped the Remake Learning team avoid some key problems. It’s a very human, relational enterprise to build out a network.“
TH: I think time and rhythm are really important. How do you plan for that? Did you have in your mind that this is going to take five years or ten years?
GB: It’s interesting that you ask this question because I think rhythm is often overlooked. If Doncaster, England calls us or Fremont, California, calls, I always talk about the rhythm. I think the rhythm sets expectation. Like every spring we’re going to host Remake Learning Days. Every fall, there’s a Remake Learning assembly, which is kind of like our “State of the Union.” There are four meet ups every month. You can expect communications to come out every Friday. It’s not haphazard — all of the little things create expectations and make it easier for people to connect. thing. Kids need rhythm in their schools. but it’s also important for organizations, for cities, for regions to have a rhythm. Like this is our birthday. This is when we’re going back to school. For the network, creating a rhythm and being deliberate and intentional about it builds a culture; it builds tradition; it builds relationships. It builds all of those things.
Kids need rhythm in their schools. but it’s also important for organizations, for cities, for regions to have a rhythm. Like this is our birthday. This is when we’re going back to school. For the network, creating a rhythm and being deliberate and intentional about it builds a culture; it builds tradition; it builds relationships. It builds all of those things.
There are a couple other things that I think kept Remake Learning grounded. One of them is that many times over the course of nearly 20 years, Remake Learning has hired consultants well trained in human centered design. They’ve convened members of the Remake Learning network for half-day or daylong retreats or other gatherings so that Remake Learning can ask “how are we doing? “How might we do things better?” It’s ongoing strategic management with a real sense of human-centered design in it, regularly checking-in with the broader community.
TH: So often funders and others are focused on the short-term – on generating outcomes in two or three years, but part of what I’m taking away from what you’re saying is that you weren’t focused on a specific time frame; you were focused on creating a set of activities and events that could be sustained to support activity over time, into the future.
GB: Yes, and I would add that the focus was more about a mindset, an idea. It was about a movement to think about learning across a landscape that supports young people’s passions and interests. The events, the activities, the grants, the communications are all in support of changing mindsets about learning.
[T]he focus was more about a mindset, an idea. It was about a movement to think about learning across a landscape that supports young people’s passions and interests.”
TH: But that also entails a foundation, an organization, and people that are willing to say, “We’ll support these activities into the foreseeable future” rather than to say, “We’ll give you a three-year grant.”
GB: Yes, that is true. Remake Learning’s been lucky, and my work at the Grable Foundation plays a significant role in this, but beyond the Grable Foundation, we’ve had support from lots of other funders. Along the way, there have also been many one year and three year grants and other kinds of support for Remake Learning. But because of the steadiness of the support, Remake. Learning has always been able to budget years ahead. That’s very powerful; it’s never had to budget year to year.
Kids in Remake Learning activities (photos: Ben Filio)
TH: What kind of advice do you give other people about how to establish that kind of support? Especially in a context where funders may be more inclined to give a grant for a three-year project than to provide core backbone funding for as long as it’s required.
GB: I might win a Nobel Prize for philanthropy if I could answer that question! I use the phrase “make yourself lucky” occasionally, but there’s no doubt that you need some funder or, ideally, funders – whether they are individuals, corporations, philanthropies, or municipalities – to recognize that a network or an intermediary organization needs multi-year, discretionary, unrestricted support. Period. That’s the bottom line. If a funder doesn’t get that, you’re in trouble.
“[Y]ou need some funder or, ideally, funders…to recognize that a network or an intermediary organization needs multi-year, discretionary, unrestricted support. Period. That’s the bottom line. If a funder doesn’t get that, you’re in trouble.”
TH: Are there things you’ve done – generating evidence of impact or sharing information – that have helped convince funders to provide that kind of support?
GB: We use a lot of analogous and proxy examples. When we thought about Remake Learning initially, and its focus on relevant, engaging, equitable learning across our community, the easiest argument to make was to say, “look at what we’ve done collectively in philanthropy in the early childhood space over the past 20 years: we’ve built an intermediary that, in turn, supports hundreds of early learning centers. Look at what we’ve done in the out-of-school time space. Look what we’ve done in arts education space.” We really used those other examples – like the Campaign for Grade Level Reading – to say “these are the types of results we should anticipate when we create a network of schools, museums, libraries, other sites of learning committed to future facing, future driven learning.”
TH: You’ve been doing this work on Remake Learning for twenty-plus years now, but, early on, were there any developments or things you looked at that told you were headed in the right direction or that helped you convince other people to get on board?
GB: Yes, and I wish we had more, but for one thing, we looked at data from individual organizations. I’ll give you two examples. The Elizabeth Forward School District was deeply involved in Remake Learning early on. They began rethinking how they approach professional development and learning. They sent their administrative teams to go see what was happening at some innovative places here in Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon; they went to visit the Quest School in New York City, and to see a media space in Chicago. Then they started reimagining how to use their own spaces. They built a classroom that mimicked the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) and they were at the forefront of reimagining what school libraries could look like. In pretty short order they started to see some improvements in traditional measures, including math scores and reading scores. Their dropouts went from about 28 or 29 kids a year to 0 or 1. They saw the number of families choosing charter school drop by two thirds. They also suddenly found there was a new energy; there was an agency. People wanted to be in the school, and students were performing at higher levels. At the same time, the Carnegie Libraries of Pittsburgh, like the public libraries in Chicago were at the forefront of imagining what teen spaces might look like. They brought in filmmakers and hip-hop artists alongside librarians, and they filled the shelves not only with books, but also with games and hardware and software. In pretty short order, they saw a two-fold increase of teens coming to the library. There was a massive increase of kids coming back to the library because, in that Mimi Ito way, they wanted to hang out and they wanted to mess around. Then, lo and behold, in the short term, there was something like an 18% increase in book circulation among those kids. Again, traditional measures. So clearly, things were happening, and we could point to those two and lots of other examples.
Next week: How do you Build a Learning Ecosystem? Gregg Behr on the evolution and expansion of Remake Learning and Remake Learning Days (Part 2)
Sustaining Productive Teacher Collaborations: Infrastructures Across International Contexts – Bryant Jensen (BJ), Brigham Young University, Amanda Datnow (AD), University of California, San Diego, Sarah Woulfin (SW), University of Texas at Austin
Lead the Change (LtC): What are some of the ideas you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at American Education Research Association (AERA) can learn from your work related to practice, policy, and scholarship?
BJ, AD, & SW: We hope the session audience will take at least three ideas from our session. First, that instructional infrastructures matter a great deal in realizing and sustaining productive collaborations among teachers. They include, for example:
● A regular time and place for small teams of teachers to plan and study their practice (Borko, 2004; Gallimore et al., 2009);
● Common pacing and instructional aims (Garet et al., 2001; Supovitz, 2002);
● Peer facilitation of team meetings (Andrews-Larson et al., 2017); and
“Instructional infrastructures matter a great deal in realizing and sustaining productive teacher collaboration.”
Chapman et al. show how conditions across Dundee schools shaped the collective agency of teachers and school leaders alike. They provided opportunities for building trust among collaborating teachers and shared beliefs in themselves and in their schools which can influence the sustainability of equitable practice. Drawing on Sarason’s (1972) idea of “settings,” Jensen et al. illustrate the nested nature of instructional infrastructure to sustain improvement. In their ten-year case study, teacher teams in a middle school were led by peer teacher leaders; teacher leaders met monthly to debrief, plan, and prepare their team meetings; and settings for teacher leaders were organized by school administrators who also maintained a monthly setting. This system of settings sustained instructional change from the bottom up and top down; student academic performance gains on state tests over a ten-year period demonstrate sustainability.
Second, sustaining and scaling productive collaborations for equity in teaching and learning are related but distinct. In previous research, Tappel et al. (2022) showed how sustainability concerns the continuity, integration, and adaptability of change, whereas scale is about expansion and replication of change–to reach more teachers and students. In our session, Lefstein’s paper—an account of expanding a teacher collaboration program in Israel from 11 teams in 4 schools in the first year to 458 teams in 158 schools in the fifth year—illustrates tensions between sustainability and scale. He shows how smaller-scale change in Israel was more feasible because external resources enabled the infrastructure teachers needed whereas large-scale change was much less effective at sustaining change because existing infrastructures were poorly equipped to support the collaborative learning processes that researchers and designers sought to cultivate.
Third, sustainability should consider the perspectives and experiences of teachers. In their paper, Datnow and colleagues show that teachers change their routine ways of interacting and talking together as they change in the ways they think—about students, about teaching, and about collaborating. Infrastructures to sustain productive collaboration, they argue, should acknowledge how teachers’ thinking and practice develop and change over the course of reform. In their qualitative analysis of teacher and administrator data from four schools across four years, the authors identify institutional impediments or threats to teachers becoming more collaborative: accountability pressures, complex team dynamics, and the conclusion of capacity-building support provided by their research project.
Dr Amanda Datnow
Dr Bryant Jensen
Dr Sarah Woulfin
Resilient pathways: Toward political theories of action for achieving educational equity – Aireale J. Rodgers (AR), University of Wisconsin-Madison, Heather N. McCambly (HM), University of Pittsburgh, Román Liera (RL), Montclair State University
Lead the Change (LtC): What are some of the ideas you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at American Education Research Association (AERA) can learn from your work related to practice, policy, and scholarship?
AR, HM, & RL: Given the precarity of this sociopolitical moment and people’s varied sensemaking around it, we understand and appreciate the urge toward action. So often, educational change work focuses on doing something differently. Indeed, now is a moment where bold action is required. Yet, lessons from radical organizer-educators like Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba (2023) teach us that a move to action without critical reflection and collective organizing won’t free us. At worst, moving too quickly to action can rebirth the same system in a different form.
“A move to action without critical reflection won’t free us.”
So rather than move directly to action, our intention with this symposium is to provide AERA members with an opportunity to explore where we should persist and where we might break from common theories of change toward equity and liberation in higher education. Through empirical cases focused on ethnic based community organizations (Hailu, 2025), Boards of Trustees (Rall, 2025), faculty cluster hiring (McCambly et al., 2025), and scholarly papers exploring the permanence of racism (Tichavakunda, 2025) and the fallacy of white supremacy (Davis III et al., 2025) in postsecondary institutions, we offer a generative pause to consider the often tacit and unspoken logics that guide our actions in an attempt to better name and collectively restrategize for future change efforts.
Dr Aireale J. Rodgers
Dr Heather McCambly
Dr Román Liera
Teacher-Led Learning Circles: Professional Learning for Teachers’ Use of Formative Assessment to Improve Students’ Learning – Carol Campbell (CC), University of Edinburgh, Chris DeLuca (CD), Nathan Rickey (NR) & Danielle LaPointe-McEwan (DL), Queen’s University, Martin Henry (MH), Education International
Lead the Change (LtC): What are some of the ideas you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at American Education Research Association (AERA) can learn from your work related to practice, policy, and scholarship?
CC, CD, NR, DL, MH: The research and practices connected to the Teacher-Led Learning Circles project offer hope for the powerful combination of effective professional learning for teacher leadership and the use of formative assessment to benefit students’ learning. It has long been established that teacher quality and teaching quality are central to educational change (Barber & Mourshed, 2007; Darling-Hammond et al., 2017; Education International and UNESCO, 2019; OECD, 2021; Thompson, 2021). Similarly, the potential of formative assessment and feedback has been integral to educational change, for example, in developments stemming from the seminal review by Black and Wiliam (1998) with the Assessment Reform Group, establishing foundational principles for assessment for learning (AfL). Through the experiences and evidence from seven countries participating across four continents in the Teacher-Led Learning Circles project, overarching lessons identified in our final report (Campbell et al., 2024a, 2024b) include:
While sustained education renewal would require comprehensive educational change at the systems level, we found that professional learning can contribute to successful change efforts at the local level when:
● Supporting teachers in identifying and focusing on goals linked to their students’ needs and for teachers’ own professional learning needs. These twin goals can enhance both student agency and teacher leadership.
● Differentiating for teachers’ professional contexts and experiences and for their goals and approaches to formative assessment, including further differentiation with changing experiences over time.
● Offering quality content. However, quality of content needs to be balanced with quantity and differentiated to be relevant and practical.
● Providing active and collaborative professional learning opportunities. Supports for collaboration across geographical contexts is necessary and requires attention to both availability of online and in-person activities.
● Ensuring adequate resources such as funding to support access to expert resources, including facilitators, and time for professional development.
● Combined with system leadership, including teacher unions. Growth in teachers’ leadership, confidence, skills, and practices was beneficial, with impacts within and beyond their schools. It is also essential to engage and educate formal school leaders.
Moreover, we found that for change efforts were more likely to successfully reach the classroom through the use of formative assessment that:
● Involves a suite of highly interconnected practices that are all aimed at supporting student learning. The heart of the formative assessment process—i.e., teachers and students interpreting and using evidence of student learning to guide and promote learning—can be accessed and encouraged in multiple ways.
● Are adapted for local contexts and assessment systems. Formative assessment can operate within a variety of assessment cultures, even if specific practices are operationalized differently within these contexts.
● Occur across a range of teaching contexts, regardless of access to technology. When students had consistent access to devices and reliable internet connections, this could support formative assessment. Yet similar formative assessment practices were reported by teachers whose classes had limited or no access to devices or the internet.
● Is intentionally integrated into teachers’ pedagogical practices in their classrooms. In some cases, teachers’ strategies did not integrate or maximize the potential of formative assessment to further benefit students’ learning.
Action spaces to support teaching critical consciousness: Risk-taking within professional learning communities – Christina L. Dobbs, Boston University – Madora Soutter, Villanova University – Daren Graves, Simmons University – Elianny C. Edwards, College of the Holy Cross – Scott Seider, Brianna C. Diaz, Babatunde Alford, Kaila Daza, Sarah E. Fogelman, Trang U. Le, Alexandra Honeck, Hannah Choi, Yuwen Shen, & Hehua Xu, Boston College.
Lead the Change (LtC): What are some of the ideas you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at American Education Research Association (AERA) can learn from your work related to practice, policy, and scholarship?
CD, MS, DG, EE, SS, BD, BA, KD, SF, TL, AH, HC, YS, & HX: We will present a project from the past several years called the Critical Crew Project. This project sought to teach middle grade students about critical consciousness (Freire, 1973), the ability to challenge and navigate oppressive forces, and to document how those schools used professional learning community (PLC) spaces to learn and teach critical consciousness with students during advisory meetings….We learned a great deal across this project about systems of multi-level change to build support for learning at a range of levels. Teachers needed space and support to learn about teaching critical consciousness that had structure without prescription. Our approach of having flexible tools with lots of space for specialization for contexts and particular students seemed to resonate with teachers. We found also that, as university partners, we served as conduits to research and other materials for PLCs and to use their feedback for refining the work, without being overly directive about the project. We also learned about producing a range of work products as a result of the project – academic papers, curricular materials, videos from classrooms, etc. – which has helped us push different levers, such as publishing research or presenting teacher workshops or building curriculum and participate in different conversations as a result of the work.
“Teachers needed space and support to learn about teaching critical consciousness that had structure without prescription.”
From Left to Right: Dr Christina Dobbs, Dr Scott Seider, Dr Daren Graves, Babatunde Alford
From Left to Right: Brianna Diaz, Dr Elianny Edwards, Kaila Daza
From Left to Right: Dr Trang Le, Alexandra Honeck, Hannah Choi
From Left to Right: Sarah Fogelman, Hehua Xu, and Dr Madora Soutter
Digital Equity and Inclusion: Insights into Educational Change and School Initiated Improvements – Christopher Sanderson, University of Arizona
Lead the Change (LtC): What are some of the ideas you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at American Education Research Association (AERA) can learn from your work related to practice, policy, and scholarship?
CS: My research offers insights into the challenges and strategies facing K-12 school districts in their efforts to promote digital equity and inclusion, providing valuable lessons for practice, policy, and scholarship. My work emphasizes the importance of integrating digital tools and providing professional development for educators to address disparities effectively. For example, I highlight the need for further training to bridge digital literacy fissures. From a policy perspective, I encourage sustained district-level planning and collaboration to tackle systemic barriers, such as the expiration of temporary programs like the CARES Act and ACP (Federal Communications Commission, n.d.; US Department of Education, 2024). Digital equity must be treated as a long-term priority rather than a short-term response to crises like the COVID-19 pandemic (Petersen, 2024).
I also emphasize holistic definitions of digital equity and inclusion, which include access to affordable internet, devices, and the necessary digital skills. Collaborative approaches are essential, and I focus on engaging administrators, teachers, parents, and community members in co-creating solutions to foster a shared vision of digital equity and inclusion. My research highlights the importance of addressing systemic inequities and recognizing biases in policy and practice. For instance, I noted that federal programs often exclude K-12 schools, advocating for tailored, inclusive, sustainable, district-level strategies (National Telecommunications and Information Administration, 2024).
My work offers frameworks to explore the intersections of digital inclusion, systemic inequities, and community collaboration in educational change. It contributes to the growing body of literature on digital equity by providing insights into how schools can navigate barriers to ensure every student has the tools for success. Focusing on localized, context-driven solutions and collaborative efforts, this research aims to inform and create more equitable learning environments that address both immediate needs and long-term goals. This study may support school districts in assessing their progress toward digital equity and inclusion, offering recommended actions for transformative change. Through the collection and analysis of data, districts can identify patterns and make informed decisions on future steps.
The findings from this study can serve as a catalyst for action-oriented planning beyond its conclusion. The ultimate goal is to develop actionable strategies that help school districts achieve equitable student access. While an outsider can only begin to grasp the challenges students, communities, and schools face regarding technology access, internet connectivity, and digital skills development, addressing these barriers requires strategic, locally driven planning. Schools are complex and diverse, with digital equity and inclusion needs varying from one site to another. For example, one school might require more digital literacy training for caregivers, while another may need additional internet hotspots to ensure students can access devices outside school hours.
“The ultimate goal is to develop actionable strategies that help school districts achieve equitable student access.”
Dr Christopher Sanderson
Achieving Excellence Academy: Critical Unschooling and the Promise of a Humanizing Education – Dr. María del Carmen Salazar & Nadia Saldaña-Spiegle, University of Denver, Ashlea Skiles, Denver Public Schools
Lead the Change (LtC): What are some of the ideas you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at American Education Research Association (AERA) can learn from your work related to practice, policy, and scholarship?
MS, NS, AS: One of the central contributions of this research is the expansion of the concept of critical unschooling. We, the researchers, extend this concept by conceptualizing “home-based” as one’s sense of “home” which is inclusive of home culture, community, native language, intersectional identities, history, heritage, ancestors, and ultimately, of one’s full humanity. We, the researchers, put the concept of critical unschooling on the ground and bring to live a real-world example in an educational setting with secondary students and teachers of color. This is an important contribution to the field because it extends theory into practice.
Another important contribution of this research is that student voices are centered and the concept of critical unschooling is shaped by their experiences and insights. One of the most impactful findings is how students redefine excellence as a result of the Achieving Excellence Academy (AEA). As an example, one student stated, “Excellence is not just holding onto your goals, it’s going after and representing yourself, and reflecting yourself in your goals.” Another student emphasized, “Before, I only thought about excellence athletically and academically, but after this program, I think it’s cultural too…pride in your own culture, accepting other people’s cultures, and being woke.” The AEA expanded students’ perceptions of excellence to include a focus on their well-being and cultural pride. Moreover, teachers of color extended this concept into teaching and learning by sharing how they enacted critical unschooling.
“Before, I only thought about excellence athletically and academically, but after this program, I think it’s cultural too…pride in your own culture, accepting other people’s cultures, and being woke.”
Lead the Change (LtC): What are some of the ideas you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at American Education Research Association (AERA) can learn from your work related to practice, policy, and scholarship?
AB & IB: Our work offers valuable contributions to the practice of teacher education. Teacher education curricula should respond to the cyclical nature of educational change, preparing teachers for shifts in pedagogical trends and the potential return of seemingly outdated practices. Instead of presenting a singular “best-practice” model, teacher education programs should equip pre-service teachers with the adaptability and critical thinking skills to navigate fluctuating pedagogical paradigms. For example, this could involve teaching both content-centered and student-centered methods and conducting simulations to help teachers practice adjusting their approach based on different classroom scenarios. This also necessitates supporting prospective teachers in forming a strong professional identity and developing reflexive skills. Curricula could integrate historical analysis and context-awareness practices, enabling teachers to understand the deeper social and political forces that shape educational policy and practices in their local context. Our study’s [Historical changes in teacher education in Israel: An analysis of professional perceptions from 1960 to 2020] findings underscore the importance of teachers’ adaptive expertise in responding to changing societal conditions and emerging needs. Teacher training should equip prospective teachers with versatile knowledge and skills to adapt to various contexts and specific learners while preserving their established pedagogic creed.
The study also contributes to educational policymaking. Given the cyclical nature of educational reform, it is crucial to focus education policy on incremental, sustainable improvements rather than rapid, radical shifts that may prove unsustainable. This requires developing adaptable teacher education policies that respond to shifts in societal values and priorities without abandoning fundamental principles of educational equity and justice. A “one-size-fits-all” approach is unlikely to succeed; effective policy requires adapting to specific contexts and addressing the unique needs and challenges of national systems. The long-term perspective necessary to address cyclical patterns demands a shift from short-term policy cycles to long-term planning horizons. Policymakers must avoid pursuing quick fixes and instead focus on fostering sustained, systemic changes that can withstand shifts in ideology and priorities. This might involve establishing broader cross-sectoral collaborations that include policymakers, teacher educators, researchers, and community stakeholders.
“Policymakers must avoid pursuing quick fixes and instead focus on fostering sustained, systemic changes that can withstand shifts in ideology and priorities.”
Lastly, our work contributes to the relatively limited body of scholarship that explores the historical path dynamics of educational change (e.g., Berkovich, 2019; Hargreaves & Goodson, 2006), shedding light on the interplay between past trends and present educational challenges. Our 60-year study highlights the significance of adopting a long-term perspective to understand educational shifts. Researchers would also benefit from examining the nuanced sociopolitical circumstances that mobilize, stabilize, and destabilize educational changes within specific contexts. We encourage a comparative analysis of long-term cyclical patterns in other national contexts to determine the scope and applicability of the cyclical model in diverse settings.
Ayelet Becher, PhD
Izhak Berkovich, PhD
Developing the Korean version of the equity scenario survey: Pilot study – Sojung Park (SP), Nicholas S. Bell (NB), Elizabeth Slusarz (ES), University at Albany, State University of New York
Lead the Change (LtC): What are some of the ideas you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at American Education Research Association (AERA) can learn from your work related to practice, policy, and scholarship?
SP, NB, & ES: Our study [Developing the Korean version of the Equity Scenario Response Survey] highlights a critical gap between teacher candidates’ self-perceived readiness to address racism and ableism in the classroom (as seen in quantitative data) and their actual preparedness (as revealed by scenario-based responses). To examine these discrepancies, we employed the Korean-adapted Equity Scenario Response Survey (ESRS-K)—a scenario-based tool derived from the ESRS (Bell & Codding, 2021)—which we translated and culturally tailored to capture equity-related dilemmas specific to Korean classrooms.
From a policy perspective, our results offer a roadmap for educational leaders in South Korea and other societies facing similar demographic shifts. Policymakers should leverage these findings to set clearer teacher certification requirements or require mandatory equity modules in teacher education curricula. By explicitly targeting racism, ableism, and related forms of discrimination, policy reforms can foster inclusive practices throughout national teaching standards.
“Policymakers should leverage these findings to set clearer teacher certification requirements or require mandatory equity modules in teacher education curricula.“
In terms of scholarly contributions, our research applies QuantCrit [a theory that uses quantitative methods in ways consistent with the tenets of Critical Race Theory] in a novel way, both theoretically and methodologically. Adapting the ESRS for a Korean setting not only refines its cultural relevance but also expands the global discourse on equity assessment tools. This contextualized application of QuantCrit can guide teacher education in other rapidly diversifying contexts, offering a model for how researchers and practitioners might evaluate teacher readiness in settings undergoing similar demographic changes.
Taken together, our work bridges theory—Critical Race Theory (CRT) through QuantCrit—and practice in the form of teacher training and classroom realities. We invite the AERA community to critically examine how traditional self-report measures can be supplemented with tools like scenario-based assessments. These tools uncover the complexities of equity education, moving beyond surface-level self-perceptions to provide deeper insights into candidates’ readiness to enact equitable practices.
Nicholas Bell, PhD
Elizabeth Slusarz, PhD student
Sojung Park, PhD
Are team meetings a place for teacher learning? An ‘in situ’ analysis of meeting practices – Enikö Zala-Mezö (EZ), Zurich University of Teacher Education, & Amanda Datnow (AD) University of California San Diego
Lead the Change (LtC): What are some of the ideas you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at American Education Research Association (AERA) can learn from your work related to practice, policy, and scholarship?
EZ & AD: In our paper, we address the question: How does professional learning—which is similar to “collective trial and error” in Haslanger’s (2023, p. 169) wording—unfold in team meetings in schools? We describe meeting practices ‘in situ’. Driven by practice theory (Reckwitz, 2002), ‘in situ’ means we focus on daily practices in schools as the unit of analysis. We analyze detailed audio-recorded data gathered in team meetings in three Swiss schools and two different teams within each school. We attend to discourse sequences with potential for knowledge generation, where future practices or new insights are produced. We build on the definition of generative sequences from Beech et al. (2010): “engagement between two or more people that goes beyond the trivial, which changes some meanings or processes and/or creates some new knowledge” (p. 1342). In other words, we are looking for instances in which educators engage in deeper discussions that are characterized by inquiry and problem solving.
A non-generative discussion would be one in which the team does not engage issues of teaching and learning in much depth and jumps to quick solutions, such as blaming students for their underachievement.
Our analysis reveals that, in the Swiss schools we studied, educators often organize highly structured meetings with full agendas that last around an hour (with some exceptions). These meetings tend to have very short sequences discussing up to 12 topics, which limits opportunities for deeper understanding, and joint learning. The generative aspect of the discourse was found to be low in many cases, yielding few opportunities for teacher learning. Additionally, the high level of structuring activities (introducing, summarizing, coordinating the discussion), along with the dominant role of the meeting leaders (who often have the lion’s share of speech time) and full agendas, suggests an underlying bureaucratic approach to team meetings. Managing organizational tasks tends to overshadow the learning opportunities for teachers, emphasizing administrative concerns over collaborative learning or reflective discussions. This structure implies that the primary focus of the meetings is on fulfilling organizational needs rather than fostering meaningful, collaborative learning experiences for the educators involved.
We believe these findings have important implications for research and practice. Our hope is to raise the consciousness of educational leaders, teachers, and external partners about the discourse in team meetings. Teacher collaboration meetings are expected to be a vehicle of educational improvement (Vescio et al., 2008; Lefstein et al., 2020), and our analysis suggests they could be much more generative of learning than they presently are. There is of course no recipe for changing practices; rather, shifts happen through continuous inquiry, a trial-and-error process drawn on educators’ deep professional knowledge. The research community could also play a role through gathering and sharing micro-analytic data of meeting practices and conditions and partnering with educators in an inquiry process.
“Our hope is to raise the consciousness of educational leaders, teachers, and external partners about the discourse in team meetings.“
“It’s not always about college”: Teachers’ sense-making around the shifting purpose of high school —Aaron Leo (AL) & Kristen Wilcox (KW), University at Albany (SUNY)
Lead the Change (LtC): What are some of the ideas you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at American Education Research Association (AERA) can learn from your work related to practice, policy, and scholarship?
AL & KW:NYKids’ research offers a unique contribution to the field of Educational Change considering we are investigating schools which have sustained above-predicted outcomes for an extended time. As all schools are unique, our findings are not meant to be copied and pasted onto every location; instead, we view the lessons learned from positive outlier schools as a partial roadmap which can inspire and inform educators grappling with challenges in their own particular school-community contexts. Moreover, our qualitative approach provides a way to hear directly from educators as they describe, in their own words, their unique school and community ecologies, the obstacles they have encountered, and the particular policies, practices, and programs they have designed to overcome them. Our full dataset from the seven participating schools include: 70 interviews, 43 focus groups, 361 collected documents, and field notes taken during four school tours.
“As all schools are unique, our findings are not meant to be copied and pasted onto every location.”
One aspect common to the positive outlier schools we studied was an effort to make curriculum relevant, engaging, and responsive – especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and related school closures. For instance, at Lafayette Jr.-Sr. High School, educators have worked to ensure that the sizeable population of students from the Native American Onondaga Nation were provided culturally relevant activities and were represented in the school’s activities, appearance, and values. This process took many forms such as flying the Onondaga flag outside the school, creating a section in the school library featuring Native American authors, and working with a Native American liaison and My Brothers’ Keeper Coordinator to foster positive connections between the school and Onondaga community. At Fillmore, educators also developed culturally responsive approaches, but these looked different in a rural locale with a long history of agriculture. In this context, educators reinstated the Future Farmers of America program and provided hands-on opportunities for students to care for plants and animals on school grounds. To engage their students, Fillmore teachers worked together to create cross-disciplinary lessons and project-based learning opportunities.
We feel that these findings are of high value to the field of Educational Change as they provide examples of educators working to identify and address challenges in varied contexts. As our improvement hub has been supported by the state for over two decades, our research, and research-based tools have attracted the attention of the New York State Department of Education and have been highlighted by our advisory board member organizations including the New York State Council of School Superintendents, The New York State School Boards Association and several others that in turn influence policy in our state.
Kristen Campbell Wilcox, PhD
Aaron Leo, PhD
Call for efficacy: Changes in prior learning assessment (PLA) measures in the Florida college system — Giang-Nguyen T. Nguyen (GN) & Carla Thompson (CT), University of West Florida, Rashmi Sharma (RS), Western Illinois University
Lead the Change (LtC): What are some of the ideas you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at American Education Research Association (AERA) can learn from your work related to practice, policy, and scholarship?
GN, CT, & RS: The researchers hope that AERA and the field of educational change could be the space to share research that directly impacts the students of the underserved community. The audience at AERA could learn about the current landscape of prior learning assessment (PLA) in Florida. This one segment of research from Florida has far-reaching implications beyond the US. By shedding light on PLA, the researchers hope that the participants from other states and internationally can advocate for transparency and support the community college students. Moreover, the audience at AERA could make the change by being the change they want to see in practice.
“The audience at AERA could make the change by being the change they want to see in practice.”
The researchers are advocating for uniform and sustainable policies at the state level guided by federal guidelines as a critical step in ensuring equitable access to PLA opportunities for community college students. The researchers are hoping that the participants will engage in scholarly discussion about the following implications of the research and provide their insights and actionable suggestions:
Sustainability in Education Systems. Researchers hope to see a shift in thinking about the sustainability of educational reforms related to educational practices and policies. We are advocating for creating a system for continuous improvement on PLA for community college students, where changes could be implemented and evaluated regularly to take into account the needs of different groups of students.
Bridging research to practice. Research shows that students have limited access to PLA information so it is important to provide multiple avenues of information for easy access. Using evidence from the research to inform the practice, the researchers propose changes at the state and federal level policies that involve multiple stakeholder groups.
State-Level Uniformity. Advocate for state-level uniform policies that ensure consistency across institutions, making it easier for students to understand and access PLA opportunities. Such policies can standardize some processes like credit evaluation, eligibility criteria, and application procedures. State mandates can require institutions to make PLA information readily available through multiple channels, such as websites, orientation sessions, social media, and advising services.
Federal Guidelines as a Framework. Federal guidelines can establish minimum standards to ensure that PLA policies promote equity, inclusion, and access for all students, particularly those from underserved communities. The federal government can incentivize states to adopt uniform PLA policies by tying funding or grants to comply with these guidelines. Federal guidelines can encourage states to adopt reciprocity agreements, ensuring that PLA credits earned in one state are recognized in others, thereby supporting student mobility.
Collaboration Across Stakeholders.Encourage collaboration among educators, policymakers, and advocacy organizations to align state policies with federal guidelines. There is a need to consider local needs and provide professional development opportunities to ensure administrators and faculty are well-equipped to implement uniform PLA policies effectively.
Carla Thompson, PhD
Rashmi Sharma, PhD
Giang-Nguyen Nguyen, PhD
Youth and institutional change: The impact of student protests on curricula transformation in higher education — Tafadzwa Tivaringe (TT), Spencer Foundation
Lead the Change (LtC): What are some of the ideas you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at American Education Research Association (AERA) can learn from your work related to practice, policy, and scholarship?
TT: A key insight from this work [with students in higher education in South Africa and the US] is that practical efforts to facilitate institutional change that are rooted in research stand a better chance of delivering on the promise of transformation. For example, my work finds that while there was a statistically significant increase in course offerings that aligned with students’ demands for more social justice curricula, sentiment analysis of the syllabi of those classes in both country’s colleges demonstrated that a significant proportion adopted neutral framings on the subject. Furthermore, while colleges in both countries adopted courses that had titles and/or course descriptions that referenced social justice, most of the goals of those courses did not involve pedagogical outcomes that explicitly involve addressing injustice. This was despite explicit student demands for curricula transformation that includes ethical commitments to social justice during the #FeesMustFall and #BlackLiveMatter protests (Nyamnjoh, 2016; Taylor, 2016; Tivaringe & Kirshner, 2024). These findings show that there is a gap between students’ input and institutional responses that, if not fully understood, undermines our collective capacity to deepen equity within higher education institutions.
My research underscores a growing call by many educational change scholars on the importance of centering the experiences of those most affected in the policy process (Furlong & Cartmel, 2006; Henry et al., 2013). Too often, policies and programs designed to support people marginalized in the policy making process fail to take their input seriously. This can lead to a false sense of redress and repair. Even more, it can erroneously shift attribution of bad outcomes to individuals, rather than a proper interrogation of the inadequacies of said policies in achieving desired outcomes.
Lastly, there is often a discomfort with the use of quantitative and computational methods in educational change. I must admit that this skepticism is not without cause: those tools have historically been used to stall and/or attack efforts to advance social justice in education (DiGarcia et al., 2018; Dixon-Román, 2017). However, by leveraging a combination of text-mining machine learning algorithms and longitudinal structural equation models to examine the impact of student protests in South Africa and the United States, I join a growing group of critical scholars (e.g., de Freitas & Dixon-Román, 2016; Lukito & Pruden, 2023) who believe and indeed demonstrate that sustainable and effective research on educational change ought to include such tools in its repertoire. Additionally, given the global nature of inequities, it is imperative that reparative efforts learn across contexts. Yet, as we have argued in our work (Kirshner et al., 2021; Tivaringe & Kirshner, 2021) insights in the field of education are disproportionately drawn from the global North. As such, insights that could be critical in learning how to deepen social justice are marginalized. My conference paper offers one instantiation of a comparative approach that, while neither perfect nor exhaustive, ensures that change efforts are informed by both local and global insights.
What does it take to support effective teaching and learning in rural Colombia? That was the question that the founders of Fundación Escuela Nueva (FEN) set out to address in the 1970’s. Since that time, FEN´s flagship program, Escuela Nueva, has encompassed an innovative approach to learning that has expanded in Colombia as well as other parts of the world, including Vietnam, Zambia, and El Salvador. To get a better understanding of Escuela Nueva’s evolution and the lessons learned along the way, Jonathan Beltrán Alvarado spoke with Laura Vega, Ed.D., Head of Community Connections and Training at Fundación Escuela Nueva (FEN).
This post summarizes that conversation and draws on slides from a presentation Dr. Vega made at Teachers College, Columbia University, in November 2024. Fundación Escuela Nueva Volvamos a la Gente (FEN) is a non-profit organization created to develop, strengthen, and expand the implementation of the Escuela Nueva model. Last November, Fundación Escuela Nueva was one of three organizations to receive a 2024 Best Practice Prize from the Jacobs Foundation for “their effective application of scientific evidence, use of a clear results framework, and potential for scaling and implementation around the world.”
Vicky Colbert and colleagues designed the Escuela Nueva model in 1976 as a specific response to the difficult conditions for education in rural Colombia. At that time, schools struggled with high dropout rates and low academic achievement, reinforcing negative perceptions of the capabilities of the students, teachers, and their communities. Amid the country’s ongoing internal conflicts, many students experienced trauma and low self-esteem along with their troubles in schools. In a pre-internet world, teachers and principals in these communities worked in isolation, with few resources, little support, and weak school-community relationships.
Compounding the isolation, many teachers had limited pre-service training and were not prepared for handling multi-grade classrooms, an everyday necessity in small schools located in the sparsely populated countryside. As Dr. Laura Vega explained, “It is pretty isolating when you are a rural teacher. In many, many areas, you are on your own. That is hard, and it was even harder fifty years ago.” Beyond the isolation, Vega described a number of other challenges for rural education at that time: “insufficient time for effective learning, rigid calendars, rigid evaluation, a very rigid system of promotion. Of course, not enough materials for children, but those materials and the pedagogy weren’t appropriate either. There was an emphasis on memorization, not on comprehension, and the curriculum didn’t make any sense for the students and for the teachers….”
“It is pretty isolating when you are a rural teacher, in many, many areas, you are on your own. That is hard, and it was even harder 50 years ago.”
At the time, rural education in many countries of Latin America, including Colombia, was shaped by the Escuela Unitaria (Unitary School) model promoted worldwide by UNESCO in the 60s to provide education in rural areas. The Unitary School offered primary education in schools where a single teacher worked with all grades through the use of self-instructional materials and individualized learning cards. Colombia was one of the countries where this approach was tested, alongside other experiences that used a variety of methodologies to pursue a similar aim. The approach, however, came in the form of whole-class instruction. As Vega put it, that meant “teachers were responsible for adapting generic materials, and while they could use any books or resources available, this wasn’t effective.”
This challenge motivated Escuela Nueva founder Vicky Colbert and her colleagues to try to use the limited resources to transform the Escuela Unitaria model into an approach more responsive to the context’s conditions, addressing key technical limitations of its design. Alongside many pedagogic innovations in the learning experience, both for children and teachers, the new approach included a structured and comprehensive curriculum that fulfilled government education guidelines and provided learning materials to facilitate teachers’ and students’ work. As Vega explained, Escuela Nueva’sinnovation emerged in a local context of meaning and experience with tested practices. “It’s not something that no one ever thought of before,” Vega said, “it’s re-organizing things that already exist and using them in a new way.”
“It’s not something that no one ever thought of before; it’s re-organizing things that already exist and using them in a new way.”
The Escuela Nueva model
This approach to learning involves a shift from traditional whole-class instruction to child-centered, active learning where students work in small groups. To achieve this, FEN developed a series of learning guides that ease rural teachers’ access to high-quality learning materials and allow them to work effectively with multiple grade levels and students to learn at their own pace. As Colbert described it in Scaling Innovation: The Escuela Nueva Story: “A learning guide is like a hybrid between a textbook, a workbook and the guide of the teacher, all in one, but directed to the student, not to the teacher. Here, what we wanted to do was empower the students. We designed the materials very, very concrete, simple, pragmatic learning materials for children very focused on questioning — higher level thinking skills. We gave a structure to their learning process. The children started working individually, in pairs and in groups, dialoguing among themselves, constructing knowledge together.”
Democratic participation is built into daily school life in the Escuela Nueva approach through a student government that allows children to serve in concrete roles and offers real agency in shaping their learning environment. The model also positions teachers as facilitators, not lecturers, and supports them in making that transition by providing specialized training, ongoing support in the process, and professional development opportunities. Escuela Nueva also deliberately draws on the communities’ funds of knowledge, making families active participants in their children’s education rather than passive observers of a curriculum created with urban schools in mind.
These elements are drawn together as part of what Escuela Nueva describes as four interconnected components: curricular, teacher training, school-community, and administrative.
Curricular: focusing on developing effective learning environments and relevant content and processes through an active and participatory methodology. It promotes student-centered learning, the development of basic competencies (cognitive and socio-emotional), cooperative and personalized learning, continuous and qualitative assessment, and flexible promotion. Learning guides, rather than traditional textbooks, form the core classroom resource, designed as self-directed, reusable materials that guide students through structured thinking.
Teacher training: focusing on the professional development of teachers to improve their pedagogical practices and their role as facilitators of learning. Teachers receive comprehensive training through in-situ, intensive, and experiential workshops. Additionally, they participate in micro-centers (teacher learning circles) to build communities of practice that foster exchange and collaboration.
School & Community: aiming to strengthen the relationship between the school and the community, promoting the active participation of parents and other local stakeholders in the educational process. The model positions students and families as knowledge creators, employing diverse pedagogical strategies to reinforce cultural identity and strengthen community connections. It encourages an open-school model where the community is actively involved in learning and contributes to students’ social and cultural development.
Administrative: seeking to ensure leadership and administrative support to enable adequate learning environments and ensure the long-term sustainability of the model. It builds trust and ownership among the school community and facilitates the connections between classroom learning and local community life.
A number of studies have examined the impact of Escuela Nueva’s approach, with some showing improvements in language and math skills and others showing benefits for students in the development of democratic values, prosocial behavior, and self-awareness. The model has also demonstrated its ability to transform teaching practices in rural settings and emergency situations where traditional approaches have struggled. The micro-centros and leaders’ networks have also helped to break the isolation that often characterizes rural education and have contributed to the development of more positive attitudes among teachers. Beyond the classroom walls, Escuela Nueva has engaged families and community members in the educational process, encouraging them to take an active part in student learning, contributing their knowledge and experiences in the classroom, not just in attending meetings.
Escuela Nueva’s adaptations and expansions
As part of its mission and commitment to innovation and evidence-based practices, Fundación Escuela Nueva (FEN) has adapted elements and strategies of the Escuela Nueva model to cater to the needs of diverse contexts and populations, resulting in new programs and initiatives. For example:
Escuela Activa Urbana (Urban Active School): adapts EN strategies to urban contexts with one teacher per grade.
Círculos de Aprendizaje (Learning Circles): focuses on out-of-school and highly vulnerable children and youth (e.g., displaced & migrant children); this program supports students’ transition to the mainstream educational system.
Online campus: provides teachers’ professional development and support.
SAI (Ancestral Indigenous Knowledge): aims to strengthen the intercultural approach and integration of ancestral indigenous knowledge into everyday practices.
In addition to these adaptations to the Escuela Nueva model, the organization has worked in scaling and expanding the approach in culturally different countries such as Mexico and Vietnam. In general, for FEN, scaling to a new context involves several key steps, including:
Building awareness through country research and finding appropriate local partners. As part of that process, beyond reading about the model, partners are expected to visit and experience Escuela Nueva in action.
Conducting a pilot project.
Engaging in an adaptation or “contextualization” phase where FEN works with local partners and teachers to tailor and contextualize the learning guides and other strategies.
Gradually expanding the model – starting with one school, then two, then three, while providing continuous support. This support is primarily directed at local partners rather than individual teachers.
While recognizing the importance of context, Vega stressed that taking a systemic approach is a key lesson from FEN’s efforts to scale the model. As she explained, “When implementing the model in different countries like Vietnam or Mexico, it’s imperative to maintain this systemic process. You cannot implement isolated pieces – a bit of training here, learning guides there, or just thinking about student tools. The process must be comprehensive; otherwise, you won’t achieve anything resembling the Escuela Nueva model.”
“When implementing the model in different countries like Vietnam or Mexico, it’s imperative to maintain this systemic process. You cannot implement isolated pieces – a bit of training here, learning guides there…”
Vega also emphasized that the successful expansion of Escuela Nueva hinges on finding the right local partner. To that end, FEN has worked with various types of partners, from ministries of education to NGOs and international organizations, each bringing different knowledge, strengths, and challenges. Government partnerships offer ample reach but can be vulnerable to administrative changes and low sustainability, while NGOs may provide dedicated focus but face resource constraints. But whoever the local partner is, as Vega stated, “The local partner essentially becomes your extension in that country.”
FEN´s next steps
Most recently, FEN has focused on deepening its impact rather than expanding further. This strategic choice reflects the belief that educational transformation is not a short-term project but a long-term commitment that requires sustained attention to quality and network building. All of which can take three to five years or more to show substantial results. That work includes strengthening assessment practices, enhancing teacher training, expanding support systems, and building internal capacity. The organization is also exploring new ways in which its programs, strategies, and model can more intentionally support gender equity, intercultural education, project-based learning, and the development of a growth mindset among students.
As it works to deepen its impact, FEN continues to focus on reorganizing existing educational elements into a coherent system rooted in a local context rather than reinventing education from scratch. In the process, the model demonstrates that educational transformation doesn’t always require massive investment or revolutionary new ideas but takes careful attention to how the different components of the educational process can work together systemically to create networks of people who understand and value what they are doing.
This week’s Lead the Change (LtC) interviews explore the power of partnerships, networks and collaboration for supporting system improvement. This is the first in a series of posts that will featuring excerpts of interviews with presenters participating in the Educational Change Special Interest Group sessions at the upcoming Annual Conference of the American Educational Research Association in Denver in April. This post includes presenters from the session titled: “Organizing Systemic Change in Education: Leveraging Partnerships, Networks and Teacher Collaboration.” These interviews are part of the Lead the Change series produced by Elizabeth Zumpe and colleagues from AERA’s Educational Change Special Interest Group. The full interviews can be found on the LtC website.
Networks for Knowledge Brokers: A Typology of Support-Seeking Behaviors — Anita Caduff (AC) University of Michigan, Alan Daly (AD) & Marie Lockton (ML) University of California San Diego, Martin Rehm (MR) University of Southern Denmark
Lead the Change (LtC): What are some of the ideas you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at American Education Research Association (AERA) can learn from your work related to practice, policy, and scholarship?
AC, AD, ML, & MR: Our research offers important insights into the field of Educational Change, particularly for practitioners, policymakers, and scholars interested in understanding the critical role of knowledge brokers in improving education for all learners. Knowledge brokers do not operate in isolation; instead, they are embedded within relational ecosystems that provide access to various forms of support, such as financial resources, infrastructure, strategic advice, capacity building, networking, and knowledge mobilization. We define knowledge mobilization as the movement of knowledge and resources to where they will be most useful through a multidirectional process that supports the co-construction and use of knowledge. By examining how knowledge brokers navigate these ecosystems and engage in support-seeking behaviors, our study highlights three major contributions to practice, policy, and scholarship.
“Knowledge brokers do not operate in isolation.”
To begin with, we surfaced seven distinct knowledge broker profiles based on their social network dynamics and support-seeking behaviors: (1) networked strategist, (2) resource-driven strategist, (3) balanced strategist, (4) capacity-centered networker, (5) self-sufficient mobilizer, (6) balanced mobilizer, and (7) well-funded all-rounder. For example, the self-sufficient mobilizer operated without any financial support to sustain their operations; they focused solely on knowledge mobilization and strategic advice. In contrast, the well-funded all-rounder had high levels of support in all dimensions: infrastructure and finances, strategic advice, networking, and knowledge mobilization. Understanding these profiles helps the field to have a better grasp on the activities of these important educational actors as well as to support knowledge brokers in designing tailored strategies to enhance their effectiveness based on their unique circumstances and needs.
Additionally, the study surfaced three significant tensions that influence knowledge brokers’ support-seeking behaviors. For example, knowledge brokers often compete for scarce resources (e.g., grants) while recognizing the potential benefits of collaboration to achieve shared goals (i.e., the tension between competition and collaboration). Further, brokers balance efforts to create immediately observable, focused outcomes with aspirations for broader, systemic, and long-term impact. The third tension that emerged was between autonomy and interdependence. While autonomy enables alignment with internal organizational goals, interdependence with partners offers access to critical resources but sometimes requires compromising on internal priorities. For example, a knowledge broker may rely on their partners for funding, networks, and expertise and, as a result, occasionally need to cater to the external demands of these partners. These tensions highlight knowledge brokers’ complex balancing act and underscore the importance of creating policies and practices that encourage collaboration, sustainable funding, and alignment between short- and long-term goals.
By mapping knowledge brokers’ relational ecosystems and differences in support-seeking behavior and tensions, this study shifts the focus away from knowledge brokers alone to include the supports they leverage in their broader relational ecosystems. As such, this study suggests that knowledge mobilization is not exclusively an attribute of the knowledge brokers, but is influenced by, and distributed within, a wider knowledge mobilization ecosystem. This reframing opens new avenues for research and practice, including questions about how brokers’ ecosystems influence their effectiveness and how to strengthen these ecosystems. This shift in perspective encourages researchers and practitioners to consider not only the actions of knowledge brokers but also the systemic supports and partnerships that enable their work.
From left to right: Anita Caduff, Ph.D., Marie Lockton, Ed.D., Alan J. Daly, Ph.D., & Martin Rehm, Ph.D.
Reimagining the role of broker teachers in cross-sector partnerships — Chun Sing Maxwell Ho (CH) The Education University of Hong Kong, Haiyan Qian (HQ) The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Chiu Kit Lucas Liu (CL) University of Oxford
Lead the Change (LtC): What are some of the ideas you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at American Education Research Association (AERA) can learn from your work related to practice, policy, and scholarship?
CH, HQ, & CL: This research highlights the transformative power of Hong Kong school–university partnerships (SUPs) in reshaping middle leaders (ML) within schools, offering valuable insights for practice, policy, and scholarship in educational change. We demonstrate how SUPs enhance MLs’ connectivity and brokerage across the school, promoting a layered and collaborative leadership structure. This finding aligns with previous research that highlights the importance of distributed leadership in fostering school improvement. For instance, Leithwood et al. (2020) argue that effective school principals distribute their leadership to engage both formal and informal teacher leaders, thereby enhancing their influence through interactions with others. Similarly, Spillane and Kim (2012) emphasize that leaders enact practices differently according to the school context, which supports the notion that SUPs can tailor development activities to meet specific needs. Furthermore, Bryant and Walker (2024) suggest that principal-designed structures can significantly enhance middle leaders’ professional learning, which is consistent with our findings on the positive impact of SUPs on MLs’ connectivity and brokerage.
“Our findings underscore the necessity for policies supporting sustained, context-specific leadership development.”
Key takeaways include the importance of designing SUPs to foster reflective dialogue and interaction among all school members, thereby nurturing an inclusive, interdisciplinary learning community. Schools can involve interdisciplinary projects where teachers from different subject areas worked together with university researchers to develop integrated curricula. These projects encouraged teachers to engage in reflective dialogue about their teaching methods and explore new ways to connect different subjects. By working together, teachers were able to create a more cohesive and interdisciplinary learning environment for students, promoting a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement (Ho et al., 2024). Our findings underscore the necessity for policies supporting sustained, context-specific leadership development and integrating university resources to facilitate these changes. For scholars, this study provides a model for examining the effects of leadership training on organizational dynamics, emphasizing the role of middle leaders in driving school improvement and fostering a collaborative professional culture.
Chun Sing Maxwell Ho, EdD
Lucas Chiu-kit Liu, Masters Student
Haiyan Qian, PhD
Transforming school systems to support adolescent learning and well being: Evidence from four California districts — Sarah M. Fine (SF) University of California San Diego, Santiago Rincon-Gallardo (SR) Liberating Learning
Lead the Change (LtC): What are some of the ideas you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at American Education Research Association (AERA) can learn from your work related to practice, policy, and scholarship?
SF & SR: The first takeaway is that there is a growing number of spaces of vitality and deep learning in California’s high schools, but these remain mainly outside the academic core. The local education agencies (LEAs) in our sample are leveraging new funding to expand and transform Career and Technical Education (CTE) courses into incredibly vibrant places for applied learning. Most LEAs we have visited in California are working successfully to de-stigmatize CTE, to disrupt patterns of social reproduction, and to add “high skill, high wage” pathways for all. Young people are incredibly alive and engaged in these courses, doing work ranging from building fully functional tiny homes for unhoused populations in their community to producing, running, and broadcasting live shows for their school and the larger community, to designing and testing rovers that can explore Jupiter’s moons. Visual and performing arts are also incredibly vital spaces. In less optimistic news, in many of the systems we visited, the academic core seems to have been left on life support, with many classes still featuring low-complexity tasks, teacher-centered instruction, and traditional assessments. This is consistent with research and theory on the remarkable power of the default culture of schooling to maintain the dynamics within the pedagogical core stable despite deliberate attempts to change it (Elmore, 1996; Mehta & Fine, 2019; Tyack & Cuban, 1995) Linked Learning, an approach to student learning that intentionally and strategically links together student’s personal purpose with hands-on, immersive learning opportunities, and disciplined knowledge, is a promising but generally immature effort to connect the vitality that characterizes CTE to core academic classes.
A second takeaway is about the importance of steadiness, systemness, and symmetry when undertaking system-level work to improve adolescent learning and wellbeing. To draw on the work of our shared mentor Richard Elmore (2004), all of the LEAs in our sample were engaged in impressively steady work, developing a clear set of goals and then pursuing those goals over the long haul without succumbing to mission creep or being buffeted by changes in the political winds. In most of the systems that we visited, we also encountered strong evidence of what Michael Fullan (2025) calls systemness – meaning, a broad range of stakeholders (parents, educators, leaders, learners, even crossing-guards) recognized their roles in shaping and enacting the goals of the system. And finally, most of the leaders in the sample clearly recognized the importance of what Sarah and Jal Mehta (2019) call symmetry, e.g.an overall stance and set of values and beliefs about learning that applies both to young people and to adults.
“Successful system transformation requires deprioritizing old academic obsessions.”
Last but not least, our work suggests that successful system transformation requires deprioritizing old academic obsessions. In many of the systems that we visited, there has been a strategic and courageous decision to de-prioritize or eliminate the programs and metrics connected to “the old game” of No Child Left Behind-style academic achievement. One district, for example, decided to deprioritize state standardized tests, while another phased out all Advanced Placement courses and replaced them with dual enrollment opportunities. Elsewhere, system leaders have started to move attention away from California’s college and career readiness indicators, focusing more on the quality of student engagement and learning every day in schools, as well as on indicators of lifelong learning.
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