Miha Lee’s Leadership Paper for SED610
May 14, 2008
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The New Meaning of Educational Change
While I was reading the book for this paper, I thought about my position in
educational reforms. One thing that I learned from SED 610 is that we teachers can and
should improve our education even though we are not in authority positions, so we need to
build up our leadership for the improvement.
In fact, I had been frustrated with being told what I should do in my classroom
because in many cases up-down policies were far from my “reality” in my classroom and
school. So, I joined a group of educators for research on educational policies where I had an
opportunity to take part in a task force for improving students’ achievement in my school
district. The task force consisted of district officials, principals, and teachers. Although my
hierarchical position was very low in the group, I could give some advice. From the
experience, I learned that making a policy is not a simple process and more teachers should
join processes of policy making. Furthermore, I realized the importance of having visions for
education and of developing leadership in order to improve our educational system.
The book I read for this paper helped me understand the causes and dynamics of how
educational change occurs and gave me an insight for leadership in education.
1. What is the writer’s definition of leadership?
The author doesn’t explicitly define or explain the concept of leadership in this book.
He just talks about how to deliberately transform a setting from a previous state to a new one
that represents clear improvement.1 However, from reading the book I envisioned leadership
as ability to forge synergy and coherence in a system by the improvement of relationships to
foster better culture or climate for successful change on an increasingly large scale.
1
P.4
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Quality leadership is required to plan for, bring about, implement and accomplish
innovations. Fullan suggests three sets of core practices of successful leaders in education.2
1. Setting directions: moral purposes, shared vision and group goals, high performance
expectation
2. Developing people: individual support, intellectual/emotional stimulation, modeling
3. Redesigning the organization: collaborative cultures and structures, building
productive relations with parents and community
Making a difference in the lives of students requires leadership with care,
commitment, and passion as well as the intellectual knowledge to do something about it.3
Leadership also includes cultivation of the next generation of leaders in the interests of
continuity and deepening of good direction.4
2. How does this book relate to leadership in schools?
This book is about how to combine “meaning” and “action” to achieve continuous
improvement on a sustainable scale. Fullan focuses the book on such concepts as capacity
building, learning in context, lateral capacity building, sustainability, and systems leaders in
action. According to him, leaders at all levels should be engaged in changing the system,
changing their own context. He also points out the importance of people who are morally and
intellectually committed to educational improvement. The key to leading a successful change,
which is to cope with endemic social complexity, is for individuals, especially in interaction
with others, to arm themselves with knowledge of the change process, to engage in reflective
action, and to test what they know against the increasingly available knowledge in the
literature on change.5
2
3
4
5
P.166
P.20~21
P.59
P.xii~xiii
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The book is composed of three parts: Part I. Understanding Educational Change; Part
II. Educational Change at the Local Level; and Part III. Educational change at the Regional
and National Levels. Honestly, I didn’t finish all three parts, so I write the report based on the
first two parts that I read.
3. How does it relate to management?
According to Stacey (1996), while most leadership textbooks focus heavily on
techniques and procedures for long-term planning, on the need for visions and missions, on
the importance and the means of securing strongly shared cultures, on the equation of success
with consensus, consistency, uniformity and order, the real management task is that of coping
with and even using unpredictability, clashing counter-cultures, disensus, contention, conflict,
and inconsistency. In short, the task that justifies the existence of all managers has to do with
instability, irregularity, difference and disorder.6
Fullan also summarizes the role of management as providing continuing positive
pressure and support.7 Effective management is required to alter the conditions for change in
more favorable, workable directions8 and sustain the change. The solution to motivating
people to work for change is to establish the right blend of tightness and looseness, or more
accurately to build both into the interactive culture of the organization.9
In addition, people in managerial positions should ensure that the best people are
working on the problem. In fact, the more talented teachers and principals are needed
precisely because the challenges are greater. If the right combination of strategies and support
6
P.115 cited from Stacy, R. (1996). Strategic management and organizational dynamics (2nd
ed.). London: Pitman.
7
P.9
8
P.118
9
P.43
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is marshaled, problematic situations can become successful, and this could be where the best
educators get their satisfaction.10
4. What does it mean to be a leader in a school?
What it means to be a leader in a school is to build the school capacity to manage
change. Because I perceive leadership as an ability to forge synergy and coherence in a
system, I believe that capacity building is about what it takes to make friends and influence
people to induce and carry out change. Solving complex educational problems as a leader on
a continuous basis is enormously difficult because of the sheer number of factors at play. It is
further complicated because the sine qua non of successful reform is whether relationships
improve by collaboration and support. Indeed, a leader has to learn how to develop
relationships with those s/he might not understand and might not like, and vice versa.11
Restoring people’s confidence in relationships requires four kinds of action:
1. Getting connected in new ways through conversation
2. Carrying out important work jointly
3. Communicating respect
4. Demonstrating inclusion
Particularly, leaders should foster shared ownership and empowerment among
teachers which eventually develop motivation to put energy into the reform direction12 by
persistently working on multilevel meaning across the school over time.13 Any innovation
cannot be assimilated unless its meaning is shared. The development of shared meaning of
change results from the process of how those involved in change can come to understand
what it is that should change, and how it can be best accomplished, while realizing that the
10
11
12
13
P.51
P.115
P.81~82
P.92
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what and how constantly interact with and reshape each other. Educational change is a
process of coming to grips with the multiple realities of people, who are the main participants
in implementing change. Shared understanding among participants help them make a
judgment whether they should accept, modify, or reject the change.14 However, prior to the
development of shared meaning, individual must be able to attach personal meaning to
change, regardless of how meaningful they might be to others. There is no reason for teachers
to believe in the value of proposed changes, and few incentives to find out whether a given
change will turn out to be worthwhile.15 All real change involves loss, anxiety, and
struggle.16 Accordingly, the approach to change is important in developing the capacity to
carry out change. Mutual adaptation or evolutionary perspective stresses that change often is
and should be a result of adaptations and decisions made by users as they work with
particular new policies or programs. The policy or program and the user’s situation mutually
determine the outcomes.17 Therefore, leaders should help individuals find moral and
intellectual meaning in new policies or programs to acquire their energy required to transform
the status quo. Put differently, meaning fuels motivation to carry out the change.18 What
motivates large number of people to invest their energies in making improvements and
working collectively with others is to be driven by tapping into people’s dignity and respect.
Leaders need to show empathy with people involved in difficult circumstances while calling
for and reinforcing higher standards. If the policy makers or introducers ignore teachers’
anxiety and shrug off oppositions as ignorance or prejudice, they fail to develop shared
meaning with teachers and thus fail to accomplish the change. For the reformers have already
assimilated these changes to their purposes, and worked out a reformulation which makes
14
15
16
17
18
P.139
P.28
P.21
P.31
P.39
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sense to them, perhaps through months or years of analysis and debate. If they deny others
the chance to do the same, they express a profound contempt for them.19 Therefore, leaders
should provide a framework of theory, values and related technology which enables
individuals to make sense of their lives in change. Real change represents a serious personal
and collective experience characterized by ambivalence and uncertainty; and if the change
works out, it can result in a sense of mastery, accomplishment, and professional growth. The
anxieties of uncertainty and the joys of mastery are central to the subjective meaning of
educational change and to the success or failure thereof.20
In addition, capacity building is creating a highly motivating and energized
collaborative culture in which people are passionate about their work and deeply focused on
making and continuing changes that would get results. Capacity building creates work
environments that is based on trust to make more comfortable exchanging ideas, and where a
collective sense of responsibility for student development is likely to emerge. 21 Leaders
should find ways of developing infrastructures and processes that engage teachers in
developing new knowledge, skills and understandings required for roles associated with the
new innovations to reduce the magnitude of resistance.22 Put differently, leaders should
initiate ongoing professional development for the staff and engage themselves in it. Principals
and teacher leaders actively foster collegial involvement, that is, collective commitment to
student learning in collective settings.23
A leader in a school’s changing effort doesn’t need to be a principal, but in most case
the principal is the person most likely to be in a position to shape the organizational
conditions necessary for success, such as the development of shared goals, collaborative work
19
20
21
22
23
P.22
P.23
P.143
P.28~29
P.140
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structures and climates, and procedures for monitoring results.24 Especially, the principal’s
role is reconciling and combining top-down and bottom-up forces for change.25
Another work of leaders lies in the connection between their groups and the wider
network that provides support, loyalty, revenues, or capital. Leaders must prove to those in
the wider circle that their investments are warranted.26
5. What were the main lessons that you learned for your career from this book?
The most important lesson to me from this book is the need for a professional
learning community which is related to changing cultures of teacher society. Current school
cultures are collegial loyalty, noninterference, and solidarity. Collegial loyalty serves to close
down collective and reflective dialogue rather than embrace it. The “classroom press” isolates
teachers from meaningful interaction with colleagues. Therefore, reculturing about how
teachers come to question and change their beliefs and habits is what is needed. It is the
leaders’ role that cultivates professional learning communities27 which foster an open
exchange. Teachers in the communities deeply are engaged with other colleagues in joint
planning, observation of one another’s practice, and seeking, testing, and revising teaching
strategies on a continuous basis.28 Teachers need to work on practice-based inquiry and
teaching for understanding, in which assessment, curriculum, and opportunities for teachers
to learn about connecting assessment and instruction are evident on an ongoing basis.
Teachers and teacher leaders should break down the autonomy of the classroom so that
greater consistency of effective practice can be achieved. It is called lateral capacity building
24
25
26
27
28
P.96
P.11
P.62
P.48~49
P.7.54.55
Miha Lee’s Leadership Paper for SED610
through collaboration and support.
29
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The crux of educational reform lies in the change of
teachers’ culture from autonomy to interactions that stimulate continuous improvements.30
Significant educational change consists of changes in beliefs, teaching style, and materials,
which can come about only through a process of personal development in a social context.31
Professional learning community is about the advantages of working with others, that
is, peer relationship in a school. Educational change is a learning experience for the adults
involved (teachers, administrators, parents, etc.) as well as for students. In a word, success of
change depends on the degree and quality of change in actual practice.32 Professional
learning community establishes a highly interactive infrastructure of pressure and support.33
New meanings, new behaviors, new skills, and new beliefs depend significantly on whether
teachers are working as isolated individuals or are exchanging ideas, support, and positive
feeling about their work with peers.34 According to Newmann and his colleagues,
professional communities make the difference because:

Teachers pursue a clear purpose for all students’ learning.

Teachers engage in collaborative acitivty to achieve the purpose.

Teachers take collaborative responsibility for student learning.

Schoolwide teacher professional community affects the level of classroom authentic
pedagogy, which in turn affects student perfprmance.

Schoolwide teacher professional community affects the level of social support for
student learninf, which in turn affects student performance.35
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
P.56
P.97,138
P.139
P.85
P.92
P.97
P.141~142
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Two conditions for development of professional learning community are structural
and social and human resources. Time to meet and talk, physical proximity, interdependent
teaching roles, communication structures, and teacher empowerment and school autonomy
are required for structural condition. Social and human resources include openness to
improvement, trust and respect, cognitive and skill base, supportive leadership, and
socialization. The structural conditions are easier to address than the cultural ones.36
Professional learning community can be developed not only within a school but also among
schools via using media such as internet.37
Besides, there have been conflicts between administrators and teachers because each
of them just think of things from their own view points. Policy makes charge that teachers are
resistant to change; a teacher complains that administrators introduce change for their own
self-aggrandizement and that they neither know what is needed not understand the
classroom.38 However, Fullan explains that these conflicts prove the lack of relationships
among people involved in change. Minds need to interact. As a teacher, sometimes we are
forced to respond to and cope with educational change introduced by others. In this case, we
should assume neither that it is beneficial nor it is useless. The major initial stance should
involve critical assessment in which we should determine whether it is “implementable”. In
other words, we should give heeds to decide whether it is worth the effort, because it will be
an effort if it is worthwhile. A few things we need to consider to make the critical assessment
are: Does the change address an unmet need? Is it a priority in relation to other unmet needs?
Is it informed by some desirable sense of vision? Are there adequate resources such as
technical assistance and leadership support committed to support implementation? If the
conditions are reasonably favorable, we need to actively participate in the process of change.
36
37
38
P.149
P.152
P.3
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If the conditions are not favorable or cannot be made favorable, the best coping strategy
consists of knowing enough about the process of change so that we can understand why it
doesn’t work, and therefore not blame ourselves. In sum, the problem is one of developing
enough meaning about the change so that we are in a position to implement it effectively or
reject it.
39
Bibliography
Fullan, M. (2007). The New Meaning of Educational Change (4th ed.). Teachers College
Press, Columbia University, New York
39
P.119~120