Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]
In previous blogs I have written how artificial intelligence, an external event, will (has already changed) education. That prompted me to reflect upon the failure of planned educational changes during my more than 50 years in education. There are many reasons why planned educational changes fail that I will address in this blog and the two that follow.
In a blog titled “You can't change what you don't understand” I argued that a distressingly common and costly tendency in education is to jump to a solution without knowing exactly where the problem lies. But even in those rare instances where problems have been carefully analyzed and planned changes implemented, there is often little change.
Systems try to maintain a steady state for their own survival. For true change to occur, that condition must be overcome (disrupted), a new state established and maintained. Most planned changes in education are not maintained for enough time to establish a new set of conditions.
System-level planned changes seem doomed to fail because of risks that can be anticipated and mitigated but rarely are. One of the risks is the failure to recognized that education systems are among the most resistant to change. Education systems are the stabilizing force in a society subjected to increasingly powerful centrifugal forces. As agencies of cultural transmission education systems help to anchor societies to their core values, beliefs, traditions, norms, and practices.
One of the many factors that can interfere with the maintenance of the planned changes is the election cycle. Provincial and school board elections that result in new education ministers and school boards (system governors) can disrupt planned changes. Skilled administrators can mitigate the potential damage that regime changes might bring by linking the planned changes to the agenda of the incoming governors, showing how the changes underway can help the governors meet their commitments.
System governors and administrators allow seemingly urgent issues to distract from important, planned changes. A return to steady state is almost certain when system leaders fail to maintain ‘signal continuity’ - a clear, consistent, and constant message about what the changes are intended to accomplish. A return to steady state is almost inevitable when new policies, programs, and practices are introduced without regard to their connection to the changes underway.
Another of the risks that portend failure if not mitigated is poor implementation. In human systems, new capacities must be developed and nurtured if the planned change is to occur. Planned changes in education typically require changes in practice, behavioural changes. For these to occur, people must learn the new practice, have time to apply it, and be coached. Most planned changes falter because insufficient provision has been made for learning the new behaviour and receiving feedback and support until the changes become internalized.
In education there are several obstacles to learning new behaviours. Many planned educational changes ask teachers to make too great a change in their behaviour. Rather than conceive and plan for incremental modification in behaviour, many planned educational changes ask teachers to make a leap too far, engendering a fear of failure that keeps them rooted in whatever current practice they believe is satisfactory.
Even when the behaviour changes are small, incremental adjustments, teachers rarely teach in the company of their peers who can provide support and advice. But successful learning depends upon clear and supportive feedback as all teachers know.
The risks outlined above do not exhaust the risks to planned educational changes that typically lead to their failure. In a blog or blogs to come, I will address the risks of lack of fidelity of implementation, failure to monitor progress and evaluate, pilot-testing, and the costs of bringing changes to scale.
Planned educational changes are not doomed to failure. The
risks to change are formidable, but I believe they are manageable if
anticipated and mitigated.