Why teachers resist planned educational changes

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]  

In earlier blogs I talked about the risks that threaten planned educational changes and how they might be anticipated and mitigated. In this blog I want to talk about teachers and educational change.  

Teachers seem to oscillate between a barnacle-like attachment to some educational changes and an impenetrable, clam-like resistance. I think there are many reasons for this tendency to fluctuate.  

The first reason is that teaching is difficult work. There are many things to consider, including curricular expectations, the range of student abilities, the allocation of scarce instructional time, etc. The complexity of teaching makes most teachers risk averse. Once they have developed confidence in their ability to manage and have experienced success, they are reluctant to change. They are disinclined to adopt new pedagogy or curriculum if they think doing so would have an adverse impact on students or because they are worried that they may not be able to execute them well.  

There is a smaller group of teachers who are risk takers. This group appears to have developed sufficient mastery and acquired sufficient self-confidence that they are eager to adopt new practices. Eager to explore new practices, these teachers are easy to recruit to pilot-tests. They are what, today, are called influencers. If they think the new practice or resource is worthwhile, they will advocate on its behalf.  

The enthusiasm of teachers involved in or inspired by change is infectious. Once imbued with the spirit of change, they can inspire even mildly resistant teachers to adopt the practice. A teacher once described such an influencer to me in terms that have always stayed with me. “You know,” she said, “every teacher wants to touch her garment. If she likes something, it gives everyone else confidence.” The influencers are often the teachers who, if a pilot is successful, become the evangelists and coaches for the broader implementation.  

There is some danger in relying on influencers whose garments others want to touch. They don’t inspire confidence in everyone. There are resistant teachers who will say, “Maybe she can do it, but I’m not her.”  

Unsuccessful implementation of planned changes produces cynicism that undermines future change efforts. Teachers have a long memory for implementation failures that bolster their resistance to future changes. Teachers whose experience has made them cynical will wait out subsequent changes because their confidence in the system has been diminished by failures. Introducing system-wide changes takes a long time. Adopting new practices or curricula is hard. Some teachers will “opt out” of the change, confident that they will be retired before they will be “required” to change.  

Change fatigue is a factor contributing to resistance to change. New governments often come to office with plans to fix some educational problem. They are often branded, or as one teacher put it, “things with names.” When too many “things with names” are introduced in too short a period, often without sufficient support for their adoption, teachers become clam-like, shutting their doors to whatever the change may be. “This, too, will pass,” they say.  

Changes imposed from above are typically resisted. Even when perceived to have value for students, the adoption of the changes can take a very long time even when provision is made for building capacity and support – which they often are not. Making educational change is like repairing a car while you are driving. You cannot shut down the education system to ‘retool’ as you can with a factory.  

Changes that teachers perceive as negatively affecting their relationships with students will also be resisted. Relationships with student are almost synonymous with success in teaching. Few teachers are willing to make a change they perceive as threatening established relationships.  

Teacher resistance to change can be overcome with careful planning. Although it is tempting to rely on influencers to encourage change. I think it preferable to engage what a well-known BC teacher used to call “OCTs” – ordinary classroom teachers. Reluctant or resistant classroom teachers are more likely to entertain a change if it is one that OCT’s can implement.   

Politicians who avoid fostering change just for the sake of being seen to be doing something help to reduce the cynicism engendered by “things with names.”  

Well planned pilots, carried out by OCTs, with strong documentation of the factors contributing to success will go a long way to overcoming resistance to change. Involving teachers centrally in the change planning process will likely improve implementation and contribute to the adoption of successful changes.  

Another factor that will help overcome resistance to change is declaring that teachers have the “freedom to fail.” Teacher willingness to try something new is likely to increase if they know that there is a possibility that things won’t work as planned and that they will be supported for having tried something new. The “freedom to fail” coupled with monitoring and feedback will increase teacher receptivity to change and help them to make the adjustments that are necessary during any educational change.

Why most planned educational changes fail – part 1

 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.

Demographics foreshadow significant educational changes

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

According to a Statistics Canada year-end report demographic changes will have an impact on Canada’s economy and society, including its education systems. And the impact will not be trivial. COVID-19 has produced fewer births, lower numbers of immigrants, fewer inter-provincial migrants, and fewer fee-paying international students.

 

As the graph above from Statistics Canada illustrates, population growth, natural increase (births minus deaths), and migratory increase are declining precipitously. To put the decline in perspective, the annual growth in population in 2020 (149,461) was the lowest in number since 1945 and the lowest in percent since 1916. International migration, which accounted for three-quarters of population growth since 2016, declined by more than 50% in 2020.

Some changes such as the decline in the birth rate are part of a longer trend. The chart below indicates, over the past 70 years there has been a dramatic decline in the number of births per 1,000 people. In 1950, there were over 25 births per 1000 Canadians. Today, the number is closer to 10.

 

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CAN/canada/birth-rate Canada Birth Rate 1950-2021. www.macrotrends.net. Retrieved 2021-08-28.

COVID will exacerbate the downward trend in the number of children born through its impact on fertility. Twenty percent of Canadians between the ages of 25 and 44 said they want to delay having children and 14% want fewer children than they had anticipated having. There are some Canadians in that age group who want to have children sooner (7%) and want more children that they did prior to the pandemic (4%).

Even if these reductions are only temporary, together they will have a dramatic impact on education in the years to come. Decline in student numbers is consequential, affecting many, if not all, facets of the school district, including facilities usage, employment of district staff, and the nature and types of services the district provides.

If the Government of Canada increases the number of immigrants to offset the decline in natural increase (which is much below the replacement level), there will be increased need for settlement and language services for newcomers for whom English or French is an additional language. Part of the settlement process will need to give attention to the social integration of newcomers and the maintenance of social cohesion. Engagement of parental support--so crucial for successful schooling--will need to figure even more prominently in school districts' community outreach. Increased immigration will also put pressure on schools to ensure the successful educational and social integration of students who are only just learning the language of instruction.  

A drop in the school age population is not uniform across all regions of the country. School boards will be under significant economic pressure to close small, rural schools. School consolidation may produce some economies of scale, but these may be offset by increased transportation costs, environmental impact, and diminished small ‘p’ political support for schools.    

Forecasting and planning capacity differ among school districts. Large districts sometimes have dedicated specialists who can estimate changes in the population at the district level and help policy makers and educators plan for those changes. Smaller districts often lack such capacity because there are fewer, if any, in-house specialists. Differences in capacity would be alleviated if ministries and departments of education assumed responsibility for student population forecasting.

School boards would likely resist such a move, arguing that they know their local conditions better than the ministries or departments. They would also recognize that ministries in possession of such detailed information would likely point out schools that might be candidates for closure to save scarce resources. On the one hand, boards wouldn’t like that. On the other, boards might welcome being able to blame ministries for forcing boards to close small, less efficient schools.

Boards might decide to work together on developing population estimates. They might do this through the provincial associations to which boards belong or they might wish to establish a shared service.

The continuation of COVID makes it unclear whether the declines that have been observed will continue, what the magnitude of those declines might eventually be, and what impact governmental policies such as admitting a greater number of immigrants will have on school age populations.  Regardless of the impact of government policy, demography plays an important part in educational policy, planning, and resourcing. Boards that fail to plan for demographic changes put themselves on a precarious economic and educational footing.

Technology & The Transformation of Education

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus of Education, The University of British Columbia

[permission granted to reproduce if authorship acknowledged]

In last week’s, E-Learning and Student Success, I expressed concern about Ontario’s plan to require students to take four of the 30 credits required for graduation on-line. I expressed hope that those responsible for planning and implementing the change would consider the capacities of adolescent learners. Notwithstanding those concerns, what students will learn and how they learn will both be influenced by changes in information and communication technologies.

New, and increasingly sophisticated, technologies will enable teachers to conduct pre-assessments of what students know and are able to do in a domain. That information will enable teachers to link instruction closely with students’ prior knowledge, allowing them to plan instruction better matched to their students’ current level of understanding.

Technologies will provide more focused opportunities for student practice and remediation. Teachers will be able to make provision for individual students who require additional practice in order to achieve mastery of a procedure (adding, subtracting, multiplying, etc.) and become fluent in the use of the procedure. Teachers will do so by employing applications that can customize the practice problems to the individual student’s characteristics and needs, monitor the student’s success, and adjust the difficulty of new practice problems. The increased use of this and other adaptive technologies will help to reduce the gaps between students in terms of their mastery of fundamental conceptual and procedural knowledge.

Adaptive technologies have the potential to reduce early school leaving due to lack of challenge. These technologies will be able to customize problems to enable students who have mastered fundamental concepts and procedures to apply them in new and more challenging contexts. The judicious and carefully constructed use of technology will provide students with opportunities to solve problems with the conceptual and procedural knowledge they have acquired.

Problem solving need not and should not be confined to extensions or challenges for concepts and procedures already mastered. There are many elements of science and social studies in which problem solving is an appropriate vehicle for learning. There are quite a few simulation games that have been developed over the years that prompt users to design, build and manage cities and nations that must confront a variety of issues over the course of their development. The ubiquity of smartphones, inexpensive laptops and tablets will enable more deliberate use of such programs in schools. 

A related development is the use of technology to give students the experience of being in an environment that they might not otherwise experience or to immerse students in an environment for the purpose of exploration.  While virtual experiences have existed for some time, the proliferation of inexpensive devices and the exponential increase in bandwidth will enable teachers to use them more extensively and deliberately.

The more deliberate and extensive use of new technologies will have a significant impact on teachers and teaching. There will be teachers responsible for the management of the learning of a group of learners much as a general practitioner physician manages the health of a patient.

There will be educational technologists who, working under the direction of teachers, will identify the various technologies that may be mobilized to support a student’s learning. There will also be subject specialist teachers who are responsible for diagnosing the learner’s needs in their areas of specialization and planning an instructional sequence to enable the students to progress from where they are to where they should be according to the established curriculum. 

General practitioner teachers will ensure coordination among specialists and technologists, monitor the implementation of the learning plans of students for whom they are responsible, communicate with and report progress to parents and guardians. They will collaborate with teacher technologists and specialist teachers to assess, plan, implement and evaluate the student’s progress. They will also be adept in marshalling the services and resources that students with special needs require to succeed and will be the primary point of contact for their parents and guardians.

Technology will figure prominently in the management of student learning and in communication with parents and among staff members. It will facilitate student self-assessment and increase their autonomy as learners, desirable changes that will help prepare them for a life of learning. But, as I said last week, these changes must be carefully planned and implemented. That means they must consider learner characteristics and capacities.