Journal of Educational Change最新文献

Professional learning (PL) programs increasingly rely on the expertise of instructional coaches in supporting teacher learning and instructional change. To continue to improve the use of coaching as a lever of teacher PL, it is important to understand how both coaches and teachers understand and view their interactions in the context of such PL programs. Using survey data, we investigated middle school mathematics teacher and coach perceptions about the quality of their PL and the curriculum materials embedded within that PL, and considered individualized coaching approaches that may have influenced teachers' perceptions. We found that coaches had more positive views about the quality of district-mandated professional learning and curriculum materials compared to teachers. However, we also found that teachers who had coaching support viewed their learning experiences and curriculum materials more positively than teachers who did not have a coach. Finally, we found that teachers' perceptions about the quality of their coach related to their perceptions about the quality of their PL and curriculum, and that coaches' reported emphasis on using curriculum materials in their coaching work was related to more negative teacher perceptions about the quality of that curriculum and associated PL. These results indicate meaningful differences in how teachers and coaches perceive of their shared work, suggest the importance of a coach's perceived expertise and interpersonal relationship with their teachers, and point to challenges and complexities in how teachers and coaches can mutually adapt their shared work to achieve desired instructional change.

Introduction: Despite decades of school improvement efforts, maintaining lasting change in schools remains challenging. So far, traditional interventions have been unsuccessful in recognising schools' unique and complex contexts, which is why a shift towards a more reciprocal, emergent, and contextualised approach is necessary.

Objective: Our aim is to develop citizenship education with students and staff in vocational education and training (VET), which increases student voice and fits the complex school system.

Methods: We involved students and staff in citizenship education development and identified relevant factors that influenced this process. This participatory action research (PAR) study used a retrospective design assessing logbook entries, observations, interviews, and focus group discussions collected between September 2020 and September 2023 in four study programmes from one VET institution in the Netherlands. Thematic analysis was used to code the datasources.

Results: Collaboration between students and staff flourished while using the curriculum negotiation tool. Relevant factors influencing the process were: alignment between project and participants' priorities and goals, receptivity to student and teacher voices, leadership engagement, and tensions and intentions about roles and responsibilities between participants.

Conclusions: This study emphasises the promise of involving students and staff in educational development. When teachers startedworking collaboratively with students, many of their initial doubts decreased, which led to renewed motivation for becoming student voice advocates. PAR has the potential of starkly disrupting the existing status quo and breaking through ingrained patterns within complex systems to ensure influence for students from all levels of education.

Calls to improve relationships between education research and practice abound, among them efforts to help researchers work in partnership with and communicate more effectively with policy and practice audiences. Recognizing this need, the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine have emphasized the importance of integrating knowledge mobilization (KMb) into education research funding frameworks to ensure that research outcomes are both impactful and responsive to the needs of policymakers and practitioners. In our study, we seek to identify and clarify effective strategies for bridging the divide between education research and practice, contributing to the scholarship on educational change by highlighting the potential of KMb to drive research impact. Using a mixed-methods approach, we conducted an inquiry into the KMb practices of education researchers, beginning with a national survey followed by in-depth case studies of ten research projects identified through the survey. Our analysis examines how knowledge is mobilized from the inception of research through its dissemination and identifies the key factors that support effective KMb in these projects. We demonstrate that Kmb has the potential to generate significant impact when research is practice-centered, when stakeholders are actively engaged throughout the research process, and when KMb strategies are tailored to meet the needs of policy and practice audiences. We also highlight examples of how education research has achieved impact. Additionally, we identify key barriers to KMb, including institutional and systemic challenges that hinder its integration into the research process. We conclude that for education research to be truly impactful, it must prioritize relevance to practice from its inception. We advocate for systemic changes such as incorporating KMb training into doctoral programs, recognizing the value of engaged research within institutions, and diversifying funding mechanisms to support KMb activities.

School climate surveys are frequently used to collect information about student experiences in school. Less is known about how educators use survey data after survey administration. This paper explores one school district’s critical use of evidence to promote equitable change. We conducted eight semi-structured interviews with district and school leaders to investigate their uses of evidence. Through our qualitative, reflexive thematic analysis, we generated six themes: (1) using evidence to provide a common language; (2) bringing attention to trends to shift staff understanding of problems, (3) making structural changes, (4) planning for professional learning, (5) following up directly with students, and (6) engaging with the community. Findings illustrate how education leaders can apply a critical lens to their generation and use of evidence. We explore how the strategic use of evidence is needed to advance the broader goal of fostering school change and improving school climate for all students.

This article explores external facilitation for school improvement; more specifically, it examines the practical work of external facilitators. It is based on a Swedish case in which facilitators at the Swedish National Agency for Education support low-performing schools. The article aims to develop knowledge about how external facilitators in their practical work both promote and prevent developed understanding and improvement capacity. Based on observations and documents, facilitators’ endeavours and critical situations in their work to support school improvement are identified. The findings show five different endeavours to promote development of understanding and improvement capacity. However, they also show how taking ownership, simplification, and model focus, three of five identified recurring critical situations, prevent such development. The conclusion is that there are several aspects for external facilitators to balance to promote school improvement and turn around low-performing schools. When planning for external facilitation, it is important to consider how the facilitators’ practical work can be adapted to the local contexts of those who are facilitated in order to promote their ownership of the processes. Without balance and adaptation, external facilitation can lead to deprofessionalisation instead of development of improvement capacity.

Strategies that promote student voice have long been championed as effective ways to enhance student engagement and learning; however, little quantitative research has studied the relationship between student voice practices (SVPs) and student outcomes at the classroom level. Drawing on survey data with 1,751 middle and high school students from one urban district, this study examined how the SVP of seeking students’ input and feedback related to their academic engagement, agency, attendance, and grades. Findings revealed strong associations between this SVP and student engagement. Additionally, results showed that having just one teacher who uses the SVP is associated with significantly greater agency, better math grades, higher grade point averages, and lower absent rates than having no teachers who do so. In models testing interaction effects with choice, responsiveness, and receptivity to student voice, teachers’ receptivity was strongly associated with all outcomes. Few interaction effects were found. This study contributes compelling evidence of the impact of classroom SVPs and teacher receptivity to student voice on desired student outcomes.

Despite the benefits of improving teaching and learning that research evidences, professional learning communities (PLCs) can be challenging to sustain for a sufficient period of time to become deeply engrained within the school’s culture and accepted by teachers as organizational norms. As PLCs strive to achieve a system-level reform and promote educators’ reflective dialogues and shared experiences, they have strong potential to achieve positive changes in teacher perspectives and teaching practices focused on equity. Despite this potential, only a small number of studies have explored the potential of PLCs being used as vehicles to advance equity, and challenges educators can experience in translating PLCs’ collaborative culture into advancing equity are under-researched. Therefore, employing Hord’s (1997) attributes of PLCs as our conceptual framework, we conducted this study to understand how a middle school in the U.S. Midwest sustained its PLC to be deeply permeated in and accepted by the staff as a prevailing organizational culture. This study also aims to identify equity-related challenges educators experienced in the process. Data analysis identified school leaders’ support for staff sense-making of the PLC and the promotion of security and vulnerability as the essential mindset for shared practice and innovation. We also found that issues around educational equity relevant to educator race, English Learners, and inclusive practices for students with special needs were limited and indeed need further development. Implications for school leadership practice and future research are provided in the discussion.

Historically, scholars in the fields of culturally responsive-sustaining education and student engagement have operated in separate silos, limiting their abilities to foster meaningful and significant change in education. In this conceptual article, we call for scholars in both fields to integrate their scholarship for the purposes of more fully enhancing students’ experiences and learning in schools. To do so, we provide overviews of key ideas in both fields and outline some limitations and challenges that could be addressed by integrating the fields. We also illustrate the synergy and alignment between these fields by using a recently developed tool from the New York State Education Department, The Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework, to demonstrate how the principles of culturally responsive-sustaining education align closely with the fundamental needs for human engagement outlined in 70 years of psychological research on student engagement. We argue that the integration of these two fields will support implementation of culturally responsive-sustaining education in ways that will positively and meaningfully engage all students in K-12 schools.

This article sets out an original conceptual framework for place-based professional learning by teachers and schools in decentralised education systems. High quality Continuing Professional Development and Learning by teachers is associated with improvements in children’s outcomes. Most research in this area focuses on evaluating formal professional development programmes provided by external, non-school organisations. However, in practice, much professional learning is informal and takes place ‘on the job’. Meanwhile, in many systems globally, school leaders have been granted increased autonomy, for example taking on responsibility for the recruitment and professional development of staff. In these contexts, traditional place-based providers of professional development, such as Local Authorities and school districts, have been rolled back, while school leaders have been encouraged to draw on a wider marketplace of provision. These developments might create space for agency and innovation, but also present risks in terms of coherence, quality, and equity. For these reasons, we argue that there is a need to conceptualise the ways in which formal and informal learning occurs across complex local learning landscapes. We describe the iterative process through which the conceptual framework was developed before setting out the framework itself and the bodies of research and theory which underpin it. We draw on our empirical research using the framework in England to illustrate its three main contributions: as a heuristic device, an analytical tool, and an example of methodological innovation. We conclude by highlighting key implications for educational stakeholders, arguing that strengthening coherence, quality and equity across local learning landscapes in decentralised school systems requires attention to system governance and design as well as leadership and locality dynamics.

Central among a range of reforms and policy measures aimed at enhancing the quality and social cohesion of Norwegian early childhood education and care (ECEC) services is the 2017 Framework Plan for Kindergartens. In this article, we investigate the policy formation process and how framework plan reform has been carried out by public and private stakeholders at different levels. The reform is explored as institutional layering, referring to theoretical contributions that stress the role of incremental development and gradual institutional change. We ask: What are the policies added, and to what extent do added policies instigate institutional change? This article relies on qualitative document analyses, semistructured interviews, and quantitative survey data. We find high legitimacy for the framework plan in the ECEC sector, and informants broadly regard it as a continuation of earlier versions of the plan. Our analysis further shows that the implementation of the 2017 framework plan reform cannot be viewed in isolation, as it interacts with other reforms, trends, and instruments in the sector. We argue that blending reform design features with existing values and practices adds layers to Norwegian ECEC, instigating change. The analysis points to the need for further research on how national educational reforms are implemented in complex settings and to investigate the relationships between policy design and measures and between policy outcomes and ambitions. The relationships between different measures can be unclear to local implementers. Thus, we stress the importance of considering how reform outcomes depend on intertwined reforms and varying local conditions regarding capacity, norms, and values.