A developmental process

Elmore (2003) reports that “schools increase their internal coherence and capacity around instruction in several discernible stages. These stages often involve significant gains in externally measured performance, followed by periods in which improvement in quality and capacity continue but improvement in performance slows or goes flat” (page 9). This is largely because improvement is a learning process that proceeds in stops and starts. It takes time for learners to make sense of new ideas and to embed them in their day-to-day practice. It can also take time for changes in practice to reveal themselves in measurable improvements to performance.

Schools are “improving” just as much when they are changing practices as they are when they are changing performance; performance, however, is easier to measure than is practice.

page 10

Like Elmore, Fullan’s (2007) ideas about the processes that can bring about sustainable improvement in education are closely associated with theories of learning. However, Fullan’s ideas are perhaps more closely integrated with theories about change management. He emphasises that “change is a process, not an event”. Making a change and then sustaining the improvements that result can be the work of many years. He warns that while we now know a lot about the change process, the many factors that affect change mean that it is not possible to come up with hard and fast rules. However, there does seem to be general agreement amongst researchers that change takes place in three broad phases, as shown below in Figure 6.

Figure 6 : An overview of the change process

Figure 6 text version

Phase I – variously labelled initiation, mobilization, or adoption – consists of the process that leads up to and includes a decision to adopt or proceed with a change. Phase II – implementation or initial use (usually the first two or three years of use) – involves the first experiences of attempting to put an idea or reform into practice. Phase III – called continuation, incorporation, routinization, or institutionalization – refers to whether the change gets built in as an ongoing part of the system or disappears by way of a decision to discard or through attrition (see Berman and McLaughlin, 1977; Huberman and Miles, 1984). Figure [6] depicts the three phases in relation to outcomes, especially whether or not student learning is enhanced, and whether or not experiences with change increase subsequent capacity to deal with future changes.

Fullan, 2007, page 65

The arrows indicate the fact that decisions made at one stage can feed back to change decisions made at an earlier stage, “which then proceed to work their way through in a continuous interactive way” (page 50). That is, reformers continually monitor whether practices have changed as intended, whether the changed practices are achieving the intended outcomes, and whether the intended outcomes are still appropriate.

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