It takes time

The learning that is required to achieve sustainable change is deep, intentional, and complex; it cannot be imposed. Writing in 1975, Marris stressed how vital it is to allow everyone involved in change the time they need to make and share their own meaning out of new ideas or experiences:

No one can resolve the crisis of reintegration on behalf of another. Every attempt to pre-empt conflict, argument, protest by rational planning, can only be abortive: however reasonable the proposed changes, the process of implementing them must still allow the impulse of rejection to play itself out. When those who have power to manipulate changes act as if they only have to explain, and when their explanations are not at once accepted, shrug off opposition as ignorance or prejudice, they express a profound contempt for the meaning of lives other than their own. For the reformers have already assimilated these changes to their purposes, and worked out a reformation which makes sense to them, perhaps through months or years of analysis and debate. If they deny others the chance to do the same, they treat them as puppets dangling by the threads of their own conceptions. (Marris, 1975, page 166)

Cited in Fullan, 2007, page 22

Thirty years later, the pace of change has continued to accelerate. The capacity to learn is essential for humanity to adapt and survive. Ironically, it has never been harder to find the time that is needed for such learning.

Negotiating uses of time is not an easy task in a world that is routinely speeding up and demanding more of everyone, always more quickly. One of the challenges of the twenty-first century will be finding ways to capture and dedicate the time necessary for the serious business of learning.

Stoll et al., 2003, page 41

The findings in the TPLD BES support this claim, with many of the core studies (those that reported on programmes that achieved substantive change) taking place over extended periods of time and incorporating multiple opportunities for learning.

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