Educational change often fails due to its complexity: differing, even contradictory factors, agents, goals, norms or beliefs are involved. Too often practitioners, researchers and educators try to reduce or even ignore tensions, paradoxes and uncertainties and search for clear procedures and the one and only best solution in achieving the foreseen change. In this article, we discuss a valuable theoretical framework from organizational science, paradox theory, to understand why many change efforts fail and how to enhance the effectiveness and sustainability of change. We propose that (1) educational change is characterized by complexity; (2) that change therefore is inherently associated with tensions and paradoxes; (3) that paradox theory can help to understand and improve complex educational change by 3a) providing a lens to recognize, label, and acknowledge paradoxes and their interactions and 3b) investigate how to handle these paradoxes to foster effective and sustainable educational change (i.e. to find a dynamic equilibrium). Based on these important lessons we propose a three-step model to investigate and improve educational change processes.
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Evidence-informed change (EIC) has gained attention recently because it is seen as a lever to enhance the effectiveness and sustainability of educational change. Important questions are: how is EIC conceptualized, what counts as evidence, and what factors can support EIC in practice? Because of the complexity of EIC, we aimed to understand these factors from a systems perspective. Different parts of the educational system (e.g. policy, practice of teachers’ and school leaders, research) are interrelated and need to be aligned for effective and sustainable change. Based on our scoping review we propose a model that conceptualizes EIC, identifies and defines different sources of evidence, and discusses influencing factors describing a system's readiness and capacity for EIC. Our results are an important step forward in understanding and supporting EIC in practice and developing targeted policy. This article also defines a common ground for future research, bringing together insights in an integrated framework of evidence-informed change.
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Due to the variegated nature of the teaching profession system, different actors operating in this system (teachers, school leaders, policy makers) are inevitably intertwined and assumably influence each other’s sensemaking processes, especially when system-wide educational change occurs. Gaining insight into how different actors in the teacher profession system make sense of educational change is important, as it might hamper or enable the system's adaptive capacity. That is why we stretched Coburn’s model of collective sensemaking from a teacher-team lens to include different actors and focus on their interpersonal dynamics during sensemaking processes. Performing a conceptual review, we synthesized 87 articles which focus on collective sensemaking of the following actor groups: (1) teachers (micro), (2) school leaders (meso), and/or (3) district/state/national leaders, policy makers, professional development providers, curriculum developers, researchers, community members, and parents (macro). In the results we describe how actors’ involvement varied due to different role distributions and role perceptions of actors. In addition, four contextual factors influencing the interpersonal dynamics were distinguished that were closely related to leadership practices that enable actors to compare the change with their own beliefs and (organizational) practices. We describe three mechanisms which explain how actors valuate a change (valuating), how they are owning this change (owning), and which is shaped by gatekeeping of sensegivers in their social context (gatekeeping).
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Dit Trendrapport Open Educational Resources 2013 beschrijft de trends op het gebied van open educational resources (OER) en open onderwijs in binnen- en buitenland, geschreven vanuit de context van het Nederlandse hoger onderwijs. Dat gebeurt aan de hand van vijftien artikelen van Nederlandse experts op het gebied van open en online onderwijs. Ook bevat het vijftien korte intermezzo’s met spraakmakende voorbeelden.
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Dit rapport beschrijft de trends in binnen- en buitenland op het gebied van Open Educational Resources. Dat gebeurt aan de hand van twaalf artikelen van Nederlandse experts op het gebied van open leermaterialen in het hoger onderwijs. Ook bevat het rapport twaalf intermezzo’s met spraakmakende voorbeelden.
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Insider ethnographic analysis is used to analyze change processes in an engineering department. Distributed leadership theory is used as conceptual framework.
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Malnutrition is a serious and widespread health problem in community-dwelling older adults who receive care in hospital and at home. Hospital and home care nurses and nursing assistants have a key role in the delivery of high-quality multidisciplinary nutritional care. Nursing nutritional care in current practice, however, is still suboptimal, which impacts its quality and continuity. There appear to be at least two reasons for this. First, there is a lack of evidence for nutritional care interventions to be carried out by nurses. Second, there are several factors, that influence nurses’ and nursing assistants’ current behaviour, such as lack of knowledge, moderate awareness of the importance and neutral attitudes. This results in a lack of attention towards nutritional care. Therefore, there is a need to generate more evidence and to focus on targeting the factors that influence nurses’ and nursing assistants’ current behaviour to eventually promote behaviour change. To increase the likelihood of successfully changing their behaviour, an evidence-based educational intervention is appropriate. This might lead to enhancing nutritional care and positively impact nutritional status, health and well-being of community-dwelling older adults. The general objectives of this thesis are: 1) To understand the current state of evidence regarding nutrition-related interventions and factors that influence current behaviour in nutritional care for older adults provided by hospital and home care nurses and nursing assistants to prevent and treat malnutrition. 2) To develop an educational intervention for hospital and home care nurses and nursing assistants to promote behaviour change by affecting factors that influence current behaviour in nutritional care for older adults and to describe the intervention development and feasibility.
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University teacher teams can work toward educational change through the process of team learning behavior, which involves sharing and discussing practices to create new knowledge. However, teachers do not routinely engage in learning behavior when working in such teams and it is unclear how leadership support can overcome this problem. Therefore, this study examines when team leadership behavior supports teacher teams in engaging in learning behavior. We studied 52 university teacher teams (281 respondents) involved in educational change, resulting in two key findings. First, analyses of multiple leadership types showed that team learning behavior was best supported by a shared transformational leadership style that challenges the status quo and stimulates team members’ intellect. Mutual transformational encouragement supported team learning more than the vertical leadership source or empowering and initiating structure styles of leadership. Second, moderator analyses revealed that task complexity influenced the relationship between vertical empowering team leadership behavior and team learning behavior. Specifically, this finding suggests that formal team leaders who empower teamwork only affected team learning behavior when their teams perceived that their task was not complex. These findings indicate how team learning behavior can be supported in university teacher teams responsible for working toward educational change. Moreover, these findings are unique because they originate from relating multiple team leadership types to team learning behavior, examining the influence of task complexity, and studying this in an educational setting.
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Chronic diseases represent a significant burden for the society and health systems; addressing this burden is a key goal of the European Union policy. Health and other professionals are expected to deliver behaviour change support to persons with chronic disease. A skill gap in behaviour change support has been identified, and there is room for improvement. Train4Health is a strategic partnership involving seven European Institutions in five countries, which seeks to improve behaviour change support competencies for the self-management of chronic disease. The project envisages a continuum in behaviour change support education, in which an interprofessional competency framework, relevant for those currently practising, guides the development of a learning outcomes-based curriculum and an educational package for future professionals (today’s undergraduate students).
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Wessels asks the question what kind of educational space we should open in response to complex questions and challenges that permeate our contemporary, shared world (e.g., related to climate change and multiculturalism).
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