Fullan’s CHAPTER 5.

Insights into the Causes and Processes of Educational Change Implementation

and Continuation….

https://canvas.vub.be/courses/32954/assignments/58930?module_item_id=335988

CHAPTER 5. Causes and Processes of Implementation and Continuation

A major change effort will grasp with the complexity of social dimension. A large part of the problem
may be less a question of dogmatic resistance and bad intentions - difficulties related to planning and
coordinating a multilevel social process. The change may be externally imposed or voluntarily,
explicitly defined in detail in advance or developed and adapted incrementally through use, designed
to used uniformly or deliberately planned.

- Factors affecting Implementation

Instrinsic dilemmas in the change process, coupled with the intractability of some factors, the
uniquetness of individuals settings and variations in local capacity: make susccesful change a highly
complex and subtle social process.

Effective strategies from improvement require an understanding of the process. We should avoid
thinking of sets of factors in isolation from one another, they form a system of variables that interact
to determine success or failure.

9 critical factors organized into the 3 main categories: Each factor can be unpacked into several
subvariables.

→ Factors related to Characteristics of change:

1. Need: Relating needs to decisions about innovations or change directions. There are 3
complications: 1. schools are faced with overloaded improvement agendas (whether a need
is important/how important is relative of other needs)- people are reluctant, 2. precise

1
 needs are often not clear at the beginning- people clearer their needs when they start doing
things (during the implementation), 3. need interacts with other 8 factors to produce
different patterns. Early rewards and tangible success are critical incentives during
implementation.
2. Clarity (about goals and means): The more complex the reform, the greater the problem of
clarity. Lack of clarity- diffuse goals and unspecified means of implementation- represents a
major problem at this stage. False clarity occurs when change is interpreted in an
oversimplified way: the proposed change has more to it than people perceive or realize.
Unclear and unspecified changes can cause great anxiety and frustration to those who
implement it. Wheter it is or not accomplished depends on the process.
3. Complexity: Refers to the difficulty and extent of change required of the individuals
responsible for implementation (skill required, alterations in beliefs/teaching strategies/use
of materials). While complexity creates problems for implementation, it may result in greater
change because more in being attempted. Simple changes may be easier to carry out, but
they may not take much of a difference.
4. Quality and practicality of the Program: The history of the quality of attempted changes
relative to the other 3 variables (need, clarity, complexity) is revealing. Ambitious projects
are nearly always politically driven. Part of the return of ambitious reform has been the
realization that ‘’large-scale’’ changes requires greater attention to front-end quality. It is
possible to combine ambitious, change and quality.

→ Local Factors:

Social conditions of change: the organization or setting in which people work and the plan or
unplanned events and activities that influence whether or no given change attempts will be
productive.

The local school represents one major set of situational constraints or opportunities for effective
change. The individual school may be unit of change, but frequent change is the result of system
initiatives.

The school district: Most attempts at collective change in education seem to fail- frustration, waste
time, feelings of incompetence, lack of support. The more that teachers or others have had negative
experiences with previous implementations attempts in the district or elsewhere, the more apathetic
they will be about the change presented. To predict and understand individuals’ and groups’
responses to particular innovative programs, one must know their intermediate past history.

Individual teachers and single schools can bring about change without the support of central
administrators, but district-wade change will not happen. Teachers and other know not take change
seriously unless central administrators demostrate through actions that they should.

Board and community characteristics: school boards can indirectly affect implementation by hiring or
firing reform oriented superintendents. In situations where the school board and the district are
actively working together, substantiated improvements can be achieved, compared with conflictful or
uninvolved boards. The role of communities and school boards is quite variable, ranging from apathy
to active involvement—with the latter varying from conflictual to cooperative modes, depending on
the conditions.

2
The principal: Principals’ actions serve to legitimate whether a change is to be taken seriously (and
not all changes are) and to support teachers both psychologically and with resources. The principal is
the person most likely to be in a position to shape the organizational conditions necessary for
success, such as the development of shared goals, collaborative work structures and climates, and
procedures for monitoring results. The new evidence reveals that effective principals help address
“multiple innovations” by working on program coherence.

The role of teachers: Both individual teacher characteristics and collective or collegial factors play
roles in determining implementation. Some teachers, depending on their personality and influenced
by their previous experiences and stage of career, are more self-actualized and have a greater sense
of efficacy, which leads them to take action and persist in the effort required to bring about
successful implementation. The quality of working relationships among teachers is strongly related to
implementation. Collegiality, open communication, trust, support and help, learning on the job,
getting results, and job satisfaction and morale are closely interrelated.

→ External Factors:

The last set of factors that influence implementation places the school or school district in the
context of the broader society. In the United States the main authorities consist of state departments
of education and federal agencies. Agencies such as regional R&D laboratories and centers,
philanthropic foundations, universities, and other external partners also attempt to support
educational implementation across the country.

Government agencies have become increasingly aware of the importance and difficulty of
implementation and are allocating resources to clarifying standards of practice, to requiring
accountability-based assessments, to establishing implementation units, to assessing the quality of
potential changes, to supporting professional development, to monitoring implementation of
policies, and to addressing other factors discussed in this chapter.In any case, with the increased
focus on larger-scale reform, some government agencies are becoming more adept at combining
“pressure and support” forces in order to stimulate and follow through in achieving greater
implementation. But this is subtle because it requires integrating pressure and support in a seamless
manner.

- Factors affecting Continuation

Continuation represents another adoption decision, which may be negative, and even if it is positive,
may not get implemented. Lack of interest or inability to fund “special projects” out of district funds
and lack of money for professional development and staff support for both continuing and new
teachers signaled the end of many implemented programs. Lack of interest and support at the
central district office (e.g., on the part of those who had taken on the project for opportunistic
reasons) was another reason for noncontinuation.

Huberman and Miles (1984) stress that continuation or institutionalization of innovations depends
on whether or not the change (1) gets embedded or built into the structure (through policy, budget,
timetable, etc.); (2) has, by the time of the institutionalization phase, generated a critical mass of
administrators and teachers who are skilled in and committed to the change; and (3) has established

3
procedures for continuing assistance (such as a trained cadre of assisters), especially relative to
supporting new teachers and administrators.

We talk about continuation as the third phase in a planned change process, but it should be clear
that the process is not simply linear and that all phases must be thought about from the beginning
and continually thereafter.

- Perspectives on the Change Process

The familiar problems of obtaining shared meaning on a large scale:

1. The tendency to oversimplify. Once you think you have a good idea, and you are facing
urgent problems, there is a great vulnerability to legislating the solution. These ready-made
remedies make matters worse, as they narrow the curriculum and in effect try to control the
uncontrollable. There are no shortcuts to achieving shared meaning, including providing it on
a platter.
2. Even if we identify the right set of factors, there is a devil of a time getting them in place in
new situations. This is the pathways problem. To know what success looks like, and even to
know how it works in one situation, is not the same thing as getting it in place in another
situation. Success is about one-quarter having the right ideas and three-quarters establishing
effective processes that sort out and develop the right solution suited to the context in
question.
3. Implementation and continuation are not just technical problems. Even the best technical
ideas, in the absence of passion and commitment, do not go very far.

The broad implications of the implementation and continuation process have several interrelated
components. The first is that the crux of change involves the development of meaning in relation to a
new idea, program, reform, or set of activities. Meaning has both cognitive (knowledge) and affective
(moral) dimensions. Both must be cultivated and connected. And it is individuals working in
interaction with others who have to develop new meaning, and these individuals and groups are
insignificant parts of a gigantic, loosely organized, complex, messy social system that contains myriad
different subjective worlds.

The causes of change also become more easily identifiable and understood once we possess an
underlying conception of what constitutes change as a process over time. The factors of
implementation and continuation reinforce or undercut each other as an interrelated system.
Single-factor theories of change are doomed to failure. Arguments that product quality is more
important than teacher attitude, or that external factors are more important than internal ones, or
that teachers are more central than administrators, are pointless. Effective implementation depends
on the com- bination of all the factors and themes described in this chapter. The characteristics of
the change, the makeup of the local district, the character of individual schools and teachers, and the
existence and form of external relationships interact to produce conditions for change or nonchange.
It takes a fortunate combination of the right factors—a critical mass—to support and guide the
process of relearning, which respects the maintenance needs of individuals and groups and at the
same time facilitates, stimulates, and prods people to change through a process of incremental and
decremental fits and starts on the way to institutionalizing (or, if appropriate, rejecting) the change in
question.