Strong student-educator relationships support adolescent development, yet schools often struggle to translate relational priorities into meaningful improvement efforts. This qualitative multi-case study examines how three middle school improvement teams engaged in the planning and sensemaking phases of relationally focused school improvement using an Improvement Science approach and the Developmental Relationships Framework. Data included interviews with school improvement team members, field notes from partnership meetings, and improvement planning documents. Across sites, teams identified common structural barriers to relationship building, including limited time, large class sizes, staffing constraints, demographic mismatches between educators and students, and challenges engaging families. Despite these shared challenges, teams developed distinct improvement plans shaped by differences in team composition, organizational context, and local political conditions. These factors influenced how teams interpreted relational challenges, framed equity, and prioritized strategies for change. Findings suggest that the planning phase is a critical component of school improvement and that who participates in improvement planning meaningfully shapes both problem definition and solution design. The study offers practical implications for designing more context-responsive and equity-oriented relational improvement efforts in schools.
Synchronicity remains an underexplored perspective in the study of educational change. Traditional models often neglect the intricate interaction between management, communication, and emotional alignment, identified here as factors essential for implementing effective change. To address this gap, we investigated the role of synchronicity between school principals and school teams in shaping teachers’ readiness for change. Specifically, we examined synchronicity in three areas: managerial innovation, team communication, and team emotional synchronicity. We used an online survey to collect data from 275 teachers in Israeli public schools and performed paired t-tests, clustering analysis, and ANOVAs on the data. Paired t-test analyses revealed that team communication synchronicity was significantly higher than team emotional and managerial innovation synchronicity, demonstrating the critical role of team communication as a key synchronizing force in educational settings. When conceptualized as coupled oscillators, the three synchronicity variables interact to produce distinct states of synchronicity. The k-means clustering analysis distinguished three groups: two corresponding to chimera states and a third reflecting self-organization. In the first (management-based) chimera state, managerial innovation synchronicity was medium, while team communication and team emotional synchronicity were low. The second (team-based) chimera state demonstrated the opposite pattern, with medium synchronicity in both team-based dimensions but low managerial synchronicity. The self-organization state exhibited high levels across all synchronicity types. Readiness for change varied significantly across these states, with the highest levels observed in the self-organization state, followed closely by the team-based chimera state, with the management-based chimera state showing the lowest readiness for change. The findings offer new insights into the mechanisms underlying educational change, noting the importance of synchronicity in promoting adaptability and readiness for transformation. We suggest that mapping concrete synchronicity patterns to readiness for change provides a conceptual and empirical foundation for improving managerial strategies, team dynamics, and systemic change in schools. The insights offer practical implications for encouraging innovation and effective leadership in schools.
Young people are often excluded from democratic processes in schools. When involved in school improvement, students are regularly positioned as informants rather than as co-inquirers. Grounded in a pragmatist perspective and drawing on the concepts of weak and strong democracy and collective habits, this empirical study examines the conditions that constrain and enable student participation in school improvement. The study focuses on two Swedish municipalities – spanning compulsory, upper secondary, and adult education – that have initiated efforts to institutionalise student participation in school improvement work. It examines which collective habits among school professionals (principals, middle leaders, and teachers) constrain such participation and interprets these dynamics through a democratic lens. Six habitual practices are identified: initiating, organising, acquiring propositional knowledge, transferring, interest alignment, and predetermining agendas. These habits reflect a weak conception of democracy in which improvement is done to students rather than with them. The study argues that stronger democratic forms of participation may require democratic leadership, collaborative improvement practices, and a balance between the purposes of education.
Over the past quarter century, education systems worldwide have pursued sustained reform aimed at improving quality, equity, and responsiveness of education systems. Yet despite the scale and intensity of these efforts, progress has remained uneven and often fragile. This ‘think piece’ argues that a central limitation of contemporary education reform lies in its predominantly technical orientation, which has largely overlooked the relational conditions necessary for meaningful and durable change. Drawing on research, including contributions published in the Journal of Educational Change, the article positions relational trust as a precondition and mechanism of successful educational change. It examines how trust operates across system levels to enable professional agency, mediate policy enactment, and sustain improvement, while also exploring how inequality and governance structures shape its distribution. The article cautions against superficial invocations of trust in policy discourse and argues for a fundamental shift toward a relational paradigm of educational change. It concludes by suggesting that future educational change efforts must focus less on designing new interventions and more on cultivating the conditions under which trust can emerge and endure.
Teachers’ job satisfaction has decreased in the U.S. and worldwide. One way to increase job satisfaction and relieve stress among teachers might be a school workforce redesign that distributes classroom teachers' responsibilities among a cadre of novice, experienced, and expert teachers. This study used survey, interview, and focus group data from a school with a workforce redesign and a traditional one-teacher-one-classroom school to examine teacher job satisfaction through teachers’ self- and collective efficacy and school climate. Through surveys, teachers in the school with a workforce redesign demonstrated higher job satisfaction, as evidenced by more consistently positive views of teaching self-efficacy, collective teacher efficacy, and school climate, than teachers in the traditional one-teacher-one-classroom school. Interview data corroborated the survey results, with teachers in the workforce redesign reporting more consistently positive views of themselves, their peers, and their school than teachers in traditional one-teacher-one-classroom schools. Policy makers and district personnel might consider a workforce redesign to increase teachers’ job satisfaction.
This study investigates the relationships between distributed leadership (DL) and secondary school teachers’ teaching practices (TP) during Vietnam’s transition to a competency-based curriculum under Circular 32/2018/TT-BGDĐT. Addressing a critical gap in literature, this research examines the application of Western-centric leadership concepts within a highly centralised, Confucian socialist context. Using PLS-SEM to analyse cross-sectional TALIS 2018 data from 2,577 lower secondary teachers, the study evaluates the direct paths from DL to TP, alongside the mediating roles of teacher self-efficacy (TSE) and school innovativeness (SINO), and the moderating role of teacher autonomy (TAU). Results demonstrate that DL positively predicts TP both directly and indirectly through TSE. Interestingly, a unique chain of mediation emerged in which SINO is negatively associated with TP directly but positively predicts TSE, which in turn positively predicts TP. Furthermore, TAU significantly moderates the direct DL–TP relationship. These findings underscore the importance of aligning structural leadership dynamics with teachers’ psychological perceptions during educational reform. The study recommends that policymakers align curriculum innovation with traditional assessments, provide strong support mechanisms for teachers, and prioritise teachers’ psychological readiness to achieve substantive improvements in instructional quality.
Responding to the need for context-sensitive approaches to school improvement, this study examines beyond-school collaborations (BSCs) as social learning spaces (SLSs) in initiatives addressing persistent and complex challenges. Drawing on value-creation cycles (VCCs) as an analytical lens, the study addresses two research questions: (1) What are the defining characteristics of BSCs? and (2) In what ways are these characteristics enabling or constraining collaborative processes for school improvement work within BSCs, as analysed through VCCs?. The empirical material is drawn from 15 Swedish municipalities working in collaboration with a national education agency and includes interviews, observations of project meetings, and field notes. The findings identify three interrelated characteristics—manageability, knowing, and attitudes—that shape how collaboration unfolds across institutional boundaries. Conceptualised as dynamic thresholds, these characteristics operate as practice-based conditions that influence participants’ engagement and mediate movement across cycles of value creation. The findings suggest that collaboration across boundaries is not a fixed design feature but an ongoing accomplishment shaped by relational, organisational, and epistemic dynamics. BSCs appear most generative when they are as flexible as possible and as structured as necessary, with sustained attention to enabling and constraining thresholds in the domains of manageability, knowing, and attitudes. Engagement in VCCs supports expanded learning processes, pushes current knowledge boundaries, and contributes to the development of improvement-oriented cultures. In this sense, BSCs function as generative SLSs capable of addressing complex and “wicked” challenges through shared inquiry and capacity-building.
This study was conducted to investigate the impact of the large-scale educational reform 2018 on teacher emotions in Vietnamese secondary education. A mixed methods approach was employed with an explanatory sequential design, utilizing a self-developed and validated survey questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. A total of 564 lower secondary and upper secondary teachers who were teaching subjects in the new curriculum participated in the study, with 21 of them interviewed later. The findings revealed that teachers experienced both positive and negative emotions; however, positive emotions were more prevalent and stronger than negative ones. Teachers expressed interest and curiosity about new teaching methods and were grateful for the reform as it provided professional development opportunities. However, they reported feelings of anxiety and confusion regarding the effective implementation of the reform. Teachers believed that the reform positively influenced their pedagogical knowledge and skills, and they acknowledged that it brought significant changes to the education system. Based on these findings, the study offers several implications for teachers and relevant stakeholders regarding teacher education.
This paper argues that educational change can no longer be understood as a process confined to schools, policy systems, and formal educational institutions. As young people’s learning, orientation, and experiences of recognition are increasingly shaped within social media environments, educational change unfolds under conditions that extend beyond institutional control. Drawing on social network perspectives, the paper introduces the concept of digital closeness to describe forms of connection that are experienced as immediate and continuous, yet remain unstable, visibility-dependent, and shaped by platform dynamics. The paper shows how social media environments reorganize educational processes by shifting learning from instruction to exposure, orientation toward visibility, and recognition toward attention. It then argues that these changes transform the mechanisms of educational change itself. Under conditions of digital closeness, change becomes more selective, volatile, decentered, and fragmented. Rather than emerging primarily through formal implementation, educational change increasingly depends on the circulation, uptake, and stabilization of ideas, norms, and practices across networked environments. The paper concludes by suggesting that research on educational change needs to broaden its analytical frameworks beyond institutions and attend to the wider relational and platform-mediated ecologies in which educational processes increasingly unfold.
Across international contexts, many decisions that influence the interactions between teachers and students are made at levels across educational systems. Change initiatives regularly begin at the top of the system and trickle down, resulting in a role across levels not only for educators to engage in sensemaking but to also act as sensegivers. From a three-year case study of one urban district in the midwestern United States, we analyzed a robust dataset of observations, interviews, and artifacts of district leaders, principals, instructional coaches, and teachers to understand why the district’s attempt to significantly change instructional practices in a subset of schools identified as underperforming did not achieve widespread acceptance. Our findings suggest that despite general agreement across levels about the importance of improving instruction and changing the instructional cultures of those schools, the ways in which educators make sense of change and then give sense to change to others is critically important not only to launch change but to systematize operations.
This study examines how teachers in Hong Kong navigate educational change, drawing on identity grafting (IG) theory. By profiling teachers based on how they reconcile identity differences, we explore their value orientations and pedagogical practices. Using survey data from 634 in-service primary and secondary teachers, we conducted a latent profile analysis. We identified six profiles: versatile, jack-of-all-trades, selective, conservative, skeptical, and disengaged. These profiles varied in instructional practices and value orientations, including risk-taking, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance. For example, versatile and jack-of-all-trades teachers employed diverse pedagogies, whereas selective and conservative teachers adopted more cautious approaches to change. Skeptical and disengaged teachers exhibited the lowest receptivity to change. Theoretically, the findings extend the IG framework from fixed identity types to a more fluid, spectrum-based model of how teachers navigate educational change. Drawing on cross-cultural parallels with Finnish teacher identity profiles and prior research across Chinese cities, this study also highlights the global and regional contingencies that shape identity formation and instructional behaviors, thereby contributing to international understandings of how teachers experience educational change across diverse cultural contexts. In practice, this study calls for tailored professional development and leadership strategies that address teachers’ diverse orientations toward change.
Responding to the call for “Short Notes on the State of Educational Change and Its Future,” I reflect on changes explicitly and implicitly articulated through twenty-five years of Journal of Educational Change scholarship and educational change scholarship more broadly, particularly external actors’ increasing prominence in and control over educational change. I then argue we must look to educators’ resistance to those private forces as a map to returning the power of change to educators.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping educational systems worldwide at a moment when educational change stands at a critical crossroads. Twenty-five years after the founding of the Journal of Educational Change, reform efforts confront intensifying political polarization, resource constraints, and slowed progress toward equity. While often framed as an instructional innovation, AI increasingly functions as a structural driver of change, reconfiguring governance, professional autonomy, and equity in PK-12 systems. Drawing on classical educational change scholarship and contemporary research on algorithmic governance, this conceptual essay argues that AI represents an infrastructural transformation rather than a discrete reform initiative. Predictive analytics, adaptive platforms, and automated assessment systems embed algorithmic logics into everyday schooling practices, potentially shifting authority away from educators and toward opaque technical systems. Without anticipatory governance, AI risks reinforcing structural inequalities and consolidating technocratic control. The future of educational change depends not merely on adopting innovation, but on ensuring that technological transformation remains guided by professional expertise, democratic accountability, and equity.
In response to the harmful effects of punitive school discipline in the United States, there has been a call for change to move towards non-exclusionary and non-discriminatory interventions, such as peer mediation. In peer mediation programs, a cohort of students at a given school are trained on how to mediate conflicts between peers, working towards mutually beneficial solutions. While this alternative approach to school discipline has been adopted by schools across the United States, there remains minimal guidance for how schools should implement peer mediation programs to support meaningful change in school disciplinary culture. In this paper, we evaluate the implementation and perceived impacts of a peer mediation program implemented across four schools in partnership with a non-profit organization. Through the lens of institutional and organizational theory, we explore factors that led to the partial implementation of the program despite widespread support from educators and students alike. Based on findings derived from observations, surveys, and interviews, this paper offers actionable knowledge on factors that hinder and support the success of peer mediation programs. Additionally, the findings of this study demonstrate that despite the program’s partial implementation, students still derived benefits which supported a shift from punitive to restorative school cultures.
The paper presents findings from interviews conducted with leaders in schools and municipalities in Norway, capturing their descriptions of and reflections about how they intentionally lead for student voice and participation. Research in this field has gained considerable momentum in recent years; however, there is a need for more knowledge about how educational leaders engage with and sustain voice and participation practices. Findings show that, despite differing contexts, the six leaders described strikingly similar orientations to leading for voice and participation, indicating that specific leadership approaches can be illuminated. Daring to lead emerged as a unifying theme, encompassing a readiness of leaders to critically examine their own practices and prevailing norms, to advocate openly for student voice as a core organisational value, and to boldly design new structures that make participation an ordinary feature of school life. This paper argues that such practices are necessary to actively promote and meaningfully advance student voice and participation.
Instructional leadership teams (ILTs) have become popular reforms, described as teams of teacher leaders and administrators who collaborate to lead instructional improvement. While ILTs can be important vehicles of distributed leadership, their potential rests, foundationally, upon developing collective agency—or group capabilities to accomplish tasks and solve problems together. Little empirical research has focused on ILTs and how they may develop such capabilities. Drawing on literature about group development, work teams, teacher leadership, problem solving, and professional learning, we conceptualize four domains that may shape ILTs’ development of collective agency: basic self-organizing capability, seeing ourselves as leaders, navigating problem complexity, and conceptualizing professional learning. We applied this framework to trace group dynamics in four ILTs based upon 230 h of participant observation, action research, and reflective conversations collected as part of a district research-practice partnership. Tracing how collective agency became constrained, emerged, or expanded over two years in each ILT, our findings revealed collective agency for ILTs to be a context-specific emergence, but two domains appeared particularly critical across the schools: basic self-organizing and conceiving of professional learning. The findings reveal ILT development as non-linear and contextually-embedded, posing implications for policymakers, district leaders, and researchers for understanding differentiated ILT supports and finer-grained developmental dynamics as work groups.
This study explores professional learning (PL) as knowledge co-construction in a multistakeholder professional learning community (PLC) in China. The PLC, involving teachers, academics, and policymakers, was designed with a top-down structure to support a curriculum reform but aimed to foster bottom-up collaborative inquiry. PL is conceptualised as knowledge co-construction in this study through the lens of epistemic fluency. Data from workshop transcripts and phased interviews were analysed using the Progressive Inquiry Model (PIM) and the concept of organisational capability. Findings reveal that the development of stakeholders' epistemic fluency was the key mechanism driving the PLC's evolution from a rigid, hierarchical structure to an adaptive, co-configurative learning system. This transition was propelled by the emergence of “shared epistemic fluency” within the group. The analysis also uncovered a strategic adaptation termed “compromised epistemic fluency,” wherein academics maintained a static expert role to steward the PLC's primary goal, contrasting with the role fluidity exhibited by teachers and policymakers. The study suggests that epistemic fluency provides a diagnostic and design lens for understanding multi-stakeholder collaborations, nuancing its application in such contexts by proposing the concepts of shared and compromised epistemic fluency. It concludes that organic PL can be cultivated within mandated structures by prioritising the development of integrative knowledge work.
Successful innovation in schools is often complex and depends on the innovative capacity present at multiple levels of the school organization, yet, a clear conceptualization of the individual innovative capacity (IIC) of teachers (how they cope with and guide change) remains underdeveloped. Drawing on a scoping review, we identified and brought together a set of competencies that are frequently associated with teachers’ capacity to contribute to educational change: entrepreneurship, creativity, resilience, and inquisitiveness. Rather than presenting these as the definitive elements of IIC, our results represent a first step in unpacking the concept and offering insight into its possible content. While the term innovative capacity is not used consistently across international contexts, our synthesis shows that combining separate, yet related, concepts can help create a more comprehensive understanding of how teachers can develop the competences needed to lead change. We propose that this integrative perspective offers a useful foundation for future research and discussion on teachers’ IIC in relation to complex school-level change.
This study applied explainable machine learning (ML) to identify school-level conditions that predict organisational innovativeness using OECD TALIS 2018 principal data from 47 education systems. Six machine learning algorithms were compared, and XGBoost achieved the best predictive performance. SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) was then applied to interpret the model and rank the most influential factors. The results show that organisational innovativeness is shaped primarily by relational and cultural conditions rather than by isolated structural inputs. School climate emerged as the strongest predictor, particularly the encouragement of staff-initiated projects, mutual support, shared responsibility, participatory decision-making, and cooperation with the local community. Shortage of time with students, by contrast, reduced predicted innovativeness. Principals’ job satisfaction was the second most influential factor. Leadership practices that promote teacher cooperation for pedagogical development showed a modest positive association. Diversity beliefs among teachers and access to mentoring programmes contributed small but generally positive signals. Overall, the findings suggest that organisational innovativeness in schools depends mainly on a supportive and participatory school climate, principals’ job satisfaction, instructional leadership practice, diversity belief and structured mentoring.
Although substantial research highlights the positive impact of family–school cooperation on students’ academic success and well-being, language teachers—both in-service and pre-service—often feel underprepared to take agentic roles in fostering collaboration with families. In Norway, where multilingualism is common and multiple languages are taught in schools, such cooperation is vital. This qualitative study from the Norwegian context investigates 13 pre-service language teachers’ awareness of the role of families and family language policy in children’s language development, and their readiness to engage agentically in family–school cooperation. Data from focus group discussions were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Findings reveal that while participants recognised families as valuable linguistic resources, they were hesitant to initiate cooperation due to structural, institutional, and cultural constraints. Pre-service teachers identified several hindrances in collaborating with families. These included parents’ inadequate language knowledge, language barriers present in families with an immigration background, and teachers’ limited time. The study underscores the need to integrate knowledge of family language policy, the influence of home linguistic environments, and strategies for effective family–school cooperation into language teacher education programmes to better prepare future educators for effective cooperation with families.
