As political turnover places educator-led reforms under pressure, this short note asks what may persist after the administrative infrastructure of reform is withdrawn. South Korea’s Hyukshin Hakgyo (Innovation Schools) provides a concentrated case: the initiative expanded from 2009 to 2,746 schools (22.9
Contemporary educational change is unfolding amid volatility, uncertainty, and recurring global disruption. Against this backdrop, it is proposed that system leadership is a necessary response to a changing educational landscape in which crisis is endemic. Drawing on established theoretical perspectives, system leadership is conceptualised as a collective, relational practice that mobilises knowledge, trust, professional capacity, and coordinated action across boundaries. This article suggests that the future of educational change will depend less on fragmented school improvement and more on collective leadership and adaptive responsiveness to the challenges and crises that education systems face.
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.
