The article aims to depict the political framing of three grading reforms in Swedish compulsory school, in terms of the political problem they are supposed to solve and what kind of attention is given to the lowest performing pupils. Discourse analysis is employed, focusing on statement producers. The empirical material consists of policy documents from the late 1930s to 2010. The analyses show that

This paper compares the evolution of two initiatives—one in Singapore and one in New York City—designed expressly to support the development and spread of new and innovative school models. These two initiatives—Future Schools in Singapore and the iZone in New York City—reflected the hope that new school models and associated innovations could be incubated and then replicated to help create system-wide

Wales’ education system is part-way through an extensive journey of reform. This contextual paper explores the evolution of that journey, from the establishment of the Welsh Parliament in 1999 to late 2020, as Wales readies itself for the launch of a radical, new national curriculum. Drawing from a range of international literature and experience, it provides an overview of key policy developments

This article deepens the knowledge of middle leaders’ impact on school improvement and organisation development. More precisely, it focuses on how middle leaders from comprehensive schools and preschools translated improvement strategies and tools from a municipal course on leading school improvement into their own organisations. It is based on interviews with middle leaders, teachers, and principals

International policy trends point to an increased focus on student achievement, teaching quality, and school outcomes. Attention to Swedish students’ poor academic achievement over the past two decades has resulted in an increased emphasis on the responsibility of municipalities and schools to create a better educational atmosphere through building quality control systems at the local level. The purpose

Teachers worldwide are challenged to adjust their teaching to meet students’ needs for deeper learning. The lack of mutual understanding among researchers, policymakers and teachers tends to blur the discussion on how to enhance deeper learning through teaching, which further challenges teachers in making changes in their classroom practices. This qualitative observation study aims to explore how five

Causal relationships are traditionally examined in quantitative research. However, this article informs the discussion surrounding the potential use of qualitative data to explore causal relationships qualitatively through an empirical illustration of a school leadership development team. As school leadership development is supposed to offer continuing development to practicing school leaders, it brings

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused both unprecendented disruptions and massive changes to education. However, as schools return, these changes may disappear. Moreover, not all of the changes are necessarily the changes we want in education. In this paper, we argue that the pandemic has created a unique opportunity for educational changes that have been proposed before COVID-19 but were never fully realized

Reference to teachers as agents of change has become commonplace in the education literature, including change toward more inclusive practice in response to the changing demographic of schooling. Yet, little is known about how teacher agency relates to (1) their understanding of, and commitment to any given change agenda and (2) the institutional and social structures through which they are able to

This article describes the use of a Learning Commission to experiment with conceptualising and implementing richer modes of educational accountability. A Learning Commission is a form for collaborative thinking that brings different kinds of knowledge and expertise to bear in relation to a common matter of concern: the role of schools in relation to the communities they serve. As part of a broader

Educational systems worldwide promote the use of collaborative networks to foster teacher learning and improve practice in the pursuit of educational change to address longstanding equity and achievement issues. New Zealand is no exception, with its Communities of Learning/Kāhui Ako policy mandating collaboration spanning across schools—a mandate that has proven to be challenging. In this paper, we

The theory of Expansive learning and the change laboratory (CL) methodology has been developed and applied in many studies on workplace learning and educational change. There are fewer studies made on small-scale interventions, exploring the longitudinal development of expansive learning in an educational change effort. This article examines a CL intervention performed in an upper secondary school

While prior research suggests that many educators turn to social media to grow and enhance professional learning networks (PLNs) that extend beyond their schools, little is known about how PLNs shift over time. In this exploratory study, we investigated the nature of continuity and change in the PLNs of 192 K-12 and university educators from 17 countries. Participants responded to our request to comment

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether teachers’ engagement in research fosters teachers’ professional development and school development. We investigated changes in teachers’ professional behavior, the impact of such changes, and factors that affect such changes. Questionnaires were distributed among more than hundred teachers who participated in a course on teacher research in the period

Teacher evaluation’s relationship with instructional improvement is under-theorized in the literature. To address this gap, this paper uses a conceptual framework rooted in human, social, and material capital to analyze and synthesize findings from research conducted since 2009 on whether and under what conditions teacher evaluation stimulates change in teachers’ instruction. We find that teacher evaluation

To demonstrate whether individuals of the new generation have developed a unique and different learning model, research was conducted on children aged 10–11 in England, the United States, Australia and Germany. The qualities and the characteristics those children seek in the activities with which they spend more time were recognized. Using this knowledge, an innovative IT-based teaching model was structured

Recent research has indicated global trends of decreasing teacher autonomy and increasing teacher accountability. Standardised national tests have been identified as one of many factors constraining teacher autonomy. Another trend influencing teachers’ scope of action is the profiling and branding of schools that compete for students. This qualitative case study concerns the general upper secondary

Innovative initiatives in education often have problems with their sustainability. The present study focuses on three educational innovations that have proved to be sustainable over time. We used a qualitative research approach to study and identify essential features of sustainable educational innovation. Two theoretical frameworks were used to guide the study: the integrated model for sustainable

Recent United States (U.S.) educational policies—especially the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015—have challenged state education agencies (SEAs) to take greater responsibility for and leadership over improving underperforming schools. SEA capacity to accomplish this charge varies, so many SEAs contract with third-party, external providers in the school improvement industry. Yet, little

Collaborative (Co-) teaching is an increasingly popular model of instructional used to improve inclusive education outcomes. The woefully under theorized and researched arrangement involves multiple certified teachers—a general and special educator—sharing a classroom space and increased spectrum of student learning needs. Our multiyear Design-Based investigation of and intervention with co-teachers

Effective schooling requires teachers to have professional discretion; yet in the twentieth century, bureaucratization enhanced administrative control of teaching. Teacher unionization offered one response to bureaucratization, intended in part to protect teacher professional discretion. More recently, the charter school movement offered a second means to protect teacher professionalism, though some

This article introduces a special, 20th anniversary issue of the Journal of Educational Change. The special issue edictoras have organized significant international contributions to theory-building into three areas. These concern diverse modalities of educators’ professionalism, debates around “getting to scale” with successful innovations, and conflicting views of social justice in schools and societies

Achieving changes to education practices and structures is a significant issue facing reformers internationally, and researchers have confronted how such changes, and the conditions for these, might be conceptualized. These issues resonate particularly as researchers grapple with imagining a post-COVID-19 landscape where social and educational norms may change. Tyack and Tobin, in their 1994 article

What happens when a state’s literacy reform policy allows for ownership and individualized diversification of the policy’s instructional mandates at the level of district and school? How do systems and individuals experience the change in reform and respond to both the power and the pressures of having to design and implement their own literacy assessment and intervention accountability plans? This

Over the years, I’ve been investigating capacity for learning to understand under what conditions it’s seeded, flourishes and is sustainable. Drawing on my own and others’ research and knowledge, I’ve supported school and system leaders internationally in endeavours to create and sustain capacity for learning. My sense is that everyone engaged in similar activity believes that we want the best learning

The article title in the original publication contains an error. The correct title is presented in this Erratum, as the journal existed 20 years when this article was published and not 25 years.

Over the past 20 years, the pages of the Journal of Educational Change have been filled with some of the most important and exciting thinking in the field. That said, three important challenges need to be addressed in the next decade if the Journal is to continue to hold its prominent position. The first relates to finding a way to diversify the geographic distribution of leading thinkers in the field

As we look ahead to the next 20 years of educational change, I argue that broader community contexts interplay with students’ in-school learning, and thus, we, as an educational change field, ought to examine more deeply the role school–family–community partnerships play in the students’ holistic development. This consideration is particularly relevant in the environments where inequities in the access

The international agenda for quality improvement in early childhood education and care (ECEC) has driven policies targeting workforce professionalisation. Increased training and accountability have been required, but without commensurate renumeration. Attendant staff turnover and educator stress threaten to undermine the achievement of intended policy goals. In a study of the Australian ECEC workforce

The key premise of professional development (PD) is that learning to teach continues throughout teachers’ careers. And yet, experienced teachers are often portrayed in media and public policy as resistant to such learning and afraid of change. This paper seeks a more nuanced understanding of why experienced teachers might resist the prospect of PD by investigating their responses to an innovative research-based

The current study deals with the question of whether affective trust among the teaching staff and teacher participation in decision-making (PDM) might influence the relationship between principals’ skills (cognitive and interpersonal) and organizational outcomes (job satisfaction and teacher absenteeism) during the first year of educational reform implementation. The research model was further compared

This paper analyzes the nature and perceived effects of mid-stakes testing (known as the EQAO) in Ontario, Canada. Ontario’s mid-stakes tests were meant to ensure accountability and transparency, and assure system-wide improvement, while avoiding the negative effects and perverse incentives of their high-stakes counterparts. The paper provides new evidence from two projects covering almost a 10-year

Professional learning communities are promising for teacher learning and improving the quality of education. In the past decade, there has been a shift in focus from within-school to cross-school PLCs: Professional Learning Networks. Knowledge of the underlying working processes of teacher learning in PLNs is scarce. This is even more complicated for PLNs, because of organizational, geographic and

Recognition and implementation of best practice collaborative partnerships are fundamental to developing inclusive schools and achieving positive outcomes. This is particularly important for those students requiring additional educational supports. In order to develop an individual approach to learning, and implement the necessary adjustments required to assist a student with specific needs, input

As transfers of educational ideas across countries accelerate in the twenty-first century with globalization, studies on educational change have lagged in foregrounding the importance of cross-national contexts when ideas traverse borders. This qualitative study investigates 30 Singapore teachers’ perceptions of challenges involved in implementing differentiated instruction from the U.S., to sketch

Questions about purpose, life meaning, and life satisfaction drive central debates about what good education should look like in schools. This study compares adolescent purposes, life meaning, social support and life satisfaction in Singapore and Israel. Meaning in life refers to finding one’s significance; purpose uses this significance in ways beyond self. Key findings showed four purpose clusters

Teacher Leadership is an effective way to support positive school change (Lai and Cheung 2015; Mangin and Stoelinga in Effective teacher leadership, Teachers College Press, New York, pp 1–9, 2008). To accelerate success, professional development programs aimed at building teacher leadership have proliferated across the globe. And yet, teacher leaders attending such programs often report difficulty

This paper advances the notion of social movement as a new way to think about and pursue educational change. It articulates a critique to scientific management, the paradigm that has shaped how schools and educational systems have been understood and run for over a century, since the creation of compulsory schooling. Drawing on some examples of radical and widespread pedagogical change in the Global

While debates rage on regarding various approaches to educational change and improvement, there is no doubt recent decades have been marked by a shift in how these approaches are conceptualized and enacted. In the last 20 or so years many nations have applied neo-liberal principles of competition, profit, and efficiency to the public sector and to education more specifically. Beyond dramatically reshaping

This article discusses some educational issues introduced by the uprise of transnational students in global educational systems. It demonstrates the relevance of these issues for the field of educational change, in particular, topics of diversity and globalization that are in need of greater attention in the Journal of Educational Change. The article presents a recent conceptual and empirically-based

Teachers’ professional lives and their role in change efforts have always been central to the Journal of Educational Change. Articles have addressed teachers’ motivation for and commitment to reform, their belief systems, their professionalism, their networks, and their professional development, among other topics. Unequivocally, teachers are central to educational change. In this article, I will reflect

The Programme for International Students Assessment (PISA) has become one of the most influential forces in global education. The growing influence has been accompanied by growing criticism. For nearly two decades since the first round of PISA was conducted in 2000, the global assessment program has been roundly scrutinized and criticized by education researchers all over the world. But the mounting

The aim of this study was to compare students’ and teachers’ perceptions of two differently organized learning environments, i.e. teacher- versus student-centred activities. Specifically, we considered their views on the dimensions of student agency, responsibility and context equity. The study was held on a sample of 26 teachers and 397 middle school students. The results showed that student-centred

This paper draws on recent research in Europe and England to discuss the politics of accountability. It is suggested that, as policies in education are increasingly focused on delivering technical-managerial accountability, that is accountability understood as evidenced in international, national, institutional and individual comparative measures of performance, so the shifting power relations of system

The article reanalyzes findings from a systematic review on the work situation and training needs of middle leaders in schools. Following an update search, 37 articles were analyzed and consistently reveal that middle leaders have trivial jobs that do not build their competence. Researchers conclude that they instead should be instructional leaders, observe teachers’ work and give them feedback on

When seen in a positive light, accountability systems are understood as a means for promoting transparency, improvement, responsibility and commitment to valuable goals, thus ensuring that State funding is invested in initiatives that are beneficial to all citizens. However, in education, there is extensive evidence about the negative effects of predominant accountability systems, which call their

Sustainable school development is suggested to result in both meaningful learning and enhanced well-being for those involved in the reform work. The aim of the study was to gain a better understanding of the relations between the strategies utilised in school development work, school impact of the reform and burdening in the context of curriculum reform in Finland. Altogether 550 district-level stakeholders

This article presents the perceptions and experiences of 12 school principals, 35 teachers and 85 students on the influences and processes used by eight Australian government primary and secondary schools to transform traditionally arranged classrooms into flexible learning spaces. Characterised by a variety of furniture and layout options, these spaces are designed to enable a range of learning styles

Trust and accountability are often positioned as opposites, the argument being that accountability is based on distrust and correction of identified deficiencies. Yet, trust is also important in order for accountability to lead to improvement; only when teachers and principals are open about the quality of their teaching and their school can there be a meaningful discussion about change. How can we

Using Australia as a case, it is the purpose of this article to historically investigate the implications of the OECD’s economistic approach to education in terms of accountability in order to add more clarity and body to the concept of intelligent accountability proposed by the British philosopher Onora O’Neill. Such a historical prism offers the opportunity to illuminate past experiences and debates

The Roma are facing serious disadvantages in education in Romania, where segregated schooling and lack of quality education are two main factors contributing to de facto exclusion from the education system. In an effort to compensate for this missing commitment of the formal education system, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) provide non-formal education for Roma children, often under the label

We present a case study that examined the role of teacher belief change and agency development through enactment of an innovative student-centered STEM program in three public urban secondary schools. In the program, 9th grade STEM classrooms were restructured to incorporate daily small group instruction facilitated by 10th grade near-peers. We found that teachers who had successfully persisted in

This paper explores what underlies the recent introduction of a Higher Education Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) in England. Related changes to the higher education landscape are discussed: the 2017 Higher Education Act and creation of a new HE regulator, the Office for Students. How TEF works and some of the consequences of TEF are outlined. As well as discussing what constitutes teaching excellence

In response to accountability systems dominated by external inspections and achievement data, calls are being made for intelligent accountability or a new accountability paradigm that focuses on meaningful learning, enabled by professionally skilled and committed educators within the system. In such systems, the actors are encouraged to strive for continuous development in learning organisations based

The purpose of this paper is to present findings from a study of a 3-year leadership development initiative designed to enhance the leadership capacities of 10 school leaders from a consortium of rural, high-poverty school districts. The initiative provided cross-district, job-embedded, and personalized leadership development through leadership coaching in a professional community. The findings highlight

There is now an impetus for schools to be more effective for more students, meaning that being able to measure impact effectively is vital. Simultaneously, if innovations are found to be impactful, it is reasonable they should be scaled-up to enable other schools to benefit. It is appropriate, therefore, that in networked and self-improving school systems, we should be attempting to link together approaches

This study explores the relationship between factors related to the implementation of school reform in technology and variables related to students’ acceptance of technology, in particular, of tablets. In order to do this, 2659 students in 208 schools were surveyed using an instrument developed according to the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology. Additionally, the school reform process

Teacher education programs and school reform efforts are two mechanisms by which research-based reform messages reach thousands of teachers. Prior research has noted, however, that these messages are often in conflict with longstanding beliefs and norms at school sites. This paper examines teacher agency in the context of school of structure and culture to investigate how both new and experienced teachers

Accountability has been a major feature of educational policy making across the globe, including in the US where there is a persistent focus on student achievement results. This paper examines how accountability influences organizational routines in US schools, paying particular attention to meeting routines. We draw upon in-depth qualitative data gathered in four urban middle schools in which approximately

This manuscript explores how the changing policy context of common standards may have influenced the provision of curriculum materials in the United States. Many educational reforms do little to change the nature of classroom instruction, and prior research has argued that this constancy is, at least in part, due to the common use of instructional materials from a small set of large publishing companies