Transforming the School

Contemporary School Administration by Theodore Kowlaski  - Chapter 14  NOTES
 
Organizational Change

Administrators can usually induce temporary behavior changes (through the promise of rewards or threats of punishment), but unless the basic values and beliefs of teachers and other employees are reshaped, they revert to the routine behaviors once the pressure to change has subsided

• Defining Change
• Change is a process. 
• Change is a medium for adaptation.
• The only thing that is permanent is change. 
• Often, changes that occur in schools are not perceptible to the general public
• Many changes that occur in school generate little attention and produce little conflict. However, attempted transformations of values and practices are a different matter...

• Change in Educational Institutions
• Gene Hall and Shirley Hord (2001) offer and explanation as to why schools appear to be both intractable and adaptive. They observed that many education innovations have been "adopted, tired out, and subsequently rejected - only to cycle around and be readopted some years later in a 'new and improved' form"
• schools are caught in a web of enduring internal and external dilemmas that serve to derali change initiatives
• The more detrimental internal issues include the following: 
• Goals -
• Task structures
• Hierarchy
• Professionalism
• The more detrimental external issues include the following: 
• Persistence - tensions between protecting the status quo and making adaptations
• Boundaries - tensions between protecting the integrity of the organization and dealing with environmental uncertainty
• Compliance - tensions between technical compliance and institutional compliance

• Educational change has been studied in relation to three key variables: 
• Change source
• Change type
• Time orientation

• A major difference between external and internal change relates to administrative choices
• because schools were created and sustained as agencies of social stability, administrators have not been especially encouraged to initiate or support changes that could threaten this role.

Resistance to Change
Resistance to change has been described as "any attempt to maintain the status quo when there is pressure to change"

• General Resistance
• schools have developed an institutional character that generally treats change as disruptive and counterproductive
• Organizational character is perceptible in the following areas:
• Vision - common understanding of purpose and identity?
• Fairness - motivational faith in administrators because of trust?
• Ability - motivational faith in administrators because of knowledge and skills?
• Distinctive skills - customs? networks of experts? technology?

• when people inside the school have little or no understanding of the purposes or potentialities of change, they almost always develop high levels of anxiety and resistance

• Specific Barriers
• barriers to understanding - pertain to information deficiencies
• barriers to acceptance - pertain to philosophical or professional incongruity
• barriers to acting - pertain to human or material resource deficiencies

• Some of the most common obstacles found in schools:
• lack of involvement in setting the agenda
• lack of information about the agenda
• lack of conviction
• disenchantment and alienation
• discontinuity of leadership
• insufficient time and resources
• inadequate preparation to deal with the complexity of change
• ineffective or insufficient use of the professional knowledge base

Change Strategies
Common Strategies that have been used to pursue change:

1. Empirical-Rational strategies: Employees behave rationally and employees are motivated by self-interests.
• fails because people do not always act rationally
2. Normative-reeducative strategies: change requires employees to alter their normative orientations to behavior patters - by exposing employees to new knowledge and skills that will affect values and beliefs
• have been used extensively in education; however, that does not mean that they have been highly effective.
3. Power-coercive strategies: most members of the organization are unwilling or incapable of producing change.  Economic or political force must be used.
• fail because educators resent being forced to do things differently - and the condition of their work environment (e.g. control over the classroom) gives them the power to resist.
  

Culture Change
The reactionary nature of educators is attributable to several circumstances:
Past practice (shaping role expectations) and limited knowledge about organizational culture and its effects on behavior (creating apprehensions about recreating culture)


Complexity of Culture Change
f
Basic Values and Beliefs
Time Dimensions
Culture and Restructuring