Chapter 9: Organisational Change: Synthesising Leadership and Teacher Work

Education is a pursuit of change. The very purpose of a school is to help engage children in learning and thus to change them. This occurs through the gaining of new knowledge and insights, through learning how to socialise and ultimately through understanding what it is they would like to do with their lives as confident, productive individuals as they mature into adulthood. Hence, teachers are dealing with change all the time, both in relation to the children they teach but also in relation to the continual development of their own expertise as teachers. As we explored in Chapter 8, teachers are learners themselves as they reflect on and consider how to change their practice to better help children make the most of their educational opportunities. Thus, schools are centres of change, and yet in those countries which have followed a more neoliberal path since the 1980s, change has in a sense become rarified, a process to be formally managed and developed by leaders and a process enshrined in strategic plans and formal improvement projects. But there are many different ways of understanding organisational change which extend well beyond this narrow view, as demonstrated by the very rich literature within the organisational sciences, which offer many different lenses through which change can be understood and enacted.