{"id":360,"date":"2021-02-14T21:04:56","date_gmt":"2021-02-15T05:04:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0165\/?p=360"},"modified":"2021-02-14T21:05:15","modified_gmt":"2021-02-15T05:05:15","slug":"managing-change-in-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0165\/managing-change-in-education\/","title":{"rendered":"Managing Change in Education"},"content":{"rendered":"

While reading “Integrating the Organizational Change Literature: A model for Successful Change” by Al-Haddad and Kotnour (2015) as part of the readings for the course in LRNT 525, one of the things that stood out for me was the importance of incremental change. Al-Haddad and Kotnour (2015) explains that “sometimes the most economical and cost effective change strategy is to adopt the semi-incremental approach” (p. 239). In their article, Al-Haddad and Kotnour (2015) view change from an business organization point of view, but I believe this to be true for education as well. I have seen resistance to change because leaders attempting to make radical changes took a transformational approach instead of an incremental change approach.<\/span><\/p>\n

As part of my work, a situation arose where a major change was proposed. I found myself along with many others, resisting the change. This major change involved a number of smaller changes, with the plan to be executed all at once in a short timeframe. I saw the potential benefit to the changes, I approved of the overall vision of the project, and was willing to contribute to the changes, however, I still resisted. I guess for me, it was not the individual changes themselves, it was how radical these changes were as a whole. According to Al-Haddad and Kotnour (2015) this major change would be categorized as a short duration and big scale for the change type.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the other members of the team made a really good point – if we make all these smaller changes as part of one big change it will be hard to evaluate the effectiveness of each of the individual smaller changes. For example, if one of the small changes results in poor results overall, it could be very difficult to determine which small change resulted in the failure. If the results were catastrophic, would the entire project need to be reverted even if many of the smaller changes were worthwhile? Transformational Change, that is, applying a major change composed of many smaller changes, does not allow for a critical analysis of individual components as part of the change. In contrast, Incremental Change, by applying the smaller changes slowly, would allow the observation of the individual and isolated changes. It would then be clear which changes resulted in the observed benefits and\/or deficits. \u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

According to Kindler (1979), when comparing Transformational Change to Incremental Change, indicated that “under stable circumstances, from a cost-benefit perspective, incremental change is often the preferred strategy” (p. 476) and in contrast explains “A transformational change \u2026 because it represents a departure from tradition, more risks are involved” (p. 478). In our situation, our company had been stable and successful for over 30 years. Perhaps this is why this proposed major change is seen as a departure from tradition and a transformation change. I believe we should be taking an approach similar to what is proposed in the article by Star (2016), which discusses the benefits of incremental change to improve math teaching. It states that “instead of broad scale, it may be better to consider improving instruction incrementally by identifying small, powerful, changes that teacher can implement relatively easily in their instruction” (p. 59).<\/span><\/p>\n

Although some people are anxious to implement the changes sooner rather than later, perhaps performing the changes incrementally and switching to a different change type (to long duration or small scale) will have better alignment with the change method (Al-Haddad & Kotnour, 2015) and have better chance of success and less resistance from team members.<\/span><\/p>\n

References<\/span><\/p>\n

Al-Haddad, S., & Kotnour, T. (2015). Integrating the organizational change literature: A model for successful change. Journal of organizational change management, 28<\/em>(2), 234-262. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1108\/JOCM-11-2013-0215<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Kindler, H. S. (1979). Two planning strategies: Incremental change and transformational change. Group & Organization Studies, 4<\/em>(4), 476-484.<\/span><\/p>\n

Star, J. R. (2016). Improve math teaching with incremental improvements. Phi Delta Kappan, 97<\/em>(7), 58-62.<\/span><\/p>\n

Featured Image: “Choose”<\/a> by Nithinan Tatah, TH<\/span><\/a>\u00a0from the Noun Project<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While reading “Integrating the Organizational Change Literature: A model for Successful Change” by Al-Haddad and Kotnour (2015) as part of the readings for the course in LRNT 525, one of the things that stood out for me was the importance of incremental change. Al-Haddad and Kotnour (2015) explains that “sometimes the most economical and cost […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":187,"featured_media":361,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[61,62,63,53,64],"class_list":["post-360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lrnt525","tag-change","tag-education","tag-incremental","tag-leadership","tag-transformational"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0165\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0165\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0165\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0165\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/187"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0165\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=360"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0165\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":362,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0165\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360\/revisions\/362"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0165\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0165\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0165\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0165\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}