Innovations in Educational Change: Cultivating Ecologies for Schools

Description

This book offers an ecological perspective to understand the opportunities and complexities of spreading and sustaining educational innovations. It explores the imperatives underpinning educational reforms and identifies the role of schools in developing, disseminating, and sustaining changes in Singapore’s educational context. It also includes international case studies that examine the dialectical relationships between structure, people and culture and demonstrate that cultivating ecologies involves leveraging affordances and resources across the education system to create new contexts, synergies and capacities. Further, it argues that educational innovations and reforms also need to consider tacit knowledge and conditions of transfer, which may be ambiguous and challenging. Few books address the nuances and interactions of innovation and change across levels of the education ecology – from the micro (classroom), meso (organisation / school), exo (partners), macro (policy) and chrono (time scales) levels. The ecological perspective adopted in this book explores the dynamic tensions in order to understand the interplays of policy and school-level influences that contextualize school innovations. By presenting multiple voices and views, it allows impediments and affordances of innovation diffusion to be discussed holistically, which is an integral caveat for nurturing a sustainable ecology that enables innovations. Front Matter ....Pages i-xx Front Matter ....Pages 1-1 Centralised-Decentralisation in Singapore Education Policymaking (Paul Meng-Huat Chua, Yancy Toh, Sujin He, Azilawati Jamaludin, David Hung)....Pages 3-21 Transforming Education for All: Tower Hamlets and Urban District Education Improvement (Chris Brown, Chris Husbands, David Woods)....Pages 23-38 Front Matter ....Pages 39-39 Wide-Scale Implementation Through Capacity Building of Senior Leaders: The Case of Teaching Thinking in Israeli Schools (Anat Zohar)....Pages 41-63 Spreading Educational Technology Innovations: Cultivating Communities (Fei Victor Lim, Yew Meng Kwan, Meng Leng Poh)....Pages 65-83 Towards a Framework of Diffusing Education Innovations at Different Levels of the System (Imran Shaari, David Hung, Yusuf Osman)....Pages 85-102 Community-Based Design Research to Sustain Classroom Innovation with ICT (Chew Lee Teo)....Pages 103-118 Front Matter ....Pages 119-119 Negotiating Policy Meanings in School Administrative Practice: Practice, Professionalism, and High-Stakes Accountability in a Shifting Policy Environment (James Spillane, Lauren Anderson)....Pages 121-145 School Orientation to Teacher Learning and the Cultivation of Ecologies for Innovation: A National Study of Teachers in England (David Pedder, V. Darleen Opfer)....Pages 147-179 Seeding Change: Growing and Sustaining a School’s Culture of Innovativeness (Shu-Shing Lee, Peter Seow, David Hung)....Pages 181-203 Diffusing Innovative Pedagogies in Schools in Singapore: Case Studies on School Leaders’ Diffusion Approaches and Their Rationalisations (Jun Song Huang)....Pages 205-222 Front Matter ....Pages 223-223 Exploring the Change in Nature and Efficacy of Learners’ Questions Through Progressive Interaction with the Stanford Mobile Inquiry-based Learning Environment (SMILE) (Kenneth Y. T. Lim, Bing Heng Song, Matthew Xiang Kho)....Pages 225-251 Exploring the Dimensions of Interest Sustainability (5Cs Framework): Case Study of Nathan (Aik Lim Tan, David Hung, Azilawati Jamaludin)....Pages 253-276 Conclusion: Tenets for Cultivating Ecologies: Towards Sustaining Innovations and Self-Improving Schools (David Hung, Shu-Shing Lee, Azilawati Jamaludin, Yancy Toh, Longkai Wu)....Pages 277-290 Back Matter ....Pages 291-295