Understanding Complex Change

Using a change chart can help kick start conversations at a district or school level around what is missing in their tech integration plans. Missing any of the above vital building blocks can cause one of the many issues listed along the right-hand side. Using this same chart I decided to analyze my own school environment and my district to see if we were lacking in any of these regions. My results are as follows:

Despite being a public school, we are small with only 22 teachers in the entirety of our K-12 school. Second, as an expeditionary learning school, we as a staff are innovative, open to new thoughts and ideas, possess a thirsts for learning, and most importantly get along with each other and our principals. Our principals believe that we as a staff work best together when there is a high level of trust and thus he does not micromanage our time with useless meetings and check-ins. They put a lot of faith in us that we will collaborate on what matters and include them when we need them. Because of all of this, I really struggled to place our school on any level of the Complex Change chart other than the top. This is not to say that we are always there, but we are there with more consistency than I would say most other schools in our district are. Sometimes we do slide down to the Gradual Change level as incentives are not always presented with new ideas for change as we sometimes get the notion that the benefits of the change are incentive enough. This leads to a small group test driving the change and then if it works out, other staff follow suit later which again slows down the adoption of change efforts. However, our district as a whole experiences several gaps in the change chart. The biggest one is that it often forgets that it needs to help teachers acquire new skills when they roll out new forms of tech to buildings. Those less tech savvy often find themselves drowning or if they’ve been put in this spot before they don’t even bother to give it a shot as they’ve lost trust in the district to teach them what they need.