Educational Reform and School Leadership in 3-D Perspective

by Andy Hargreaves and Dean Fink

Overview

In this article, Andy Hargreaves and Dean Fink look at three factors they believe lead to sustained educational reform:

  • depth – reform that improves important rather than superficial aspects of students’ learning
  • duration – reform that can be sustained over long periods of time after the first flush of innovation
  • breadth – reform that is applicable to multiple school sites as a transformative initiative.

The authors explore these factors using the stories of two new high schools in the United Kingdom, Lord Byron and Blue Mountain, to illustrate their thesis. Both schools, initially regarded as lead schools in terms of their innovative approaches to schooling, failed to live up to their potential. Their "trajectories of change" were similar – early promise, followed by fading enthusiasm, then initiatives that were eventually eclipsed by community politics and government policies.

An important issue to emerge from the article is that individual school improvement efforts cannot be isolated from their surrounding policy context – changes are only sustained in schools when government policies do not undermine them.

The authors also go on to outline three "moral and strategic touchstones of reform” that can be used to underpin a sustainable reform process.

Reflective questions

These reflective questions might guide you in your reading of this article:

  • Think about any high-profile schools you know of that set out to be innovative. What happened to them, and why?
  • What innovations are you interested in exploring at your school? How would you introduce the innovation to your school, keeping in mind a three-dimensional perspective?
  • What do you understand by 'deep learning' – how would you recognise it?
  • If you are introducing changes, how easy/difficult is the process made by community politics or government policies?

Further reading

Two Heads Better Than One? Building a Cross-Phase School of the Future by Alison Banks, Catherine Finn, Smita Bora, Karen Lees, and Carol Watson.

This report records and analyses the experiences of a unique situation – the appointment of two principals to two new schools in Essex, England, which were being designed to be one innovative 'future school'.

Reference

This NCSL evidence base paper is abridged and adapted from Hargreaves, A., & Fink, D. (2000, April). The three dimensions of educational reform. Educational Leadership, 57(7), 30-34. PDF added with permission

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