Empathetic Understanding of Teachers’ Resistance to Change

 Published in Iatefl Blogs October 2020

EduLEADER, August 2020

     School leaders often face resistance when introducing a new approach to be adapted by teachers. This was evident when schools had to abruptly shift to online teaching during the involuntary closure of schools due to the COVID-19 lock down. While administrators were pushing for the shift to online teaching, many teachers, who are instrumental for the success of this shift, resisted it. The stand of either side is justified since each perceives teaching online from a different perspective.

      Administrators need to lead their institutions. In their attempts to keep up with change, maintain the existence of their institutions, and perform their duty of educating children, they are required to act as a driving force to cause change to occur. This is necessary but might be countered by an opposing force from the teachers. At a first glance, teachers might be perceived negatively for not wanting the change to occur, but with careful study, their attitudes are justified and need to be dealt with and understood with extreme patience and tolerance. A sudden adoption of a new approach by the school is likely to drift teachers from their comfort zone, and that can cause them stress and anxiety. The feeling of failure at trying something new is enough to cause resistance to it.  All this can be due to lack of knowledge and skills and abilities in what the school is proposing.

      Change should be planned well for proper implementation. First, school leaders need to differentiate between resistance that is caused by the individual’s indifference and resistance that is caused by anxiety and fear of failure. To deal with the latter, educational leaders must approach the issue empathetically. Empathizing with teachers means understanding their points of views, their problems, experiences, feelings, and above all the stories they have. Those stories can be understood when conversing with teachers. Conversing empathetically, rather than interviewing them to elicit answers to questions, is what helps teachers reveal stories about their experiences and how those experiences have impacted their feelings and understandings. Such conversations will allow you to know that the teacher feels uneasy when giving a lesson via a video conferencing tool and how the mother of one of her students interfered in the lesson unexpectedly and wouldn’t stop giving answers to the questions asked to the class. During such conversations, you know that a teacher has problems giving lessons early in the morning because that is the time her toddler wakes up and wants his mommy beside him or else he throws a tantrum. Such conversations will let you know that the teacher feels uneasy during a live lesson because he doesn’t know how to stop the students from annotating on the screen which disrupts the class, and they all fall into laughter. These stories give the school leader much insight into the struggles of teachers, and that is when the driving force of the administration and the resisting force of the teachers unite into one force pushing into one direction: adoption, implementation, and change.

      Making informed decisions requires that the administration and other school leaders understand the reasons behind resistance (or acceptance) of change. Once understood, they can be evaluated and rated to understand which can be influenced and which cannot. Then it becomes easy to devise a strategy to enhance the points of strength and tackle the points of resistance. In the case of integrating technology to teach online, as the case is now that schools had to close down, the strategy might include a training agenda to equip teachers with the skills they need, creating coaching groups to support and mentor those who need assistance, providing resources for online teaching, creating support groups for sharing stories of successes and disappointments, and providing the necessary infrastructure for online teaching such as internet and devices.

      Change is a process of unfreezing a certain situation. It is only natural to experience resistance when initiating this process. But this resistance is not necessarily out of ill-intentions but may be due to lack of skills, abilities, and other necessary requirements. Discerning these needs makes it easier to make informed decisions and devise plans of action that would achieve optimal results. Once new behaviors are adopted, implemented, and sustained, the school culture will be functioning with a new normal. That is change.

Are We Focusing on What Matters Most in Classrooms?

EduLEADER Newsletter, March 2020

In our leadership practice, we focus on so many variables in classrooms to collect data. We use this data, whether numerical or narrative, to improve classroom performance for the purpose of improving students’ achievement. We ensure that we collect evidence that is concrete. Concrete evidence can be analyzed with teachers, and it functions as the basis for planning for improvement. However, are we collecting the appropriate evidence? Are we focusing on what matters most?

Classroom observations tend to focus mainly on the teacher. It could be because we subconsciously think that the teacher is the center of classroom action; an idea we have acquired from the education system we have been through for decades. Or, it could be because the teacher is the sole performer in the class, and we can’t but pay most attention to him or her. Whatever the reason is, we need to shift our attention from the teacher to the learners. This shift is vital for change. When focusing on the learners, focus should be on the tasks they are carrying out. Students might be pre-occupied with their tasks and with coming up with an outcome. But what kind of task is it? What outcome will it yield to? What level of thinking does it require? How related is it to the curriculum standards? The PISA[1] results in some countries are scary in that they show that students are not functioning well on tasks that require high levels of proficiency. PISA 2018, for example, showed that, 64% of 15-year-old children in Lebanese schools achieved at or below level 2 on reading proficiency[2]. If we are to assume that tasks predict performance, we can assume that those students are not engaged in their classrooms in tasks that require high levels of thinking, and thus, they are unable to perform on tasks that require high levels of thinking.

Another example that shows the need to focus on tasks is when students are engaged in project work. Educators and curricula encourage integrating projects in teaching for the many merits they have on learning. Through projects, students can synthesize a breadth of skills they have been working on to come up with a new composition that is their own. This is how creativity is reached. However, many times the outcome of such work is a superficial product that requires minimal thinking. Simply copying textbook material on a poster board is at times portrayed as project work. At other times, you might see a replica of information in the form of a wooden model that is made by parents or a carpenter in the student’s family portrayed as a project. Students might put together a simple PowerPoint presentation of information collected from Wikipedia and present it as a project.

The same is true to integrating technology into lessons. Technology integration into teaching can transform the class into a highly interactive and engaging one. However, the essential question is, “How effective are the tasks?” They might be interesting and engaging, but do they require high levels of thinking? Or, are they merely activities of matching items or classifying them into groups? Are the tasks related to the curriculum? Again, this is a situation where focus on the task is important.

While focus on the quality of the tasks is crucial, classroom interactions are just as important. The teacher, the content and the students should not each be focused on in isolation of the others, but focus should be on how the three components interact: what interactions take place among students, what are those that take place among students and the teacher, what are the interactions between students and teachers and the content? These interactions tell us a lot about the emotional support that takes place in the classroom, how much students’ perspectives are regarded, and how positive the climate is. In addition, they allow us to know how efficiently time is being used. The interactions can inform us about the tasks; how aligned they are with the standards, the level of thinking they require, and how engaging they are. Moreover, they inform us about the quality of feedback and the type of instruction students receive.

As teachers, we often focus on ourselves rather than on our learners. This is evident in the lesson planning. We see focus on the teachers’ actions more than on the students’. The lessons might be written from the teachers’ perspectives and are phrased in the first person singular. Here, focus should be shifted to the students and what tasks they will be carrying out in class. In classrooms, teachers need to be helped to shift from focusing on their performance to focusing on how their performance affects the students. The reflection sessions that take place after a classroom observation are a great opportunity for this. In these sessions, concrete data collected plays an important role in helping teachers focus on what should be focused on; the learners, their tasks and the classroom interactions.

[1] “PISA is the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment. PISA measures 15-year-olds’ ability to use their reading, mathematics and science knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges” https://www.oecd.org/pisa/.

[2] Levels of reading proficiency of PISA are 1a, 1b, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6