Leading Change In Schools Towards Sustainable Improvement In A South African Province

Author(s):

Arrie Van Wyk(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

32. Organizational Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

32 SES 04, Leading Change in Educational Organizations

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-23

09:00-10:30

Room:

K3.18

Chair:

Petr Novotný

Contribution

Changes have taken place in the education sector in South Africa after 1994 to rectify unequal practices (Phakathi, 2013). Since then some schools perform above the required benchmark while the majority of the schools situated in poverty-stricken communities, underperform, notwithstanding investment from various organisations, including the Department of Basic Education (Smithies, 2008; Prew, 2010). A factor that has consistently been identified in the literature over the past quarter century at least as being critical for managing change and raising the achievement of learners, is that of effective leadership (Liu, 2016; Ncgobo & Tickly, 2010; Van der Westhuizen, & Theron, 2014). The purpose of this research was to determine how to lead change in schools towards sustainable improvement in disadvantaged settings. The research question for this research is therefore as follows: How do leaders of schools lead change towards sustainable improvement in disadvantaged settings?

In attempt to solve this conundrum, the research seeks to explain it against the backdrop of Lewin’s (1951) change theory, the normative-re-educative and power-coercive theories (Chin & Benne, 1969), as well as the environmental-adaptive theory of Nickols (2016). According to Lewin’s theory, people in the organisation are usually in equilibrium with their work environment. Disturbing the equilibrium might be a source of anxiety and hence impacts negatively on people. The result will be that people want to restore the status quo in their work environment at all cost (Nonceba , Ntuta, & Schurink, 2010); Van Wyk & Van der Westhuizen, 2015). The first phase of Lewin’s theory, unfreezing, entails the disturbance of existing practices in schools that are obsolete and not working effectively anymore. The second phase of Lewin’s (1951) theory is where the actual change is implemented. The necessary resources for the change, effective and continuous communication during the change, as well as continuous support seems to be paramount during this phase (Owens, & Valesky 2011). Olcum, & Titrek, 2015). The last phase of Lewin’s theory entails the refreezing of the change efforts and the change process can only be concluded as successful if the first two phases were handled appropriately.

During these phases leaders have the latitude to choose among different strategies, namely the normative-re-educative strategy, power-coercive strategy and environmental-adaptive theories or they could use all three theories exchangeable to alter the status quo. The prevailing culture of the school will assist them in this regard. The underlying assumptions of the normative-re-educative theory are that people are social beings and will follow cultural norms and values that satisfy their basic views of reality in their workplaces (Chin & Benne, 1969). In the case where people are dissatisfied with realities at their workplaces, the construction of a different reality requires changes in the assumptions, beliefs, and values of the organisation members, which in turn implies changes in their behaviour (Janićijević, 2012). Furthermore, Speck (1996), is of the view that the power-coercive theory is based on the view that people are basically accommodating and will generally do what they are told to do or can be made to do it and that efficacious change is based on unilateral communication and the application and imposition of power and penalties by leaders (Zafar et al., 2013). As a last resort, leaders could use the environmental-adaptive theory which is grounded on the building of a new organisation and progressively relocating people from the old one to the new one (Zafar et al., 2013). This strategy transfers the inconvenience of change from management and the organisation to the employees (Janićijević, 2012). All these theories have advantages and disadvantages and leaders have to carefully balance the application of it

Method

A qualitative research design, together with an interpretative orientation, was followed to interview principals and focus groups at six different rural schools in one of the nine provinces of South Africa (Nieuwenhuis, 2014). Three good performing and three underperforming school were selected. Good performing school were chosen to inform us what did they do well to change their schools or what does it take to keep the school at a high performing level while the underperforming schools could inform us why they are not able to change the schools or what are they doing and why it may not succeed in the short to middle term. Underperforming schools are schools with a lower than 70% pass rate. To be able to compare schools, schools from a similar context and location were selected. This approach was suitable, as the detail of the problem could only be founded by talking directly to people, by going to their workplaces and allowing them to tell stories unrestricted by what was expected to be found or what was read in literature (Creswell, 2013). The interpretative paradigm was applicable in this research, since the reality of the situation in the different schools was co-constructed by the researcher and shaped by the individual experiences of principals and teachers in their schools respectively (Creswell, 2013). This reality that was constructed, gave rise to problem-solving techniques to the existing problems in their schools. The research made use of purposive sampling in order to get applicable and rich information from the participants (Creswell, 2009). In this regard, the criteria to select the participants were, among others, gender, experience, persons who attend all meetings and developmental opportunities, as well as those who have a variety of perspectives on different issues in education. The normal ethical process was followed including ethical clearance from the own institution, (NWU) as well as the different provincial departments of education and the individual participants. The interviews were recorded and transcribed from which the coding and analysis was done. Individual interviews were conducted with the principals while the focus group interviews were conducted with teachers, including heads of departments. The advantage of the focus group is that people inform each other and built on each other’s perspectives which are a form of knowledge construction which is aligned with the interpretive methodology.

Expected Outcomes

The results showed that some leaders did not exhibit the appropriate leadership behaviour to be of assistance to improve their schools. It becomes thus crucial for the DoBE to appoint leaders who will be able to relate to recent management approaches. Since the workload of school leaders in South Africa had increased over time, they must also make use of specialists and district officials at their disposal. In order to get the buy-in of all stakeholders, leaders must be at the forefront of motivating, monitoring, supporting, enabling and even disciplining others. They could use the strategies as was outlined by the normative-re-educative-, power-coercive-and the environmental-adaptive theories. Furthermore, the results indicated that principals and teachers ascribed the improvement of their schools to the hard and extra work of teachers. It is indicative that the change process was consolidated and refreezes at specific schools. Since these attributes of teachers are contagious, it might influence the learners and parents positively. It is alleged by principals that, since parents signed forms to pledge co-ownership for their children’s education, these schools move out of their underperforming basis. Principals and teachers are of the view that regular communication with relevant parties is important in order to establish strategies to rectify the mistakes that were made in classrooms. Furthermore, the results of this research indicate that there are some schools that are not sustainable in their improvement due to the fact that assistance to these underperforming schools is not sustainable. The latter is testimony of the use of only one strategy, maybe the power-coersive or the environmental-adaptive strategy to improve the Grade 12 results at the end of the academic year. It is therefore recommended that the assistance of the Department of Basic Education (DoBE) must be for all schools for sustainable improvement, irrespective of their performing status.

References

Chin, R., & Benne, K. D. (1969). General strategies for effective change in human systems. In W. G. Bennis, K. D. Benne, & R. Chin (eds.), The planning of change (2nd ed.). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Creswell, J. W. (2013). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five approaches (3rd ed.). USA: Sage. Janićijević, N. (2012). The influence of organizational culture on organizational preferences towards the choice of organizational change strategy. Economic Annals, (LVII)93, 25-51. Lewin, K. (1951). Field theory in social sciences. New York: Harper & Row. Liu, P. (2016). Transforming turnaround schools in China: a review. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, DOI: 10.1080/09243453.2016.1239641 Ngcobo, T. & Tikly, L. P. (2010). Key dimensions of effective leadership for change: a focus on township and rural schools in South Africa. Educational Management Administration and Leadership, 38(2), 202-228. Nickols, F. (2016). Four strategies for managing change. Distance Consulting. pp 1-7. Nieuwenhuis, J. (2014). Analysing qualitative data. In K. Maree (Ed.), First steps in research (pp. 99-117). Van Schaik. Pretoria. Nonceba P., Ntuta, N. P., & Schurink, W. J. (2010). Towards sustaining performance in a Gauteng secondary school. South African Journal of Human Resource Management, 8(1), 1-9. Olcum, D. & Titrek, O. (2015). The effect of school administrators’ decision-making styles on teacher job satisfaction. Procedia: Social and Behavioral Sciences, 197, 1936-1946. Owens, R. G. & Valesky T. C. (2011). Organisational behaviour in education. Leadership and school reform. Boston: Pearson Phakathi, B. (2013, 19 September). Minister questions no-fee school model. Financial Mail. Prew, M. (2010, 10 June). SA Education: A case of mistaken identity. Mail and Guardian. Smithies, G. 2008. Schools Matter: “Underperforming”. Retrieved from http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2008/05/underperformimg.html Speck, M. (1996). The change process in a school learning community. The School Community Journal, 6(1), 69-79. Van der Westhuizen, P. C. & Theron, A. M. C. (2014). Resistance to change in education. In P.C. van der Westhuizen (Ed.), Schools as Organisations (pp. 218-242). Pretoria. Van Schaik. Van Wyk, A. & Van der Westhuizen, P. C. (2015). Resistance to change in impoverished schools of a South African Province. Problems and Perspectives in Management, 13(4), 172-180. Zafar, F., Alam, A., & Khan, S. (2013). How Change Management Can Improve Business Processes. International Journal of Scientific Engineering and Research, 2(1), 81-85.

Author Information

Arrie Van Wyk (presenting / submitting)

North West University: Potchefstroom Campus

Potchefstroom

Search the ECER Programme

Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
Search for authors and in the respective field.
For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.