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Education reform glossary
35 terms from C23, Education reform: why change is slow and what scales — each defined in the primer's own words. Every term the primer teaches links to the slide that teaches it.
C23 · Evidence and change
Education reform: why change is slow and what scales
“Good innovations spread on merit.”
Every term below is defined in the words of education reform, primer C23 of understanding the context of education, and opens the primer at the slide where it is taught. 3 terms are also defined by another primer in the series; where the two differ, both wordings are given. The whole context glossary holds all of them together.
| Term | Definition | Referred to in | Read further |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | |||
| Adaptation | Changing a programme to fit the setting it lands in. Often treated as a failure of fidelity; in the few studies that measured it, adaptation was associated with better outcomes, not worse (Durlak & DuPre, 2008). Primer C11 covers it for curriculum. |
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| C | |||
| Coherence | Fullan and Quinn’s term for the "[s]hared depth of understanding about the purpose and nature of the work" across a school or system. It is a state in people’s heads, not an alignment of documents (Fullan & Quinn, 2016, quoted in DeWitt, 2016). |
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| Concerns-Based Adoption Model | Hall, Hord and colleagues' model, which treats adoption as something that happens to people rather than to organisations. Its two instruments are the stages of concern and levels of use (SEDL, n.d.-a, n.d.-b). |
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| Core of educational practice | Elmore’s term for "how teachers understand the nature of knowledge and the student’s role in learning, and how these ideas about knowledge and learning are manifested in teaching and classwork", together with the structural arrangements that hold them in place (Elmore, 1996, p. 2). |
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| D | |||
| De-implementation | "The systematic process of identifying, then reducing, replacing, or discontinuing low-value programs and practices, including organizational routines and policies" (Farmer et al., 2026). The counterpart to implementation, and far less often planned. |
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| Depth | Coburn’s (2003) first dimension of scale: change in the substance of practice, including beliefs and norms, rather than in its surface features. | ||
| Diffusion of innovations | Rogers’s account of how a new practice spreads through a population over time, through adopter categories from innovators to laggards, and according to how an innovation is perceived on attributes such as relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability and observability (Rogers, 2003). The craft series’ guide 19, Adoption and change in schools, covers it in detail. |
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| Disruptive innovation | Christensen's theory, applied to schooling with a forecast that by 2019 about half of high school courses would be delivered online. That did not happen, and it has been widely questioned (Christensen et al., 2008). C02 The theory that a new model first serves people the existing system does not, then improves until it displaces the old one; Christensen, Horn and Johnson applied it to schools (Christensen et al., 2008). |
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| E | |||
| Educational change | The general field concerned with how practice in schools and systems alters, why most attempts fail, and what distinguishes the ones that last. |
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| F | |||
| Fidelity | How closely delivery matches the design. One of eight aspects of implementation, alongside dosage, quality, participant responsiveness, programme differentiation, monitoring of comparison conditions, reach and adaptation (Durlak & DuPre, 2008). |
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| First- and second-order change | First-order change makes the existing arrangement work better; second-order change alters the arrangement itself. The distinction comes from Cuban (1988), and explains why most reforms that survive are of the first kind. |
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| G | |||
| Grammar of schooling | "The regular structures and rules that organize the work of instruction", such as age grades, periods and subjects (Tyack & Tobin, 1994, p. 454). Primer C02 covers it in depth. C02 "The regular structures and rules that organize the work of instruction", such as age grades, periods and subjects (Tyack & Tobin, 1994, p. 454). |
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| H | |||
| Hybrid | What usually results when an ambitious reform meets an existing classroom: some new language and materials over a largely undisturbed core (Cuban, 1984, reported in Elmore, 1996). |
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| I | |||
| Implementation drivers | The supports that make new practice usable: selection, training, coaching, performance assessment, data systems, facilitative administration and systems intervention. Fixsen et al. (2005) call them core implementation components and note that they compensate for one another. |
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| Implementation science | The study of what it takes to put an evidence-based practice into routine use, and of why the same programme produces different results in different places (Fixsen et al., 2005; Durlak & DuPre, 2008). |
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| Implementation stages | The stages a change passes through: exploration, installation, initial implementation and full implementation. They are not linear, and fully operationalising a practice can take two to four years (National Implementation Research Network, 2015). |
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| Improvement science | A discipline that treats variation between sites as the object of study, works in short cycles close to the practice, and measures the process as well as the outcome (Bryk et al., 2015). |
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| Initiative overload | The condition of a school running more initiatives than it has attention for, so that each is implemented shallowly. Fullan and Quinn describe coherence as "so difficult to accomplish under conditions of overload, fragmentation and policy churn" (quoted in DeWitt, 2016). |
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| Innovation | A practice, product or arrangement that is new to the people adopting it, whether or not it is new in the world. Newness to the adopter is what creates the implementation problem. |
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| Innovation fatigue | The loss of energy and credibility that follows repeated cycles of announcement and abandonment. It is what makes the next good idea harder to introduce than the last one. |
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| K | |||
| Kotter's eight-step change model | A popular change model that "appears to derive its popularity more from its direct and usable format than from any scientific consensus on the results"; best used as organised experience (Appelbaum et al., 2012). |
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| L | |||
| Levels of use | The second CBAM instrument: eight behavioural profiles from nonuse and orientation through preparation, mechanical use and routine use to refinement, integration and renewal (SEDL, n.d.-b). |
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| Lighthouse and pilot schools | Schools chosen to run a change first, either to test it (pilot) or to demonstrate it to others (lighthouse). Both give better-than-average conditions, which is what makes them useful for learning and misleading for forecasting. |
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| N | |||
| Networked improvement community | A group of sites working on the same specific problem with shared measures, so that what one learns is usable by the others. Proposed as an alternative to the usual organisation of educational research (Bryk et al., 2011). |
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| P | |||
| PDSA cycle | Plan, do, study, act: a short test of a change in real conditions, with a prediction made before the test and a decision made after it. The working unit of improvement science (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, n.d.). |
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| Pilot-to-scale | The move from a small, supported trial to system-wide use. Effects normally fall in the move: in teacher coaching, programmes with 100 teachers or more showed effects one-third to one-half the size of smaller ones (Kraft & Blazar, 2018). |
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| S | |||
| Scale | Not only how many sites have a reform, but how deeply practice has changed, whether it survives, how far it has spread, and whether ownership has shifted from the sponsor to the school (Coburn, 2003). | ||
| Shift in reform ownership | Coburn’s fourth dimension: the point at which a change stops being the sponsor’s project and becomes the school’s own practice. Without it, sustainability depends on continued external attention. |
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| Spread | Coburn's third dimension of scale: how widely a reform travels. It is countable, cheap to report and the least informative of the four (Coburn, 2003). |
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| Stages of concern | The first CBAM instrument: seven categories of concern about an innovation, running from unconcerned and informational through personal and management to consequence, collaboration and refocusing (SEDL, n.d.-a). |
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| Sustainability | Coburn’s second dimension of scale: whether a change persists once the funding, the champion or the attention moves on. | ||
| System leadership | Leadership exercised beyond one’s own school. "System leaders are those Heads or Principals who are willing to shoulder system wide roles in order to support the improvement of other schools as well as their own" (Hopkins & Harris, 2023). |
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| T | |||
| Teacher coaching | Follow-up support in the classroom where the work happens. Across 60 causal studies it moved instruction by about half a standard deviation, with effects thinning as programmes grow (Kraft et al., 2018). |
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| Tinkering | Gradual, incremental change that adapts reforms to schools, defended by Tyack and Cuban (1995) as a way to "preserve what is valuable and rework what is not" (p. 5). C02 Gradual, incremental change that adapts reforms to schools, defended by Tyack and Cuban (1995) as a way to keep what works. |
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| W | |||
| Wrong drivers | Fullan's term for what systems repeatedly pick: accountability rather than capacity building, individual quality rather than group solutions, technology rather than instruction, and fragmented rather than systemic strategies (Fullan, 2011). |
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