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Communicating change to schools glossary
45 terms from R20, Communicating change to schools — 21 defined in the guide itself and 24 more from the field around it. Every term the guide teaches links to the slide that teaches it.
R20 · How to measure & scale
Communicating change to schools
Does the right person know what changed, why, and what to do?
Every term below is defined in the words of communicating change to schools, guide R20 of craft guides for educational technologists, and opens the guide at the slide where it is taught. 24 of the 45 are the field’s vocabulary rather than the guide’s own: words a reader will meet around this subject, defined here because the guide assumes them. 2 terms are also defined by another guide in the series; where the two differ, both wordings are given. The whole craft glossary holds all of them together.
| Term | Definition | Referred to in | Read further |
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| A | |||
| Audience segmentation | Dividing the people a change affects into groups by role, need or situation, so that each group gets the message that applies to it. |
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| Audience-first message | A message that opens with what changes for the reader, from when, and what they must do. |
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| C | |||
| Call to action | The line in a message that tells the reader exactly what to do next, such as a button, a link or a dated instruction. |
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| Cascade | The chain of people a change message passes through, from the centre to the classroom. |
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| Change impact assessment | An analysis of which groups a change affects, in what way and how much, used to decide who needs which message, training and support. |
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| Change note | A short public record of what changed on a page or in a product, written so a reader can act on it (Government Digital Service, n.d.-a). |
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| Changelog | A curated, dated list of the notable changes in each version of a product (Lacan, 2026). |
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| Circular | An official notice sent by a ministry or authority to all the schools or bodies it oversees, usually numbered and dated. |
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| Communications plan | A schedule of who needs to be told what, by whom, through which channel and when, agreed before a change is announced. |
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| Content design | The practice of helping people quickly find out what they need to know or do, a test of the reader's position after the message, not of the sender's activity before it (Government Digital Service, n.d.-e). R07 Meeting a user need with the right content, in the right format and place (Winters, 2019). |
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| Curse of knowledge | The difficulty people have in setting aside what they know when judging what others know (Camerer et al., 1989). |
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| D | |||
| Deprecation | A warning that a feature will be removed in a later release, given before it goes. |
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| E | |||
| Embargo | An agreement that information shared in advance will not be published or passed on before a set date and time. |
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| End of life (EOL) | The date after which a product or version is no longer sold, updated or supported, announced in advance so users can move off it. |
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| Explain-back | A check in which the people affected describe the change and what they will do, in their own words. |
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| Explainer pack | A short set of materials that lets a school leader or head of department explain a change. |
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| F | |||
| F-shaped pattern | The way people often scan web text: across the top, across again a little lower, then down the left side (Pernice, 2017). |
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| Front-loading | Putting the most important information at the start of a message, heading or line. |
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| G | |||
| Grapevine | An organisation's informal network of conversation, which carries news of a change faster than official channels and with less accuracy. |
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| Guiding coalition | A group with enough authority, expertise and credibility to lead a change and speak for it, the second of Kotter's eight steps. |
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| I | |||
| In-app notification | A message shown inside a product while it is in use, such as a banner, badge or pop-up, rather than sent by email or text. |
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| Information overload | The point at which a person receives more information than they can process, so that decisions get worse and messages are missed. |
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| Inverted pyramid | A structure that starts with the most important point and tapers to detail. |
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| K | |||
| Key message | One of the few points a communicator wants every reader to remember, agreed in advance and repeated in the same words across channels. |
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| L | |||
| Lead-in time | The time between announcing a change and the date it takes effect. | ||
| M | |||
| Media richness | A channel's capacity to carry cues and allow quick feedback. Face-to-face talk is rich and a bulk email is lean; ambiguous messages need richer channels. |
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| Moment of use | The point at which a person meets a change while doing their task. |
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| N | |||
| Noise | Anything that distorts or drowns a message between sender and receiver, from a crowded inbox to an inaccurate retelling. |
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| O | |||
| Open rate | The share of delivered emails that recipients opened. It is a rough measure, because image blocking and privacy features distort the count. |
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| P | |||
| Paraphrase test | A test in which readers restate a text in their own words, to show what they understood (General Services Administration, n.d.). |
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| Plain language | Writing that lets its intended readers find what they need, understand it and use it (International Organization for Standardization, 2023). |
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| R | |||
| Readability formula | A calculation that estimates how hard a text is to read from measures such as sentence length and word length; Flesch Reading Ease is the best known. |
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| Reading age | The age at which a typical reader could understand a text, used as a target when writing for a broad audience. |
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| Release note | An announcement of the changes in one release, drawn from the changelog and shaped for its readers. |
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| S | |||
| Sense of urgency | A shared belief that a change is needed now. Kotter makes establishing it the first step of a change effort, before any solution is announced. |
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| Sensegiving | A leader's attempt to shape how others interpret a change, by offering a preferred account of what it means and why it matters. |
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| Sensemaking | The process by which people interpret a change in light of what they already know and do (Spillane et al., 2002). |
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| Serial reproduction | Experiments in which material is retold from one person to the next; they suggest familiar material survives retelling better than unfamiliar material (Ost et al., 2022). | ||
| Stages of concern | A model of how people's concerns about a change shift, from information and personal impact towards consequences and refinement (Hall & Hord, 2014). R19 Seven stages describing what a person worries about as they meet a change, from unconcerned to refocusing (Hall & Hord, 2014). |
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| Statutory guidance | Guidance issued under a legal power, which schools must have regard to and need a good reason to depart from. |
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| Style guide | An organisation's written rules for spelling, terms, punctuation and formatting, kept so that everything it publishes reads consistently. |
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| T | |||
| Tapper study | A 1990 Stanford study in which people tapping out well-known songs predicted listeners would name about half, and listeners named three of 120, or 2.5% (Newton, 1990). |
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| Tone of voice | The consistent character of an organisation's writing, such as how formal, warm or direct it is, adjusted to the reader's situation. |
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| Two-step flow of communication | The finding that messages often reach people through opinion leaders, who take them from the media and pass them on with their own interpretation. |
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| Two-way communication | Communication in which the audience can reply and the sender listens and adjusts, as opposed to one-way broadcast. |
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