Thinking about change in a Thinking School: Conceptualising whole school change in the context of an English secondary school

Abstract

Abstract Thinking about change in a Thinking School: Conceptualising whole school change in the context of an English secondary school This thesis examines a qualitative case study of whole school change based on the perceived experiences of members of a Staff Drive Team and a Student Drive Team in a coeducational selective secondary school. The Staff and Student Drive Teams are a special feature of Thinking Schools, tasked with driving whole school change for cognitive teaching and learning that encourages an intentional, explicit, and long-term commitment to the process of teaching and learning for, of, and about thinking. This study seeks a further understanding of whole school change through a systems theory perspective by considering the role of practices, processes and structures involved, as well as their interrelationships. The philosophical underpinnings of this research encompass constructivist principles from an interpretive relativist position. The case study draws on two non-participant observations, two initial focus groups, 16 semi-structured interviews and two final focus groups as primary data sources combined with contextual secondary information from three school development plans, ten agendas of Drive Teams meetings and three Thinking School accreditation reports. The semi-structured interviews are analysed adopting Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), with Content analysis (CA) employed for the rest of the data. An integrated theoretical and analytical framework is developed to interpret the findings, drawing from previous research on whole school change (Thomson, 2010) based on systems theory with influences from systems thinking (Senge, 1990) and ecological development (Bonfenbrenner, 1979) and subject to autopoietic connotations. This research concludes that initial struggles with resistance to whole school change were reframed and translated into openness to change achieved through systems thinking. The findings indicate that the Student and Staff Drive Teams experienced the whole school change for cognitive teaching and learning as ongoing systemic change and as a multiple-loop, multi-layered learning process supported by risk taking, reflection, teams interrelations, non-negotiable whole school change, common values and language, and continuous learning. From this case study, a ‘petal’ model of whole school change is proposed as meriting further attention.