From Planning for Change to Seeing Intended Change in Practice

Friday 20 November 2009
09.15-10.00 IST (GMT + 5.5 hours)

The world is awash with educational policy documents. Policy makers and academic experts outline rationales for, detail the content of, and state more or less explicit outcomes of, educational change initiatives. Successful achievement of the stated goals of many such changes entails a profound reorientation of many existing educational practices and assumptions. Perhaps this is why it is so rare to see evidence of the implementation of such changes resulting in widespread adoption of practices consistent with even approximate achievement of hoped-for outcomes.

India , in common with many other countries worldwide, is currently engaged in planning for and / or implementing (ELT) Curriculum and Teacher Education Reform. Many features of the contexts into which such reforms are introduced are of course different from setting to setting within and between countries. The exact route and rate of implementation will thus inevitably differ from place to place. However, there are a number of core issues that implementers need to consider in all contexts, since these issues critically influence the extent to which the complex changes that the reforms hope to implement can ever become widely visible in classrooms. This talk hopes to illustrate these using ideas from the educational change literature and examples of real ELT change implementation contexts in various places. Some of the issues identified will provide a focus for the implementation planning discussions that will follow in the next session.