Action Research for Organizational Development in Higher Education 1

5 Action Research for Organizational Development in Higher Education 1

What are the processes for managing change in higher education? How does an organization with traditions of academic freedom respond to a new government policy for teacher education? Can action research support the processes of change more effectively if senior managers and professors carry out action research into their own role as change agents? In 1989, while I was still working on the PALM Project but aware that my contract would be coming to an end the following year, I heard about the newly published Trotter Report on Information Technology in Initial Teacher Education (DES 1989a) at the Association for IT in Teacher Education (ITTE) confer- ence. The Trotter committee had been set up after an education minister had been embarrassed by roars of laughter when he announced at a con- ference that newly qualified teachers, skilled in using information technol- ogy (IT), would be able to take the lead when they took up their first teach- ing posts in schools. The report confirmed suspicions that the provision of training in how to use IT for pre-service teachers was generally poor, ‘patchy’ at best. Reading the report in detail I found that it included a rec- ommendation that ‘NCET should take steps to expand and broaden the advice and assistance that it offers to initial teacher education institutions, especially in the area of staff development’ (DES 1989a: 22). Knowing a lot about the challenges and possibilities that the IT innovation was posing for schools, I was interested in looking at the same innovation in the very dif- ferent context of teacher education. I went home and wrote a proposal to NCET outlining an action research project to explore how to support the development of IT in teacher education. I received no response for several months. The Trotter report attracted considerable interest among policy makers however, and as a result, new guidelines for teacher education pro- duced by the Council for Accreditation in Teacher Education (CATE) included requirements for all newly qualified teachers to be able to:

1 I would like to thank the 14 members of the Project INTENT team with whom I worked for their enormous contribution to the ideas contained in this chapter.

ACTION RESEARCH FOR ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

i make confident personal use of a range of software packages and IT devices appropriate to their subject specialism and age range;

ii review critically the relevance of software packages and IT devices to their subject specialism and age range and judge the potential value of these in classroom use;

iii make constructive use of IT in their teaching and in particular prepare and put into effect schemes of work incorporating appro- priate uses of IT; and

iv evaluate the ways in which the use of IT changes the nature of teaching and learning. (DES 1989b: Circular 24/89)

Then, in the spring of 1990, NCET advertised the post of co-ordinator for a project that had considerable similarities with the proposal I had sent them the previous year. The person employed could either be based in Coventry or remain in their current institution. I applied for the job and was appointed, opting to remain based at CARE/UEA.

The project was to be called Initial Teacher Education and New Technology (INTENT). As originally specified by NCET, five participating teacher education institutions (TEIs) would each be given half the funding to release a tutor from teaching for a year, provided they matched this to release the tutor full time. The idea was that the tutor would support col- leagues in beginning to use IT in their teaching by working alongside them very much in the way that the newly appointed subject specialist advisory teachers were working with teachers in schools (see Chapter 4: 101). There was to be support from a national co-ordinator and project secretary with a budget to provide low-level additional funding for specific initiatives in the TEIs, and NCET had a further budget to fund regular meetings of the project team and publications arising from the work. The project would run for two years and the co-ordinator, according to the original plan, would provide support in year one and evaluate the impact of the initiative in year two.

In the fortnight or so after my appointment I worked with NCET to develop and refine the research design, making changes which significantly shaped the future project’s methodology and working practices. A key feature of the re-designed project was that very senior managers would become active participants, carrying out action research into their own role in supporting change. The project would adopt ‘a research approach to development’, continuing to carry out development work over two years rather than one, led by a partnership of a staff development tutor (SDT, funded in year one) and senior manager (without external funding) in each TEI, who would both attend the residential project meetings; as co-ordina- tor I was to work more holistically, combining support for development in the TEIs with evaluation over the whole period. The participating institu- tions were selected through a competitive tendering process in which, from

ACTION RESEARCH

24 original applications, 12 TEIs were short-listed. This surprisingly large number of applications, given the low level of funding, perhaps indicated the perceived timeliness of the initiative. Over a period of three weeks, during glorious summer weather, I drove around the country spending a day in each TEI, interviewing those identified to lead the project if they were selected, asking to know who exactly would be making up the ‘active team’ of colleagues, outlining the proposed roles of the lead staff develop- ment tutor and senior manager, and ending by asking, notebook in hand, if they would both be available to attend the planning week in early September. Five TEIs were selected: Chester College of HE, Goldsmiths’ College at the University of London University, Liverpool Polytechnic, Worcester College of HE and the University of Exeter.