Conclusions. Seven Lessons to Build an Education Renaissance After the Pandemic

This chapter draws out seven lessons from the cross-country analysis of the six reforms studied in this chapter. These are: Lesson 1. The power of complex mindsets about education reform. The six reforms all reflect reliance on the worldviews presented in the five frames of reform: cultural, psychological, professional, institutional and political. Those that have been sustained relied on insights from more of these five frames than those that were short lived. Lesson 2. Implementation matters considerably. The chapter discusses how the implementation process in effect recreates a reform, and how the development of an operational strategy defining the details of reform is what in the end most matters to the success of reform. The chapter discusses how the six reforms produced rather distinct operational strategies of seemingly similar components of the reform such as the learning goals for students or teacher professional development. Implementation strategies are also based on implicit theories of how organizations work, and the chapter explains the usefulness of a developmental theory of how organizations evolve to designing strategies that are aligned with the functionings that are possible in a given developmental stage, while also helping the organization evolve towards higher levels of functioning. Lesson 3. The need for operational clarity. People can’t execute what they don’t understand, and a reform must be able to translate goals into clear objectives and reform components into clear tasks which can be widely communicated and understood, as well as tracked to discern improvement and course correct when necessary. Lesson 4. Large scale reform is a journey: Coherence, Completeness and the Five Frames. The chapter explains how using the five dimensional theory of educational change can support coherence and completeness in a reform. Lesson 5. Sequencing, pacing and the importance of first steps. An operational strategy needs to be sequenced attending to ambition of goals, to existing levels of capacity and to institutional stage of development of the system. The first steps in the sequence are consequential because they shape the narrative of reform in ways that have long lasting consequences. Lesson 6. Staying the course. Long policy cycles are essential for reforms to be implemented and to produce results, and those cannot be taken for granted. Coherence, communication and participation can garner support that sustains a reform over time. Lesson 7. Learning from experience to build system level capacity. Most important to the coherent implementation of a reform is to create opportunities for key stakeholders, at various levels of the system, to learn together as a result of implementing components of the reform. Creating feedback loops and processes for making sense of such information is critical to support such learning.