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  1. Knowledge occurs when an individual (or other decision-making unit) is exposed to an innovation’s existence and gains an understanding of how it functions.
  2. Persuasion occurs when an individual (or other decision-making unit) forms a favorable or an unfavorable attitude towards the innovation.
  3. Decision takes place when an individual (or other decision-making unit) engages in activities that lead to a choice to adopt or reject the innovation.
  4. Implementation occurs when an individual (or other decision-making unit) puts a new idea into use.
  5. Confirmation takes place when an individual seeks reinforcement of an innovation-decision already made, but he or she may reverse this previous decision if exposed to conflicting messages about the innovation. (p. 163)

In this study there was recognition that the educational delivery system, as well as teaching and learning, were evolving into something different from what the schools, classrooms, teaching and learning looked like in the recent past. As one school leader explained, “Education tends to move pretty slowly. It probably took forty years to get the overhead projector out of the bowling alley into the classroom.” And, the problem isn’t only one of resistance to change. It is also an incremental adaptation of the school district bureaucracy to changes in physical space, teaching, learning, and use of time to support the learning process. According to another school leader:

Whether there’s a piece of technology involved or not, I think that the space has to change to reflect what’s going on more and more with teaching and learning and that is that people are realizing that it is a social activity and it is something that we do in a variety of modes, that we don’t just “sit and get” but that we gather together and we reflect quietly and we work on projects in small groups and we collaborate and we build and . . . I mean so I need space that allows me the flexibility to jump from a lecture.

In this school district there was an incubation period that helped parents, teachers, principals, board members, and other community leaders gain a positive perspective before an implementation decision was made.

Christensen, Horn,&Johnson (2008) described the inability of present day schools to innovate and change because they have a “structure that mirrors the architecture of their product” (p. 207). The fundamental problem with bringing about innovation and change is that the adults in the typical school district do not have the knowledge or capacity to make the dramatic changes in that traditional bureaucratic architecture.

An architectural change for a school entails combining subjects, reordering who does what and how, imagining new roles for computers, instituting project-based work, altering the hours, and so forth. Combining the study of history and literature into a single course in which each discipline is used to examine the other is an example of an architectural innovation. (p. 208)

This study surfaced the divide between how one educational organization recognized the impact of technology/software innovation upon teaching, with a lagging but growing awareness of the disruptive nature of this innovation upon the entire school system. Yet, this divide did not keep the district from moving forward with implementation.

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Source:  OpenStax, Education leadership review, volume 12, number 2 (october 2011). OpenStax CNX. Sep 26, 2011 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11360/1.3
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