Seeding Change: Growing and Sustaining a School’s Culture of Innovativeness

The twenty-first century compels schools to shift towards dialogic, student-centred learning orientations. This change involves developing teachers’ capacities to innovatively balance teacher-directed and student-centred approaches to provide students with quality learning experiences. This chapter describes a Singapore school’s change journey in which teachers were encouraged to engage in ICT-mediated curricular innovations and grow a culture of innovativeness. We postulate that change involves interactions and alignments at multiple levels (school, district, and national) of the education system. We appropriate theoretical understandings of change and leadership informed by a systems and complexity viewpoint to unpack the tenets of change which shape a school’s culture of innovativeness in the Singapore context. Findings describe structures and processes for change that the school leader created by initiating curriculum innovations, developing teachers’ capacities to balance teacher-centred with student-centred approaches, and sustaining the school’s culture of innovativeness. Findings are discussed to understand the directives from the education system and the mechanisms that school leaders create to catalyse change from a top-down approach, as well as the synergies within and across levels of the education system which school leaders address so as to encourage bottom-up efforts and stakeholders’ ownership to spread and sustain cultures within and across schools.