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Reports the results of a qualitative, cross‐sectional study involving a survey of 549 teachers′ perceptions of the Unit Curriculum system in 22 metropolitan state senior high schools in Perth, Western Australia, in the context of system‐wide change, within a centralized educational system. Surveyed perceptions of six general variables applied to the specific case of the Unit Curriculum system. These variables are: perceived cost benefit to the teacher; perceived practicality in the classroom; alleviation of fears and concerns; participation in school decisions on aspects affecting the classrooms; perceived support from senior staff; and feelings towards the previous system compared to the new system. Suggests these variables offer pointers to educational administrators on how best to tailor system‐wide changes so that teachers will be more receptive to the changes in the implementation stage.

This paper seeks to discuss the rationale of the newly reformed health education curriculum in Cyprus, which aspires to enable not only teachers, but also all the school personnel, to work from the perspective of health promotion. It is a curriculum which moves from the traditional approach of health education focusing on individual lifestyle/behaviour modification into approaches that recognise and tackle the determinants of health.

The paper critically discusses the structure and the content of the learning objectives of this curriculum that encourages teachers to work in a health promoting way.

The central goal of this curriculum is to enable students and schools to act as health agents, addressing the structural determinants of health and promoting environmental changes. The optimum level for all topics of the curriculum is achieved through learning objectives, which concern three interconnected levels. These are: “investigating determinants of health”, “practising action competency skills for health” and “achieving changes in favour of health”. All levels are means as well as end products in terms of the curriculum objectives.

The outcome of the development of the health education curriculum acts as a guide for school interventions, through a methodological framework, which encourages participants to identify and promote environmental changes that facilitate healthy choices. This is of significance to those working in the field of health promotion and who seek to establish a new language of health promotion that goes beyond the pervasive discourse of individual lifestyles.

The implementation of the particular health education curriculum will promote not only health in the school community but also in the local community. This is because a key principle which underlies the curriculum is the involvement of the students, school staff, family and community in everyday health promotion practice. It also promotes the development of partnerships among them.

This is an innovative curriculum for Cyprus, based on health promotion and health education principles, but at the same time taking in account the local socio‐cultural and political perspective. This curriculum may be applicable to other European countries.

This research aims to investigate the leadership strategies employed by two higher education institutions in Malaysia as they navigated the shift to online delivery of their computer science programs in response to the demands of Education 4.0.

A phenomenological, comparative case study approach was used to delve into the leadership and management practices of these institutions during the transition to online learning. Data were collected through interviews and document analysis.

This study explores the leadership strategies employed by two higher education institutions in Malaysia during their transition to online learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Five key themes emerged from the data: leadership and team coordination, training and skill development, adaptation to new assessment methods, resource management and work culture and environment. Both institutions demonstrated effective leadership, continuous training and adaptability in assessment methods. However, differences were noted in resource management and work culture. Institution A's leader had to liaise with various departments and personally invest in equipment, while Institution B was already well-equipped. The work culture at Institution A demonstrated flexibility and mutual understanding, while Institution B used key performance indicators to measure progress. Despite these differences, both leaders successfully managed the shift to online teaching, underscoring the importance of effective leadership, continuous training, flexibility, resource management and a supportive work culture in managing change. The study also highlighted the distinct roles of curriculum leaders in both institutions, with Institution A's leader focusing on multiple activities, while Institution B's leader was able to focus solely on curriculum change due to their institution's preparedness.

This study provides a rich, qualitative exploration of the strategies and challenges faced by program leaders in managing the shift to online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. Future research could build on these findings by conducting similar studies in other educational contexts or countries to compare and contrast the strategies and challenges faced by program leaders. Additionally, future research could also employ quantitative methods to measure the effectiveness of different strategies in managing the shift to online teaching. This could provide a more comprehensive understanding of the factors that contribute to successful change management in educational institutions.

This study provides valuable insights for program leaders, educators and policymakers in managing change in educational institutions. The themes identified in this study – effective leadership, continuous training and skill development, flexibility in adapting to new assessment methods, effective resource management and a supportive work culture and environment – can serve as a guide for program leaders in managing future changes in their institutions. Moreover, the strategies employed by the program leaders in this study, such as forming a powerful coalition, providing training on online tools and prioritizing student welfare, can be adopted or adapted by other program leaders in managing change.

This study presents a unique contribution to the existing literature by offering a comparative analysis of change management strategies in two distinct educational institutions during the shift to online teaching due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It uncovers the nuanced differences in leadership styles, resource management and pedagogical adaptations, providing a rich, context-specific understanding of the change process. The study fills a research gap by examining the practical application of Kotter's 8-Step Change Model and the McKinsey 7S Model in real-world educational settings. The findings offer valuable insights for other institutions navigating similar changes, thereby extending the practical and theoretical understanding of change management in higher education.

This chapter provides a synthesis of the research project which investigated whether or not the most recent mathematics curriculum reform has reached the classroom and influenced classroom practice and student learning in the mainland China. Three types of evidence for change as a result of the curriculum reform were examined. These included the beliefs and perceptions of teachers about learning and teaching mathematics, the cognitive features of learning tasks and of classroom interaction that were implemented in classroom, and student learning outcomes. Two groups of elementary math teachers and their students participated in the study. One group had participated in the reform implementation in classroom for several years, and the other group had used the conventional curriculum when the project was conducted in 2005. About 150 videotaped class sessions were analyzed from 58 classrooms of the two groups. Survey methods were used to probe the changes in the beliefs and perceptions of teachers about teaching and learning mathematics. The student learning outcomes were assessed for three times with multiple measures of mathematics achievement. Findings of the project provide the converging evidence that the curriculum reform has resulted in some of the expected changes. Reform teachers were more likely to hold a dynamic view of mathematics and to indicate the importance to provide students the learning opportunity to hypothesize, to proof, and to communicate in learning mathematics. The reform classrooms used more learning tasks with higher cognitive demands. The teachers in the reform classrooms asked more questions that required students to describe procedures leading to their answers and the students in the reform classrooms raised more questions in learning mathematics. Students of the reform classrooms showed to have achieved a relatively more balanced development in different cognitive areas of mathematics achievement.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the progress of the curriculum reform in Hong Kong in the implementation phase from 2001‐2006, with the agreement and support of heads and teachers on the reform.

Survey questionnaires and focus group interviews were used to collect data from various stakeholders. A stratified random sampling method was employed to select 150 primary schools and 120 secondary schools to participate in the study.

It is found that with the agreement and support of school heads and teachers, there is good progress in the reform items on teaching and learning. Findings of this paper also suggest that teachers who agreed with the reform items made changes with their practices in terms of learning and teaching strategies, catering to learner diversity, assessment for learning, developing students' language proficiency, cross‐curricula learning, playing multiple teachers' roles and preparation for the new senior secondary curriculum. This study thus supports most findings from the change literature with its empirical data that educational changes and innovations with the agreement and support of school heads and teachers tend to have a greater chance of succeeding.

The paper contributes by examining to what extent findings and views established in change literature elsewhere can be justified and enriched with the case of Hong Kong.

Jobs of communication professionals are closely linked to transformations in society and therefore the role of these professionals is changing rapidly. Communication students must be prepared for the new demands put on communication professionals in the field. In Ede, a new curriculum in communication was launched in order to enable students to become relevant partners in dialog with society. Not only has the content of the curriculum changed but also the organizational structure of our faculty and the educational role of the lecturers.

We can identify three areas in the new curriculum where fundamental transitions have been made, in order to meet the expectations of a profession in transition:

1. Decentralization. In order to create an agile educational environment, we choose flatter structures and more autonomy for development teams (including budgets). Creating educational ownership improved knowledge sharing and idea generation among lecturers.

2. An agile curriculum. We renewed the content of the curriculum and added subjects as online reputation management, web care, training skills, and advanced listening. What’s more: from now on we invest to improve the curriculum every year, in cooperation with stakeholders. Students participate in focus groups about the curriculum and partners in the field are invited as cocreators.

3. The role of lecturers. The ongoing development of the profession has huge implications for the role of the teaching staff. The lecturer used to be the expert. He shared his knowledge with the newcomers, the students. Nowadays lecturers only add value if they continuously gain experience from practice. Therefore, we encourage teachers and students to learn together with partners in the communication field.

Although recent decades have seen increasing calls for fundamental change in the teaching of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics (SEM), efforts to more broadly propagate proven innovations have met with only modest success despite (i) numerous national reports calling for changes, (ii) considerable funding that has been invested in SEM education improvements, and (iii) the growing body of literature on the superior efficacy of many curricular innovations. This chapter suggests that SEM innovators, while expert in their fields, may need to thoughtfully consider research and literature on change, both within higher education and including broader work on organizational change. From a review of the literature on change in higher education, two particular challenges are identified: goal ambiguity and narrow focus of change initiatives. To address these challenges, the authors offer a conceptual framework for decisions that SEM educational change agents make as they design and implement their change initiatives. Within this framework, they offer options and combinations of options that change agents might consider. Given the breadth and complexity of the literature and challenges of change, SEM educational change agents might consider forming collaborations to which they would contribute their disciplinary expertise in one of the three research communities. They might team with individuals who bring requisite expertise from other research communities or with respect to individual and organizational change. Such partnerships might develop approaches that would concurrently address multiple foci. Collaborations that included expertise in individual and organizational change would also be better prepared to navigate complexities of institutional change.

This paper aims to explore the changing pedagogic discourses in China today, using the current wave of English curriculum innovation as a focused case. Given the cross-cultural nature of foreign language education, the change in the English as a foreign language curriculum in China has served as a fertile ground for different pedagogical ideas to emerge and to cross. The new English curriculum in China has endorsed a more communicative and humanistic view of language teaching, encouraging teachers to adopt a task-based approach to organize their classroom teaching. The new English curriculum has aroused a heated debate among Chinese scholars on the suitability of such a Western curriculum idea in the Chinese educational context on the basis of its relation to the Confucian tradition of education, the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context of China and the danger of post-colonialist imposition.

A critique is conducted on the three areas of controversies by situating the debate in the larger context of the cross-cultural understanding of the Chinese pedagogic discourse in the process of globalization and internationalization.

It is important for China to resist the homogenizing effect of globalization and internationalization in the area of curriculum development; however, being defensive and protective of one’s own and dismissive of others has not been and should not be the attitude of Chinese curriculum reform. The evolution of Chinese pedagogy is not only a result of Western influence but also a result of social change in the process of industrialization (Cheng, 2011). Global trends and national traditions should not be taken as extremes in an incompatible and irreconcilable dichotomy.

The three areas of debates on the new English curriculum can serve as a good lens into the evolving curriculum discourses in China. They reflect the cultural–historical, contextual and critical considerations among Chinese educational scholars in the national curriculum innovation efforts.

This chapter examines organizational and instructional responses of California's high schools to the introduction of a High School Exit Examination through interviews with 47 high school principals across the state. I found that most schools changed little about their organizational structure, and provided little support for students until after they failed the exam. Findings also indicate that the exit exam influenced the curriculum most significantly in low-performing schools and in low-track classes within higher performing schools. While the exit exam spurred some positive changes, it also led to unintended consequences inside classrooms.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss a curriculum change in the provision of health promotion in pre‐service teacher education in a one‐year postgraduate certificate in education (PGCE) secondary course in one Higher Education Institution (HEI) in England.

The paper describes the iterative development process, from an initial survey and mapping of the existing pre‐service teacher training programme, which provided an evidence base for the piloting of a new health promotion component in the curriculum, and its subsequent evaluation. Changes to the health promotion element of the curriculum reflect the programme philosophy which balances the requirements of a competency based curriculum with a more liberal approach to education and training in which pre‐service teachers are expected to critically reflect on, and evaluate their practice. This work adopts a socio‐constructivist approach to teacher education, in which teachers develop their knowledge, skills and attitudes by interacting with others through dialogue, and learning from more knowledgeable others in a cooperative and scaffolded manner.

The paper presents the results of these changes and discusses implications for their sustainability. The changes made to the health promotion component of the programme and their implementation would not have been possible without the inter‐professional collaboration that took place over three years.

To the authors’ knowledge similar work involving a multi‐disciplinary collaborative approach to the development of a health education component of a pre‐service teacher education curriculum has not been employed or reported.