In education, change management usually refers to not only the process of making changes, but also how those changes will be implemented and managed. While this can refer to a variety of things, and will most likely continue to do so as education evolves in the future, it frequently refers to technological advancements or changes in teaching methods. Because these changes rarely occur overnight, some direction must usually be established to help facilitate and ensure that they occur as smoothly as possible. In education, change management refers to the effort to ensure that as change occurs, it does not disrupt the educational process for students or teachers.
Consider change management as a concept first. This is one of the simplest ways to understand change management in education. Change management, in general, is the process of overseeing any major change in a system to ensure that it happens as smoothly and quickly as possible. This can include managing human resources to ensure that people understand how the change is taking place, determining how the change will take place and developing criteria for evaluating it, and finally putting these concepts into practice. It is a term that can be used to describe any type of change process. In education, change management simply refers to this process as it applies to any educational system.
Change management is a term used in public education to describe the process of implementing and evaluating changing policies established by governments or other supervisory educational institutions. This type of work can be seen in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) program, which was established in the United States in the early twenty-first century. To ensure that teachers and staff were able to fully comprehend and implement the changes made by NCLB, proper change management was required. This process was able to go relatively smoothly thanks to the use of change management in education, and various methods for analyzing these changes were put in place to later judge their merits.
Change management in education can be applied to higher education as well, and it frequently deals with technological or teaching methods changes. For example, if a college or university were to place a greater emphasis on “E-learning” and eliminate the majority of its classrooms, this process would need to be well-managed. This would include not only the actual implementation of the change, but also ensuring that teachers were aware of how to work within the new system and assisting students in learning with the help of new technology. If a university decided to encourage teachers to become more passive in education and serve primarily as facilitators, rather than the traditional method that had been used at the school, similar change management would be required.