The Change Paradox in Education
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
This quote, often attributed to Einstein, captures something important about the current situation in education. It reflects the current situation found in education today: constantly doing different things and expecting them to somehow add up to meaningful results.
Welcome to the central paradox of modern education: the relentless quest for “more” has become the very thing preventing us from achieving the “better” so many desperately seek. Each school year brings new initiatives, fresh programs, innovative technologies, and reformed curricula. We add another layer of improvements, each promising to be the breakthrough that will finally transform schools. Yet, the achievement gaps persist, teacher frustration and burnout increases, and there is an overwhelming feeling that students are not receiving the skills they need to become the empowered people we want them to be.
Why is this happening? How can so much effort and financial input produce so little change? The answer lies in understanding three critical paradoxes that shape educational change:
The Innovation Trap: This paradox reveals how our addiction to new programs and initiatives creates a culture of surface-level change while preventing any true deep transformation. Educational leaders are looking for the next quick fix, the promise of instant improvement, moving from initiative to initiative, keeping everyone so busy there is little time for any meaningful reflection or change. Initiatives are introduced without long-term adaptive systemic change which leads to wasted human and economic resources, staff change fatigue, and, ironically, stagnant organisations. We mistake busy for progress, collecting data and reforms like trophies while the fundamental challenges continue to plague schools.
The Sustainability Dilemma: This paradox exposes how the various efforts to improve education often undermine their own long-term success. Change fatigue, created by the constant focus on “brighter and shinier” causes staff to disengage and negatively affects staff. The trend shows no signs of stopping as the advent of AI and new programs sits on the horizon, poised to plunge schools into even more change efforts. In our eagerness for quick results, we create cycles of perpetual change that exhaust educators and confuse students, making lasting improvement almost impossible.
The Leadership Paradox: This paradox illuminates the impossible position of principals who must simultaneously drive change while maintaining stability. They are taxed with the mandate to innovate while preserving what works. Called on to respond to external mandates while being told to honor their communities’ needs. These frequent changes create change fatigue, adding even more pressure and stress to school administrators and teachers. These leaders find themselves caught between competing demands, often blamed for both changing too much and not changing enough.
The Redesign Imperative: This imperative points toward a new path entirely. Instead of continuously adding new programs, we must redesign our systems to be naturally adaptive and resilient. This requires shifting how we think about change and change implementation in schools. This begins with shifting from change being something we do to schools to envisioning change as something schools are designed to do well.
These paradoxes are not just academic curiosities. Each of these have very real consequences for teachers, students, and families who depend on educational systems. Each time an initiative fails, or more likely, is replaced by another initiative, resources are wasted. More importantly, opportunities to genuinely improve learning and life outcomes are missed. Every burned-out teacher who decides to leave teaching is a loss of expertise and care that takes years to rebuild. Every student who slips through the cracks of learning, is a young person whose potential may never be fully realized.
But understanding these paradoxes opens up new possibilities. If we see that these problems are not primarily about finding the right program, technique, or software, but about how we think about and implement change itself, we can address the root causes rather than just the symptoms. We can move from a culture of constant reform and change to a culture of continuous improvement—one that values depth over breadth, sustainability over speed, and wisdom over innovation for its own sake.
In this series of four blog posts that follow, I will explore each of the above in greater detail. I will offer some practical insights for working through each more effectively, exploring why the most innovative thing we can sometimes do is stop innovating and start implementing well. I’ll examine how to build sustainable change that energizes, rather than exhausts educators, and how leaders can embrace paradox rather than being paralyzed by it. Finally, I’ll delve into how schools can be redesigned to thrive in an era of constant change without losing their essential purpose: supporting students.
The quest for more in education is not wrong! We should want more learning, more engagement, more equity, and more opportunity for all students. But we must learn to pursue these goals in such a way as to embrace the very nature of change. This requires the wisdom to know when to change and when to preserve, when to innovate and when to consolidate, when to push forward and when to step back. As with life, there are seasons for planting and growing and seasons for harvesting and rest. By honouring this natural flow, we can embrace change in a new and profoundly different manner.
The journey begins with acknowledging a fundamental truth: in education, as in life, more is not always better. Sometimes the most revolutionary act is to do less, but do it better. Sometimes the most innovative approach is to honor what has always worked while adapting thoughtfully to what is new. Sometimes the quest for more must become a quest for deeper, more sustainable, more meaningful change. This is the paradox we must embrace if we are to build educational systems worthy of the students we serve and the future we hope to create.