Implementing Educational Change: A Qualitative Study of a Parenting Education Program

A study examined the organizational factors inhibiting and facilitating implementation of an innovation in an educational setting. The innovative program selected as the subject of this ethnographic study was Georgia's parenting education program. Data were collected from field interviews of teachers, observations of parenting education classes, and analyses of various documents used in planning and implementing the parenthood education programs. The following eight education factors were found to influence the implementation of the innovations to which the parenthood education teachers were introduced in an inservice workshop: school structure, decision-making power, advisory committees, role of the workshop, resources, teacher commitment, and demands on teachers. The interaction of the innovation and the school setting resulted in an alteration of both. As individual teachers attempted to implement the parenting class, they tested and sometimes modified existing policies and procedures; conversely, as the teachers experimented with ways of fitting the program into the existing school structure, the innovation itself was adapted to meet local needs. (MN)