Implementing Educational Innovations: A Staff Perspective of Personal Development Planning
ABSTRACT The aim of this study has been to explore and understand the implementation of PDP as an educational innovation in a single institutional context. Adopting a Sartrean ontology in which the subjective individual takes precedence over the systems within which that same individual exists, an interview process sought to understand the attitudes of educational members of staff to PDP and the ways in which those attitudes impacted on the innovation process. As an innovation based around the concepts of academic and professional identity, and the ability of a Community of Practice to shape and drive the implementation process, the key barrier to the implementation process proved to be a failure to account for difference at a fundamental level. This was not found to be just socio political difference but a psychological incongruence between the notions underpinning the concept of PDP and the multitude of worlds through which those notions were to be promoted. In Sartrean terms by focusing on a systems model of change management significant power relationships between self and context had been lost, and yet these ultimately proved highly influential on the behaviours and consequences of the implementation process itself and the willingness of practitioners to engage with it.