Introduction: The Growth of Educational Change as a Field of Study: Understanding its Roots and Branches -- Introduction: The Growth of Educational Change as a Field of Study: Understanding its Roots and Branches -- The Roots -- World War II and Schools -- Finding Keys to School Change: A 40-Year Odyssey -- Listening and Learning from the Field: Tales of Policy Implementation and Situated Practice -- The Vital Hours: Reflecting on Research on Schools and their Effects -- A Kind of Educational Idealism: Integrating Realism and Reform -- School-Based Curriculum Development -- Unfinished Work: Reflections on Schoolteacher -- Seduced and Abandoned: Some Lasting Conclusions about Planned Change from the Cambire School Study -- Ecological Images of Change: Limits and Possibilities -- Three Perspectives on School Reform -- The Meaning of Educational Change: A Quarter of a Century of Learning -- Expanding the Dialogue -- Patterns of Curriculum Change -- Change and Tradition in Education: The Loss of Community -- Educational Reform, Modernity, and Pragmatism.ANDY HARGREAVES Department of Teacher Education, Curriculum and Instruction Lynch School of Education, Boston College, MA, U.S.A. ANN LIEBERMAN Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Stanford, CA, U.S.A. MICHAEL FULLAN Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada DAVID HOPKINS Department for Education and Skills, London, U.K. This set of four volumes on Educational Change brings together evidence and insights on educational change issues from leading writers and researchers in the field from across the world. Many of these writers, whose chapters have been specially written for these books, have been investigating, helping initiate and implementing educational change, for most or all of their lengthy careers. Others are working on the cutting edge of theory and practice in educational change, taking the field in new or even more challenging directions. And some are more skeptical about the literature of educational change and the assumptions on which it rests. They help us to approach projects of understanding or initiating educational change more deeply, reflectively and realistically. Educational change and reform have rarely had so much prominence within public policy, in so many different places. Educational change is ubiquitous. It figures large in Presidential and Prime Ministerial speeches. It is at or near the top of many National policy agendas. Everywhere, educational change is not only a policy priority but also major public news. Yet action to bring about educational change usually exceeds people's understanding of how to do so effectively.