The success of your journey towards implementation of a whole school reading culture will be very heavily influenced by your ability to secure strong stakeholder engagement and adequate resources to sustain the process. Whether you are leading the process from the school library, the English staffroom or any other area within the school, you will need to garner the support of educators, school leadership, support staff, parents and guardians, and key stakeholders in the broader community. To maximise the opportunities available to the school, you may seek additional funding from external sources. To this end, this chapter focuses on stakeholder engagement and resourcing before we move on to considering change management principles more broadly, though you will notice strong interrelationships with other parts of this book.

Research exploring comprehensive school reform in the US found that stakeholders within the school differed in their understanding of comprehensive school reform components:

While stakeholder engagement is an essential component of effective comprehensive change management within schools, it is useful to consider it independently as a starting point so that its importance is not lost among the competing demands of change management.

Planning for a whole school reading culture is also an opportunity to strengthen relationships with key stakeholders in the broader community, as well as fostering new, productive and mutually beneficial connections. Not all schools are currently making the most of possible literacy and reading resources available to them in their contexts. For example, while many schools in the UK make the most of their public library resource, as indicated in their literacy policies, schools in Australia rarely mention making use of these resources though they are also typically available (Merga, 2022a).

Planning for initial and sustained educator and leader engagement

Even if you are used to working alone, when it comes to embedding a whole school reading culture, this should be a team endeavour, led by a competent and inspired leader.

The prototypical design of learning experiences is based on a logic that requires us to work backward from what we can confidently forecast students will likely need to be able to know and do in the foreseeable future. This approach has its benefits, but it also has serious limitations with respect to what educational experiences can and should offer young people in preparation for navigating uncertain futures.

The UxD approach provides opportunities and support for young people to develop their own sense of agency when facing uncertainty in their own learning and lives. When designing UxD experiences for students, it is important to understand that not all forms of uncertainty are the same. Some are more easily resolvable. Others require focused effort and support. And still other forms of uncertainty may never be resolvable. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the nature of uncertainty and the different types of uncertainty students (and we all) encounter in learning and life.

Whether students will take action in the face of uncertainty is based, in part, on their own agentic self-beliefs and the social supports they receive. This chapter provides an oveview and discussion of the kinds of beliefs and supports involved in deciding to (or not to) take action under uncertainty.

Whenever you implement a new approach in schools, it is important to build in opportunities to evaluate it. You need to have a planned opportunity to find areas that can be addressed to strengthen the whole school reading culture, as well as identifying successes and strengths. Evaluating initiatives and programmes needs to become a norm in schools, with schools allowing and encouraging this kind of process and permitting the reading culture team to deliberately and critically consider what has been achieved, and where redirection or revision may be appropriate. Freedom needs to be given to (at least internally) consider failures as well as successes so that an iterative process of improvement can take place.

Evaluation plays a key role in improving school performance (Pont et al., 2008) and, as briefly touched upon in the previous chapter, every plan for the development of a whole school reading culture should also include clear planning for evaluation of the plan as a whole, as well as its key components. Evaluation involves the processes, data and scheduling used to monitor, measure and assess progress towards achievement of goals (Merga, 2023b). Evaluation in schools can be an incredibly complex process, and this chapter is not an exhaustive coverage of this important area; rather, it may be a starting point from which further reading and learning may be conducted if you wish.

When we think about evaluation, we may automatically think about seeing changes in quantitative data between Point A at baseline (before an initiative) and Point B (after an initiative has been active for a sufficient period of time to realistically expect to see change). However, understanding of how to measure the success of change has evolved over time, with growing recognition of the value of qualitative and mixed-methods approaches. The effectiveness of your plan should not be purely ‘determined by quantitative shifts in achievement data’; ‘qualitative data in the form of the perspectives of students, staff and parents can also be drawn upon’ (Merga, 2023b, p. 117).

Evaluation could and should include multiple forms of data, and capture the perspectives of multiple stakeholders. For example, a school in the UK seeking to analyse the success of a literacy policy was interested in the following data sources.

Anyone who has ever set foot in a school will be able to tell you something about its school culture. As a former teacher, and as a researcher and consultant who has worked with schools in diverse capacities, it doesn't take me long to get a feel for what a school prioritises. Indeed, the more time we spend in a school, the more confident our perception will be, as we have increased exposure to the many tacit and explicit indicators of what it truly values.

Sometimes we may even see direct contradictions between what a school professes to value, and what they actually do in practice, as the shaping of a school culture is about what the school both believes and practises. Sometimes the tacit culture can subsume the explicit, approved culture. A school culture reveals itself in many ways, with students’ academic results being just one of many indicators that those outside a school will draw upon to judge the merits of a school. A school culture relates to the values and norms of a school (MacNeil et al., 2009), and these are communicated by what occurs and is privileged within the school space, given the competing demands and differing resourcing schools experience, and the unique contexts contem - porary schools are situated in.

The point of this book is to justify the transformation of school cultures into reading cultures, and to explain in practical terms how this can be done, drawing on the available research as well as my own experiences consulting with schools. A whole school reading culture cannot be achieved through making superficial or limited changes and commitments. In contrast, it

While there is limited research that has quantified the impact of a whole school reading culture on student reading engagement and achievement, there has been considerable research that has found positive effects of the individual practices featuring in a whole school reading culture, which are detailed and explored in the following chapter.

The purpose of this chapter is to describe and demonstrate how structuring uncertainty can result in generative UxD learning opportunities aimed at preparing young people for unknown futures.

This preface introduces the book, describes the purpose, audience, and need for us all to step into the unknown and work together to bring about more promising educational designs for young people. Such designs are aimed at better equipping young people to navigate uncertainty now and into the future.

This chapter describes how UxD learning can be thought of as a form of creative learning and how the result of UxD learning experiences can be thought of principled contributions to oneself and others.

The focus of this chapter is to describe how to support young people in exploring uncertainty for the production and selection of actionable possibilities to resolve uncertainty in learning and life.