Arab Educational Information Network

Change is considered to be important and inevitable for the life of any educational institution. It consists of great rapidity, nonlinearity and at the same time a great potential for creative breakthroughs; hence, it does not take place without accompanying messiness, chaos and concerns in the form of feelings of uncertainty, anxiety, frustration and ambivalence among teachers. Teachers’ concerns towards change are considered to be very natural and inevitable; but at the same time, they are an impediment that can impact the flow of the change. During the last decade, the leaders of some large Lebanese private schools had multiple initiatives to induce change in their schools for the aim of improvement and distinction. So, they chose to apply for the accreditation of their schools from internationally known accreditation bodies or to apply for one of the programs offered by the International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) necessitating changes in the teachers’ roles, relationships, tasks and continuous professional development practices. Several studies have been made around the world on teachers’ concerns towards different types of change; however, no studies have been made yet in Lebanon on the private schools undergoing change. Thus, the purpose of my study was to explore the nature and stages of concerns that arose among the teachers at the Lebanese private schools as a result of their schools’ adoption of change and to find out the relationship that existed between these concerns and characteristics like teachers’ gender, years of total experience, years of experience at the current school, years of involvement in the innovation or type of change. The Concerns Based Adoption Model (CBAM) was used.The study adopted a quantitative non-experimental causal-comparative design. Nine Lebanese private schools have participated with two hundred and thirty four teachers. Data was collected using the Stages of Concern Questionnaire. Descriptive statistics were carried out as well as analysis of variance to investigate the difference in the teachers’ concerns as a function of gender, years of teaching experience, years in the current school, years in the innovation and type of change. The results showed the teachers at the Lebanese private schools displayed concerns of different natures and at various levels or stages. The nature of concerns was related to the self, the task, and the impact. Besides, they showed concerns at all the stages of concerns; namely, awareness, informational, personal, management, consequences, collaboration, and refocusing. These concerns differed as a function of experience and type of change, but not as a function of gender. The less experienced teachers were, the more concerned for the self they were as well as the more concerned at the stages of awareness, informational and personal they were. Conversely, the more experienced they were, the more concerned for the impact they were and the more they were in the consequences, collaboration and refocusing stages. Teachers in accredited schools displayed higher concerns for self in the awareness and informational stages, while the IB teachers displayed higher impact concerns in the collaboration and refocusing stages.