Teachers’ concerns towards change in Lebanese private schools and their relationship to gender, experience and type of change

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to explore the nature and stages of concerns that teachers at Lebanese private schools underwent as a result of the change initiative they implemented (whether organization-based or curriculum-based accreditation), and to find out the relationship that existed between these concerns and other variables like gender, the experience of the teachers, in addition to the type of change they experienced. The sample of the study included nine schools and 234 teachers. Statistical methods included descriptive statistics, multivariate analysis of variance, and univariate analyses using the post hoc Scheffe test at a confidence interval of 95 %. The results showed that teachers at Lebanese private schools displayed different types of concerns at various stages. The concerns were related to the Self, the Task, and the Impact. They also showed concerns at the awareness, informational, personal, management, consequences, collaboration, and refocusing stages. These concerns varied depending on the teachers’ total years of experience, years spent at the current school, years of involvement in the change initiative, and the type of change they underwent, but not according to their gender. © 2016, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.