Secondary school teachers perceptions on their schools openness to change

Abstract

Any possible difference to occur in the subsystems or dimensions of the organization or the interrelations between them is called organizational change. Organizational change means an organization's adapting a new way of thinking or an action. In this sense, change is such a comprehensible term that includes all events and phenomena related to creativity, renovation, growth and development. The purpose of this research is to investigate the secondary schools' openness to change based on the views of teachers. This is a descriptive research in which both qualitative and quantitative data gathering techniques were used. The sampling group of the study consists of 105 teachers working at 9 secondary schools in the districts of Nilüfer and Osmangazi of Bursa province in 2015 to 2016 academic year. In order to determine the secondary schools' openness to change, the Faculty Change Orientation Scale (FCOS) which was developed by Smith and Hoy (2007) and adapted into Turkish by Demirtas was used. For the analysis of the quantitative data, descriptive statistics which are Anova and Kruskall Wallis were used. To analyse qualitative data, content analysis technique was used. As a result of the research, it was found that the secondary schools' scores from different dimensions of the scale differ significantly with regard to gender, seniority, and last higher education program the teacher graduated from, years at current school and union membership.