Values+and+Beliefs

=Values and Beliefs= Values and beliefs can be religious in nature but often take the form of secular issues including work ethic or competitiveness (ellsworth, 168). The Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL), a non-profit educational research organization located in Texas, provides an explanation of how values, attitudes and beliefs held within a culture can create a barrier to change by stating "The attitudes and beliefs of those in the school create mental models of what schooling is and how others in the school should and will respond to events and actions. It is these attitudes and beliefs that the culture of the school is created." The SEDL article further states that "many times innovations are not put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works, images that limit persons to familiar ways of thinking and acting."

A change agent who detects this form of barrier to change should, as stated by Ellsworth, reposition the innovation in a way that appears less threatening to social norms. For example a school district may push to suspend purchases of traditional textbooks and move to online texts. Teachers, especially veterans, may respond negatively to this change since textbooks are a traditional teaching material that many believe must be physically in the students hands. The change agent could reposition this change by allowing veteran teachers to purchase one classroom copy of the text for students to reference during class time but have the online version of the text for regular student use.