How Does Educational Innovation Happen?

Since the 1990 s,a series of reforms in the field of primary education curriculum in China have been carried on till now.Education reform at the national level is undoubtedly a complex systematic project.Now that innovation has become a national development strategy,how does the practical exploration on education innovation of grass-root schools and front-line teachers proceed? Are they able to drive systemic change from the bottom up? These problems deserve attention.Curriculum is at the center of school education.This thesis pays attention to a grass-root education innovation case with curriculum as the core,and intends to answer three main research questions: Where does the novelty lies in education innovations? How does educational innovation happen? What are the boundaries that case school still faces? Qualitative oriented research method,especially the case study method is used.This paper first describes and presents the reality of the implementation of educational innovation in the case school.On this basis,a Policy-Place-People analysis framework is applied to sort out the situational environment of school X,and explore what factors affect the development of its innovative curriculum.At last,various driving forces and impeding forces in terms of school X's curriculum implementation is further reviewed and discussed.It is found that school X's practice of educational innovation is based on the school characteristic curriculum policy.It has developed the innovative curriculum's goal,content,teaching and evaluation methods.Meanwhile,it has realized the guarantee conditions of curriculum implementation with the cooperation between school management methods and family-school cooperation approach.This paper finds that behind the above innovative performance,the city and region where school X exists,the X Education Group and the school itself all played a role in the development and implementation of the curriculum from different perspectives.There are still some difficulties for school X to implement its integrated inquiry curriculum,including the score pressure caused by external valuation,the higher requirements of the inquiry based comprehensive curriculum for teachers to creatively implement the curriculum,and the cross-cultural issues related to teachers' cooperation and school administration.In view of these problems,some suggestions are put forward in regard to how to promote grass-root education innovations.