School reforms are unlikely to happen if teachers are not involved enough in the process. Teachers play a ‘make-or-break’ role in a success of a reform. One aim of IRRESISTIBLE has been to add Responsible Research and Innovation into teaching modules developed by teachers. There has been plenty of issues that were addressed in order to make this happen. Teachers needed information about RRI teaching, teachers needed time and resources to develop their teaching methods, and teachers needed possibilities for various kinds of collaborations. To find out more about the success of the project and the types of teachers participating in IRRESISTIBLE a questionnaire was implemented.

 

According to the Stages of Concern (SoC) questionnaire, 58 % of IRRESISTIBLE’s teachers had a concern profile of a ‘co-operator’. This is the most common profile type seen in many SoC studies.  The co-operator has obviously high collaboration concerns, but also high informational and consequence concerns – they want to collaborate in order to gain information about the innovation and they also want to figure out the consequences on their students and their school. The less obvious quality of a co-operator is that they have low managing and refocusing concerns – they are willing to implement the innovation but are not ready to refine it further.

Other concern profile types include the ‘resistor’, who uses managing and refocusing concerns as an excuse to reject the innovation, the ‘precarious’ who is uncertain of himself and is unwilling to collaborate, the ‘all-rounder’ who has concerns in all stages, and the ‘overachiever’ who has exceptionally low informational, personal and managing concerns but very high consequence, collaboration and refocusing concerns. These concern profile types were rare in the early phase of IRRESISTIBLE.

The SoC-questionnaire is also suitable for detecting change. It is expected that a successful adoption process resolves low level concerns like informational, personal and managing concerns, and on other hand lets teachers experience concerns in the higher stages like the consequence stage, collaboration stage and the refocusing stage. It remains to be seen how concerns change during IRRESISTIBLE.