This handbook reflects and represents the established and expanding knowledge base in the field of educational change as embodied in publishing outlets like Springer's Journal of Educational Change, the AERA Educational Change Special Interest Group, The AERA Teacher and Teacher Education Division, the British Educational Leadership and Management Association, and the International Congress of School Effectiveness and Improvement. The work captures the changing and more inclusive and critical nature of the field. This involves responding to calls for traditionally marginalised and minoritized groups, regions and issues to be centred and uplifted in the field and in practice. The Handbook includes classic, contemporary, and cutting-edge contributions to the field of educational change. It offers rigorous scholarly work written in a style that is accessible to researchers, academics, educational leaders, and policymakers who are drawn to evidence-based and theoretically informed approaches. Contents are inclusive in authorship and focus, representative of different fields such as leadership, policy, curriculum, pedagogy, equity, and diversity, inclusive of diverse and sometimes competing perspectives, and attentive to international range and scope of contribution. This is a time when there is turnover of generations in the field of educational change, with many of the founders now having passed away or holding senior Emeritus status. It is a time of emerging scholarship among mid-career academics and evolving research among new generations of graduate students that call for familiarity with established canons of educational change, and a growing field of intellectual, cultural, and global diversity.

This Third handbook is written at this generational tipping point in the academic field, at a time when global knowledge and understanding of educational change is more accessible and abundant, and in a moment of great controversy regarding future directions of educational change in relation to a rapidly changing world.