Leading School Change

How to Overcome Resistance, Increase Buy-In, and Accomplish Your Goals

Todd Whitaker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815363989
• eBook ISBN: 9781351107938
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Being a cheerleader for innovation or change is great. Implementing specific strategies to increase the likelihood of success is essential. In this key book from bestselling author and speaker Todd Whitaker, you'll discover clear ways to lead and manage school change by setting realistic goals, planning your approach, and tracking your progress. You'll also find out how to work effectively with others, overcome resistance, and gain widespread acceptance. Whether you are a district leader, building leader, instructional coach, or teacher-leader, you'll come away from this book with all the tools and inspiration you need to make a positive, immediate, results-oriented change with the support of your staff.

Bonus: This enhanced second edition includes a special Action Plan and Implementation Guide. The Action Plan will help you apply the ideas, step by step, to your own situation. The Implementation Guide can be used for independent reflection or as a study guide with book groups or professional learning communities.

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Leading School Change

Change seems to be the operative word in education (and the world) today. We have changes we want to make, changes we need to make, and changes we are directed to make. Some of the changes are significant and seem life altering, and others are minor tweaks or adjustments.

A major differentiator between types of changes is those we desire to implement and those that are imposed upon us by other people or forces. The challenge leaders face is this: How can we move our entire organization and all of its members forward with a myriad of required and desired changes? Where do we start and how can we bring others along with us?

Being a cheerleader for innovation or change is great. Developing and implementing specific strategies to increase the likelihood of success is essential.

This book helps us understand where to start and how to have the most influence and best results in our efforts to change. There are certain people and entry points that provide the most opportunity to leverage change in an effective and efficient manner. We need to understand and utilize these opportunities before we begin.

This is the second edition of Leading School Change, and this version includes a special Implementation Guide and Action Plan. The Action Plan is referred to immediately after several of the chapters. These activities can be completed at that point to help you move from understanding to implementation. You may want to complete them right after reading the chapters or you might want to finish the book and then develop your Action Plan.

The Implementation Guide has a section for each strategy covered in Chapters 2–9. There are three purposes for the Implementation Guide. One is to help you develop a deeper understanding of the change process and apply it to your setting. A second is to allow communication and discussion for a group of people working on implementing a change in their organization. The third is to serve as a facilitation guide if someone wants to lead others in a study group on the book.

Shelves full of books have been written about change in the field of education. Many of these present theories or historical research. Some describe why we should change, or—even more directly—prescribe wha t we should be changing in our schools. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that approach. But this book is different. It’s not about theoretical, historical, or hypothetical changes. It’s about real change happening today in real schools.

This book presents nine strategies—one per chapter starting with Chapter 2—for managing change effectively. I wrote it for educational leaders—formal or informal—at the school or district level, with examples drawn from my experience working with schools, districts, and their leaders as they work, successfully or not, to implement changes in their organizations. Hopefully everyone who wants his or her school or district to grow better will read it. The odds of success are greater when everyone—each person on the school improvement team, each member of the curriculum committee, and every teacher working to improve classroom instruction—understands the dynamics of change. By everyone knowing the ‘inside skinny’ it also weakens those who attempt to thwart growth.

This book is not designed to tell you what specific changes to make, or even what types of changes to make. Every school setting is different, and you know—or you can figure out—what your organization needs. But it attempts to illustrate how to set realistic goals, plan your approach, and track your progress as you go along. You will discover obstacles you should avoid and factors you can tilt in your favor. The book will help you understand how to work effectively with the people in your setting—those who already support the change you seek, those who dig in their heels to resist change of any kind, and everyone in between.

Managing change in schools is never straightforward. It’s much more like playing chess than like playing checkers.

If you play checkers often enough, you begin to recognize certain patterns. Furthermore, until a piece advances to the king row, all of your pieces have to march across the board in the same direction. Well, chess players also start each game with a specific set of pieces in specific positions, but each piece moves differently, and the number of possible combinations is so vast that every game can turn into a contest much different from the one before.

Likewise, when we embark on change in a school or school district, we start with a set of people with their own ingrained habits and ways of thinking. If we can get them to work together for a common purpose, we definitely tip the odds in our favor.

And steering change in schools is never easy. Instead of facing an equal opponent across the table, it’s more as if we’re competing against a supercomputer named “the status quo.” This adversary has outlasted many a challenger and seems to have an inherent advantage. As we know, however, the chess masters can still outwit the programmed machines—and even the status quo comes up against the inevitability of change.

Our task is to steer the change in the direction we choose by applying intentional strategies to maximize the chance of success as the game unfolds.

When I wrote the book Dealing with Difficult Teachers (2014), I looked at al l the resources I could find. Ironically, their basic message was that school administrators who wanted to improve their schools needed to deal with their difficult teachers. Well, guess what? I already knew that. I wasn’t looking for direction. I needed strategies!

As I kept digging, abo ut all I could find was advice on how to formally document the situation (what a deluxe treat that is!) so that over the course of a few years I could accumulate the paper work needed to dismiss the less effective staff members. But in my view, we can’t afford to wait a few years to improve our schools. We need to make these essential changes now.

Each of us can recognize the need for change. The challenge lies in knowing how to make it happen.

This book offers specific strategies to help you effectively implement whatever changes you need to make—strategies that dramatically increase your chances of getting widespread acceptance and implementation of your organization’s goals. Following these approaches will put you on the path to improvement—not in a few years, but now.

The strategies in this boo k are presented in an order, in Chapters 2–10, but that doesn’t mean you have to apply them in that order, or that one is more important than another. In fact, they work together and reinforce each other. You can decide when and where and how to apply them, depending on the specific situations and mix of personalities in your setting. You may focus on one at the start, turn to another that makes sense as a way to get around a particular obstacle, and move on to a third once the road is clear ahead. You may find some of them easier to put into practice than others, and it’s fine to start with those.

But the strategies that come less easily to you might be the very ones that will make you a more effective leader, and the very ones that will make the difference between success and failure in your setting.

As you try out these nine strategies and learn how to pursue them more effectively, you may be able to reflect on past efforts and see why some never got off the ground, some went well, and some fizzled out. You may even decide to try again in some area where success has eluded you, putting your new tools to work.

Don’t expect to master these strategies on the first attempt, but don’t give up on them, either. I have every confidence that after a time, you will be able to look back and say with satisfaction, “There, and there, and there I see growth.” And then keep moving forward on the journey.

Also, please remember that there is a difference between changing and improving. Every time a change occurs and it does not lead to improvement, it actu ally creates more resistance to future possible growth. People become more cynical and negative when something new happens, not because they are inherently resistant, but because the last alteration provided little or no value.

So we need to make sure that the things we are working on will lead to better schools rather than just different schools.

Pace and Size of Change

Two quick notes to ponder. One involves the pace of change. Many times people say that change is occurring too quickly. This could be true. However, many times when people say they want to go slowly what they are really saying is that they do not want to change. We will discuss how you can tell the difference by monitoring and asking certain people in the organization what their view of the rate of change is and how it is being received.

Another key point is that usually people perceive any change as a very big deal and see it as very stressful. What is interesting is usually this is true regardless of the size of a change. So, if you are changing you might want to reflect on whether it is best to go ahead and make all changes at once or do one a year for multiple periods. Often the all-at-once approach is better, as long as it is done correctly. This book should provide some guidance in this area. However, if there is a natural big change, such as the opening of a new school, that is absolutely the time to make all changes. Everything is new so there will be an implementation transition automatically. Most likely this will be an opportunity to do everything at the same time and will allow people and the school to take one large step forward, rather than requiring you to hold back on some things and then implement the next things over time.

Keep in mind those two things as you progress through understanding how to best implement the change(s) you need. And to reiterate a key point made earlier, be sure the changes we are making have actual value to improve our schools for the students.

When We Actually Get There, Are We Going To Be Happy We Arrived?

At times it feels that seemingly everything we do in education now is about standardized tests. If we cannot put it in a narrow slot and measure it, it is not worth doing. It also appears that what we test changes on a regular basis. Kind of like, “this is the most important thing in the world; no wait, this is the most important thing in the world; no wait …” Well, if we are putting everything else aside while we center on these narrow skills, we need to be confident that this really is the most important thing in the world. Because, unfortunately, at times it seems like it is becoming the only thing in the world. (Except for possibly making sure that we also reduce childhood obesity.)

If someone decides that flipping a coin with your right hand is the most essential skill in life and we spend all our time and energy helping students master this, I do hope it isn’t decided at some point that they meant the left hand. And then if it turns out they actually did mean the left hand when we master that, have we actually accomplished anything of value? I do believe we can help students get better at almost anything. The point of education is to help students achieve the most important things.

I always smile when people say that they wish all politicians would teach for at least a year before they propose new laws. Well, I don’t—at least not in the schools that my own children attend. Teaching is way too difficult for a novice to take on. Just think about the remediation we would need then!

There is no question that testing has made us more intentional in what we do. Curriculum mapping, developing outcomes, etc. have sharpened the focus of all educators. But at what cost? One grave concern is that this emphasis holds back the very best teachers. Why would we split the atom when we are only testing for the definition of photosynthesis? Why should we move on to three-digit addition when we only measure at the two-digit level?

The best teachers have always taken their students to heights never achieved by others. They help young people dream and believe. When you think back to the best teacher you ever had, you still get goose bumps remembering what that was like—how they made you feel so smart and so special. Do we really want to take this away?

I always tell my own children that a follower is never going to cure cancer. And personally, I would like someone to come up with that solution as soon as possible. However, if it is not on the test, can we ever get there?

The United States became a great country by doing new and better things, not by repetitively enhancing minimal skills. A friend of mine once said, “If we want to get to the moon we cannot just keep building faster trains; at some point we are going to need a rocket.”

If we visualize e ach student as a jar of potential, our responsibility is to take the lid off the jars and point them in the right direction, not tighten the tops so that the highest levels of creativity can never get out.

By limiting dreams we also limit possibilities. Confidence is the most valuable gift a teacher can receive or give to their students. We have to make sure that this is what is at the end of our educational path. Otherwise our journey will have been for naught. The best teachers instinctively know this. They know what is right and wrong and what is best for our students. Let’s make sure that we do not limit them by placing restrictions on what they do. Our best teachers do not need research to lead them down the correct path. We need them to forge ahead to discover the solutions for the rest of us, and then we need to research them.

Good luck and good reading!

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Identify the Change

This book is designe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Meet the Author
• 1 Leading School Change
• 2 Identify the Change
• 3 Make Sure the First Exposure Is Great!
• 4 Determine Who Matters Most
• 5 Find the Entry Points
• 6 Reduce the Resistance
• 7 Harness the Power of Emotion
• 8 Look Past Buy-In to Action
• 9 Reinforce Changed Behaviors and New Efforts
• 10 Fit It All Together
• References
• Appendix A: Implementation Guide
• Appendix B: Action Plan