Shifting

How School Leaders Can Create a Culture of Change

Kirsten Richert, Jeffrey Ikler, Margaret Zacchei

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781544381398
• eBook ISBN: 9781544381374
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

Establish a school change culture where desired outcomes are actually achieved

Change in schools is hard, but often essential. Internal and external factors require careful analysis before jumping into any change. Are you prepared to work with colleagues with confidence and clarity through such shifts?  

In Shifting, educators and leadership experts Jeff Ikler, Kirsten Richert, and Margaret Zacchei empower educational change leaders to proactively and coherently navigate complex change in schools to achieve the desired outcomes. Using a three-part framework—Assess, Ready, Change—this book leads educators to examine a school's imperatives and readiness for change, identity the tools and abilities required to manifest change, and take action by defining the roles and processes necessary to effectively implement both sweeping change and smaller day-to-day adjustments. Change leaders learn to

·         Shift the emphasis in the change process from procedure to the people implementing change

·         Move from an environment of "command and control" to one of leaders creating other leaders

·         Reframe change as an essential shift in school culture rather than a series of episodic events

Rich with leadership insights, stories, podcasts, and hands-on activities, Shifting offers an integrated tapestry of wisdom and support for changemakers intent on meaningful collaboration in a positive, engaged workplace.  

1 Shifting: A New Way to Look at Change

The Big Shift

Avoiding change failure starts with building and getting a commitment to an organizational why—the core belief underlying what the district and/or school is attempting to accomplish on behalf of those it serves.

A Leader’s Story

“It was a miserable fail.”

Dr. Karen Rue, former superintendent Northwest ISD, Texas

Now, Clinical Professor, K–12 Educational Leadership, Baylor University

In my first year in the district, I just shoved things down people’s throats. I got there and evaluated the elementary reading program and realized there was something missing. I knew exactly what needed to happen, so I told people what needed to happen. I wanted them to begin with staff development on what a balanced reading program was. They’d never had that kind of PD. They also didn’t understand all the program components, so I wanted to bring in professional development to address those two issues. What I didn’t do was let people discover the issues themselves. I didn’t set the stage. I didn’t give them the time to do their own learning. I didn’t start with a small ask, such as, “Would the principals get together with your key reading people at your elementary levels, with whomever, study what a balanced reading program is, and look at it in light of our own and make some recommendations about what we might need?” I can think of a hundred ways I could’ve done it differently, but I didn’t. I came in as the expert. I knew what we needed. I went about putting it in place.

And it was sabotaged. People went through the motions, but they never did it. I remember telling one of the people I worked with, “I’m smarter than this. I should’ve known this.” It was a miserable fail.

Why Change Initiatives Fail

According to the Gallup Organization, upwards of 70 percent of all complex change initiatives fail annually (Leonard & Coltea, 2013). Interestingly, Gallup notes that roughly the same percentage of all U.S. employees feel disengaged from their work. Is that figure a mere coincidence (Schwantes, 2017)?

The literature is replete with stories about the one, three, five, seven, ten, or fifty reasons why proposed changes don’t go as planned. Our assessment of those reasons, backed up by more than one hundred years of combined experience in business and education, has led us to focus on three, which we will examine throughout the book.

Making Sense of It

Words matter, and we use three terms throughout with specific meanings: outcome, impact, and organizational why.

Outcome: The result of a single change event (e.g., As a result of revising the building schedule, teachers are now meeting and engaging in collaborative planning twice a week).

Impact: The overall benefits that serve a population, such as students, as a result of a series of cohesive changes (e.g., Through effective collaborative planning and instruction around solving complex and real-world problems, students’ engagement and achievement have increased).

Organizational Why: The core belief underlying what impact the district and/or school seeks to have relative to those it serves (e.g., To succeed in a rapidly changing world, students need to be increasingly challenged to [1] demonstrate their ability to use their knowledge and skills in new and unrehearsed ways to solve complex, real-world problems and [2] justify their answers).

Yes, complex change initiatives also require attention to be paid to the more technical factors of skill acquisition, resources, timetables, infrastructure, and the change plan itself, but we believe that change success ultimately rests as much or more on human nature and behavior.

Many of you reading this narrative are probably familiar with the model of change that Professor Tim Knoster shared back in 1991. It’s a clear and simple model of what can derail change efforts and negatively impact culture. There, Knoster showed that if certain change factors weren’t addressed, the result in the organization could be confusion, sabotage, anxiety, resistance, and frustration—all human implications (Moesby, 2004). We can only conclude that the 70 percent of organizations that experience change failure did not address those potential implications either adequately or accurately and, as a result, suffered a commensurate negative impact on staff.

Thus, two questions need to be thoroughly examined, which we will start to do here and then more fully examine in subsequent chapters:

• Who is leading the change effort, and do they view themselves as a valued leader of any change that works toward the organizational why?
• Who is executing the change effort, and do they view themselves as a valued contributor to the why behind the change?

The word valued is particularly important in both of these questions. As neuroscience researcher Dr. Melissa Hughes observed in a vlog post, “When we see ourselves as a vital part of the work, that’s when our engagement grows. This is when we know that what we do really matters and that our colleagues value our contributions.” In short, a major component of change success is the engagement of the people leading and executing the change (Hughes, 2019).

“Houston, we have a problem.” (Actually, we have three of them.)

Let’s look at the three factors of change failure in greater depth.

Why Change Initiatives Fail

1. Neglecting the WHY: Failure to agree on the organizational why—the core belief underlying the overall impact the district and/or school seeks to have relative to those it serves—and to cohesively tie any changes and their desired outcomes to that why.
2. Neglecting the WHO: Failure to assess and develop the mindset, talents, and behaviors that leaders and staff need to bring about changes and their desired outcomes; to focus as much or more on the people leading and executing the change than on the specific change itself.
3. Neglecting the WHAT: Failure to acknowledge what people are already doing well in the school or district as it assesses conditions that speak to the need for additional change; to see change as cultural—a cohesive set of proactive actions that people undertake to serve their why.

When we step back and look at these three factors, our cautionary note to leaders is

“Ignore at your peril the people charged with leading or implementing the change.”

Leadership Spotlight

Change initiatives fail overwhelmingly because of what is not known or taken into consideration relative to the people charged with leading and making the change happen.

In his 2016 book, Thank You for Being Late, three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman reflected back to 2004 when his bestseller, The World Is Flat, was published. He was surprised to discover that what are today commonplace technologies were absent from the index. “Facebook didn’t even exist, Twitter was still a sound, the cloud was still in the sky, 4G was a parking space, ‘applications’ were what you sent to colleges, LinkedIn was barely known and most people thought it was a prison, Big Data was a good name for a rap star, and Skype, for most people was a typographical error” (Friedman, 2016, p. 25).

The changes that Friedman notes are only those we’ve experienced in technology and social media over the past decade. We could easily identify a similar list of changes in politics, international relations, economics, society, and, as we will do momentarily, in education.

At least three problems that require major shifts in how we approach, develop, and lead change have compounded our ability to effectively navigate those changes in education. We introduce these shifts here and then more fully develop them throughout the book.

Problem 1: The Why—We Haven’t Always Agreed on the Outcomes or the Impact We Want to Have

As the educational reform advocate, Sir Ken Robinson, noted in an animated video (see Link 1.1),

Leader Voices

Focus on the Why

Listen to part of our interview with Jonathan Adams, assistant principal at the International School in Luxembourg, where he describes his work to clearly articulate the why behind a literacy initiative and ensure that those implementing the change viewed themselves as valued contributors. (Listen via the QR code at the end of this chapter, or click on Link 1.2 at www.shiftingforimpact.com.)

We’re trying to meet the future by what we did in the past. The current system of education was designed and conceived and structured for a different age. Education is modeled on the interests of industrialization and in the image of it. Schools are organized around factory lines—ringing bells, separate facilities, specialized and separate subjects—all-in-all, a production line mentality. It’s all about standardization. (RSA Animate, 2010)

Evan Robb, principal of Johnson Williams Middle School in Berryville, Virginia, echoed this point in our interview: “You can search for pictures of an elementary classroom from the 1920s or the 1950s, and some of those classrooms don’t look much different from classrooms today. But if you did a search and looked up factories from then they would be radically different from what we see today. I talk to my staff about the fact that businesses are beholden to a bottom line—they have to change with the times, or they go out of business—but education hasn’t been that way.”

In short, as educators, we’ve largely gone about our business as we have since the dawn of the industrial age. We haven’t always pushed ourselves away from our desks to take a hard look at the why behind contemporary education. We’re often so mired in tasks and putting out the proverbial fires that we’ve lost the focus on what we’re trying to accomplish—the real outcomes w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Website Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Preface
• 1 Shifting: A New Way to Look at Change
• 2 Who You Need to Be as a Change Leader
• 3 What Organizational Principles Support a Culture of Productive Change?
• 4 Assessing Your Leadership
• 5 Assessing Your Environment to Inform Change
• 6 Getting Ready to Lead Change Differently
• 7 Getting the Organization Ready for Change
• 8 Implementing Organizational Change
• 9 Creating Sustained Impact
• References
• Index
• Advertisement