Leading Change in Your School: How to Conquer Myths, Build Commitment, and Get Results
Guiding schools through significant change is one of the toughest challenges educational leaders face, but learning from the examples of those who have succeeded can make it less daunting. In Leading Change in Your School, distinguished author and researcher Douglas B. Reeves offers lessons learned through his work with educators in thousands of schools around the world and presents real-life examples of leaders who have met the challenge of change head-on—with impressive results for their...
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Guiding schools through significant change is one of the toughest challenges educational leaders face, but learning from the examples of those who have succeeded can make it less daunting. In Leading Change in Your School, distinguished author and researcher Douglas B. Reeves offers lessons learned through his work with educators in thousands of schools around the world and presents real-life examples of leaders who have met the challenge of change head-on—with impressive results for their schools and districts. Readers will also find practical resources for engaging their colleagues in change initiatives.Expanding on a number of his columns in the journal Educational Leadership, Reeves offers insights and recommendations in four areas:• Creating conditions for change, including assessments to determine personal and organizational readiness for change;• Planning change, including cautionary notes about strategic planning;• Implementing change, including the importance of moving from rhetoric to day-to-day reality; and• Sustaining change, including the need to reorient priorities and values so that individual convenience gives way to a shared sense of the greater good.The change leaders—both teachers and administrators—whose stories Reeves tells come from varied districts, but they share a passion for creating schools that work for all students. They are, Reeves says, "people like you, sharing similar challenges but perhaps with different results."
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction 1Part 1 Creating Conditions for Change 7Chapter 1 Pull the Weeds Before You Plant the Flowers 13Chapter 2 The Personal Change Readiness Assessment 18Chapter 3 The Organizational Change Readiness Assessment 26Chapter 4 Cultural Change 36Chapter 5 Confronting the Myths of Change Leadership 41Part 2 Planning Change 57Chapter 6 Leadership Leverage: Focusing on Changes with the Greatest Results 61Chapter 7 The Right Team: Selecting Teachers and Administrators 67Chapter 8 Building Capacity with Coaching 72Chapter 9 Making Strategic Planning Work 78Part 3 Implementing Change 85Chapter 10 Closing the Implementation Gap 89Chapter 11 The Flywheel: Getting Short-Term Wins to Sustain Long-Term Change 94Chapter 12 Building Stakeholder Support: Academics and the Arts 110Chapter 13 Defining Change: Lessons from Literacy 116Part 4 Sustaining Change 123Chapter 14 Sustaining Excellence 127Chapter 15 Lessons Across the Globe 133Chapter 16 Teacher Leadership 137Epilogue: The Risks and Rewards of Change 141Appendix A Support Documents for Creating Conditions for Systemic Change 147Appendix B Freeport School District Plan on a Page, 2007-2008 162References 164Index 171About the Author 179
