Tony Wagner - Change Leadership: A Practical Guide to Transforming Our Schools

CONTENTS

Copyright 2006 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wagner, Tony.

Change leadership: a practical guide to transforming our schools / Tony Wagner, Robert Kegan.1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN-10: 0-7879-7755-1

ISBN-13: 978-0-7879-7755-9

1. School management and organizationUnited States. 2. EducationAims and objectivesUnited States. 3. Educational changeUnited States. I. Kegan, Robert. II. Title.

LB2805.W315 2006

371.200973dc22

2005027613

The Jossey-Bass Education Series

Readers are invited to review and download full-size versions of the exercises in Change Leadership to use with their own groups and teams.

If you would like to download and print out an electronic copy of the exercises, please visit http://www.gse.harvard.edu/clg/news1a.html or http://www.josseybass.com/go/changeleadership

Thank you,

Change Leadership Group

PREFACE

The need for a dramatically more skilled and highly educated workforce in a global knowledge economycombined with profound changes in students and families life circumstanceshave created unprecedented demands on education leaders. Although it is increasingly clear that schools and districts must change fundamentally, not just incrementally, most leaders in education are understandably uncertain how they might go about their work differently.

Working to ensure that no child be left behind, struggling to overcome long-standing achievement gaps among racial and ethnic groups, dealing with the expectation that every school make progress annuallyschool leaders are being asked, in essence, to perform two very different jobs simultaneously.

Imagine being asked to rebuild an airplane while you are flying it . Doing so would be difficult under any circumstances, but even more so if youas all other hard-working, conscientious pilotshad received all your training in flying the plane as it is , rather than also learning how to transform the plane itself. Rebuilding it may require an entirely different set of skills.

Our goal in Change Leadership is to help school leaders, and leadership teams, better understand and develop the capacities needed to succeed at their second job of rebuilding the school systemwhile it operates. We offer a new systems change framework for education and a set of tools for leaders who are hard at work rebuilding the planewhile keeping it in the air, loaded with passengers.

The Change Leadership Group has spent the years since 2000 with school and district leaders from all over the United Statesin urban, suburban, and rural districts; in districts with thirty-seven high schools and districts with one; in districts with decent financial resources and those forced to reduce personnel each year despite rising student populations. As different as these settings were, we never found an administrative team that was not working as hard as it could. What weve learned is that improving our schools on the scale now demanded cannot simply be added to the set of routine responsibilities and activities with which leadership teams in schools and districts are normally occupied. The problem is not lack of hard work, good intentions, or initiative.

We believe the successful leadership of transformational improvement processes in schools and districts requires sharpening capacities in two quite different directions at the same time:

We must sharpen our capacities in both directions because, in the end, each depends on the other. It may be impossible for us to change at work in the ways we need to without new organizational arrangements, and it may be impossible to bring about significant changes in our organizations without considering deeply the possibility of our own change.

It is precisely this simultaneous attention to cultivating both a greater organizational savvy and a deeper self-awareness that distinguishes our approach. Not just ends unto themselves, these new forms of organizational and personal knowing are tightly linked to bringing about new results. We deliberately formed the Change Leadership Group to bring together an unusual collection of people knowledgeable about (1) the world of educational reform, (2) organizational development, and (3) adult learning because it was our judgment that many improvement efforts founder on the limitations of a nave approach to the complications of either organizational or individual change or both. Our goal here is to clearly illuminate what we at the Change Leadership Group call the dual focussimultaneously sharpening our outward and inward attention. Like any discipline, this dual focus can be learned and develops gradually over time. In Change Leadership , we present a variety of ways to help you develop it.