Leading Change in Your School: How to Conquer Myths, Build Commitment, and Get Results » (New Edition)

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 ix

Introduction 1

Part 1 Creating Conditions for Change 7

Chapter 1 Pull the Weeds Before You Plant the Flowers 13

Chapter 2 The Personal Change Readiness Assessment 18

Chapter 3 The Organizational Change Readiness Assessment 26

Chapter 4 Cultural Change 36

Chapter 5 Confronting the Myths of Change Leadership 41

Part 2 Planning Change 57

Chapter 6 Leadership Leverage: Focusing on Changes with the Greatest Results 61

Chapter 7 The Right Team: Selecting Teachers and Administrators 67

Chapter 8 Building Capacity with Coaching 72

Chapter 9 Making Strategic Planning Work 78

Part 3 Implementing Change 85

Chapter 10 Closing the Implementation Gap 89

Chapter 11 The Flywheel: Getting Short-Term Wins to Sustain Long-Term Change 94

Chapter 12 Building Stakeholder Support: Academics and the Arts 110

Chapter 13 Defining Change: Lessons from Literacy 116

Part 4 Sustaining Change 123

Chapter 14 Sustaining Excellence 127

Chapter 15 Lessons Across the Globe 133

Chapter 16 Teacher Leadership 137

Epilogue: The Risks and Rewards of Change 141

Appendix A Support Documents for Creating Conditions for Systemic Change 147

Appendix B Freeport School District Plan on a Page, 2007-2008 162

References 164

Index 171

About the Author 179