ACTION PLAN

Change Project Action Plan

Change Project Action Plan

The educational challenge of the 21st century is to achieve higher levels of learning for all children. To attain this all, public school teachers and administrators must undertake changes that are specifically and significantly directed toward that end. While it is well-recognized that schools now serve linguistically, racially, and ethnically diverse student populations, educational administration programs have not responded to this diversity of needs. Daniel Griffiths, a long-time observer of educational administration whose words appear at the beginning of this article, may be more direct and damning of current preparation programs than are most commentators. However, he is not alone in his concern about the quality of programs and the implications of that quality for public education. Even though the reform of administration preparation programs has been debated and discussed since 1987, to our knowledge there have been no fundamental changes in such programs, but only isolated initiatives that have refined components of existing programs.One possible reason for the inertia found in both initial preparation and continuing professional development programs for principals and superintendents is the absence of models of change-oriented leadership. Recent research and development at the National Center for School Leadership (NCSL) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign,[4] has focused on conceptions of leadership within changing environments and on case studies of current administrators who have reputations for success in such environments. In this article we will draw on this research to promote a discussion of how administrator preparation must change if we are to meet children's needs.

At NCSL we embrace a specialized view of leadership throughout our research programs, while acknowledging that no one particular form of leadership is effective in every imaginable situation. Similarly, our conceptions of leadership and leaders are inherently tied to the nature of relationships between school leaders, school culture and climate, and the community the school serves. Position titles and job descriptions do not define qualities of effective leaders. Rather, the processes the participants engage in when presented with specific educational problems are what characterize their effectiveness. One fundamental issue that runs through all our work is the degree to which leaders can initiate, nurture, and maintain changes that benefit students. This basic theme led us to develop four postulates as essential elements of change-oriented leadership that benefits students:

Leaders for change are transformational and engage in relationships with school personnel that inspire all participants to accept and accomplish goals that rise above self-interest.

Leaders for change create collaborative, inclusive decision-making processes.

Leaders for change are oriented toward continuous learning; they believe that the school's context partially defines the school's needs and thus that responses to those needs must be tailored to the school's context.

Leaders for change use a variety of student outcomes to evaluate the effects of improvement efforts.

To test these postulates, we began four case studies of schools whose principals and teachers had local and national reputations for commitment to and progress toward change. We examined the claim of progress at each of these ...