Module 10: Change Manager or Change Leader?

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Relating the Parts to the Whole

In the preceding chapters, we have used the word system as a way ofillustrating the interrelated nature of the elements that make up an organization or a change effort. This way of thinking, first introduced

in the late 1950s by MIT professor Jay Forrester, became popular in

1990 when the now classic work The Fifth Discipline was first pub-

lished. In it, Peter Senge proposes a systems thinking framework as

the foundation of what he terms a learning organization. As a result

of this pioneering work, systems thinking is now understood and

practiced in many professions. It has been less commonly used in the

field of education.

A system is a “perceived whole whose elements ‘hang together’ because they

continually affect each other over time and operate toward a common purpose.”1

Systems thinking is about trying to keep that “whole” in mind, even while work-

ing on the various parts. More “ecological” than logical, it recognizes that simple,

linear cause-and-effect explanations sometimes miss the fact that today’s effect

may in turn be tomorrow’s cause, influencing some other part of the system. This

shift in thinking, and the need to understand the interrelationships among the

various components of the work, presents an enormous learning challenge for

change leaders. It requires addressing a number of questions:

• How can change leaders form a more holistic picture of change processes that

makes sense to themselves and to others?

c h a p t e r

S I X

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Wagner, Tony, et al. <i>Change Leadership : A Practical Guide to Transforming Our Schools</i>, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nlu/detail.action?docID=533929. Created from nlu on 2019-09-02 15:29:50.

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• How can change leaders learn to identify the contributors to an identified

problem?

• Where do change leaders look to find these contributors?

• How does a leader build a shared vision of success that is coherent and is truly

owned and inspiring to others?

More “ecological” than logical, it recognizes that simple, linear cause-and-effect explanations

sometimes miss the fact that today’s effect may in turn be tomorrow’s cause, influencing some other

part of the system.

These are difficult questions to answer individually, and rarely do leaders have

the data needed to answer them all at once. Yet it is very difficult to develop

a thoughtful strategy for change without some clear answers—or at least some

thoughtful hypotheses. What is needed is an analytic framework for understand-

ing the interrelated parts or elements of the change process in schools and districts.

This chapter explores a means for leaders to develop and practice new ways of

seeing the “whole.”

ARENAS OF CHANGE We offer an approach to thinking systemically about the challenges and goals

of change in schools and districts, which we call the 4 C’s—competency, condi-

tions, culture, and context.2 As we walk you through each of these components,

we encourage you to become familiar with the ideas represented by each and with

the relationships you see among them. We start with competencies because devel-

opment of adults’ skills is the most obvious and familiar realm of the change work.

From here, we move to the other arenas of change and some strategies for

improvement that may be progressively less familiar to the reader.

The goal of change we proposed in Chapter Two—improving teaching and

learning—remains at the center of the work. As we discuss the 4 C’s, we ask, what

do leaders need to think about to achieve this goal throughout their school or

district?

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Competencies Most efforts to improve education have at their core a focus on professional de-

velopment as a way to build competency. In this context of school transformation,

we define competencies as the repertoire of skills and knowledge that influences stu-

dent learning. Skillful, competent adults are a foundation of this work. Teachers

and administrators at every level of the system need to develop their competen-

cies regularly through ongoing development opportunities. This is not a terribly

new idea. But we have come to understand the limits of competency building as a

stand-alone strategy for change. Even with a focus on improving instruction,

developing educators’ competencies is necessary but insufficient for reinventing

schools. Competencies are most effectively built when professional development

is focused, job-embedded, continuous, constructed, and collaborative. But—and

here’s where the system comes into play—implementing this type of professional

development necessarily implicates many parts of the system.

To illustrate, we’d like to introduce you to Luis and Althea, whose stories illustrate

the systemic nature of schools and districts. Luis is a ninth-grade English teacher at

“Franklin High School” in a district where student literacy rates are uniformly low

and where teachers have had little training in how to teach literacy at the secondary

level. After much research and discussion, district leaders have decided to focus

change efforts on improving students’ literacy skills through the teaching of writ-

ing. His district sends all its English teachers for training in “writers’ workshop,” a

comprehensive strategy for teaching writing that has been in use for more than

thirty years. Luis and his colleagues learn about the importance of having students

write frequently and the value of live, one-on-one conferencing with students in-

stead of just filling papers with red ink. They learn how to increase motivation with

relevant writing topics and authentic audiences outside of school.

Luis comes back from this training with very mixed feelings. On the one hand,

he is excited to try these new approaches to teaching writing. They make sense to

him. But almost immediately he is overwhelmed by the reality of what it would take

to put these new ideas into practice. Luis has 130 students. How many sets of 130 pa-

pers can he grade in a month? The same goes for conferencing. Luis tries a few one-

on-one conferences and begins to understand how valuable they are—both as a way

to teach writing and as a means to better know students in order to learn what writ-

ing topics might motivate them. But each takes more than fifteen minutes. How

many can he do in his one planning period per day? When will he prepare his les-

sons, if all his time is taken up with student conferences? Finally, he begins to have

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students read their work aloud in small groups so they can get feedback from peers,

but here too, Luis quickly becomes discouraged. The students enjoy reading their

work aloud, but it takes time for every student to have a turn. With all the required

material that he must cover, time is a precious commodity in Luis’ classes.

Althea is Luis’ principal at Franklin High. Their district has come to understand

the need to teach principals how to supervise for instructional improvement. In

addition to working with English teachers on writing, it is developing the compe-

tencies of its principals as instructional leaders. Althea and all the principals in her

district have received training in how to do school learning walks. The principals

have also been examining and discussing videotapes of teaching, and for the first

time Althea feels more confident about going into classrooms and determining

what might be most important to teachers’ practice. She is learning the skills of

powerful supervision that far surpass her earlier training in the bureaucratic details

of how to fill out an evaluation form. She sees how her time in the classrooms can

enhance the opportunities for students through better support for her teachers.

She is excited to think of herself as a leader of instruction who might effectively

practice these new competencies.

When Althea thinks about scheduling some classroom visits, she immediately

realizes there are problems. The district leadership places a premium on answering

parent and central office phone calls and e-mails promptly. Furthermore, the dis-

trict’s test scores have plateaued in recent years, so Althea has been expected to spend

her time ensuring that all teachers are covering the required state standards. The

district is also stressing the importance of improving the daily attendance rate in

its high schools and wants school administrators to spend more time tracking down

truants and “in-school” dropouts—students who come to school to see friends but

who rarely attend classes. Althea knows that if she is to expand her role in super-

vising individual teachers, phone calls and e-mails won’t get answered promptly,

and daily student attendance numbers won’t go up. She also knows that the skills

of the few teachers with whom she can work in a month may improve at the ex-

pense of the school’s test scores in all classes. When she is not busy doing hall sweeps

for kids out of class, should she rush to the office to answer phone calls and e-mails?

Ride herd on her assistant principals and department heads to make sure every-

thing in the curriculum gets covered? Or can she afford the luxury of spending

more time in classes trying to give in-depth help to a few teachers? She can’t

do it all. She begins to wonder how she might become clearer about her highest

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priorities and what other conditions in her work environment might be changed

in ways that would enable her to focus on what’s most important.

Conditions For both Luis and Althea, opportunities to further develop and effectively use the

new competencies they’ve acquired are seriously undermined by the conditions of

work imposed on them. We define conditions as the external architecture

surrounding student learning, the tangible arrangements of time, space, and resources.

Some examples include:

• Time spent with and for kids, with colleagues, with parents, with the community

• Explicit expectations around roles and responsibilities, student outcomes tied

to assessments, laws and policies, contracts

• Scale and structure, including size of physical plant, organization of physical

plant, teacher-student ratio, transitions between grade levels

Luis’ instructional goals ran into several challenges associated with time—time

for reading student papers, time for students to “workshop” their writing with each

other, and time for him to confer with students individually. For Luis to use his

new competencies to improve his teaching, one condition that might need to

change is the number of students for whom he is responsible. But the district office,

although eager to improve students’ writing and support the investment it

has already made in the writers’ workshop, is also wrestling with recent budget cut-

backs and is not in a position to allocate resources for smaller class sizes.

Let’s assume that the district comes to appreciate the time barriers that frus-

trate the implementation of writers’ workshop. It decides to tackle this condition of

teaching and learning and reduces the number of students Luis sees by combin-

ing English and history into a double block. Now Luis sees 65 students a day for

ninety minutes instead of 130 students for forty-five minutes. The district then

takes the additional step of “looping” ninth- and tenth-grade classes, so that Luis

now teaches the same group of students for two years. Suddenly, without spend-

ing additional money, Luis’ two-year overall student load drops from 260 students

to 65 students! Luis is ecstatic. For the first time in his professional career, the

conditions of teaching and learning in his school allow him to know all his students

well. Now Luis can begin to try out the new competencies he has learned to teach

writing. He feels more successful with more of his students than ever before.

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Meanwhile, the district also acts to improve the conditions that enable Althea to

use her newly developed competencies related to improving instruction. First, and

perhaps most important, the superintendent receives the school board’s approval to

clarify expectations about principals’ roles and responsibilities. The central office has

stated that improving instruction is the priority. The district leadership supports the

principals in this instructional leadership role by encouraging principals to delegate

more of their managerial responsibilities to other administrators so that they can

spend more of their time in classrooms. They even designated an ombudsman

position for each school and trained individuals in these roles to handle complaints

and minor disciplinary cases. With these clarifications and supports, the conditions

of Althea’s job have changed fundamentally; she is no longer expected to have an

open office door and deal with every crisis the minute it comes up. Instead, she has

authorization to block two hours in her calendar every day to be in classrooms to

exercise her new competencies for improving instruction.

Conditions represent the visible arrangements and allocations of time, space,

and money. In contrast, culture, which we take up in the next section, refers to the

invisible but powerful meanings and mindsets that are held individually and

collectively throughout the system.

Culture We define culture as the shared values, beliefs, assumptions, expectations, and be-

haviors related to students and learning, teachers and teaching, instructional leader-

ship, and the quality of relationships within and beyond the school. Culture refers to

the invisible but powerful meanings and mindsets held individually and collec-

tively throughout the system. The current culture has impeded Althea and Luis’

ability to deepen the understanding and application of their learning; they

encounter new difficulties as they attempt to use their newfound competencies

and changed conditions to positively influence student learning.

Luis is anxious to compare notes about his students’ work with other

humanities teachers, and he thinks that perhaps they ought to be developing

some common standards for grading students’ writing. But despite the fact that

teachers see their departmental meetings as a waste of time, past attempts to

make these meetings more substantive have met with covert, and sometimes

overt, resistance. Luis also observes that many of his colleagues appear distrust-

ful of the administration and even of one another. In the staff lounge, a few

veteran faculty are always heard complaining about the principal, or they’re

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griping about the parents, or the kids’ poor behavior. Increasingly, Luis feels dis-

heartened by the culture of isolation and lack of respect in his building, which

undermines any attempts at collaboration. He knows his principal, Althea, is well

meaning but wonders if she’s intimidated by those veteran faculty. It appears to

be a vicious cycle, and Luis wonders how it will ever get broken. So he retreats

to his classroom—the one place where he can create a culture of mutual respect

and shared accountability.

Althea also wonders how she is going to influence some of her veteran teach-

ers’ beliefs and behaviors and the culture of the building. Additionally, she has been

spending a good deal of her time in classrooms now, and the more she observes,

the more questions she has about how to effectively move teachers to higher levels

of competency. What are the best ways to conference with teachers? Which teach-

ing skills are most important to emphasize first? These topics weren’t covered in

the principals’ two-day training, and even if they had been, Althea would proba-

bly not have been able to take in the information back then. But now that she’s

ready to try new approaches, she remains silent rather than ask for the help she

feels her colleagues could provide. In her district, principals don’t ask for help or

even acknowledge that they have questions about their roles as leaders. Not only

is there very little real communication among the principals, but many see one

another as rivals for the attention of the superintendent, the highest test scores,

the prestige of new programs, or extra discretionary resources that the district

sometimes doles out to the “favored ones.” The culture of the district, Althea begins

to realize, is one of isolation and competition, where principals are rewarded for

having all the answers. As she sits, frustrated, in yet another district administra-

tors’ meeting where announcements take up most of the time, it suddenly occurs

to her that she has unwittingly replicated the same culture in her school. She

resolves to work with Luis and her other teacher leaders to, at the least, transform

her school’s culture into one that is more collaborative and values the process of

inquiry and adult learning.

Althea knows that to succeed with her most challenged kids, creating a more

collegial adult learning culture at Franklin High isn’t enough. She knows that she

needs more collaborative relationships with parents, for example. And she and her

teachers need to become clearer about the skills the school’s graduates will need—

two elements of what we call the “context” of teaching and learning. Nevertheless,

Althea leaves the meeting excited about the idea of working to improve the cul-

ture of her building. She knows that’s where she must start.

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Context A fourth influence on Luis and Althea’s work, and the work of all of us in schools

and districts, is the social, historical, and economic context in which all these efforts

take place. By context we are especially referring to “skill demands” all students must

meet to succeed as providers, learners, and citizens and the particular aspirations,

needs, and concerns of the families and community that the school or district serves.

As we discussed in Chapter One, the world of the 2020s, the knowledge economy

of the future, for which our students are preparing, will be very different from the

world of the 1970s—and even from what we experience today. Understanding con-

text means knowing more about the worlds from which students come and those

for which they must be prepared.

Context also refers to the larger organizational systems within which we work,

and their demands and expectations, formal and informal. For a school this might

be the district; for the district it might be the state; the state exists within the context

of the federal government. We need to understand all this contextual information

to help inform and shape the work we do to transform the culture, conditions, and

competencies of our schools and districts. And we may, in turn, need to influence

elements of the context in which we work, as well. Figure 6.1 illustrates the inter-

dependencies of the 4 C’s.

As Althea works to build a more collaborative culture in her school, focusing

particularly on creating communities of practice that will replace or transform

those departmental meetings, Luis and his colleagues are working to set common

standards for students’ writing. They have begun to question whether their stan-

dards are high enough and wonder what level of writing proficiency colleges now

expect. The community college across town has long complained that nearly half

of the district’s graduates have needed some form of remediation in writing, so

Luis seeks permission from Althea for a team from his Humanities Department to

spend the day visiting classes and talking with the professors there. The team mem-

bers are surprised to learn that students require help with much more than just

the mechanics of good writing; many come to the college not knowing how to

organize their thinking or to express their reasoning clearly in essays. The college

teachers are also concerned about students’ lack of research and study skills. These

insights lead Luis and his colleagues to begin talking about how they can strengthen

students’ analytic skills and build more independent research projects into the cur-

riculum. It further sharpens their focus on the competencies they need to continue

to develop to be effective literacy and writing teachers.

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At the same time, Luis and his colleagues want to ensure greater parental sup-

port for the emphasis they are placing on writing. At back-to-school night later

in the fall, all the humanities teachers talk with parents about some of the ways in

which they can help—most of all, by asking their children to share the contents of

their writing portfolios frequently. The department encourages Althea to address

the parents and to send a letter home to them, as well. In her letter, she stresses the

importance of all students having the right conditions for learning at home—a

supervised two-hour quiet time in the evenings for schoolwork. And she gives

parents her e-mail address, encouraging them to contact her with any questions

or concerns they might have. She also launches an advisory committee to help the

school create a culture that is more responsive to the needs and concerns of all

parents, not just the ones who are vocal.

Relating the Parts to the Whole 105

Figure 6.1 Interdependencies of the 4 C’s

Improving teaching

and learning

Conditions of learning

and teaching for students and adults

Culture of classrooms,

schools, districts

Competencies of adults

Contexts: Understa n d in

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By reaching out in these ways, Luis and Althea are acknowledging the impor-

tance of the contexts within which they work. Through conversations with the

college teachers, Luis comes to better understand the skills his students most

need—the world for which they must be prepared. And by listening to and working

more proactively with parents, Althea and her teachers are attempting to better

understand and even perhaps to positively influence the world from which their

students come.

We have captured some of Luis and Althea’s baseline challenges in competen-

cies, conditions, culture, and context in a graphic organizer (see Figure 6.2).

Although their journey has just begun, they have set some crucial changes in

motion. Just as important, they have begun to recognize how one element of their

work affects another; this insight reflects the core of systems thinking.

Your system—any system—is perfectly designed to produce the results

you’re getting.

Another dimension to systems thinking is that a system runs on its own mo-

mentum and all its parts work together to keep it going. The interactions of these

parts naturally create some kind of product or result. In fact, your system—any

system—is perfectly designed to produce the results you’re getting. In our illus-

trative story, the result Luis and Althea wanted was improved student learning. To

change even one feature of that—students’ writing—the system had to change,

and, as Luis and Althea discovered, all parts of the system had to be addressed. The

challenge in systems work, we find, is that because the system flows so effortlessly

(before you begin to change it), it is hard to see the parts that are interacting and

how they work together to hold the results in place.

With a beginning understanding of the 4 C’s and how these interrelated

elements affect the task of improving learning, teaching, and leading in place, we

now invite you as an individual (or your community of practice) to use this sys-

tems thinking tool as a way to better identify and diagnose some of the factors that

influence the problem you’ve been working on throughout this book. (See Exer-

cise 6.1 and Figure 6.3.)

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Exercise 6.1: 4 C’s Diagnostic Tool—As Is

Step One Using a blank version of the 4 C’s chart provided, put the problem statement you refined in

Chapter Two (see Exercise 2.1) in the center of the overlapping circles.

Step Two Now take some time to reflect on the contributors to your current system as they relate to

the problem you’ve identified. The following questions can get you started.

Relating the Parts to the Whole 107

Figure 6.2 Baseline 4 C’s Analysis for Franklin High School

Improving teaching for improving students’ literacy

skills

• No clear district or building priority on improving student writing— everything is important! • Isolation within the buildings and across the district • Teachers distrust administration and each other

Culture • Class sizes too large for individualization • Little time for classroom visits • Too many management requests and crises • No common standards for students’ writing

Conditions

• High student remediation rate in community college classes • Parent concerns and ability to support students

Context

• Ninth-grade teachers lack skills in teaching literacy • Principal lacks skills in providing meaningful feedback to teachers

Competencies

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Change Leadership: A Practical Guide to Transforming Our Schools108

Competencies

How well do we:

• Think strategically? • Identify student learning needs? • Gather and interpret data? • Collaborate? • Give and receive critiques? • Productively disagree? • Reflect and make midcourse corrections?

Conditions

How well do we create and maintain:

• Time for problem solving, for learning, for talking about challenges? • Relevant and user-friendly student data? • Agreed upon performance standards? • Clear priorities and focus for each person’s work? • District- and building-level support?

Culture

How would we characterize:

• Our level of expectations for all students’ learning? (Consistently high? Medium? Low? Or a mix of these depending on which students?)

• Our school’s agenda? (Multiple and unrelated? Frequent changes? Steady, consistent focus? Related initiatives that build on each other?)

• The communications between district and school leadership to teachers? (Directive? Compliance oriented? Engaged in building cosponsorship and

ownership?)

• Adult relationships with each other? (Lacking trust? Trusting?) • Adult views of responsibility for all students’ learning? (Blames others? Sees

various contributors, including oneself?)

Context

How well do we:

• Understand and work with students’ families? • See clearly the core competencies students will need for work, citizenship, and

continuous learning?

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Step Three Now add brief, bulleted descriptions of the strengths or assets your school or district has—

as they relate to the problem you’re trying to solve—to the appropriate circles or the overlaps

between the circles. We encourage you to go back to the seven disciplines diagnostic (Chapter

Two, Exercise 2.2) and the three continua diagnostics you completed in Chapter Four (Exer-

cises 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3) and consider your responses as current contributors to your system.

Step Four Using a different color, insert bulleted descriptions into the appropriate circles, listing the

weaknesses or challenges that will need to be overcome in order to solve your problem.

Relating the Parts to the Whole 109

Figure 6.3 4 C’s Diagnostic Tool—As Is

Write your problem

statement here

Culture Conditions

Context

Competencies

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This exercise can be a great help in beginning planning. For example, Luis and

Althea’s baseline analysis (shown in Figure 6.2) was an important early step in their

school improvement work. Once you’ve completed this exercise, we encourage you

take time to consider any new insights or questions that arise from your diagnos-

tic work. For example:

• Does your understanding of the problem change in any way?

• Do you see new or different ways of going at the problem?

• Does your diagnosis begin to suggest some work that needs to be done before

other work can be undertaken?

Do you feel ready to answer these questions? If not, what more would you need

to know? Are there specific data you need to collect in order to develop a robust pic-

ture of the various contributions of the 4 C’s? How might you collect these data?

What is your next step? A real-world example may help as you tackle these questions.

TOWARD TRANSFORMATION: USING THE 4 C’S In Chapters Two and Four, we briefly mentioned the work of Superintendent Tony

Alvarado and his deputy superintendent (later his successor) Elaine Fink. We now

explore some of their work in greater depth as a way of illustrating how change

leaders have used systemic thinking to guide an improvement process.

Community District 2 was one of thirty-two community school districts in

New York City until a citywide reorganization in 2003. It included about 22,000

students from exceptionally diverse backgrounds: 29 percent white, 14 percent

African American, 22 percent Hispanic, 34 percent Asian, and less than

1 percent Native American. English was a second language for about 20 percent of

the students, and nearly half came from economically disadvantaged families.3

Beginning in the late 1980s, District 2 began a long-term, systemwide instruc-

tional improvement effort. Over the next ten years, District 2 demonstrated dra-

matic results, moving from sixteenth out of thirty-two in test results across

New York to second (just behind a predominantly white, middle-class district).

What accounts for such dramatic results? The answer to that question is a rich

and important story, one documented more fully by various researchers.4 The

abridged answer is that District 2 adopted a tenacious focus on the improvement

of literacy instruction, and kept this its sole focus for the next five years. District

leaders reallocated resources from the central office, freeing up funds to funnel

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Relating the Parts to the Whole 111

into the improvement of literacy instruction. Leaders began to promote and model

a strong normative culture of respect, trust, and accountability for learning.

Furthermore, the district developed an intensive infrastructure for job-embedded

professional development—for administrators and teachers—focused on literacy

instruction.

Leaders began to promote and model a strong normative culture of respect, trust, and

accountability for learning.

The story of PS 198, an elementary school within District 2, provides a view

into how Alvarado, Fink, and the school principal worked systemically to turn that

school around.5 It also can help expand understanding of the interrelationship of

the 4 C’s.

Working Within the Context In the 1990s, a large majority of families served by PS 198 lived in poverty. More

than 90 percent of its students were eligible for free or reduced-fee lunch (a

nationally used indicator of poverty in schools). It consistently ranked last on read-

ing scores in the district. Superintendent Tony Alvarado hired a new principal,

Gloria Buckerey, in 1996. Buckerey worked hard to weed out incompetent teachers,

brought in several staff developers, and hired new young teachers. Few of them

lasted more than a year. The job seemed overwhelming, and after three years noth-

ing had changed. Only about 25 percent of the fourth graders were reading at or

above grade level on the comparatively easy standardized tests that were then in

use. The problem of poor student achievement and high staff turnover became so

severe that the State of New York put PS 198 on its list of “Schools Under Review”

in 1998. If things didn’t change quickly, the state would close the school. Alvarado

and Fink decided new strategies were needed to turn the situation around, and

Fink began visiting the school monthly. Over a period of about six months, she

developed an action plan for change focused on literacy.

Fink’s decision to begin their improvement work with literacy was not unex-

pected. As we mentioned, the sole focus of District 2’s school improvement

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efforts—in staff development, in conversations with principals—was how to

improve teaching and learning for literacy. District leadership reasoned that if

students could not read, comprehend, and write well, then they certainly were not

going to be able to decode math or science texts. Fink also knew that trying to

attend to science, social studies, and math skills all at once would not provide the

focus—and the opportunity for success—that teachers and students needed.

Changing the Conditions of Teaching and Learning One clear way to improve students’ literacy skills is to simply have them spend

more of their day reading and writing. Therefore, the first thing that Fink did as

she began to work with Buckerey and her PS 198 faculty was to examine the school

schedule. She did not try to impose a new schedule. She simply posed a problem

for Buckerey and the faculty to solve: How are we going to find more time in the

day for literacy instruction and for adult learning? Together, they created a new

schedule that allowed for three-hour literacy blocks in the school day and devoted

significantly more time for teachers to talk together about their work. The faculty

also decided that the “specialist” teachers—those who taught art, science, music,

and so on—would learn how to teach literacy and be an additional resource in the

classroom for those literacy blocks. Fink allocated extra resources to the school for

two additional reading specialists.

The immediate result of these changes was that every reading group could now

work intensely with a teacher every day rather than once a week. Fink and Alvarado

also established a summer program for all the students in PS 198 to give them more

time for learning. In the second year, they added another program to better prepare

incoming kindergartners for the start of school. These programs were so successful

that they were subsequently adopted throughout the district in those schools

serving the most at-risk students.

Developing the Competencies of Teachers and Principals When Fink began analyzing the school’s reading test data, she quickly realized that

three-fourths of the fourth graders had spent their entire school careers with

beginning teachers! These inexperienced teachers didn’t know how to teach the

balanced literacy program supported by District 2. And because the turnover rate

was so high, there were no teachers in the building with the skills to help their less

experienced colleagues. Fink approached the union and suggested that they create

a new Distinguished Teacher position—with extra duties and a higher salary.

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Two distinguished teachers, the best literacy educators in the district, came to the

school and worked alongside regular classroom teachers, modeling how to teach

literacy and coaching their peers. These distinguished teachers also worked with

all the staff during the time available for whole school professional development.

Although literacy was a nonnegotiable focus in District 2, Alvarado and Fink

did not believe that all schools and all students would best learn from one cur-

riculum. As Fink said in a conversation with one of us, “You don’t stand in front

of your principals and say ‘all schools should. . . .’ Each school, like each child, has

its own unique learning challenges. This is about kids’ learning; it’s not about phi-

losophy. All kids need rigor, but they learn in different ways, need different things.”6

Fink worked with Buckerey, the visiting distinguished teachers, and the faculty to

adapt the district’s balanced literacy program to the particular needs of the stu-

dents in PS 198. All teachers now spent one half hour each day on word study

(phonics), in addition to all the other elements of the literacy program. Gradually,

and with support from internal and external experts, they all learned how to

strengthen their ability to teach the balanced literacy curriculum.

As fruitful as this was, Fink and Buckerey realized that the competencies teach-

ers were developing could be considered successful only if there was evidence that

students were now learning more. Using the same “graded” reading texts with

all students, the faculty developed common indicators of progress and prepared

charts for each student that showed exactly what reading level each had attained.

Fink visited every classroom in the school and discussed each student’s chart with

Buckerey monthly. They also reviewed each teacher’s individual learning plan and

made changes, as needed, according to the students’ reading progress. (These prac-

tices, pioneered in PS 198, eventually became widespread in the district.)

Finally, the two worked closely to develop Buckerey’s abilities to coach

her teachers and run effective staff meetings. Fink told all her principals, “I have

failed you if I can’t teach you how to teach your teachers.” She provided time for

Buckerey to be in study groups with other principals, make school visitations, and

work with another principal in the district who was assigned to be her “buddy.”

Transforming the District Culture As Fink’s earlier comment implied, the district had an explicit understanding that

any one school’s problem was everyone’s problem. Its motto was, “isolation is the

enemy of improvement.” Alvarado and Fink helped other principals understand

that PS 198’s struggle was shared by all of them—and that its students depended

Relating the Parts to the Whole 113

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on the cooperation of the entire system. Principals of other schools knew that a

disproportionate share of the financial resources was going to PS 198, and they

supported that decision, as did the board. They worked collaboratively to investi-

gate and develop new leadership and supervision skills. Monthly principals’ meet-

ings were focused solely on discussions related to improving instruction, and many

began with school learning walks. Alvarado and Fink emphasized that the culture

of the district had to connect adults’ learning explicitly to the improvement of

instruction and to students’ learning.7 Their other motto was, “if it’s not about

teaching and learning, then it’s not about anything.”8 In effect, their entire district

was made up of nested communities of practice related to the continuous

improvement of instruction.

Their entire district was made up of nested communities of practice related to the continuous

improvement of instruction.

What were the results of their efforts? They were more successful than they ever

thought possible. Two years after PS 198 was put under review by the state, it

was taken off the list. By the end of year three, 55 percent of the students scored

in the top half of a newer and much more difficult literacy test. Their scores were in

the middle range of a district whose test scores were the second highest in the

region and whose literacy scores continue to improve every year. In 2000, Gloria

Buckerey was honored by the state as the principal who had made the most

progress of any principal leading a School Under Review. And two of Buckerey’s

teachers had themselves become distinguished teachers in District 2.

What Alvarado and Fink accomplished as educational leaders in District 2

remains one of the few successful examples of systemic districtwide change. Over

a period of years, they created an engaged, knowledge-generating culture with a

clear focus and widely shared commitment to provide a quality education for all

students, where teachers had a shared vision of good teaching, and where there

were powerful collaborative relationships based on trust and respect. This cultural

shift created the impetus to change the conditions of teaching and learning

and sustainable development of educator competencies at every level. Teachers in

District 2 sometimes complained about how hard the work was. They also said

Change Leadership: A Practical Guide to Transforming Our Schools114

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they had never been in a place where there was more collaboration, collegiality,

and opportunity for professional growth.

We have several purposes in telling this remarkable story of school and district

transformation. We want you to see that this work can be done. We certainly want

you to feel the pull of success as you read about their accomplishments. We also

want you to begin to understand their transformation from the systems perspec-

tive and how the larger system of the district became an important context and

facilitator of the school’s successful efforts, each with distinct and explicit roles

focused on the same goal.

We also have another purpose. We want to prepare you to do some further

analysis of your own school or district so that you can move from the problem you

identified (what we call your As Is state, your current reality) to thinking about

how your system might look if it is producing the results you need—all students,

new skills (your To Be picture). What is important is that both your As Is and your

To Be pictures capture the contributors to the results you have, as well as those that

would need to be in place to get the results you want. We also encourage you to

begin thinking about how to get from “here” to “there.” To help you do this, we’ll

map out the 4 C’s of PS 198’s journey.

The left side of Exhibit 6.1 should look familiar to you. It is similar to the

systems view you completed for your own school or district’s problem. (Again,

we want to stress how much more you will get out of this book if you are using

this information for your own setting!) You should recognize the contributors—

such as inexperienced teachers teaching students in the early grades and a static

curriculum delivery orientation—to PS 198’s low literacy achievement from their

story. It represents a snapshot of their system at the beginning of our story.

The right side of Exhibit 6.1 is a snapshot of PS 198’s system at the end of our story

and shows the contributions to a system that is yielding different results—high liter-

acy achievement. We call this their To Be picture; it represents the view we believe they

would have drawn had they used this framework to guide their planning. We have

laid both diagrams out side by side to illustrate the difference in the two systems and

how each component needed to be different in order to bring about different results.

The change from the As Is to the To Be side, the strategies that PS 198 used, are

briefly summarized here. These strategies represent the thinking that guided the

results identified in the To Be picture. They are the key efforts that moved PS 198

from low to high levels of literacy and the actions taken to carry them out. We include

a synopsis of those actions, as illustrative examples, pulled from our story.

Relating the Parts to the Whole 115

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Relating the Parts to the Whole 117

As we’ve seen, the 4 C’s diagnostic generates a rich As Is picture, a dynamic snap-

shot of current assets and challenges in relation to one another and to the identi-

fied problem. As PS 198’s strategies make clear, the construction of this As Is picture

is only a first step.

We now invite you into some forward thinking about your future and what you

are doing and will do to get there. Use Exercise 6.2 and Figure 6.4 to begin the

movement toward your goal.

Figure 6.4 4 C’s Diagnostic Tool—To Be

Write your problem

statement here

Culture Conditions

Context

Competencies

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Change Leadership: A Practical Guide to Transforming Our Schools118

Strategy

Focus only on improving

literacy teaching.

Develop principals as

instructional leaders.

Increase time for students’

literacy learning.

Reallocate resources.

Make data-based decisions.

Develop collaborative rela-

tionships among adults.

Action

Give school explicit permission to focus only on

literacy:

• Allocate resources. • Focus professional development only on literacy.

Deputy superintendent makes monthly visits to teach

principal how to use student reading data to work

with teachers and their individualized learning plans:

• Connect principal to study groups with other principals.

• Lead school learning walks. • Lead monthly principal meetings. • Assign “buddy” to principal.

Establish summer opportunities for all students

to begin (kindergartners) or continue working on

literacy:

• Give responsibility to school to revise schedule for increased time on literacy with students,

and for adult learning around effective literacy

instruction.

• Work with other schools and school board to send needed finances to PS 198.

• Provide two reading specialists. • Work with union to develop Distinguished

Teacher position.

Analyze student and teacher data for which students,

with which teachers, with what outcomes:

• Develop “graded” reading texts and chart student progress to inform teacher strategies.

• Work collaboratively with the school to adapt balanced literacy program to meet its needs.

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Exercise 6.2: Moving Toward the Goal, via the 4 C’s

Step One: Create a Picture of Success Earlier in this chapter, in Exercise 6.1, you used the 4 C’s to develop a more systemic un-

derstanding of the problem your school or district is tackling. Now it’s time to review your

completed version of the 4 C’s diagnostic tool.

What would success look like if the problem you identified (in the middle of your As Is

picture) were solved? In other words, what results do you want your new system to create?

Be as precise and specific as possible. Write a description of this picture of success into the

middle of the 4 C’s visual provided.

What would success look like if the problem you identified (in the middle of your As Is picture)

were solved?

Step Two: Build the To Be Picture Complete the figure by identifying all the changes within each of the four arenas of

change—competencies, conditions, culture, and context—that are necessary if you are

to realize your picture of success. You may wish to revisit the questions we suggested

in Exercise 6.1, to prompt future-state thinking, such as: How should we be able to

characterize . . . ? How will we be able to . . . ? What will we have in place for . . . ?

Map these changes onto the visual within the most appropriate circle. Some changes

you identify may not fit neatly within a single circle; place these in the appropriate

overlapping spaces of the diagram. We encourage you, in completing this visual, to be ex-

haustive in your thinking—list every change you imagine will be necessary to solve your

problem. Think, in true systemic fashion, of the relationships between the change arenas.

What relationships will exist, and what shifts will they cause in other arenas? What might

need to be intentionally engineered in one arena to provoke change in another?

This completed visual represents your To Be picture, a systemic and dynamic

vision of the future to which you aspire. This visual should help identify the land-

scape of work that is necessary in order to make progress on the problem in your As

Is picture.

Relating the Parts to the Whole 119

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Your two visuals now help present a picture of the distance between where you are and

where you want to go. We encourage you to consider any observations or questions that

emerge, such as:

• What insights about the problem and the potential solution(s) do these visuals offer? • Are there any standouts or surprises?

Step Three: Identify Current Strategies Identify any existing strategies that are in place (or are being implemented) that are

intended to help you solve the problem and realize your To Be picture. In other words,

identify what you and others are doing to move from where your school or district cur-

rently is to where you would like it to be as you’ve captured it in your To Be picture. Before

engaging in this exercise, you may find it helpful to revisit the strategies and actions that

District 2 undertook with its work in PS 198.

Step Four: Consider the Current Strategies With respect to the strategies you’ve identified, consider the following questions:

1. Consider the degree to which each strategy fully addresses a systemic understanding

of the problem or solution. Do the strategies address the main contributors to the

problem or the main changes necessary to realize your goal?

2. If there are multiple strategies, consider the degree to which they, as a whole, address

a systemic understanding of the problem or the main challenges necessary to realize

your goal.

3. What blind spots, if any, can you identify in the current work?

4. In what ways do your strategies recognize and seek to affect the relationships

between the contributors you identified?

5. What additional strategies might be necessary in light of your As Is and To Be

pictures? Your thoughts will be an important backdrop when we take up the

question of how to work more strategically.

ANOTHER USE FOR THE 4 C’S The As Is –To Be diagnostic tools can also be used to create a greater under-

standing of the need for fundamental change—reinvention versus reform—as

you realize what a shared vision of success might actually look like. For exam-

ple, Grand Rapids Public Schools used the As Is –To Be tool in an ambitious

redesign of its comprehensive high schools. District leaders wanted a way to engage

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Relating the Parts to the Whole 121

shareholder groups (students, parents, teachers, higher-education leaders, and busi-

ness partners). They used the tool in mixed-group conversations to facilitate an

understanding of why Grand Rapids needed to dramatically redesign its high

schools. This process enabled individuals to share and hear perspectives of the

dilemmas of high schools and what would be required to truly transform them

into schools that can nurture, support, and educate all high school students. The

result? They achieved a deeper sense of focus and purpose, more engagement

among various shareholders who felt a sense of genuine ownership of both the

problem and the solution, and greater collaboration in the effort to transform

the high schools.

We discuss the phasing and staging of a change process in more depth in Chap-

ter Eight. But first, it’s time to consider systemic thinking from another angle, this

time looking inward to personal, individual learning and growth.

Endnotes 1. Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (New York: Currency Doubleday,

1994), 90. 2. A description of the 4 C’s was first published by Tony Wagner in Making the Grade:

Reinventing America’s Schools (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2002), 134–146. 3. These data are from Richard F. Elmore and Deanna Burney’s The Challenge of School

Variability: Improving Instruction in New York City’s Community District #2 (Philadel- phia: University of Pennsylvania, Consortium for Policy Research in Education, 1998).

4. For further information, we recommend the following: R. F. Elmore and D. Burney, Continuous Improvement in Community District #2, New York City (University of Pitts- burgh, HPLC Project, Learning Research and Development Center, 1998); E. Fink and L. B. Resnick, Developing Principals as Instructional Leaders (University of Pittsburgh, HPLC Project, Learning Research and Development Center, 1999); L. B. Resnick and M. Harwell, High Performance Learning Communities District #2 Achievement (University of Pittsburgh, HPLC Project, Learning Research and Development Center, 1998); K. Maloy, Building a Learning Community: The Story of New York City Community District #2 (University of Pittsburgh, HPLC Project, Learning Research and Development Center, 1998).

5. This account is based on a presentation by Anthony Alvarado and Elaine Fink at the Grantmakers for Education conference (Boston, Mass., November 7, 2000) and sub- sequent conversations with both Alvarado and Fink. Anthony Alvarado served as superintendent in New York City’s Community District 2 from 1987 until 1998 and was succeeded by his colleague Fink. A slightly different version of this story was first published in Wagner’s Making the Grade (note 2).

6. In discussion with Tony Wagner after the Grantmakers presentation (note 4).

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7. For a more complete description of District 2’s “Theory of Action” and strategies for professional development, see Elaine Fink and Lauren B. Resnick, “Developing Prin- cipals as Instructional Leaders,” Phi Delta Kappan 82, no. 8 (April 2001): 598–606.

8. The culture of District 2 in the late 1980s and 1990s bore a close resemblance to the culture of collaborative problem solving and teacher teamwork that has been the pri- mary strategy used in Japan to improve public education. The Teaching Gap by James Stigler and James Hiebert, which we mentioned earlier as an example of a teacher- driven community of practice, describes what the Japanese call the lesson study process, where groups of teachers work together to identify a common learning prob- lem of students and then create a model lesson to solve the problem. Lessons are refined collaboratively and then, when proven successful, are widely disseminated.

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