Leading Change in Your School

Book excerpt: 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 ad 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."