Creating Sustainable Systematic School Change

Wafa Hozien, Ph.D.Virginia State Universitywhozien@vsu.edu

Based on the Book: Why Failure Is Not An Option

Sixth Principle:Building Sustainable Leadership Capacity

CHAPTER 10

Why Build Leadership Capacity? The Job Is Too Big To Do Alone

• Sustaining high-achieving schools because failure is not an option for any student – is a big job

• The principal’s job is too big and too complex to be done alone

Shared Leadership

• Shared leadership develops commitment and yields higher student achievement

Defining Leadership: Five Key Responsibilities

1. Shaping a vision of academic success for all students

2. Creating a climate hospitable to education

3. Cultivating leadership in others

4. Improving instruction

5. Managing people, data and processes

Building Capacity via Institutionalizing Processes, Routines and Habit

• The formation of habits includes three elements:

1. A cue

2. The routine

3. The reward

Sustainable Leadership (Hargreaves & Fink)

• Focus on:

1. Leadership of learning

2. Distributed leadership

3. Leadership succession

4. Integrating leadership

Background of Sustainability

• Implementation

• Institutionalization

• Maintainability

The Meaning of Sustainability

Sustainable leadership is characterized by

• Depth of learning and real achievement

•Length of impact over the long haul

•Breadth of influence

•Justice in ensuring that leadership actions do no harm

•Diversity that replaces standardization

•Resourcefulness

•Conservation

Discussion of Implications

1. The future of leadership must be embedded in the hearts and minds of the many and not rest on the shoulders of a heroic few.

2. Educational systems should see leadership as a vertical system over time.

3. The promise of sustainable success in education lies in creating cultures of distributed leadership throughout the school community, not in training and developing a tiny leadership elite.

Implications

4. Recruiting new leaders means focusing on their potential rather than recycling their existing proficiencies.

5. Sustainable leadership requires strategies of integrating development across school systems and networks, not just preparation of individuals. Sustainable leadership is systematic leadership (Hopkins, 2008).

Positive Interconnectedness of Sustainable Leadership Occurs in Several Ways:

1. In networks of accreditation and evaluation.

2. In networks of learning and improvement.

3. In area-based cross-school collaboration.

Ten Things That Are Sustainable About You

1. Refocus your curriculum, use of materials, and school design to include ecological sustainability as a core aspect of teaching and learning for all students.

2. Begin all discussions about achievement and how to raise it with conversation and reflection about the learning that underpins the achievement.

3. Insist that all school improvement plans contain leadership succession plans.

Sustainable You

4. Make it a condition of professional employment that every teacher and leader is part of a learning team

5. Write your own professional obituary.

6. Form a three-sided partnership with a lower-or-higher-performing district or school

7. Establish a collaborative of schools in your town or city, across district boundaries, to commit to community development initiatives

Sustainability

8. Create a system where principals and leadership teams in successfully turned-around schools can take on a second school or third

9. Coach a teacher who looks like they have little capacity for leadership

10. Spend more time in schools as a way to develop genuine interest in, curiosity about and knowledge of what teachers and students are doing

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. - Nelson Mandela

Questions

• How does leadership spread through distributed leadership?

• What does sustainability mean practically?

• As a leader and educator, how will your influence live on after your departure?

References

• Blankstein, Alan M. (2004). Failure Is Not an Option: Six Principles That Advance Student Achievement in Highly Effective Schools. Thousand Oaks, Calif. : Corwin.