Reflections on School Change

There are a few things that caused me to stop and think while reading this week’s chapter. The S.U.T.E model’s dependency on knowledgeable and selfless leaders, the participation of all stakeholders in the process of change, and finally the identification of the areas that are the cause of district change in the first place will be the focal points of my reflection.

The Step Up to Excellence methodology lays out several conditions in which success is based:

“Senior leaders who act on the basis of personal courage, passion, and vision; not on the basis of fear or self-survival…not a view of ‘we can’t do this because…who possess the professional intellect, change-minded attitudes, and the change management skills to move their districts toward higher levels of performance; not people without an inkling about the requirements of systemic change management.”  (Reiser, 2007)

I can see where needed change can be derailed right away in the process if there are not such leaders available in a district. Human nature comes into play. Egos and self esteem can get in the way of the change that needs to be made. If the right people in the right positions cannot effectively lead or are not willing to admit they do not have the skill set necessary to lead their district for systemic change and bring in others who can, then the change is doomed from the start.

In the beginning of the chapter I was hoping to read more about the involvement of  stakeholders in the process of change. I was pleased to read the example given from the Decatur Township School District. “To succeed with such a fundamental transformation of their school system, the facilitators believed it was important for as many stakeholders as possible to participate in the change process and feel a sense of ownership of both the process and whatever design resulted.” (Reiser, 2007) When my district was in the process of achieving district-wide NCA accreditation, we knew we must incorporate the perspectives of not only classroom teachers and administrators, but parents, students, support staff from all departments, community leaders, and business owners. Their input was instrumental in developing our vision and mission statements and improving our internal and external Quality Assurance Review evaluations that ultimately lead to K-12 accreditation.

Before any change can be made, a district must know exactly where their strengths and weakness are. I am sure that within the GSTE and SUTE models this would come into play, however, I feel strongly that a district’s first step must be to develop a comprehensive District Profile—a state of the district, if you will. Trends in learning and achievement need to be identified along with the needs of specific populations within the district. There are things that are working wonderfully and there are always areas that reveal glaring contradictions to the vision and purpose statements of the district. This document of and by itself can be challenging to produce, but I believe that any model for systemic change should explicitly include the development of a district profile to clearly illuminate the changes that are needed.

SCREENCASTING

One of the problems I have been finding my math students having is forgetting to multiply decimals by 100 to turn fractions into percentages. They look at .6 and think this is 6% instead of 60%. I thought I would create a very brief video so that kids can watch me convert fractions into decimals by using a calculator.

Please excuse the interruption of my Mac telling me the time in the middle of my screencast! :)