Creating a School Environment that Facilitates Success for All Students: A Model for School Leaders

Transcript: Wrap Up

The first thing is really establishing a sense of urgency. If we do the same things we’ve been doing, we’re going to get the same results. So we have to do something differently. The job of the leader is to really create a sense of urgency. Using data takes it away from a personal opinion, puts the focus on students, and puts it on what students really need.

The second step is putting together a team or forming a coalition. We always started with a small group of willing people, what I call early adopters and innovators. We focused our efforts on them, built our successes with that group, and then spread it virally through the school.

The third area is creating a vision. Most people in schools don’t really have a clear mental picture of what they want things to be like in their school. It’s really important we develop a vision because that vision will act in the future as a filter to help us compare where we are to where we want to go. It will help us align all our behaviors in relation to what we’re doing now to where we want to be. And also it provides a rationale for the changes we’re going to have to make and the things we’re going to have to endure to get where we want to go.

Next thing is communicating the vision. We have to make sure that everyone understands, appreciates, and is committed to what we’re trying to do, and use every opportunity to communicate that.

The next is to empower people. We had to really change the way we did things, and that required a lot of communication. My job, after we agreed on our vision, evolved into someone who was acquiring resources to ensure that we have the time, the equipment, the training that people needed, and I spent a lot of time removing barriers or obstacles, things that were keeping us from being successful. Nothing’s more frustrating to people than when you give them a vision and then don’t give them the time, the resources, budget, etc., to succeed. We wanted to identify the high-leverage points that we could focus on that would make the most impact on our students.

Next is short-term wins. Getting those early wins was really critical for us in terms of keeping the motivation high and creating some momentum.

Next, look at consolidating the improvements and sustaining the change over a long period of time. Initiatives like inclusion mean a change, not only in behavior but a change in the culture of the school. The key here is to distribute leadership for the initiative throughout the school. That means developing teacher-leaders—not administrators, but teacher-leaders—who really lead the effort and are in partnership with the school principal.

The last area is institutionalizing the changes, making them permanent. Sustaining change is not good enough. It has to be a continuous improvement, trying to continue to fine-tune what we were doing. Changing the beliefs, expectations, attitudes, and behaviors of people takes time. It takes three years to put the changes into effect, five years to ensure that it was a part of the culture.

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