We are proud to present/celebrate colleagues who won the prestigious Systemic Change Awards at the 2009 AECT International Convention  in Louisville, Kentucky.         

2009 AWARD FOR DISTINGUISHED SERVICE TO THE CHANGE DIVISION:   Dr. Charles M. Reigeluth  (Change Division Founder – and patient mentor!).   

2009 OUTSTANDING CHANGE JOURNAL ARTICLE AWARD:    

Dr. Sunnie Lee Watson & Dr. Charles M. Reigeluth: Community members perceptions on social, cultural changes and its implication for education transformation in a small school district community. See this fine article here in the Journal of Organization Transformation and Social Change.        

2009 OUTSTANDING CHANGE BOOK AWARD: Dr. Francis M. Duffy & Dr. Patti L. Chance:  

AECT Change Division Members! Thank you all for a fantastic conference, Louisville was fantastic and we’re so proud of our award winners in our inaugural awards program. Ali.

This year’s Systemic Change Communication Officer is Dr. Eugene G. Kowch.  If you have any news regarding systemic change, your work, or people around you affecting systemic change by all means let him know, and he’ll be in touch with you on behalf of the Division to see what we can share and learn with others. Dr. Kowch is an Associate Professor of Education Leadership and Technology in the Faculty of Education at the University of Calgary (Canada).  He teachers undergraduate and graduate courses and supervises thesis (masters, doctoral) students who are becoming exemplary leaders of sytems / organizations undergoing complex information age change.

If you are a next-genearation leader interested in gaining critical knowledge about leading systemic change, Contact Dr. Kowch: ekowch@ucalgary.ca and he’ll connect you involved with key scholars in our (international) Systemic Change/FutureMinds networks.

Download Strategic Directions

Hello colleagues,

I hope this note finds each of you happy, healthy, and functioning at peak performance.

When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, he didn’t present solutions to problems. He didn’t say “We’ve got race problems in this country and I have some ideas for changing that.”

No, he said, “ I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream .” And, in expressing his dream for the future of race relations in the United States of America he captured the hearts and minds of a generation of Americans.

Our challenge is to create an idealized future for the Division for Systemic Change—a future that is deeply and irrevocably connected to AECT and one that is sharply focused on transforming the way teachers teach and the way children learn in school systems.

Our challenge, of course, is not the same as the one that Dr. King and people of color faced back then. Nevertheless, it is an important challenge because if we succeed in creating the future we envision for the Division we will have a profound and enduring effect on teaching and learning in the United States and throughout the world. We recognize this challenge and we must rise up to meet it.

The attached document represents our dream for the future of the Division. It serves as a blueprint for creating an idealized future for the Division for Systemic Change. We cannot create the idealized future that we envision without your help. Please review the scenarios in the attached document and find a place for yourself in those scenarios. We know there is a place in there for you. Find a way to help. Identify a task in which to engage. Help us, please, to create a division that is a powerful and highly respected advocate for transforming teaching and learning in school systems.

After you find a place for yourself in the strategic plan, please contact me and let me know. Also, as you engage in tasks that support the plan, please report your results to me so we can keep track of our progress.

Thank you.

Frank

Download Strategic Directions

From John Merrow’s Learning Matter’s Group. An interview with NYU faculty member and former Central Park East principal Deborah Meier. Touches on the purposes of formal education, NCLB, the role of policymakers, inequality, etc.

http://www.pbs.org/merrow/rss/media/120.mp3

A New York Times article from March 2008 about a new charter school in New York City that proposes to pay its teachers $125,000 as a way to attract a high-caliber teaching staff and, so their theory goes, create a high-performing school. While the ideas that incentive pay and teacher quality are levers for systemic change are certainly not new, this article did raise a new question for me: Has the substantial growth of the charter movement made the business of school change more about designing new schools as opposed to improving unsatisfactory ones?

Certainly the school creation process has some significant differences from the school change process: staffing, school culture, and student-makeup take on quite different meanings depending on the case. Have those of us who study school change given enough attention to the increasingly-commmon change approach of starting a new school? In this division, we’re somewhat familiar with the idealized design processes advocated by Ackoff and Banathy, but they generally contextualized this design process within the setting of a pre-existing organization. So many of the school reformers I speak with now have simply abandoned this approach and are content to create rather than change their ideal schools. Hopefully others out there are thinking about this same issue and how it influences the study and practice of systemic change in schools.

 This 1999 New york Times article discusses the Celebration School, which was a collaboration between a number of well-known educational reformers and the Disney-created town of Celebratoin, Florida. It’s a classic example of the tension between theory-based reforms (created outside of schools) and the public who has the ultimate authority to reject or accept a particular school.

 Perhaps some of those invovled in this reform attempt might be invited to a panel discussion at the 2008 AECT conference in Orlando?

More information on the Celebration School can be found in the following book chapter:

Boorman, L. M., Glickman, E., & Haag, A. (2000). Creating a school culture from the ground up: The case of Celebration School. In K. A. Riley & K. S. Louis (Eds.), Leadership for change and school reform: International perpectives (pp. 185-210). New York: RoutledgeFalmer.

Since I just finished up my dissertation, I thought I’d post it here for division members who are interested. This is a phenomenological look at K12 Principals’ experiences with a decentralized change process in the post-Katrina New Orleans Public Schools. Certainly not all (probably none) of the individuals in this study were engaged in a traditional, planned systemic change process, but I think that change in this context gives us some insights into educational change that we can’t get in more centrally planned cases. 

Abstract:

This study examines the perceptions of public school principals in New Orleans, Louisiana during the period of extensive structural change in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Using the theoretical frameworks of Chaos and Systems theories, iterative interviews with ten school leaders, extensive document analysis, and school-site observations were used to collect data on principals’ experiences. The following themes emerged during constant comparative analysis: 1) the omnipresence of storm recovery in principals’ lives, 2) the lingering presence of the pre-Katrina school system, 3) the emerging inequalities of the post-Katrina system, 4) schools’ new relationships with the external environment, 5) Principals plans for long-term (rather than rapid) improvement, and 6) principals’ requirements for successful long-term change. The analysis identifies the need for a minimum stability at the outset of the change process as well as the important strange attractors of inequality and low-risk relationships which must be addressed for meaningful, long-term change to occur.

Final dissertation document: http://etda.libraries.psu.edu/theses/approved/WorldWideIndex/ETD-2609/index.html (may cite)

Draft of article-length version: http://www.personal.psu.edu/brb112/katrinaprincipals_AERA.doc (please don’t cite)

A podcast produced by John Merrow’s Learning Matters group and distributed by PBS. It is a 10 minute interview with a parent in the D.C. Public Schools about issues of community feedback, stakeholder participation in reform, and the power of information:

Merrow’s podcast homepage http://www.pbs.org/merrow/podcast/index.html

mp3 of this interview(11.6 MB): http://www.pbs.org/merrow/rss/media/93.mp3

This recent chapter by British policy maker and school reformer David Hopkins gets at the role of leadership in systemic change, an area of clear importance in efforts at improving schools. I thought a brief review of this chapter might be useful for folks.

 He cites three reasons for the failure of most school reforms:

1. Focus on the wrong variables (often excluding parents and students and failing to expand the teaching/learning repetoires of teachers and students).
2. Ignoring local organizational conditions (the organization may need to change in order for teaching and learning to improve)
3. Lack of systemic perspective (thinking “system-wide” and “system-deep”)

 He suggests three features of an educational system in which all schools are great schools:

1. Pedagogy redesigned to enable virtually all students to reach their potential.
2. Systemwide focus on independence, innovation, networking, and lateral responsibility.
3. School-level leadership that works for the success of all schools, not just individual schools.

Hopkins notes the need to strike a balance between top-down (prescriptive) and bottom-up (professional) approaches to reform. This is a good example of the Both/And thinking we have talked about a great deal in our division. The central problem leading to this false dichotomy of top-down/bottom-up reform is that while purely top-down reforms don’t work, there has been a lack of capacity at the local level to engage in bottom-up change. Hopkins cites four areas where capacity should be built: personalized learning, professionalized teaching, collaboration, and intelligent accountability.

He goes on to note that these are not merely technical problems for which known answers can be applied to local contexts, but complex problems which require learning and adaptation. Hence the need for school leaders who are learners, not technicians.  He defines principals who do this as “system leaders.” They “are those headteachers who are willing to shoulder system leadership roles: who care about and work for the success of other schools as well as their own” (p.169).

More specifically, these leaders focus on increasing achievement and decreasing gaps between subgroups, they focus on improving the teaching and learning process, and they see and engage with the system on classroom, school, and external levels. While this is certainly not the description of an “average” principal in the UK (or the USA), it is a worthy bar for us to shoot for. Imagine if all of our principals could answer the questions that Hopkins lists on page 172 (from Barber, 2005):

• Who are your key stakeholders in the local community? Do they understand your vision? Are they committed to it? How do you know?
• Is each pupil working towards explicit short- and medium-term targets in each subject?
• How do you ensure that every young person has a good, trusting relationship with at least one significant adult in your school?
• What do you and your school do to contribute to the improvement of the system as a whole?

Developing leaders with this systemic perspective should be a goal for those charged with preparing future school leaders. Hopkins’ chapter, while short on specifics for implementing such changes, provides a noble vision for guiding our efforts.

References:

Barber, M. (2005). ‘A 21st Century self-evaluation framework’, Annex 3 in ‘Journeys of Discovery: the search for success by design’, keynote speech, National Centre on Education and the Economy, Annual Conference, Florida, USA, 10 February. 

Hopkins, D. (2007). Sustaining leaders for system change. In B. Davies (Ed.), Developing sustainable leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: Paul Chapman Publishing.