Ensure the success of your school change efforts with a proven five-step process that will strengthen working relationships among teachers, parents, and administrators.

This is a book destined for leaders who wish to implement change more intelligently and effortlessly. Drawing on a combination of rigorous research and extensive organizational experience, the authors present a framework for leading change, ?Changing Leadership?, that describes the specific leader practices they have found make the biggest difference between success and failure in implementing high magnitude change. In doing all of this, the leader works to make change happen in the day to day activity and conversations of the organization.

Do you struggle to align day-to-day educational practices with your community's stated goals for learning? Strong public schools depend on strong partnerships between schools and communities. Unfortunately, personality clashes and conflicting perspectives among leaders too often render such partnerships elusive. In Sustaining Change in Schools: How to Overcome Differences and Focus on Quality, Daniel P. Johnson outlines a proven framework for ensuring that educators and stakeholders collaborate effectively, both at the school and district levels. The framework, which has evolved over a 25-year period across four school districts and three states, offers school leaders a way to create and sustain decision-making processes by working through differences and following these five steps: 1. Understand and align the personality of your school district with the overall personality of your community. 2. Ask quality questions that promote a commitment to a common purpose. 3. Make quality a habit by creating organizational structures that celebrate differences within acceptable community standards. 4. Focus on success as a means of renewing schools from within rather than imposing solutions from the outside. 5. Manage tasks so that your stakeholders learn to appreciate different personalities as a necessary part of your problem-solving process. Both practical and engaging, this book is just as useful to the classroom teacher as it is to the school board member. Filled with real-life examples of the framework in action and step-by-step procedures for its implementation, this is the definitive guide to sustaining positive change in schools.

In their follow-up to School Culture Recharged and the best-selling School Culture Rewired, Steve Gruenert and Todd Whitaker go deep into the roots of culture change and explore how school leaders can positively shift their cultures in a sustainable way. Drawing from the authors' extensive experience and research, Committing to the Culture - Unpacks questions around the nature of culture, including the importance of vision and climate and how the tension between the past and the future can keep a culture stagnant. - Explains how toxic cultures come about, why they can be so resistant to lasting change, and how not to change those cultures. - Describes how to build a positive culture based on trust, collaboration, and commitment rather than fear, competition, and compliance. - Offers advice to help leaders ensure that positive change endures, withstanding fads, toxic mindsets, and other threats. The authors provide real-world scenarios to illustrate how their ideas and approaches work in practice. Leaders will gain profound insight into how to create meaningful change, with the goal not just to "transform" their school but also to get all members of the school community to commit to culture change—and make sure that change sticks.

Summarizes discussions by participants in a meeting convened to learn the views of outstanding school leaders -- principals, teachers, parents, and others -- whose diversity reflected that of the local education workforce. The discussions centered on three topics: the habits of mind and heart that enable leaders to guide successful school change over the long term; the dimensions of leadership as expressed in experiences in the participants' careers as school leaders; and strategies for using the dimensions of leadership for self-assessment, peer coaching, or other professional development activities. Resource list.

Building change for the long game It's natural to resist change - but when we fundamentally commit to putting our students first, we must also commit to make lasting changes in current practice. Can we lead individuals and school teams to embrace strategic effort and lasting growth despite challenging circumstances and inevitable resistance? For school leaders willing to change their behavior on behalf of their teams, the answer is Yes! This practical, thoughtful book builds on what we already know about change, invites reflection, and provides guidance to develop changes that will last. Readers will learn to: Organize and create conditions in which staff and students flourish Focus on phases of change and address the critical leadership practices that will simultaneously move change forward and address the kinds of resistance that may appear Apply two long-term stories of district change to their own particular contexts, so they can avoid mistakes and focus on strategies that work Create their own relationship-rich, personalized path for leading and managing change We can build more reliable and effective changes in schools by ensuring steady progress over time. Dig into this informative book to discover the what, how, and why of a holistic change architecture to move your teams toward impactful changes that will stand the test of time.