Change Toolkit reaches School, District, and State Administrators in South Carolina
By Don Cantrell, Office of Technology, South Carolina Department of Education

New legislative mandates, on both the federal and state level, had a significant impact in South Carolina. The impact of both No Child Left Behind legislation and new state-level requirements has meant that our Division of Policy, Research and Technology has had to discover better ways to assist schools and districts to face and even embrace change.

We have had success in using the Reinventing Education Change Toolkit to help us meet these challenges. After our first exposure to the Change Toolkit in 2003, we decided to run a small pilot to test its usability and efficacy. As a simple test, two offices in the division used the processes outlined in the Change Wheel to develop an online application to better communicate recent organizational changes within the state department. Since the success of this pilot, the Change Toolkit has been shared with all upper management in the agency.

Building on this pilot, the Office of Professional Development and the Office of Technology at the South Carolina Department of Education have teamed together to share the Change Toolkit with school principals and new district superintendents as part of their professional development in the state-delivered Leaders’ Institutes. The content and the Website have been well-received as practical, relevant tools to support leadership and change. School and District administrators have become excited about the possibilities that the Change Toolkit holds for them as they bring about change in their organizations, engage staff and community members in strategic planning, and strive to improve student achievement.

The interactive tutorials, documents, team communications tools, and easy-to-follow navigational elements make the Change Toolkit an intuitive and simple system to use with groups of various sizes as well as a tool for individual use.

Thanks to IBM, Dr. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, and the entire Change Toolkit team for offering such a valuable resource to our education professionals. Change can be good!