Shake Your Kaleidoscope and Find Innovations
By Rosabeth Moss Kanter
© Copyright 2005 by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, rkanter@hbs.edu.

How often does an unproven idea by an unknown person make the front page?

My friend Cindy Laba was surprised and pleased that her new idea for education made front page headlines in the Boston Globe recently. Laba, a former charter school leader, is the architect of a new concept - to help low-income public school students compete for entry to elite private and public high schools and succeed at mastering their academic rigor. Her dream is called Beacon Academy, a school that offers an extra 14 months of education between eighth and ninth grades. It will enroll its first batch of students in July, with the approval of the Boston School Committee.

This column isn’t about Laba’s idea, promising as it might be. It’s about why Beacon Academy made headlines. The idea was deemed worthy of front page treatment because it leaps beyond conventional assumptions. It opens up possibilities that have been blocked by traditional structures and practices.
read the full article

Sensing Needs and Opportunities:
Tuning Into Your Environment
By Brenda Welburn

Having worked at the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE) for twenty-one years, the one thing I am certain of is that change is inevitable in state education governance. This is something that is felt particularly acutely by state boards of education, given the high degree of turnover in their membership. As a service provider to State Boards of Education, NASBE’s can only be successful to the extent that we are vigilant about "tuning in" to our environment so that we can understand the needs, priorities and concerns of our membership. We must also always keep an open mind in using strategies and proven practices from traditional and non-traditional partners, and we must be willing to reinvent ourselves to keep up with the times.
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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.
read the full article

Change Toolkit Tool of the Month
By Sasha Dichter, Change Toolkit Project Manager and Sr. Program Manager IBM Corporate Community Relations

Kaleidoscope Thinking
What do container shipping and making school change have in common? Check out the kaleidoscope thinking tool in Change Masters to find out! You’ll learn about how Malcolm McLean, in the mid-1950s, realized that, rather taking packages in and out of trucks, rail boxcars, and ships, it would make much more sense to move the 'whole box' – the container in which everything was shipped. Malcolm McLean saw the same reality as everyone else, but by shaking up his kaleidoscope he saw a totally new picture of what that reality could look like.

What does your reality look like, and how could you shake things up to see things in a new, better, more productive way?

How do I find this tool?
1. Log in to the Change Toolkit website .
2. Move your mouse to 'Get Tools' and click on Change Masters.'
3. Click on 'Kaleidoscope Thinking: Stimulating Breakthrough Ideas.'

Leadership pulse check
A monthly poll of the readership of the Education Leadership Newsletter

This Month's Poll:

Who is your PRIMARY customer?

• Students
  
• Parents
  
• Taxpayers
  
• Education Professionals
  
• Other ______________________________

	9%	Create a culture that better rewards and recognizes contributions
	30%	Create better management structure / process for change initiatives
	22%	Ensure buy-in to a shared vision of the future
	24%	Remove policies and procedures that are barriers to change
	11%	Better education and training on needed skills
	4%	Facilitate communication of useful approaches