Charles A. Dana Center relies on IBM Change Toolkit
By Sam Zigrossi, Program Director, Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin

In the 2003-2004 school year, the Charles A. Dana Center initiated a Partnership for High Achievement (PHA) technical assistance intervention. The PHA was a response to a changing landscape in Texas that grew out of the introduction of higher standards and the Texas Assessment for Knowledge and Skills (TAKS). The PHA is a systemic intervention founded on evidenced-based research that focuses on raising mathematics and science student achievement.

In the PHA, both district and school leaders participate in workshop to increase their leadership capacity while, at the same time, working collaboratively with mathematics or science teachers to design model lessons and common assessment strategies that will allow for the comparison of student work across campuses.

During the first year implementation of PHA, the Dana Center became aware of the Reinventing Education Change Toolkit through Sandy Dochen, IBM Texas Public Affairs Manager. The Center’s leadership reviewed the Change Toolkit and immediately realized its value, and we have since embedded the Change Toolkit into our leadership workshops.

The leaders in our workshops get introduced to the Change Toolkit with paper handouts and are then given a fuller introduction to the content of the Website. Over the course of the year, in feedback sessions with the leadership program participants, two topics in the Change Toolkit seemed to have resonated most: leading with structures followed by content; and mastering the "difficult middle."

As we begin to enter our third year, it is clear that education leaders realize that they traditionally have not managed change by leading with structures – instead they lead with content. This means that they have focused on the particular outcomes they want to achieve without creating a surrounding environment supportive of this outcome.

In addition, there is a tendency to jump from one 'big idea' to the next each year - what I like to call the "program of the year" phenomenon - which we recognize more clearly now as a failure to persist through the 'difficult middles' of new programs' implementations. These have been two major learning points to the leaders who are participating in our PHA intervention program.

In our experience, education leaders, including teacher leaders, are slow to embrace new concepts, but if they are constantly exposed to the same new ideas over time they do embrace those ideas, and begin to implement them. The Dana Center will continue to use the IBM Change Toolkit and expand on its application in our various programs