Leadership, Change, and Technology
Dr. Scott McLeod, Assistant Professor, Educational Policy and Administration, University of Minnesota

As Co-Director of the UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE) at the University of Minnesota, I have an inherent interest in technology solutions that can be used to facilitate effective leadership in elementary and secondary schools. The IBM Change Toolkit is an important tool for us, one that we have used for several years because of its powerful capabilities and ease of use for practicing school leaders.

CASTLE is the nation's only center dedicated to the technology concerns of school administrators. Originally funded by the federal Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) program, CASTLE offers a unique 15-credit graduate certificate program based on the International Society for Technology in Education National Educational Technology Standards for Administrators. This program has been proven by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to have positive, statistically-significant impacts on our participants' technology leadership knowledge, skills, and abilities. In addition to delivering our own academic program, we also give 15 other universities full access to all of our instructional materials and resources as part of our Postsecondary Partnership Program (P3).

CASTLE also has partnered with corporate and organizational partners to create a number of technology resources for K-12 school leaders. For example, we created two data-driven decision-making white papers that are now hosted on the Microsoft Innovative Teachers web site, and we are about to release, with support from the ADC Foundation, an online learning module to help principals with technology integration issues. By the end of this month, we also will be releasing the nation's first technology leadership assessment for principals and making it widely available to school districts nationwide. (More information on CASTLE's activities and resources is available at www.schooltechleadership.org)

IBM has been an important supporter of CASTLE. From our earliest beginnings, IBM community relations managers and education consultants have helped us incorporate innovative technology leadership paradigms into our curriculum and have exposed us to various components of the Change Toolkit that are especially appropriate for the audiences that we serve.

The ability to create different projects within the Change Toolkit is an especially effective feature for us. We typically create a new project for the graduate certificate cohort that starts with us each summer. We use the School Improvement tool to introduce our participants to the features of the Change Toolkit, focusing specifically on the tool's data-driven decision-making component. Because the federal No Child Left Behind act is such an important influence on educators' daily practice, the data-driven decision-making component is of immediate interest to our students as they begin to learn how the Change Toolkit can facilitate their organizational leadership. After a brief introduction to the structure of the Toolkit, we quickly move to the data-driven decision-making diagnostic, which is an easy way to capture our students' interest and to show them how the data aggregation functions of the Toolkit work. Once we've explored the capabilities of the diagnostic, we enter the action tools area and collaboratively enter our collective responses to the various prompts provided to structure school leaders' thinking around data-driven educational practices. While we are modeling the use of the Toolkit to our students, we also discuss potential uses of the Toolkit with other educators. For example, we help our students realize that various tools within the Toolkit can either be used individually or with school improvement teams. Our students particularly like the idea of projecting the data-driven decision-making action tool onto a screen for all to see and then working on each section together rather than individually. This process creates shared meaning and understanding across team members and effectively captures the brainstorming and dialogue that inevitably occurs.

By the time we've finished this exercise, our graduate students are hooked. They understand the power and the potential of the Toolkit and are highly interested in implementing it within their own school organizations. We spend some time introducing our students to the other areas of the Toolkit, such as the Change Wheel, Change Masters, and Change Fundamental sections, and then we discuss the suitability of the Change Toolkit for our students' technology leadership projects over the coming school year.

In addition to serving practicing school leaders well, the Toolkit is also an excellent resource for educational leadership faculty who prepare preservice administrators. Most college and university educational administration programs dedicate a significant portion of the curriculum to school change and leadership issues. The Change Toolkit is an ideal means of facilitating structured conversations and actions related to school reform and improvement.

In future months, you will hear from one of our program participants, Sharon Riehle, and one of our P3 faculty representatives, Dr. David Quinn. As they explain how they utilize the Change Toolkit within their own institutions, I encourage you to consider how various components of the Change Toolkit can facilitate meaningful school improvement efforts within your organization. When implemented strategically and intelligently, the Toolkit can be an integral tool for facilitating effective data-driven school reform activities.