Sponsored by IBM and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO)
Brought to you by the Reinventing Education Change Toolkit (www.reinventingeducation.org) project.
Brought to you by the Reinventing Education Change Toolkit (www.reinventingeducation.org) project.
Quick Starting the Change Toolkit
Dr. Joyce Eckart, Assistant Professor, Professor and Chair of the Education Division at Queens University, Charlotte, North Carolina
Introduction
School systems across the nation are pressured by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) mandates in a landscape fraught with budgetary shortfalls. In Durham, North Carolina, administrators are pressured to meet:
Not only are administrators facing greater challenges, they are doing so in the face of shortages of qualified teachers.
Given the tremendous demands administrators face, how can workshops on the Reinventing Education Change Toolkit be designed to justify an administrators' time invested in them? In other words, for these hardworking administrators, what is the immediate incentive to be trained in the Change Toolkit?
Overview of Durham School System
Located in the "heartland" of North Carolina, Durham is the seventh largest school district in the state. The system services 31,700 students in 46 schools. Fifty-five percent of students in Durham schools are African-American, 25% white and 14% Hispanic. Native American and other racial groups round out the diverse population. Of the 4,500 employees, 2,300 are teachers. Three-hundred buses transport more than 16,000 students daily, covering six million miles per year. The annual budget is $306 million (2005-2006 data).
The Durham Change Toolkit Workshop
As in most districts where the Change Toolkit is being implemented, in Durham, we have been very attuned to the time pressures administrators face. We understand that heir first priorities are to their schools, teachers and students. But at the same time, we know that the Change Toolkit can help administrators at all levels of the system successfully manage many of education's toughest challenges. Our mandate was to create a Change Toolkit workshop that administrators would embrace because they immediately recognized its value in providing them the tools and strategies to better address their district's pressing education issues.
In late September 2005, Dr. Ada Setzer of Durham Schools, Rick Falknor of IBM, and myself collaborated to develop Durham's first Change Toolkit Workshop. Rather than following the traditional Change Toolkit workshop agenda, we decided to have our participants learn the tool in an accelerated session using their own real-life projects. The team believed that if participants could find some immediate value using the Change Toolkit, they could more quickly demonstrate its implementation and functionality to others in their organizations.
Dr. Setzer offered a brief overview of the site to a group of administrators in the summer. Based on feedback from that focus group, 22 administrators in Curriculum and Instruction, Human Resources, Operational Services and Support Services signed up to attend a full-day workshop. In order to tailor the workshop to meet the need for immediate implementation, participants submitted brief descriptions of projects that they planned to apply to the Change Toolkit. All together, 17 projects were created with several participants working in teams on shared projects. Projects included developing an accountability system, a mentoring program, a long-range facilities plan, a high school reform project, and a plan to include children with disabilities into mainstream classrooms.
Prior to the workshop, participants were registered, and their projects were submitted to "Get Customized Advice" so that they could quickly access the advice links once they got to the workshop.
On the day of the workshop, each participant was seated at individual workstations so that they could concentrate on their specific change project. After a brief introduction and instruction about navigating through the site, hard copies of the site map were distributed, and we explained the major components of the Toolkit. Participants quickly located "Get Customized Advice" and filled in the information about their projects and moved to the suggested links. I monitored the group to assist with specific questions and suggestions.
After the participants explored their advice links, they continued with "Get To Work." As with many workshops, there was a wide range of familiarity with technology. While I assisted some, others quickly moved on to explore the "Get Tools > School Improvement" as they began to use the Toolkit to learn about and develop change strategies for their specific projects.
Lessons Learned and Suggestions for Future
Participants filled out anonymous evaluations at the end of the workshop. There was strong response that we had met the objectives of the workshop to provide a quick-start overview of the tool and how it could work in real-life change projects. There also was strong indication that additional support would be needed to implement the suggested projects. Several members discussed the need to incorporate calendars, timelines, project task guides, spreadsheets and databases tools into the project, in addition to using the Change Toolkit as a framework for developing effective change agents, analyzing change processes, and solving problems about change. We also discussed how the stress of day-to-day crisis and deadlines offers little time to reflect and apply the framework of Change Toolkit, though its use in a systematic way would change and strengthen the organization.
As we continue to work with the workshop participants, we believe that if we can show that using the Toolkit increases the efficiency and effectiveness of local change leaders on even just one project, we will have a foundation upon which we can begin to convince other administrators to make good use of this valuable resource. For example, we can use the results to "Enlist Support: Get Buy-In and Build Coalitions" leading to "Celebrating Accomplishments: Making Everyone a Hero" (see Change Masters) and "Rewards and Recognition" (Change Wheel) to expand the use of Change Toolkit into other arenas in the Durham School system.
This will be critical in helping school systems adopt and practice a proven change process. As President John F. Kennedy once said, "Change is the law of life, and those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future."
