INTRODUCTION

The Reinventing Education Change Toolkit, based on the work of Harvard Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, is a Web site created by IBM to help education professionals be more effective at leading and implementing change. The Reinventing Education Change Toolkit was created through the collaborative effort of Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Goodmeasure, Inc., IBM's Reinventing Education project, together with Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP), and National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP). Click here to learn more about the history of this partnership.

The Change Toolkit helps you to:

• Diagnose your situation
• Get quick, relevant advice
• Poll your colleagues and get anonymous feedback about your progress
• Read real-life vignettes from other educators about their experiences leading and managing change
• Plan for your change initiative or project
• Collaborate with your team and hold on-line discussions

The Change Toolkit can be used in many ways. You can access proven frameworks for leading and managing change, and can make these frameworks available to your colleagues. You can then dig into these frameworks and find extensive supporting content that explains – in a simple, accessible fashion – the key leadership skills for effectively managing change. Having learned about these frameworks, you can use online diagnostic tools to assess how you and your organization are doing, and you can poll other team members to get their input. The site also contains collaborative tools, including interactive worksheets, planning tools, and an online discussion area that can be used to share documents, ideas, and effective practices.

The Change Toolkit is based upon Rosabeth Moss Kanter's proven frameworks, which have been developed over more than more than 30 years of research and practice with leading organizations around the world. These are comprehensive frameworks that will help you to understand and overcome the organizational barriers to change. Much of the Change Toolkit intentionally focuses on creating a process and structures that support change, rather than on finding a single “right answer” to a question. In fact, most of the content in the Change Toolkit does not focus on specific educational practices, but looks instead at the organizational and structural aspects of schools and school districts – aspects that can help or hinder change. The Toolkit does have a School Improvement section that will helps you apply the Change Toolkit to some key issues you might be facing – including learning alignment, quality teaching, data-driven decision-making, and parental support and community collaboration.

The Change Toolkit will help you understand how structures, norms, culture, hierarchy, and roles and responsibilities in your school or school system are helping or hindering improvement efforts, thereby making you more effective. The Change Toolkit will not help you find the "right answer" in a given situation. Instead, it will help you think to systematically about change and empower you to create a dynamic, innovative, energized school or school system.

USING THE CHANGE TOOLKIT

The content in the Change Toolkit is contained in a series of tools, which are organized in four broad sections - the Change Wheel, the Seven Skills of Change Masters, Change Fundamentals, and School Improvement. Each of these sections has a number of "topics." For example, there is a topic on the Change Wheel called, "Common Themes, Shared Vision." By clicking on the "Common Themes, Shared Vision" link, you will see that this topic -- like all topics in the Change Toolkit -- has five "Tools". These Tools are:

• Overview - a brief description of the topic, with links to three related Tools
• Background - a deeper reading on the topic
• Diagnostic - an interactive questionnaire that helps you assess your organization, project or individual status on the topic
• Action - Practical, interactive tools to help you work with the information on a given topic and plan your next steps
• Vignette - illustrates how a tool was used by an educator in a real-life situation

Individual tools are all self-contained, so you can use a single tool to read up on a topic. Or, more systematically, you can use series of tools over time to help guide you through a project you, or you and your colleagues, are working on. The entire set of tools can be accessed from the Content Matrix.

The Change Toolkit is designed for use in a number of different ways. Broadly speaking, people can use the Change Toolkit to:

• Learn about leadership and organizational change
• Improve their leadership skills
• Manage a change project or lead a change team
• Assess their own change and leadership competencies
• Assess their school or school system's culture and character
• Solve problems related to leadership and change
• Enable and lead system-wide change in their school or district
• Develop and introduce innovative ideas
• Enhance their school or school system's effectiveness in general

Regardless of your how you plan to use the Change Toolkit, remember that the content on the Change Toolkit will be most relevant and useful if you are working on a specific change initiative. The particular issue can change over time, but the guidance the Change Toolkit provides will not be as valuable to you if you are not focused on a specific, real change problem. The Change Toolkit is designed to help you answer questions like, “I want to change the way we do (whatever). How might I best go about doing that? What steps should I take? How do I get started?"

Here are some examples of the types of projects that might arise in your school or district for which the Change Toolkit could be helpful:

• Developing and adopting new lesson plans
• Increasing parental involvement and community collaboration
• Finding a way to accommodate and live with a new and lower budget
• Implementing a data warehouse and moving towards data-driven decision making to inform instructional practice
• Shifting from a one teacher-one classroom model to a team teaching approach
• Improving school-wide or system-wide morale
• Developing an alliance of businesses and community groups to address school issues
• Involving students more fully in planning for their own educational needs
• Introduce some useful new technology into your classrooms

BROWSING THE CHANGE TOOLKIT

There are many ways to use this Web site, and you should find the ones that are most appropriate for your situation, temperament, and learning style. For example, you can:

• Browse the Web site, following links as you wish.
• Work your way systematically around the Change Wheel, under the "Get Tools" menu, as an individual or a team
• Evaluate your own leadership skills and that of emerging leaders in your school or school system using the Change Masters content and diagnostic tools.
• Use any or all of the six "How To..." templates, which lay out a sequence of steps and tools appropriate for particular situations
• Take advantage of the "Get Customized Advice" functionality, which provides a set of suggested tools appropriate to your particular situation.
• Use the Search engine to find specific information quickly
• Dialogue with other team members using the Discussion function and secure file-sharing.
• Use the project planning and team management tools to document project meetings, to do lists, and lessons learned.

CHANGE WHEEL - CHANGE MASTERS - CHANGE FUNDAMENTALS - SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT

The Change Toolkit is set up to make it easy for users to find the content they need quickly and easily. The content is divided into four sections: the Change Wheel, the Seven Skills of Change Masters, Change Fundamentals, and School Improvement.

HOW TO USE THE CHANGE WHEEL

The Change Wheel is a systematic framework for addressing change in an entire organizational system, which might be a school, a set of schools, an entire district, or an administrative agency. It contains 10 topics, which together lay out the key issues that need to be considered and addressed in making change to a whole system. Examples of such changes are: opening or creating a new magnet school, shifting to team teaching in an existing school, or redistributing students across a school system to pool them in a more effective way.

If you are involved with or leading a major system-wide effort, the Change Wheel is a good place to start. The quickest way to use it is to click on and fill out the overall diagnostic tool, called the Change Wheel Diagnostic and look at the feedback generated by the Change Toolkit. In addition, look at your scores on the individual questions and see which of them are lower and therefore arguably need attention. Ideally, if you are attempting to realize a systemic change, each of these 10 elements is important, and any that is especially low is cause for concern.

Gaining more insight into each of these elements, however, would be useful, and the next step toward that end would be to fill out the individual diagnostic tools associated with each of the 10 topics. These diagnose your situation with respect to a single topic in much greater detail. Moreover, asking other people to fill out these diagnostic tools, and then analyzing the results in the histograms generated by the Web site, can provide a more complete picture of your situation. These diagnostics are also extremely useful for facilitating a group discussion, either in exploring the implications of consistent results or seeking the implications of substantial differences.

BECOMING A CHANGE MASTER

The second section of tools, the 7 Skills of Change Masters, is quite different. Whereas the Change Wheel focuses on aspects of organizational systems, the Change Masters section focuses on the behaviors of individuals who have been successful in implementing a change or an innovation in a large organization. As in the case with Change Wheel, it is useful to start by completing the diagnostic tool called, "The 7 Skills of Change Masters: A Self Assessment." This will provide a quick impression of your competence in these seven critical skills. Similarly, it is possible – and useful – to go each individual topic in Change Masters and complete the diagnostic tools. You can also ask your colleagues to fill out these diagnostics to get feedback on your leadership style and effectiveness.

PUTTING IT TOGETHER: CHANGE FUNDAMENTALS

The Change Wheel and Change Masters sections of the Web site can be used to address both the leadership of and management of a change initiative, including the characteristics of the system and the ability of key individuals to bring about the end result effectively. In either case, you will find that specific tasks and issues arise that need particular attention, tasks such as minimizing people’s resistance to change, or making sure that leaders do everything they should to enable others to carry out their own obligations appropriately. The third section – Change Fundamentals – deals with these issues.

Roughly speaking, the topics in the Change Fundamentals section are the equivalent of a manager or change agent’s basic "blocking and tackling" ability. They can be viewed as the core skills without which no strategy, however powerful and relevant, is likely to succeed.

SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT

The School Improvement section was created to help you apply the approaches, strategies, and tactics described in the other sections of the Change Toolkit to some key issues you might be facing. There is content about creating learning alignment, implementing data driven decision-making systems, creating an environment supportive of quality teaching, and about effective strategies that foster parental support and strong community collaborations. These topics were designed to help you apply the other sections of the Change Toolkit – for example, content in the Change Wheel – to these important issues.

Version Number: 2.5.0

Version Publish Date: May 28, 2007