Working At The Edge

Make School Different: Digital leadership & Transformation

Sustaining Change

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I attended a session at Educon 2018 titled Sustaining Change in Schools and Systems. The session was facilitated by Zac Chase and Diana Laufenberg, both previously teachers at Science Leadership Academy. Besides the content of the session, the most powerful aspect for me was that these were practitioners – practitioners who have reflected on years of practice, actually “doing change,” and sharing out a powerful framework that can be used by others who are working to sustain change.

If you’ve read this blog before, you know that we are focused on shifting our schools and district to  learner-centered education. While we have made progress over the past few years, this work is challenging since the mindsets of an array of stakeholders have to shift from school-centered to learner-centered. Not easy rethinking the dominant conversation of school-centered education. Lots of heavy lifting. Here are just a few dimensions of the shift that make this work so complex and challenging….

  • what learning looks like in the classroom
  • mindsets about roles of learners, teachers and leaders
  • levels of agency and how agency is released
  • engaging parents and community around changes in learning
  • how we advocate for changes in education to policymakers
  • where the walls are in the “classroom”

Chase and Laufenberg shared a five-part framework leaders must engage to sustain any kind of change. The components work in concert – all of them must be present throughout the work. Laufenberg suggested thinking of the framework as a mixing board, modulating each component with the circumstances of the change which is going to look different in every context. That’s the art of leadership.

Here are the five components along with some of my thinking at the moment. This session helped me reframe some of our challenges and think about ways to overcome our roadblocks. So I’m certain I’ll come back to these in more detail in future posts.

I. Permission

  • Permission to exercise agency, leadership, risk-taking
  • What happens when people don’t want to accept permission to exercise agency, leadership, risk-taking or anything else?
  • What are some other ways we might extend permission to others to sustain and implement the change the community has set out to achieve?
  • Permission to fail equals permission to learn. This supports the work of moving from an “efficiency” organization (school-centered) to a “learning” organization (learner-centered). In the efficiency model, failure is not tolerated – it’s not very efficient. But in a learner-centered model, failure is learning.
  • Questions that might release agency in others:
    • What permissions do you need?
    • What support might you need?
    • What supports might you provide?

II. Support

  • Human/financial resources
  • Time – release time, substitutes
  • The podcasts we have created are a knowledge-base to support change – TLTalkRadio and Shift Your Paradigm
  • It’s important to create a culture of learning – whatever you need to learn that’s tied to the change, we’ll support.

III. Accountability 

  • Traditional accountability – better termed responsibility – is a two-way conversation. For example, principals are accountable for having difficult conversations about changing practice while we are accountable for supporting their needs in having those conversations. Because you are a professional and I care about you as a human being, we need to talk about X. We agreed on Y, and we need to make it happen. This is a critical and challenging conversation.
  • Peer/colleague accountability can be very powerful when there is a culture of responsibility.
  • Accountability cannot be pushed down, otherwise it becomes traditional one-way accountability.
  • How do we build an effective and humane accountability system for learning? How are principals holding teachers accountable for the agreed upon shifts? What supports are they providing and what permissions are they giving? What are the best ways to hold each other accountable for that? Weekly? Quarterly?

IV. Community Engagement inside and outside the building

  • People from inside and outside the school need to be on the team to sustain change.
  • Who should we invite in to be a part of this effort?
  • A diversity of mindsets will create an outcome you wouldn’t have imagined.
  • Include the learner voice.
  • Does everyone attached to this school feel this is a place of learning for them? If not, why not? Who do we partner with and bring on board? Bring the community in to engage WITH and not to do for?
V. Discipline
  • Go slow, be deliberate, and it will work.
  • Do not shift off the plan for the timeline of 3-5 years. This gives you the space and time to improve, to iterate.
  • How do we deepen our practice and our understanding?

Transformational change is messy – there is no recipe, formula or checklist. In order to sustain transformational change, conversations are required, a common thread through the five elements. Conversations take time and energy, but they are an investment in the sustainability of the work. Chase and Laufenberg have provided a framework worth considering and revisiting often as the work of change marches on.

How do you sustain transformational change?

Connect with Randy on Twitter, the TLTalkRadio podcast, and the Shift Your Paradigm podcast!

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Randy Ziegenfuss
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