Reviews of pertinent readings on assessment, instructional practices, interventions, and leadership
Books
Systems Change
Motion Leadership: The Skinny on Becoming Change Savvy - Michael Fullan (2010) 
Reviewed by Esmeralda Hernandez and Gary Schumacher - University of Houston - Clear Lake
Please click the following link to read a review of this work by Michael Fullan: Motion Leadership: The Skinny on Becoming Change Savvy
Leadership
Building Strong School Cultures: A Guide to Leading Change
Sharon D. Kruse & Karen Seashore Louis
Corwin Press (2009)
ISBN 978-1-4129-5182-1
Building Strong School Cultures is a must read for educational leaders that are serious about systematic and sustainable educational change. Kruse and Seashore Louis posit that leading a school building is an enormous job and a job that cannot be done by one person (building principal) alone. Leadership must be shared and it must also be intensified according to the authors. The authors contend that leadership needs to be expanded not only within the school house, but also outside the school house into the community as well if schools are indeed serious about continuous school improvement and sustainable change.
Building Strong School Cultures is not just a book steeped in theory, but rather is practical in nature as well. The authors provide real world examples of the constructs they suggest are needed to transform and intensify leadership in schools. The authors provide tools that educational leaders can employ to assess and analyze their school culture. The authors stress throughout the book that "quick fixes" are traps that educational leaders must avoid if they are serious about building strong school cultures that promote high levels of student achievement. The authors state that "embracing quick fixes fosters a belief in leaders that they are doing the best they can for students in their schools."
Kruse and Seashore Louis promote the construct of PCOLT as the framework for building strong school cultures and intensifying leadership in schools. PCOLT is an acronym that stand for a) professional community, b) organizational learning, and c) trust. The authors define these constructs throughout the book and provide examples of how these three constructs work together to facilitate deep, meaningful organizational change.
Chapters included in this book are as follows:
Changing school Culture: An Introduction and Overview
- Principals as Cultural Change Agents
- Diagnosing Your School Culture: Understanding Where You Are
- Linking Leadership and School Culture
- Networks, Networking, and Culture Change
- Intensifying Leadership Through Partnerships with Districts
- Schools and Communities: Working With the Enduring Dilemmas of Time and Accountability
- Bringing It All Together: Concluding Themes and Thoughts
This is a book that is about leadership and culture change and is appropriate not only for administrators, but all educational leaders in schools and school districts desiring to change the culture of their school in order to promote school learning. Schools and districts that are serious about employing a model of continuous school improvement and an educational model of problem-solving/response to intervention will find that Building Strong School Cultures provides deep food for thought on the leadership skills required for implementation.
Given the busyness of the lives of educational professionals, this book is worth making time to read.
Beyond School Improvement: The Journey to Innovative Leadership
Robert Davidovich, Pauli Nikolay, Bonnie Laugerman, Carol Commodore
Corwin Press (2010)
Paperback ISBN: 9781412971409
Hardcover ISBN: 9781412971393
Submitted by: Randa Gilbert, Texas City High School and Dr. Gary Schumacher, University of Houston-Clear lake
Beyond School Improvement: The Journey to Innovative Leadership is a book that addresses school improvement and the role that innovation plays in improvement efforts. It is divided into two parts. In the first section, the authors describe the difference between organizational (school) improvement and innovation. They emphasize the importance of creating a balance between slow, methodical attempts to improve education and the utilization of innovative or new ideas to change education to meet the needs of students entering the twenty-first century global community.
According to the authors, the ability to become properly focused on innovation requires four components: disturbance, self-referencing, amplification, and engagement. Disturbance is defined as something that disrupts the status quo while self-referencing is the method of deciphering new information as it compares to existing beliefs. Amplification is the act of a new idea growing until it cannot be ignored, and engagement occurs when the new idea finally competes with existing practices. The authors state an effective leader will utilize disturbances to upset the status quo and allow innovation or new practices to emerge that will expedite student improvement as well as ready them for a continually evolving society.
The authors present a “continuum of leadership behavior” throughout the second part of the book to assist in understanding how innovation in school improvement is practiced. Four essential leadership practices are proposed as characteristics of innovative systems (schools) rooted in the elements of change. The first practice is the embracing of dissonance or any factor that causes discord in the status quo. Leadership requires the exploration of new ideas – moving beyond the status quo. The second practice, creating context, includes the idea of a system or school having its own identity and necessitates the leader to strive for a clear, coherent identity that can be enriched and refined daily. The next essential leadership practice in achieving the balance between improvement and innovation in schools is the ability to change the field of perception. Changing the field of perception refers to changing the views and reflections of information and the utilization of feedback. The fourth and final leadership practice is letting ideas collide allowing new ideas and practices to emerge.
An essential message of Beyond School Improvement: The Journey to Innovative Leadership is to unlearn the old ingrained methodologies in order to make room for new and better ideas to improve student growth. This will only occur by bringing discord and decoding new ideas, allowing them to grow until they cannot be ignored and then acting upon them. The authors point out the benefits of letting ideas collide until new practices emerge. This collision of ideas is purportedly able to take place due to the environment created by the leader that allows information to flow freely. The authors emphasize that this process is cyclical.
A central point advanced by the authors is their belief that educational leaders need to be risk-takers who are willing to try new ideas to change education to fit the needs of our rapidly evolving global society.
Beyond School Improvement: The Journey to Innovative Leadership is written by school practitioners and offers practical advice to the reader. The authors compare a school to a living organism. This likeness suggests the need for continuous evolution and adaptation in order to modify education to our changing environment. They outline the requirements for these alterations clearly utilizing vignettes to illustrate real world applications as well as many graphic organizers to further describe the flow of the process.
The book offers many reflective activities. This allows readers to self-reflect in order to determine where they are as a leader and where they wish to be. In addition to these thought-provoking activities, the authors provide self-assessments at the end of each chapter that allow the reader to ascertain their openness to the journey to innovative leadership. This book can be ideal for a group study as it also offers team conversation starters for new concepts.
Beyond School Improvement: The Journey to Innovative Leadership can be a valuable book for new or seasoned educational leaders. It provides sound methods to generate new ideas that will improve student learning and the educational processes. It encourages leaders to be risk-takers in their endeavors to improve student performance as well as providing a guide to reach those goals.
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
Atul Gawande (2009)
Metropolitan Books
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9174-8
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right may seem an unusual book to be reviewed under the Leadership section of an organization and its website devoted to improving instructional outcomes for all students. It may seem unusual because this book by Atul Gawande is written by a medical doctor and not by a traditional educational professional. Gawande's thesis in this book is that complexity in processes and procedures is increasingly common in many areas of society and provides examples from medicine, aviation, and the building trades to name several. The knowledge explosion in many fields has almost become overwhelming and it is seemingly impossible for any one person to remember everything that one needs to attend two, which may result in failure. Failure, according to Gawande, emanates from two sources: ignorance (we have only partial understanding of the world and how it works) and ineptitude (applying the knowledge we have consistently and correctly). The complexity that exists requires tools that provide the core essential elements that must be considered in addressing complexity often under situations that are critical and pressure filled. The tool that Gawande espouses is a checklist.
Checklists seem to protect against failures (especially those related to ineptitude) and provide reminders of the minimum necessary steps required and to make those steps explicit. A well developed checklist provides essential information yet allows for thinking and professional judgment. Good checklists have the following characteristics:
- Good checklists are precise (a rule of thumb is to keep the checklist to between five and nine items)
- Good checklists are efficient, to the point, and easy to use (even in the most difficult situations)
- Good checklists do not spell out everything
- Good checklists provide reminders of the most critical and important steps (ones, according to Gawande, even highly skilled professionals could miss)
- Good checklists are practical
- Good checklists use wording that is simple and exact
- Good checklists are communication tools
The Checklist Manifesto does not provide examples from education, but one must consider the potential application to education especially since the risk of not doing things right (i.e., providing high quality instruction to all students with commensurate high academic and social/emotional/behavioral outcomes) is so high. The following questions come to mind?
- Where do checklists fit into the education profession?
- What checklists (if any) do we currently use and do they meet the criteria for good checklists as outlined by Gawande?
- Where would checklists provide benefit to students and educational professionals? Examples may include, but are not limited to: administration of curriculum based measures (CBM), scoring of curriculum based measures (CBM), problem-solving team process and procedures, instructional decision-making rules based on student performance data, and the like.
If you are using checklists in your school and/or district, please share them with us.