Change can be unsettling and sometimes cause the involved individuals much stress and fear of appearing the fool. Education itself is not slow to change; in fact, education involves renewal of ideas/techniques and requires learners to reorganize that, which they once believed. Education changes people; yet, some of those very people who are in charge of education may be reluctant to make changes. In a review of Michael Fullan’s book, Change Forces: Probing the Depths of Educational Reform, Anne S. Keim in School Administrator, summarizes the abovementioned. "Systems don't change themselves; individual people change them" (Keim, 1994, p.1). So if people are those responsible for making changes and they are afraid of the needed changes, the system stays the same or just changes at the surface.
Education in America has not really changed since it was founded. Conversely, the available technology, student body, teachers, and facilities have changed exponentially. As educators, we sometimes are afraid to try something new because we fear failure in its application; conversely, we ask our students to try and to not be afraid of failure. Are we hypocrites? I think we know the right things to do, but just don’t want to them because they are too hard.
School leaders are those responsible for initiating change but leaders who are successful at that need to have special qualities. A leader needs the whole school and board to back him or her; here, we require a leader that can motivate his faculty and stimulate the board to take a worthwhile risk. This leader needs spiritual intelligence. "It was the intelligence that guided men and women like Churchill, Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mother Theresa…the secret of their leadership was their ability to inspire people, to give a sense of something worth struggling for" (Zohar, 2006, p.46).
Those leaders became famous entities in our history because they truly cared and saw a need for change and worked until they saw results. Now, I am not saying we need a historical leader, but I am saying that we need people who care. If they care, they will make changes, especially changes that are best for our students
Keim, A. S. (1994). A review on change. [Review of the book Change Forces:
Probing the Depths of Educational Reform]. School Administrator, 1-3.
Zohar, D. (2005). Spiritually intelligent leadership. Leader to Leader, 38, 45-51.
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2 comments:
You hit upon what Michale Schmoker calls the "Knowing Doing Gap"-- we'll be looking at it more in class in the coming weeks.
I agree with you that change is a critical element of any healthy system. I wonder though, are the leaders within the school the only people who can cause change. Perhaps if the other stakeholders in a school, namely the parents and taxpayers, demanded better quality in their schools, that could be the impetus for change as well. A conscientious public can provoke positive change as quickly as an effective principal. Maybe I am a cynic, but I feel that most change is pushed from behind, rather than pulled from the school leader. In other words, school leaders mobilize themselves when they feel compelled to by a greater power.
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