Nicola Kuhn's List: TL as change agent

• leaders in the field of school librarianship have urged teacher-librarians to become facilitators and leaders of education reform rather than reactors to it.
• Fullan (1993) defines change agentry as "being self-conscious about the nature of change and the change process" (p. 12)
• They act as caregivers, coaches, connectors, and catalysts (Stripling, 2003

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• I'm on the committee."
• effective principals don't work harder; they work smarter. Principals who  encourage and enlist teachers' leadership leverage their own.
• A teacher who has stopped learning cannot create a classroom climate rich in  learning for students.
• powerful relationship exists between learning and leading
• the puzzling paradox that those teachers who seem to have the least time and  the most on their plates are the very ones who always seem ready and able to  take on the additional work of schoolwide leadership.
• fellow teachers also hold the power to unlock teachers' leadership potential  and to foster its growth

• Teachers who succeed in influencing the school are  tireless, incessant, and undeterred by the obstacles that seem to leap from  behind every bush.
• If greater teacher leadership is to be attained in our schools, educators will  also have to explore multiple conceptions of the role of the teacher: team  leader, lead teacher, teacher researcher, master teacher. There is no more  important form of school restructuring.

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• The  cognitive sciences teach us that if information is to become knowledge, a social  process is required. This makes great pedagogical sense. Information stays as  information until people work through it together in solving problems and  achieving goals. This is why assessment literacy, when teachers collectively  focus on student performance and develop action plans to improve it, is so  powerful. Changing the culture is even more important because it establishes  norms of continuous interaction. So, information becomes knowledge through a  social process, and knowledge becomes wisdom through sustained  interaction.
• five conceptions--moral purpose, relationship building, knowledge generation,  understanding the change process, and coherence building.
• We know that when we think about change we have to get ownership, participation,  and a sense of meaning on the part of the vast majority of teachers.
• Reculturing is  the main work of leadership

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• three stories of reform
• inside story'
• 'inside-outside' story
• internal dynamics
• outside forces impinging on them
• 'the outside-in' story
• external-to-the-school agencies
• work cultures (or professional learning communities
• make a difference
• more successful schools had teachers and administrators that (1) formed a  professional learning community, (b) focused on student work (assessment), and  (c) changed their instructional practice (pedagogy)
• difference between "restructuring" and "reculturing"
• restructuring can be legislated,
• reculturing : defined as the process of developing professional learning  communities in the school.
• deeper changes in both culture and structure are accomplished
• teachers and principals must reframe their roles and orientations to the  outside
• When there is a rapport among parents/ community, teachers/school and the  student, learning occurs.
• schools use their internal collaborative strength to seek out relationships with  the community
• They pursue programs and activities that are based on two-way capacity building  in order to mobilize the resources of both the community and the school in the  service of learning (Epstein, 1995).

  • Why we are so fortunate to have NOL and our community behind RSS initiative.
• the more powerful that technology becomes, the more indispensable good teachers  are
• new breakthroughs in cognitive science about how learners must construct their  own meaning for deep understanding to occur
• collaborative schools are active and critical consumers of external standards
• School improvement will never occur on a wide scale until the majority of  teachers become contributors to and beneficiaries of the professional learning  community
• They select and integrate innovations; they constantly work on connectedness;  they carefully choose staff development, usually in groups of two or more, and  they work on applying what they learn (Bryk, Sebring, Kerbow, Rollow &  Easton, 1998).
• They deal with the outside, partly to take on negative forces, partly to ferret  out resources (some of which are previous negative forces converted to support),  and partly to learn from the outside.
• policies focusing on decentralization, local capacity building, rigorous  external accountability, and stimulation of innovation
• the first element is to maintain and develop decentralization policies. This  would involve retaining or strengthening site-based emphasis and local district  responsibilities (but remember reculturing) and reversing policies that stand in  the way of reform. Healey and De Stefano (1997) call this "clearing policy  space" and "filling policy space" with new policies more appropriate to local  development.
• These activities range from training for school teams, local school councils,  redesign of initial teacher education, and the panoply of new activities that  will be needed to prepare teachers, principals, parents, and so on to function  as professional learning communities inside and outside the school.
• a rigorous external accountability system must be built into the  infrastructure.
• a philosophy of using 'assessment for learning'
• Balancing accountability support and accountability intervention is obviously a  tough call, but this is precisely how sophisticated the external infrastructure  must become.
• the stimulation of innovation must be a strong feature of the infrastructure.  Investments must be made in research, development, and innovative networks, so  that the marketplace of educational ideas is constantly being stimulated
• Internal school development is# a core requirement. But this cannot occur  unless the school is proactively connecting to the outside. Schools that do  develop internally, and do link to the outside, are still not self-sufficient.  It is possible for these schools to develop for a while on their own, but in  order for this development to be sustained, they must be challenged and nurtured  by an external infrastructure.

  • Use research from the outside to reculture.

  • Summary- develop a reculture; work with outside forces such as communiy; use external infrastructure as checks and balances (assessment)
• The main enemies of large scale reform are overload and extreme fragmentation.  The three stories are essentially coherence-making capacities in an otherwise  disjointed system

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