Organizing for Adaptive Change Management: If Schools Are Going to Adapt and Improve in Meaningful Ways, Then Central Office Leaders Must Lead the Way by Being Facilitators, Funders, Advisers, Evaluators, and Quality Assurance Agents
Year: 2017

One day, when I was a district superintendent, I visited two high schools we had identified as "needing improvement." I was there to share our strategy to help them boost student achievement and also give teachers and staff a chance to air their thoughts and concerns. The schools faced similar challenges, and they served similar student populations, but the comments I heard on my visits were totally different. At one school, faculty complained that students lacked respect for authority, had been poorly prepared by their middle schools, and were being raised by parents who didn't value education. In short, they pointed to problems beyond their control. They wanted me to remove the kids who were giving them the most trouble, and they also wanted more money. At the other school, teachers and staff told me about their collective struggle to improve instruction, talked about their desire for more professional learning, and described how they were challenging and changing their own beliefs about student abilities. That is, they found specific problems lurking in their own teaching practices and believed they had to learn and grow so they could serve students better. I think back to that day whenever I need a reminder of the human side of educational change. Over the past few decades, far too many reformers have assumed that school improvement is mainly a technical design challenge having to do with organizational structures and systems. But, in fact, a single organizational procedure such as designating schools as needing improvement can prompt very different responses in different schools. In one, faculty and staff might react defensively; in another, they might do some deep soul searching. As organizational theorist Ronald Heifetz has argued, it's helpful to describe change not as a technical process but as an "adaptive" one, having to do with how individuals come together to solve problems. That requires, first of all, that people reach a shared understanding of the problems, why solving them is necessary, who should be involved, what new skills and knowledge will be required, and whether achieving a change is even possible. All too often, school reformers try to skip this work, advocating for their preferred solutions without giving teachers, administrators, parents, and others a chance to decide whether there's a problem at all, much less what sort of problem it is. I'd argue that the primary responsibility of education leaders seeking to improve student achievement is to empower educators to learn together; in other words, their priority should be supporting the professional learning of the adults who work in schools.  This may seem counterintuitive for two reasons. First, today's public discourse rife with truisms like "children first" and "focus on student needs, not adult issues" suggests that teachers and staff should devote every ounce of their attention to students; anything else is said to be a distraction. Second, many policymakers have been seduced by the idea that the best way to boost student achievement is by pressuring teachers to improve by holding them accountable for student outcomes and, perhaps, by dismantling their unions. But these arguments rest on the dubious assumption that teachers already know how to provide better instruction, are too selfish and lazy to provide it, and need to be threatened and cajoled into doing so. Things look very different if we start from the opposite assumption: Teachers want to do their best for children and are willing to work as hard as it takes, but they may not know how to improve or what's wrong with the way they've always taught. In that case, maybe it's not such a distraction to focus on adult learning and adaptive change. Maybe school and district leaders should make it a priority to create opportunities for educators to help define the most important problems that need to be faced and then hash out solutions and learn new practices with and from each other.