Posted: June 17th, 2015

Advocating for Change

Post specific ways that you will “step up and speak out” to promote effective professional learning at your school. Describe how you can influence professional development efforts in your current roles and indicate other roles you might pursue in the future. Then, describe a failed change initiative (real or imagined). Invite your colleagues to analyze the scenario and report back on why the initiative failed according to Dr. Fullan’s “ Eight Forces for Leaders of Change” article.

Throughout this course, you have learned about the qualities of effective standards-based professional development. You have also worked with a learning team and shared ideas about how to improve professional learning at your school. The leadership role that you have assumed is likely to make a difference in the lives of teachers and students.

Advocacy: Your Sphere of Influence
In this week’s “Professional Development Leadership” media segment, Dr. Stephanie Hirsh suggests that you “look for your opportunity to step up and speak out on behalf of great professional learning.” Think about your various roles in your school/school district and your opportunities to be a leader and advocate for professional learning that has a direct impact on student achievement. What is your sphere of influence? Consider all of the levels on which professional development occurs (e.g., classroom teacher, member of a grade level or subject team, action team , district committee, textbook committee, strategic plan committee, district strategic planning committee, etc.).

By stepping up and speaking out, you are advocating for change in teaching practice. You cannot improve student learning without changing teaching practices and addressing the culture of the school. In a leadership role, and as someone who advocates for collaborative, ongoing, standards-based, job-embedded professional development, you will be exposed to concerns and/or resistance from individuals who are not yet convinced or prepared to change.

Change Knowledge
In “8 Forces for Leaders of Change,” Michael Fullan asserts, “ Enough research on implementation has been done in the past 35 years for us to say that if you don’t know the eight guiding principles/drivers of change (in the sense of being able to use them for insight and action), even the best ideas will not take hold. Without change knowledge, you get failure.”

Bring to mind (or create an imagined scenario of) a failed effort to bring about change in a school or district and consider how the change may have succeeded if the “eight drivers” to effective and lasting change had been addressed:

Engaging people’s moral purposes

Building capacity

Understanding the change

Developing cultures for learning

Developing cultures of evaluation;

Focusing on leadership for change;

Fostering coherence makingcultivating tri-level development)