🏫Takeaways: Leading School Change: How to Overcome Resistance, Increase Buy-in, and Accomplish Your Goals

About the Author

Dr. Todd Whitaker has been fortunate to be able to blend his passion with his career. Recognized as a leading presenter in the field of education, his message about the importance of teaching has resonated with hundreds of thousands of educators around the world. Todd is a professor of educational leadership at the University of Missouri and professor emeritus at Indiana State University. He has spent his life pursuing his love of education by researching and studying effective teachers and principals.

Prior to moving into higher education he was a math teacher and basketball coach in Missouri. Todd then served as a principal at the middle school, junior high, and high school levels. He was also a middle school coordinator in charge of staffing, curriculum, and technology for the opening of new middle schools.

One of the nation’s leading authorities on staff motivation, teacher leadership, and principal effectiveness, Todd has written over 50 books including the national best seller, What Great Teachers Do Differently. Other titles include: Dealing With Difficult Teachers, Ten-Minute Inservice, Your First Year, What Great Principals Do Differently, Motivating & Inspiring Teachers, and Dealing With Difficult Parents.

Todd is married to Beth, also a former teacher and principal, who is currently a faculty member of educational leadership at the University of Missouri and professor emeritus at Indiana State University. They are the parents of three children; Katherine, Madeline, and Harrison.

Table of Contents

⭐ The Book in 3 Sentences

🎨 Impressions

🤔 Who Should Read It?

💡 How the Book Changed Me

✍🏾 My Top 3 Quotes

📘 Summary + Notes

⭐ The Book in 3 Sentences

1. Changing a campus culture requires thoughtfully implemented strategies to address challenges in resistance from personnel.

2. Understanding the levels of change and the methods to implementing and sustaining them is a key factor to increasing buy-in.

3. Knowing your people (the superstars, the backbones, and the mediocres of the organization), how to leverage their strengths as well as how and when to contend with their resistances is crucial to accomplishing culture changes.

🎨 Impressions

This book supplemented my prior knowledge to change management within the K-12 setting whilst also affording me with the insight to understanding the realistic dynamics of campus personnel. Implementing cultural shifts is not a responsibility that rests solely upon the shoulders of administration. It is a collaborative effort between an administrative team and teachers with tactical leveraging of strengths and dependability from superstar and backbone ranking employees in order to win over the most resistant of employees.

🤔 Who Should Read It?

This book is a light read of a little over 100 pages without taking the appendices into consideration; consequently, making for a sufficient quick read to invest in prior to taking on a role of influence within the K-12 setting. Readers will receive practical tools and inspiration to initiate positive, immediate, results-oriented change with the support of staff. You’ll benefit from reading this book if:

• You are a rising leader, particularly one that is either tasked with the responsibility to implementing change leadership practices on Day 0 or knowingly walking into a workplace environment that is known for a strong level of resistance.

• You are an existing school leader who wishes to refine your change management practices.

• You are considering graduate study in Educational Administration or a closely related field.

💡 How the Book Changed Me

How my life / behaviors / thoughts / ideas have changed as a result of reading the book

• Leading School Change solidified existing knowledge of what it means to be an effective change agent within an organization. Intentionality paired with a breadth of knowledge about the dynamics of your team and the strategies gleamed from this book are crucial to successful innovation.

• FIRST IMPRESSIONS MATTER. When I pitch an idea, it needs to hit in order to increase the odds of buy-in.

✍🏾 My Top 3 Quotes

• The key to improving student behavior lies in improving the way the adults throughout the school community - teachers, administrators, staff members, bus drivers, and others - interact with students. This means changing the way we do things - and that is a cultural change (15).

• It takes eight times longer to unlearn something than it does to learn it in the first place (20).

• Change can come easily, all too easily if leadership skills are lacking. Anyone can let an organization take the path of least resistance; anyone can let people drift into inattentive habits of mind and unproductive patterns of behavior. The challenge is to keep an organization and its people moving forward on the path of growth (103).

📘 Summary + Notes

By limiting dreams, we also limit possibilities. Confidence is the most valuable gift a teacher can receive or give to their students (7).

1. Change Identification

   1. What’s the problem?

   2. Who will be affected by the decisions?

   3. What is the source of the change?

2. Three Levels of Change

   1. Procedural: Low-level, technical alteration. Memo or email.

   2. Structural: Managerial or organizational shifts.

   3. Cultural: Soul and spirit shift.

3. Change Tactics

   1. Guest speakers

   2. Site visits

   3. Staff meetings

4. Types of Employees

   1. Superstars: Represents 2-10% of employees. If this person left the campus, the principal would find it difficult to hire someone as good, and the departure would matter beyond the walls of their respective classroom. Good communicator, visionary, risk-taker, caring, positive, knowledgeable, energetic, creative, dynamic; has a sense of humor, loves teaching; puts students first

   2. Backbones: 80-90% of the campus. Some represent the most supportive faculty members. Hard worker; dedicated, loyal, productive, knowledgable, consistent follows directions; likes teaching; tries hard

   3. Mediocres: 5-10%. Slacker, cynic; negative, incompetent, sarcastic, resists change; knows the contract word for word; has poor attendance record, lacks classroom management skills.

Each time a change occurs that has little value, it increases the amount of resistance to the next change - even if the next one is very significant. Remember that people only have so much time, energy, and effort to give. Before you bring in yet another new concept, you need to make sure it is worth the resources it will consume (102).

1. Toolbox

   1. Weekly staff memo

   2. Observations are brief but so frequent personnel and students hardly notice

   3. Purposeful arrangement of the room where staff meetings take place

   4. Notes of appreciation

   5. Phone calls to inform parents when their children do the right thing