Change Leadership: A Practical Guide to Transforming Our Schools

by Tony Wagner, Robert Kegan, Lisa Laskow Lahey

The Change Leadership Group at the Harvard School of Education has, through its work with educators, developed a thoughtful approach to the transformation of schools in the face of increasing demands for accountability. This book brings the work of the Change Leadership Group to a broader audience, providing a framework to analyze the work of school change and exercises that guide educators through the development of their practice as agents of change. It exemplifies a new and powerful approach to leadership in schools.

Genres: Education, Leadership, Nonfiction, School

300 pages, Paperback

First published December 2, 2005

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Tony Wagner recently accepted a position as the first Innovation Education Fellow at the Technology & Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard. Prior to this, he was the founder and co-director of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for more than a decade.

Tony consults widely to schools, districts, and foundations around the country and internationally. His previous work experience includes twelve years as a high school teacher, K-8 principal, university professor in teacher education, and founding executive director of Educators for Social Responsibility.

Tony is also a frequent speaker at national and international conferences and a widely published author. His work includes numerous articles and five books. Tony’s latest, Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change The World, will be published in April by Simon & Schuster. His recent book, The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need—and What We Can do About It has been a best seller and is being translated into Chinese. Tony’s other titles include: Change Leadership: A Practical Guide to Transforming Our Schools, Making the Grade: Reinventing America’s Schools, and How Schools Change: Lessons from Three Communities Revisited. He has also recently collaborated with noted filmmaker Robert Compton to create a 60 minute documentary, “The Finnish Phenomenon: Inside The World’s Most Surprising School System.”

Tony earned an M.A.T. and an Ed.D. at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education.

Reviews

[Luca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anybody who is working with education will benefit from reading this book. It is full of information for developing your school or organization. No school is lacking of engaged and good-willing educators. What is important is a strategy to use the effort in an effective way, and that is what the book is about.

[Eduardo · Rating 4 out of 5]

The authors quote a school superintendent with whom they had worked: "we set out to work on our schools, and discovered that, in order to really succeed at it, we had to work on ourselves as well." I strongly recommend committing to sincerely working on the exercises that appear throughout the book. Not only does they help the book be more engaging, they also help one better define and understand the endeavors that are to be undertaken. The title of the book lays it out for the reader, this is a practical guide and I wouldn't feel as though I had truly read it if I hadn't completed the exercises with the intention of inviting changes in me, in my workplace, and in those with whom I work.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book divided into ten parts which has a gradual movement into the Echology of change and overturning the immunities to change in the 8th and 9th parts. The last part ( 10th) concerns with brief Reflection of the writer to enhance the essential aim of the topics were discussed in the book.

There are many points we can find very special about the book, he reflective quotes about education, life , community-school relation, parenting and socialization... etc. The second is the practical illustration is being provided.
A nice trip to prepare a school leader.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Helpful, clear, insightful, hopeful. Gives tools and frameworks to help explain the psychological impact of change and why our responses to it work to slow progress to a crawl. SUPER enlightening.

[Matthew William · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great resource. Practical and engaging!

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

The instructional leadership team at my school has used this book this past year as a tool for exploring our work and the changes we need to make. It has functioned as a powerful mechanism for us to examine where we are as a school and where we are headed. It offers practical advice for creating true learning communities that are aimed at educating all of the our children for our society and economy. At the heart of the book is a dual focus on both the individual changes that adults must make to truly tackle expanded visions of student outcomes and the broader systemic changes institutions must make to have these changes take root.

As I have noted elsewhere, there is a need to expand the discourse about the outcomes that we need for all of our children beyond the confines of basic skills and knowledge defined by "No Child Left Behind." If we are serious about tackling both a greater vision of what children need to be successful and educating them in a way to reach this success, then schools and public policy has to change. This book takes a major leap in describing what that change looks like in all of its messy details. This is important and difficult work.

[Kelley · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've wanted to read this book for a few years. Sadly, I was quite disappointed with it. While there are some intriguing aspects about different ways to approach change, I was largely unimpressed. The single most interesting concept was discussing how the change leader can actually hinder the change process. Otherwise, this wasn't very interesting or well presented. I even found the anecdotes hard to follow and uninteresting to read about. I missed the boat on this one.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I do not like all of the books I read for graduate school but this one was well-written, well-formatted, and very informative. The author clearly understands the school improvement process and makes allowances for the indiscrete nature of the exigent problems facing schools (I didn't intend to write such a hoity sentence, apologies). But this is a textbook, and as much as textbooks are their own form of fiction, I can't give more than 3 stars - even though it is a great book!

[Alabama Best Practices Center · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a must for any education leader. It was commissioned by the Gates Foundation and written by faculty from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, led by Tony Wagner. We are using it with our Key Leaders Network and integrating much of what we've learned from this book in other facets of our work. Highly recommended.

[Anthony A · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent book for educational leaders, especially the first chapter, which talks about the "perception gap" between universities and public schools/parents. I thoroughly enjoyed working through the Immunity Map, which made me look at something which I was doing that prevented me from being fully committed to school improvement. Highly recommended.

[Christina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned a lot from this book. The 4C's framework for school change is a beneficial model that helped me identify both strengths and areas for growth.

[Stephanie Maynard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book! I will use this when I begin trying to reinvent Az schools.