Successful School Change: Creating Settings to Improve Teaching and Learning

Drawing on 15 years of research and teaching in low-income schools, Claude Goldenberg provides a powerful model of school change for those seeking to make reform happen in their school or classroom. With great care and sensitivity, Goldenberg demonstrates the kinds of long-term planning and coordinated effort required to create lasting change. Offering a unique glimpse into the reform process, this very readable account:

• Focuses on successful reform efforts in an elementary school in the metropolitan Los Angeles area that serves a predominantly bilingual, Latino population.
• Details the partnership between school-based educators and university-based researchers working together over an extended period to improve academic achievement, primarily in language arts.
• Examines how to create a sustained, coherent, and focused school-wide effort aimed at improving identified student outcomes.
• Illustrates the everyday dynamics experienced by teachers, administrators, and students, including the many challenges involved in changing norms, beliefs, and practices and how those challenges were addressed to improve student learning.
• Concludes with a revealing but sobering chapter describing what happened after the project officially ended.

Claude Goldenberg is a Professor in the Department of Teacher Education and Associate Dean of the College of Education at California State University, Long Beach.