Sustaining Change in Schools: How to Overcome Differences and Focus on Quality

Do you struggle to align day-to-day educational practices with your community's stated goals for learning? Strong public schools depend on strong partnerships between schools and communities. Unfortunately, personality clashes and conflicting perspectives among leaders too often render such partnerships elusive.

In Sustaining Change in Schools: How to Overcome Differences and Focus on Quality, Daniel P. Johnson outlines a proven framework for ensuring that educators and stakeholders collaborate effectively, both at the school and district levels. The framework, which has evolved over a 25-year period across four school districts and three states, offers school leaders a way to create and sustain decision-making processes by working through differences and following these five steps:

1. Understand and align the personality of your school district with the overall personality of your community.

2. Ask quality questions that promote a commitment to a common purpose.

3. Make quality a habit by creating organizational structures that celebrate differences within acceptable community standards.

4. Focus on success as a means of renewing schools from within rather than imposing solutions from the outside.

5. Manage tasks so that your stakeholders learn to appreciate different personalities as a necessary part of your problem-solving process.

Both practical and engaging, this book is just as useful to the classroom teacher as it is to the school board member. Filled with real-life examples of the framework in action and step-by-step procedures for its implementation, this is the definitive guide to sustaining positive change in schools.