Mission

The Change Leadership Group strives to:

• Create and gather knowledge to support sustained systemic changes in K-12 public education that results in improved learning for all students
  
  
• Help school and district leaders create LEADERSHIP PRACTICE COMMUNITIES to strengthen local capacity for change
  
  
• Share key findings with a diverse group of educational leaders

CLG Overview

The Change Leadership Group (CLG) at the Harvard Graduate School of Education is a knowledge-development and capacity-building organization founded in 1999 with a generous five-year grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Since our inception, it has been our goal to build school and district leaders' capacities to ensure success for all students.

We are committed to building school leaders' capacities because of persistent and devastating inequities in educational outcomes for students in America's schools. This is occurring at a time when there is a need for all our children to develop higher levels of intellectual and social skills for work, citizenship, and life-long learning in the 21st century. Creating schools and districts that disrupt reoccurring inequities by helping all students learn and grow requires that educational leaders take up a new kind of work--the substantive reinvention of our schools, for which, through no fault of their own, they are insufficiently prepared and inadequately supported.

Research and our professional experience suggest that schools and districts do not improve because of the efforts of single individuals working independently, no matter how conscientious their efforts. The unrecognized key to educational improvement in our view is the reconstitution of leadership teams, at the school and district levels, from a co-operating group of separately responsible individuals to a genuinely collaborative team supporting a single, system-wide process of instructional improvement. We have learned that such a shift involves an entirely different way of doing the work of school leadership, it takes time to evolve, and it requires help.

CLG works to provide such help to district and school leaders through brief professional development programs, and through intensive, site-based, multi-year team-coaching relationships. We are guided in our work by CLG's "Ecology of Change", a framework of interrelated concepts, diagnostic lenses and tools developed through research and practice.