Key Ideas

We are guided in our work by the CLG's "Ecology of Change", a framework of interrelated concepts, diagnostic lenses and tools. Below are some key ideas from the Ecology of Change.

Leadership Practice Communities: The unrecognized key to educational improvement 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. These leadership practice teams own and collectively tend to the change process while developing an increasingly effective community of leaders and learners. Read more about these communities in Tony Wagner's EdWeek commentary.

7 Disciplines of Improving Instruction: At the heart of any successful school improvement initiative must be a focused and deliberate effort to improve teaching and learning in the classroom. CLG has identified 7 disciplines enacted by districts improving instruction district-wide. To consider how these disciplines are being implemented in your own district's change efforts, explore CLG's 7 Disciplines Diagnostic.

3 Continua: The 3 Continua capture three distinct yet interrelated dimensions around which schools and districts need to be organized and operated such that the improvement efforts can create necessary "energy" for change, generate leadership throughout the system, and produce new knowledge for solving novel improvement problems. Working in these new ways requires that schools and districts move from being Reactive, Compliant and Isolated to ones that have great Focus and Purpose, where all educators are highly Engaged, and where Collaboration is the norm.

Organizational and Individual Immunities: Despite the best intentions of all parties, we have learned that organizations and individuals have powerful means of "protecting" themselves from the very changes to which they aspire. These "immunities" to change help to hold in place the status quo despite how hard leaders work to improve schools and districts. We have developed means to respectfully surface these often unnamed and hidden immunities to change so that they can be understood and overturned.

4Cs: Transformative change requires a systemic understanding of the problems district and school leaders are trying to solve. The 4Cs is a framework for diagnosing current systemic problems and building a powerful vision of what the solution should entail. It does so by guiding our attention to the multiple "arenas of change" — Context, Conditions, Competencies and Culture.

Phases of Change: Transformative change requires time, and it also requires a strategic phasing and staging of efforts so to build a strong foundation or reinventing schooling. Successful at-scale change — changes that ultimately transform teaching and learning for all students — requires building shared urgency around a recognized problem, developing a collective vision of success, and enacting your improvement strategies.

For a comprehensive examination of these concepts and tools, the Change Leadership Group hosts the "Three-Day Learning Lab: Systemic Change for Student Success".