Books

Change Leadership: A Practical Guide to Transforming Our Schools
Jossey-Bass, 2006 Available now

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READER RESOURCES
Video exercise – Looking at Instruction
This video, a 10th grade English lesson of "The Pearl," is used during the Three-Day Learning Lab and is available for viewing via streaming video. Click on the link above to see viewing instructions.

Video: Looking for an Argument This resource provides examples of how to engage students with such contemporary issues while also giving them practice at debate, note taking, highlighting, outlining, and timed essay writing. This video is used at the Three-Day Learning Lab and can be purchased from Teachers College Press. Click on the link above for order instructions.


Downloadable exercise templates
For exercise templates that you can print from your own computer, click below:
Individual Exercises
Team/Group Exercises

Praise for Change Leadership:

“Change Leadership is a truly wonderful and brilliant book. The ideas are powerful, deep and comprehensive-and grounded with tools to turn them into transformative action. A rare book that captures both the awful difficulty of causing change, and a way to do it.”

Michael Fullan
Author, Leading in a Culture of Change
and Leadership Sustainability: System Thinkers in Action

“The Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate 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 for the analysis of 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.”

Richard F. Elmore
Gregory Anrig Professor of Educational Leadership
Harvard Graduate School of Education

“Caught between the imperative of preparing students for the next half-century and the political mandate for short-term performance improvement on standardized tests, many educators are dropping by the wayside but a few are stepping forward with new leadership skills and vision. Working with such leaders, Tony Wagner, Bob Kegan and their colleagues have created an invaluable guidebook for those with the courage to have conviction without answers and the openness to learn together.”

Peter M. Senge
Founding chairperson of SoL
Senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Author, The Fifth Discipline

“There seem to be more books on school reform than there are schools in the U.S. This one stands out. The volume, which grows out of a five year study of school reform across the country, uniquely integrates both the organizational and human elements required for success.”

Arthur Levine
President, Teachers College, Columbia University

“Change Leadership uses very believable examples and provides common sense analysis of the challenges facing today’s educators: a well-written, straightforward guide with clear explanations and practical solutions. I found it useful and entertaining.”

Thomas W. Payzant
Superintendent, Boston Public Schools

Video Exercise – Looking at Instruction
From Chapter 2: Creating a Vision of Success
Change Leadership: A Practical Guide to Transforming Schools
© Jossey-Bass, 2005

These video clips are part of an interactive exercise in our book, Change Leadership: A Practical Guide to Transforming Schools. We recommend readers review Chapter 2 in which we outline the context for this exercise and how to use it as a discussion tool with colleagues.

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Video Exercise - Overview

Although it is important for educators to understand how researchers have come to define the elements of good instruction, we have found that no robust improvement process can succeed without first respecting that all practitioners in the system have their own beliefs about what constitutes good instruction. How does one begin a constructive conversation among faculty about quality teaching, one that results in an urgency to continue the conversation and desire to develop a shared understanding?

In Chapter 2 of Change Leadership, we present an activity with exactly these aspirations. This is the same exercise we have used with participants in our Three-Day Learning Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, in which teams watch twelve minutes of a tenth-grade English lesson. Although you may eventually want to use a video clip from an actual class in your school or system, we have found that this clip regularly sparks genuine conversation, exposing differences among our ideas of what constitutes quality instruction. These differences are most noticeable when there are many (twenty-five or more) people discussing the same lesson. However, important differences are likely to emerge in much smaller groups as well.
You can do this exercise on your own or with a group of colleagues. To get started, download the appropriate instructions below.

You will need Adobe© Reader© technology to access the documents.
For Windows    |   For Macintosh

Individual instructions – download (PDF)
Team instructions – download (PDF)

Next, choose the teaching clip you would like to use for this exercise. We’ve provided clips of both a middle school and high school lesson. You will need Real Player technology to view these video clips. Click here to download the basic player for free from the Internet.

10th Grade English: Writing a Complex Problem Watch Episode 29 in the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) series, “Video Library of Teaching Episodes.” Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1991. (Total run time: approximately 13 minutes)

6th Grade Social Studies: Egyptian Civilization Watch Episode 15 in the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) series, “Video Library of Teaching Episodes.” Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1991. (Total run time: approximately 14 minutes)

*Permission granted by ASCD for the Change Leadership Group to provide these video clips in streaming format only. See FAQs (link to PDF) for additional information.

If you have trouble downloading the player files, Real Player provides answers about system requirements and a customer support page on its site. You may also contact your local technology assistance center. Please note that the Change Leadership Group and Harvard University are unable provide technical support to video users. Refer to the FAQs below for additional information.

Viewing the Videos: FAQs (PDF)