Educational Leadership Reflective Journal

            Educational leaders can utilize John Kotter’s 8 step model for promoting change in the school system.  (Refer to the following website for Kotter’s 8 steps:  http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newPPM_82.htm).  However, Kotter’s change model is born from the world of business, and some of his 8 steps need to be adapted for the realities that exist in public education.  Public schools do not nor should they run like a business.  So which components of Kotter’s 8 steps model are useful, and which components lack an understanding of how schools operate?

            According to Kotter, the first step is to “create a sense of urgency”.  The reality is that teachers and school systems have been working under a “sense of urgency” for the last 5 years under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP).  This sense of urgency has had some benefits, but there are also some serious costs from this “urgency”.  A few of these costs include good teachers leaving the profession, increased student drop outs, a de-emphasis on science and history instruction, and AYP subgroup students having less access to elective courses in favor of mandatory attendance in math and reading remediation programs.  Teachers today feel lost in this churning sea of change, and are looking for some stability. 

             Instead of feeding into this “sense of urgency”, today’s educational leader needs to focus on Kotter’s third step:  “developing a vision and strategy”.  This vision can become the stability that teachers are looking for and should be created by what Kotter calls the “guiding coalition” in step 2.  This coalition can be assembled from the various leadership roles in the school including principal, assistant principal, curriculum coordinator, guidance counselors, technology leader, department chairs in special education, math, English, science, history, and electives, library specialists, resource officer, reading and math specialists, and other various resource leaders.  In all, this coalition can have about 20% of the entire school staff.  Data collected from benchmarks, SOL tests, student assessments, parent and teacher survey’s and other sources will help to define this focus.  Then, strategies and visions can be developed by this coalition group.

            Step 4 of Kotter’s model is to communicate this vision to the other 80% of the staff.  This can then lead to step 5 in which coalition group puts their collective vision into action.  This action will in itself be an effective communication of the group’s vision.  With step 6, generating short-term wins, one needs to be very careful with this.  If the “win” comes across as fake, the entire teaching staff can lose momentum toward a goal.  Based on personal experience this is usually at this point that the vision begins to fade.  This usually takes place at the end of the school year as SOL results begin to come in. 

Step 7 which tries to get more people to join the vision of change, and Step 8 in which the change becomes deeply rooted, are rarely reached in the education world.  The summer months drown this out and the new school year starts with a new vision, often completely separate and disconnected from the visions of the previous year.  The long term change is never nurtured enough to produce fruit.