ABSTRACT
Today’s deans of education are often called upon to be change agents and to oversee organizational and/or programmatic restructuring. The calls for change can come from within the university, the teacher education profession, and/or emerge from federal and state mandates or concerns. Regardless of the etiology of why change is needed, when a dean embarks on a structural reorganization – one that reconfigures the departments or units in a College of Education – the process can be fraught with a great deal of faculty politics, criticisms, and modes of resistance as well as numerous positive and untended consequences. This chapter presents the journey of one dean from a large comprehensive College of Education located in a flagship research institution on the east coast of the United States, who guided her College of Education through organizational change. The case describes the change process that evolved; the challenges that arose, the evolving leadership required, and importantly, the lessons learned.
