ABSTRACT
The authors maintain that change for improvement is the constant companion of all school leaders, and it is an act and time at which they are most vulnerable. This chapter distils a lot of the theory and narrative of change, and it offers a sense of direction for school leaders seeking school improvement, while remembering that the goal posts keep moving.
When newly appointed school leaders arrive at their schools, instinctively they will tend to evaluate the human and physical resources available and then with this initial assessment done they will begin planning for both the present and near-future learning and teaching. However, what has not been recognised in the educational literature, or for that matter, in leaders’ performance management, is that effective school leaders already have developmental sequences for such processes in their minds. We think that the Universal Five Phases of Successful, Sustainable Change underwrites the stages of most successful school-based changes, and Figure 17.1 in the book links this process with the well-known Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. An important strategy for growing ownership of the sustainable renewal process was recognised in Schechter’s (2020, p. 16) strategy of building on success: “The goal of learning from success is to create a learning community that investigates its own beneficial actions, a community that focuses on discovering team members’ professional wisdom and identifying action-oriented knowledge.” The benefits from Learning from Success in the Hold, Build and Transition stages of sustainable renewal are that it can reduce defensiveness and enhance motivation, generate transformation, enhance reflection on effective practices, create positive organisational memory, and generate a commitment to and an investment in learning among diverse members of a school community (Schechter, 2020, pp. 19–20).
