Program Components > Leadership > Leadership Capacity > Changes That Stick
FEATURE STORY
CHANGES THAT STICK: BUILDING LEADERSHIP CAPACITY TO SUCCEED WITH AIM
IMPLEMENTATION
By Mitch Bogen and Ruby Midkiff, May 2003
Ask Bob Fuller, principal of Armstrong Middle School in Starkville, Mississippi,
to describe his students and he gets right to the point. "Students in the
middle grades are at a very exciting and sometimes frightening age," he
says. "They never run out of energy. It is that energy that makes you both
exhausted and exhilarated at the same time."
Exciting yet frightening. Exhausted yet exhilarated. Bob's ability to embrace
these creative tensions gives us a clue to his success-not only as the most
recent Middle School Principal of Year, as named by the Mississippi Association
of Middle Level Education, but also as one of the most effective school
leaders currently implementing AIM at Middle Grades Results (Note
1). Just as young adolescents make the awkward and difficult transition
out of childhood, so, too, schools that enter into comprehensive school
reform must leave behind their traditional ways of doing things. Using AIM
tools, and with AIM guidance, Fuller has taken the lead in making Armstrong
a school that now stands as a model of school improvement.
One key to Armstrong's success is a firm commitment to collaborative leadership-a
commitment shared by the Starkville School District as a whole. In fact,
Armstrong and Starkville have been effective in developing what Linda Lambert
(1998) has defined as the two key dimensions of l eadership: 1) broad-based
staff participation and 2) the strong understanding and skillfulness of
those involved.
Broad-based Participation
Taking the lead in an AIM school means sharing leadership roles. When Armstrong
was selected as an AIM pilot school and started participation in the initial
start-up phase, collaborative leadership was a new concept for Fuller and
for the school. Fuller quickly demonstrated his commitment to the concept
by selecting strong and experienced teachers and administrators to form
the leadership team that would participate in Creating Tomorrow-AIM's comprehensive
and intensive process of assessing strengths and weaknesses and planning
for school improvement.
As a first step in ensuring that leadership at Armstrong would be truly
collaborative, the Armstrong leadership team re-named itself the Armstrong
Communication Team (ACT), since the word "leadership" has traditionally
connoted concepts of hierarchy and elitism. For his part, Fuller has not
hesitated to delegate meaningful authority to ACT members. For example,
following their participation at AIM's February 2003 Leadership Symposium,
he asked the ACT members to take the lead in training the rest of school
in the leadership skills learned during the Symposium. They chose a training-of-trainers
model, working first with seven teachers, who then trained additional staff
during the spring 2003 semester.
Collaborative leadership is not the abdication of leadership and authority
on the part of the principal, though. This is something that Bob Fuller
understands well, according to Janet Henderson, Assistant Superintendent
for the Starkville School District. "He builds leaders among his staff and
delegates easily to others," she observes. "He is a member of the team and
not an omnipotent dictator. He's not afraid to make decisions, but he is
knowledgeable about what decisions he should make and what decisions the
stakeholders should make."
Skillful Practice
The fact that leadership is shared does not necessarily mean that it is
successful. To succeed, all leaders need to be clear about their purposes.
Janet Henderson is succinct on this point: "I believe that leadership has
only one focus and that is results." For AIM schools this means helping
faculty develop new skills to improve teaching and learning. Fuller explains:
AIM has helped our school focus more on the teaching and learning
process. Through our Faculty Inquiry Teams [also called teacher study
groups], our school is experiencing school improvement where it must take
place, in the individual classrooms where our students learn. The assessments
our teachers are developing for our students are assessing more for understanding
rather than mere knowledge as before. We have established learning communities
that focus on instruction, assessment, and meeting the diverse needs of
our students. Our teachers are using the [AIM] protocols in their work
together and [engaging in] focused dialogue on the teaching and learning
process.
The work of the Communication Team provides a good example of skillful practice
at Armstrong. The ACT recently reviewed a variety of data around student
achievement and identified the following dilemma: "What are some strategies
for dealing with seventh graders who achieve minimal proficiency on the
Mississippi Curriculum Test [MCT]?" Team members took this dilemma to their
study groups, where another member of the study group facilitated a conversation
using the consultancy protocol (Note
2). After these small group sessions, each study group reported back
to the ACT. As a result, the ACT created several short- and long-term strategies
to help Armstrong seventh graders prepare for the MCT. Using a variety of
AIM structures and protocols, the Communication Team and the teacher study
groups are now better able to focus on specific learning needs.
Teacher study groups provide all teachers with the opportunity to develop
their skills as instructional leaders. In these groups, teachers use a variety
of protocols to look at student work, assess student performance, and identify
specific areas for investigation. Another important leadership practice
at Armstrong involves having veteran teachers mentor first-year teachers,
informing them about AIM and helping them to begin to master AIM's core
approach to curriculum, instruction, and assessment: Teaching for Understanding.
Changes That Stick
Concrete practices, such as those outlined above, begin to change the culture
of a school, which makes it easier to sustain meaningful school reform.
"Our goal is to demonstrate that AIM is not just another new reform-it is
changing the way we think, the culture of our school," says Fuller. "Those
are the changes that stick." Teacher and leadership team member Rosemary
Cuicchi confirms that deep, sustainable change is happening: "The atmosphere
of the school has changed for the better. Teachers now spend more time collaborating
on lessons and helping each other." This changed culture at Armstrong demonstrates
Lambert's assertion that reflective and innovative practice becomes the
norm at schools functioning with well-developed leadership capacity (1998,
p. 13).
Lambert (1998, p. 13) also contends that this changed culture will result
in high student achievement. This is the case at Armstrong Middle School,
which has shown progress on the Mississippi criterion-referenced exams in
reading, language, and math. More seventh and eighth grade students scored
at a higher level in each area during the 2002 school year than during the
2001 school year. What's more, learning is also more engaging, as evidenced
by this seventh grade student reflection:
I really enjoyed creating the African Mask. I was able to be
creative on all of the projects and get a better grade than doing a written
test. I also enjoyed researching and learning about my country, when completing
the travel brochure. This was another way I showed my understanding of
the topic.
Engaging
the District
A high level of institutional support is needed to bring about comprehensive
school reform, and the Starkville district is fortunate in this regard.
Assistant Superintendent Henderson believes in the AIM approach because
it is grounded in solid research (Note
3) and because it focuses on building a learning community, which
is "instrumental to the success of building capacity for best practices."
With Armstrong serving as a primary inspiration, Henderson is working
to spread AIM principles and instructional strategies throughout the district.
Scale-up methods include a Teacher Leadership Program, a District Curriculum
Council, and the development of study groups at every school site in the
district. The Teacher Leadership Program works to develop more leaders
at each school. Each year, two or three teachers from every school in
the district go on a retreat where they form a learning community, learn
how to be effective leaders, and are responsible for planning the retreat
for next year's participants. At one retreat, two Armstrong teachers led
a session for the whole group on Looking at Student Work. The District
Curriculum Council includes representatives from each school, serves as
a liaison between each school and the district office, and acts as an
advisory committee to Assistant Superintendent Henderson.
In addition to forming teacher study groups at each school in the district,
district administrators are currently implementing their own AIM-based
study groups. At the first administrators' meeting, a principal presented
a dilemma, Henderson facilitated a session utilizing the consultancy protocol,
and administrators used structured discussion to identify key learnings.
Henderson draws special attention to the increased use of study groups
as a "significant" development in the district. In the process, she says,
"we have broken down so many…of those competitive barriers that existed
between schools….We are creating avenues for teacher and administrator
dialogue that never existed before. We are tapping into tremendous resources
that already exist in our district-our people."
While some Starkville schools are joining Armstrong by implementing selected
practices recommended by AIM, one additional school has made a full commitment.
Henderson Intermediate School is the newest Starkville school to adopt
the AIM program. Assistant Superintendent Henderson notes that this staff
has made impressive progress toward change, achieving meaningful transformation
in "the shortest amount of time" she has ever seen.
The National Staff Development Council (NSDC) agrees with Henderson's
positive assessment of growth at Armstrong, Henderson, and throughout
the district. NSDC has recently chosen Starkville as just one of six districts
in the nation to participate in its study called "Amplifying Positive
Deviance," which seeks to identify and disseminate leadership strategies
that spread best teaching practices to wide numbers of teachers and schools.
On a recent visit to the Starkville district, NSDC's Joan Richardson told
Janet Henderson that few districts in the U.S are doing as well as Starkville,
especially with a population of students in which 70 percent qualify to
receive free and reduced lunch. Richardson added that she did not see
signs stating that "all children can learn," but she did see teachers
actually helping all children to learn!
Commitment and Attitude
With Bob Fuller being named Principal of the Year and the Starkville District
being honored by NSDC, Armstrong and Starkville are more committed than
ever to continuous school improvement. Assistant Superintendent Henderson
believes that such recognition can serve as a catalyst for continued high
expectations and norms of excellence in the district. She also observes
that "our commitment and attitude are critical to the process of real
growth in the pursuit of excellence in teaching and learning."
Bob Fuller is grateful for the strong commitment and positive attitude
of the Armstrong faculty. "It is both exciting and rewarding to have a
faculty that is truly committed to the students in the middle grades,
and that is constantly looking for better practices to reach students
more effectively." Letting go of old habits as new ones are adopted is
not easy. But a quick look around their classrooms reminds Armstrong's
middle-grades teachers that the results are worth the hard work involved.
* * *
Reference
Lambert, L. (1998). Building Leadership Capacity in Schools. Alexandria,
Virginia: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
End
Notes
View End Notes to CHANGES
THAT STICK.
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