Sustaining Change in Schools: How to Overcome Differences and Focus on Quality

By Daniel P. Johnson

Do you struggle to align day-to-day educational practices with your community's stated goals for learning? Strong public schools depend on strong partnerships between schools and communities. Unfortunately, personality clashes and conflicting perspectives among leaders too often render such partnerships elusive.

In Sustaining Change in Schools: How to Overcome Differences and Focus on Quality, Daniel P. Johnson outlines a proven framework for ensuring that educators and stakeholders collaborate effectively, both at the school and district levels. The framework, which has evolved over a 25-year period across four school districts and three states, offers school leaders a way to create and sustain decision-making processes by working through differences and following these five steps:

1. Understand and align the personality of your school district with the overall personality of your community.
2. Ask quality questions that promote a commitment to a common purpose.
3. Make quality a habit by creating organizational structures that celebrate differences within acceptable community standards.
4. Focus on success as a means of renewing schools from within rather than imposing solutions from the outside.
5. Manage tasks so that your stakeholders learn to appreciate different personalities as a necessary part of your problem-solving process.

Both practical and engaging, this book is just as useful to the classroom teacher as it is to the school board member. Filled with real-life examples of the framework in action and step-by-step procedures for its implementation, this is the definitive guide to sustaining positive change in schools.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1416601473
• ISBN13: 9781416601470
• Release Date: May 2005
• Publisher: ASCD
• Length: 183 Pages
• Weight: 0.68 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 7.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Sustaining Change and the Four Ps

Daniel P. Johnson uses research and examples to outline how to successfully implement and sustain meaningful change in a school community. He links research in personality and group dynamics to develop what he calls the four Ps: Purpose, Parameters, Principles, and Priorities. He dicusses how a balance in these concepts is necessary to change the way school personnel and the community think about quality schools. Johnson then shows what specific steps the Thompson School District in Loveland, Colorado took, and other school districts should take to promote and sustain quality school districts over time and across groups. The specific steps he identifies are: understanding the quality profile; asking quality questions; making quality a habit; focusing on success; and managing tasks and leading people. Each chapter of this useful guide focuses on one of the steps and offers questions and activities stakeholders can use to create a shared commitment to quality schools. This guide helps the school and community focus on success for all students. As Johnson states, "Making every student a successful learner is therefore not just a desireable goal, but a moral obligation."