GSE faculty lead workshops on bettering school districts worldwide

By Andrea Early

Special to the Gazette

This fall, some 26 school districts in the United States, Spain, and the Virgin Islands are benefiting from what their teachers, superintendents, and administrators did on their summer vacations. While their pupils were out enjoying July's lazy days, 69 school professionals from Tuscaloosa to Pamplona convened at Harvard's second annual Institute for School Leadership for two intensive work weeks with few recesses.

Basically, the Institute helps teams of K-12 school leaders gain conceptual and practical insights into how a school district can be changed and improved, said Linda Greyser, associate director of Programs in Professional Education of the Graduate School of Education (GSE). Greyser and GSE Professor Richard Elmore created the program in 1995.

Clad in T-shirts and shorts, Institute participants worked together day and night to promote positive change and create a shared vision based on specific goals the educators brought with them. Top education facilitators, including Greyser, Elmore, and GSE faculty Howard Gardner, Robert Kegan, and Charles Willie, led the educators through lectures, discussions, role-playing exercises, and case studies designed to help them better understand themselves, their co-workers, and even the parents in their school districts. During the day, the educators focused on issues of leadership, diversity, strategic planning, and resource allocation, and tools for personal growth and change. In the mornings and evenings, smaller teams and study groups met to discuss specific goals and issues with Institute facilitators.

One beneficiary of the Institute is the Windham Public School System in Willimantic, Conn. Superintendent Patrick Proctor attended the program with team members including a principal, a vice principal, an assistant principal, and a curriculum director from his district.

According to Proctor, the Windham schools serve some of the poorest communities in Connecticut and are faced with added challenges of dealing with poverty and bilingual education while trying to effect change. Eager to plan meaningfully for the '96-97 school year within a supportive environment, Proctor and his team scraped together scholarship and grant funds mainly from the Connecticut Department of Education's Priorities Program so they could participate in the Institute.

Each evening, Proctor and his teammates met to lay the groundwork for changes they hope to implement this fall and over the next three to five years.

Even at the end of the first week of the Institute, Proctor was feeling optimistic. "It's provided us with new and expanded ways of looking at ourselves, looking at our leadership, and diagnosing our school system," he said during one of his infrequent breaks from the workshops. "It's given us the opportunity to interact in a very rich and protected environment. That's pretty rare," he said.

The Institute graduated its first class in the summer of 1995. "We wanted to create a program that would tie leadership into the realities of practice," said Elmore.

Although it is not a prerequisite for attending the program, Elmore said the idea of bringing a team of professionals from different levels of a school district the way Proctor did is encouraged. "We believe that without a critical mass of people at different levels sharing information, change won't happen," he said.

According to Greyser, the intensive nature of the Institute is also a key aspect of the program. Like all of the Institute participants, Proctor and his teammates ate meals together, lived next door to each other in dorm rooms, and learned together. "The program was designed that way. We've tried to create a community of learners where conversations that people begin in class continue at dinner and into the evening," she says. "People begin to bond with each other and I believe that makes them more forthcoming and honest about their beliefs," she said.

For Doreen Fuller, an assistant principal at Windham High School and a member of Proctor's team, bonding with other professionals was also an important benefit of the Institute. "It's not just the presentations; it's having lunch and dinner with people from different districts doing different things," she said. Fuller and the Institute's other participants also had opportunities to share their thoughts and goals away from their teammates during morning study groups designed to split up the teams and enable them to speak openly about professional issues with people from other school systems.

So far, the educators who took part in the Institute have given it good grades. "According to the evaluations I'd say it was even better than last year," said Greyser. And if the high level of activity on the e-mail list-serve that GSE created for Institute graduates is any indication, the relationships the educators began this summer have continued during the school year.

But the real test may be occurring now, as the Institute's school leaders implement what they learned last summer. Windham is a case in point. The team recognized that their schools have a hard time preparing kids for changes. For example, the school system is an Industrial Age organization still using an agrarian schedule.

With a fresh perspective gained at the Institute, Superintendent Proctor and his colleagues are addressing this concern through a five-year project called the "Windham Partnership for Learning." Before the Institute, the school administration hand-picked representatives from the community; now they are seeking to involve the community in the process of teaching its children.

The Partnership for Learning has become a forum for identifying "what we want for the kids," according to Proctor. With the assistance of Institute faculty Tony Wagner and Carlos Cortes, Windham's professional staff has engaged community and business leaders in the project. Together, they will create a document to describe goals and expectations for kids for the foreseeable future. Once the goals are in place, Proctor states, "we need to determine how well we are reaching them; what the gaps are and how we can close them."

It's the kind of project the Institute's designers hoped to spark. "People who work in schools get so bogged down with putting out small fires that they can't look at the big picture," says Greyser. "This Institute rebuilds the big picture for them. It's about teaching, learning, leadership, and change."