1.6 Step-up-to-excellence:a change navigation protocol for transforming  (Page 3/20)

To move an entire school system along the three paths identified above, change leaders need a whole-systemtransformation protocol that will help them locate and navigate the three nonlinear paths to higher student, teacher and staff, andwhole-district learning.

Three Paths to Improvement

Over the past 50 years a lot has been learned about how to improve entire systems. One of the core principles ofwhole-system change is that three sets of key organizational variables must be improved simultaneously (e.g., see Pasmore,1988). These three sets of variables are characterized as change-paths in the protocol presented below. Let us examine thetopography of each of these change-paths before exploring the change protocol.

Path 1: Improve a District’s Relationship with Its External Environment

A school district is an open system. An open system is one that interacts with its environment by exchanging avalued product or service in return for needed resources. If change leaders want their district to become a high performing schoolsystem they need to have a positive and supporting relationship with stakeholders in their district’s external environment. But they can not wait until they transform their district to startworking on these relationships. They need positive and supporting relationships shortly before they begin making important changeswithin their district. So, they have to improve their district’s relationships with key external stakeholders as they prepare theirschool system to begin its transformation journey.

Path 2: Improve a District’s Core and Supporting Work Processes

Core work is the most important work of any organization. In school districts, the core work is a sequencedinstructional program (e.g., often a preK-12th grade instructional program) conjoined with classroom teaching and learning (Duffy,2002; Duffy, 2003). Core work is maintained and enriched by supporting work. In school districts, supporting work roles includeadministrators, supervisors, education specialists, librarians, cafeteria workers, janitors, bus drivers, and others. Supportingwork is important to the success of a school district, but it is not the most important work. Classroom teaching and learning is themost important work and it must be elevated to that status if a school system wants to increase its overall effectiveness.

When trying to improve a school system, both the core and supporting work processes must be improved. Further,the entire work process (e.g., preK-12th grade) must be examined and improved, not just parts of it (e.g., not just the middleschool, not just the language arts curriculum, or not just the high school). One of the reasons the entire work process must beimproved is because of a systems improvement principle expressed as“upstream errors flow downstream”(Pasmore, 1988). This principle reflects the fact that mistakes made early in a work process flowdownstream, are compounded, and create more problems later on in the process; for example, consider a comment made by a high schoolprincipal when he first heard a description of this principle. He said,“Yes, I understand. And, I see that happening in our district. Our middle school program is being‘dumbed-down’and those students are entering our high school program unprepared forour more rigorous curriculum. And, there is nothing we can do about it.”Upstream errors always flow downstream.