1.6 Step-up-to-excellence:a change navigation protocol for transforming  (Page 4/20)

Improving student learning is an important goal of improving the core and supporting work processes of aschool district. But focusing only on improving student learning is a piecemeal approach to improvement. A teacher’s knowledge and literacy is probably one of the more important factors influencingstudent learning. So, taking steps to improve teacher learning must also be part of any school district’s improvement efforts to improve student learning.

Improving student and teacher learning is an important goal of improving work in a school district. But this isstill a piecemeal approach to improving a school district. A school district is a knowledge-creating organization and it is, or shouldbe, a learning organization. Professional knowledge must be created and embedded in a school district’s operational structures and organizational learning must occur if a school district wants todevelop and maintain the capacity to provide children with a quality education. So, school system learning (i.e., organizationallearning) must also be part of a district’s improvement strategy to improve its core and supporting work.

Path 3: Improve a District’s Internal“Social Infrastructure”

Improving work processes to improve learning for students, teachers and staff, and the whole school system is animportant goal but it is still a piecemeal approach to change. It is possible for a school district to have a fabulous curriculumwith extraordinarily effective instructional methods but still have an internal social“infrastructure”(which includes organization culture, organization design, communication patterns, power andpolitical dynamics, reward systems, and so on) that is de-motivating, dissatisfying, and demoralizing for teachers.De-motivated, dissatisfied, and demoralized teachers cannot and will not use a fabulous curriculum in remarkable ways. So, inaddition to improving how the work of a district is done, improvement efforts must focus simultaneously on improving adistrict’s internal social“infrastructure.”

The social infrastructure of a school system needs to be redesigned at the same time the core and supportingwork processes are redesigned. Why? Because it is important to assure that the new social infrastructure and the new workprocesses complement each other. The best way to assure this complementarity is to make simultaneous improvements to bothelements of a school system.

Hopefully, this three-path metaphor makes sense because the principle of simultaneous improvement isabsolutely essential for effective systemwide improvement (e.g., see Emery, 1977; Pasmore, 1988; Trist, Higgin, Murray,&Pollack, 1963). In the literature on systems improvement this principle is called joint optimization (Cummings&Worley, 2001, p. 353).

The Change Protocol: Step-Up-To-Excellence

Step-Up-To-Excellence (SUTE) is a whole-system transformation protocol especially constructed to help educatorsnavigate the three paths toward whole-district transformation described above. This protocol combines for the first time provenand effective tools for whole-system improvement in school districts. Although these tools have been used singly andeffectively for more than 40 years, they never have been combined to provide educators with a comprehensive, unified, systematic, andsystemic protocol for redesigning entire school systems. Theprotocol is illustrated in Figure 4.