Resisters and saboteurs

Class objectives

• To understand and comprehend the existance of resisters and saboteurs in a school building and/or district.
• To help the aspiring principal think about positve solutions and strategies.
• To develop a realistic and workable plan to deal with resistance within the school organization.

Assignments

• Read Phillip Schlechty's Five Types of Actors Click Here to access entire article
• Read Creighton's Resisters and Saboteurs Below.....
• Discuss Field Activity #3 and Peer Review

Field activity #3

Resisters and saboteurs

Ever so eloquently, Phillip Schlechty (1997) discusses five types of actors participating in any change process. It is important for school leaders to understand these different actors and their needs, desires, and roles in the process of any implementation of program development.

Every school has trailblazers: teachers and staff who willingly venture into the unknown, such as the implementation of technology. Education leaders are remiss if they do not provide opportunities for trailblazers to be out in front of innovation efforts. Pioneers, though as adventurous as trailblazers, need assurance that the program implementation is worth the effort. Settlers, the third type of actors, need more detail and specific direction than do the trailblazers or pioneers.

Resisters (called stay-at-homes by Schlechty) are simply satisfied with the status quo and see no reason to change their thinking or strategies for doing things. Though the principal must provide opportunities for resisters to see the advantages of the program implementation, resisters are generally not a threat to innovation. The danger of course is to neglect resisters, for fear that they will join forces with the fifth group of actors, the saboteurs.

Oh, those pesky resisters (and tyrants, time bomers, snipers, back-satbbers, underminers, connivers, plotters, and rumor mongers) !!

Most dangerous and detrimental to efforts to implement new programs to improve teaching and learning are the saboteurs: those teachers who not aren't interested in new programs, but are actually committed to stopping new ideas. Saboteurs can stop innovation in its tracks. They are very astute at knowing how to change directions - even by enlisting support from other staff, community, and board members. Schlechty posits that "the best place to have saboteurs is on the inside where they can be watched rather than the outside where they can cause trouble without being detected until the effects have been felt" (p. 218).