Creating Great Schools: Six Critical Systems at the Heart of Educational Innovation Hardcover - 2005 - 1st Edition

First line

Rather than simply asking, How does the way schools are organized affect the behavior of teachers and students in classrooms?

From the jacket flap

Today's educational leaders are under siege. They are accountable for more but hindered by a system that encourages business as usual. Myriad experts offer dream scenarios of how things ought to be, but ultimately their "solutions" offer little hope for long-term success.

In Creating Great Schools, Phillip C. Schlechty--one of the nation's best-known experts on school leadership and change--offers a hands-on primer that will help arm school leaders with the tools they need to buck the system from within. Creating Great Schools shows educational leaders how they can sustain continuous innovation and improvement in order to create truly great schools.

Schlechty outlines the six critical systems that define the norms and expressions of a school's organizational culture--recruitment and induction, knowledge transmission, power and authority, evaluation, direction, and boundaries--and shows what it takes to lead effective systemic change in order to sustain new values and direction. The book is filled with effective strategies and offers guidelines for introducing the "disruptive innovations" that are necessary to change the fundamental norms of an educational organization and truly revitalize a school. He also offers suggestions for working through the thorny issues that arise from the efforts to introduce new norms and provides school leaders with valuable insights into the critical rules, roles, and relationships in schools.

Creating Great Schools is based on Schlechty's decades of work with schools and districts all over the country. His practical wisdom provides leaders with the information and tools they need to transform their schools into outstanding learning institutions.