Resilience in the face of imposed changes

Principal Leadership, Feb 2001 by Patterson, Jerry L, Patterson, Janice H

Caught in the middle, principals must often choose between fulfilling imposed school change initiatives and remaining true to their schools' missions and values. The good news is that there's a way to do both.
Most of the writing about secondary school change focuses on setting school goals, implementing block scheduling or democratic participation, getting encouraging results, and sustaining school improvement. Most of the energy spent by secondary schools on school change focuses on how to accommodate the barrage of imposed school changes that have little direct connection to the reality of life in secondary school classrooms.
As both public school educators and university faculty members, we have worked with many secondary school groups on the topic of school change. When we pose the question, "What are the changes that have affected you professionally in the past three to five years?" participants fill pages with their lists. And, invariably, more than 90 percent of the changes listed are changes being done to them, not by them. When offered the opportunity to talk about school change, teachers and principals talk not about block scheduling or student achievement, but about how these imposed changes drain their energy and detract from the focus on their own local plans for school change.
Although well-intentioned outsiders who initiate school change may care about student achievement, huge gaps remain between intentions, actions, and consequences. With good intentions, those outside the school take action to improve the school by mandating specific school changes. The consequence is that those inside the school resent these outside intrusions by those who don't know or care to know the context of the school. But school personnel are forced to scramble to meet the multiple, sometimes competing, demands of creating smaller classes, authentic assessments, state-mandated testing, cooperative learning classrooms, standards-based classrooms, and brain-based classrooms.
Understanding School Resilience
In the multitude of high schools where these conditions exist, the challenge for school leaders is to prevent teacher burnout and to create resilient school cultures in the face of imposed changes. But first, they need a better understanding of this construct called resilience.
Borrowing a metaphor from the financial industry, consider that your school has a joint bank account that represents the collective energy of the teaching staff. The currency in this account is resilience. Over the course of a year, the staff makes resilience deposits as well as resilience withdrawals from the joint account. Individual teachers make resilience deposits when they are successful in helping a student who speaks English as a second language (ESL) learn enough English to function successfully in the school cafeteria. They make a resilience withdrawal when the principal announces in a faculty meeting that the budget was cut at last night's school board meeting and there is now no money for an ESL support teacher to assist students. Ideally, at the end of the year, the account reflects more deposits than withdrawals, indicating that school resilience has increased.
In a practical sense, however, the school account begins to shrink as people spend scarce resilience points trying to comply with school change mandates from above or outside. To fight the myriad problems today's schools face, secondary school leaders must reverse this trend. We must consciously, consistently, and persistently resolve this dilemma: How can we add to our school's resilience bank account when well-intentioned people outside the school impose school changes that have a tendency to subtract from our school account?
The Pivotal Role of School Leadership
School leaders are vital to school resilience. They shoulder the heavy burden of helping staff members stay focused on achieving school goals despite the changes being imposed from the outside. Although educational literature is devoid of solid research about resilient leaders, there are lessons to be learned from the private sector. In particular, Daryl Conner (1992) has identified five characteristics of resilient leaders that have direct implications for schools and typify the resilient secondary school leader who refuses to let imposed school change derail the efforts at the school level:
* Positive in their recognition that adversity presents opportunities, not just threats, to the school
* Focused in their efforts to guide the school toward its own compelling vision, despite disruptions from the outside
Flexible in their ability to consider alternative ways of viewing the issue and in their ability to apply alternative strategies for achieving what needs to be accomplished in the school