Leading Change Handbook

This toolkit and guide, which was developed by Jody Spiro, former director of education leadership at Wallace, aims to help leaders in schools or other settings succeed when they seek to introduce change or innovation into their organizations. Offering seven tools, ranging from a “readiness rubric” to a score sheet on sustaining a change effort, the book sets out to support change leaders on a number of fronts, including ascertaining how prepared their organization is for change, achieving early successes, and lowering opposition. Leading change “requires continuous analysis of the situation and mid-course corrections,” Spiro writes. “It includes the ability to think several steps ahead and then plan the present with the future in mind, put plans quickly into action and continuously monitor and revise the work to take advantage of—or mitigate—unintended consequences as they arise.”

The handbook was first published in 2009 and expanded in 2017 to include a new tool on continuous improvement and a chapter describing how several school principals used the tools in their change efforts.

Two tools (the “readiness rubric” and the “resistance reducer”) from Spiro’s book Leading Change Step-by-Step: Tactics, Tools and Tales are made are available in the guide through an arrangement with publisher John Wiley & Sons Inc., which offers the complete book for sale on its website. An article on “early wins” (in Supplementary Materials below) appeared in the April 2012 issue of JSD, the journal of Learning Forward, an association for those who work in professional development in education.