Introduction
The success of a change strategy is often dependent on the ability to internalize the dynamics at organizational and individual levels in order to assimilate the right capacity. In an education environment, it is necessary for a school administrator to internalize different best practice guidelines for effective capacity building, creation of a collaborative culture, and proactive inclusion of socially and action-oriented strategies. This essay examines the ideal elements that are required to entrench positive and sustainable change within an education environment. Specifically, the paper concentrates on the above guidelines to affect an efficient and effective change plan.
Action-Oriented and Socially-Based Strategies
As a building block for social cohesion, and integration of social capital is a prerequisite for the development of sustainable inter-and intrapersonal relations to encourage teamwork. This means that the success of any initiative can only be quantified by the nature of established collaboration, especially where there were no such relationships. As opined by Michael (2016), effective socially-based and action-oriented strategies are integrated into a learning system when the stakeholders institutionalize professional communities in places where there were none. For instance, the current school administration in my school has taken a proactive position in establishing an action-based plan aimed at empowering the social and technical skills of the staff. The primary intention of this plan is to encourage progressive learning by reducing any teacher-learner interaction challenges (Lipshitz, Friedman, & Popper, 2014).
The initiative excelled because of its comprehensive nature in balancing actions and socialization strategies into a well-decorated and practical manual. As a result, the school had been able to proactively track the performance of teaching within a classroom environment and during the execution of other curriculum duties. Moreover, the school has succeeded in creating strong relationships among teachers through an interactive but flexible cooperation manual. This has removed the bottlenecks that impeded professional interaction among staff members (Fullan, 2016). At present, the school’s performance tracker, through 360-degree feedback, has recorded positive results for the last three years. The trend is predicted to persist in the foreseeable future due to its positive outcomes in the performance and interpersonal relationship building among teachers and other support staff.
Lack of Capacity as the Initial Problem and Working on it Continually.
An effective action-oriented intervention strategy should institutionalize capacity building. The lack of capacity is characterized by the inability of an individual or a group to perform optimally or within the expectation due to limited skills for self-improvement. As a result, such an individual or a group would embrace an indifferent attitude towards performance improvement (Lipshitz et al., 2014). In relation to the same performance improvement plan discussed previously, the initial stage of its implementation was met with resistance from the expected beneficiaries. This is because many stakeholders throughout the process would interfere with their daily activities and disrupt their comfort zones in the school.
This means that the teachers felt little motivated to embrace the idea since its benefits were not clearly explained. In order to overcome this stumbling block, change implementers initiated a proactive capacity-building process that was inclusive and accommodative to all the stakeholders (Fullan, 2016). Specifically, the capacity-building process began by exploring the need for the proposed change plan, benefits, and potential impacts on the general performance of teachers and schools. Moreover, the capacity-building meetings were organized in an interactive manner to capture the inputs of all stakeholders (Michael, 2016). As a result, all the teachers and other support staff unanimously agreed to integrate the student learning and teacher control approaches into a single model for effective execution and general performance. Reflectively, the integration effort was successful since I noticed that the classroom learning environment improved as students were empowered to be more participatory and in control of some learning activities.
Establish Conditions for Evolution of Positive Pressure
The process of change planning and management is dynamic and multifaceted. Therefore, in order to proactively and effectively foster and manage change, there is a need to create a manual with the primary functioning conditions to transform the undesired performance level to expected improvement standards. In the case of the school improvement plan, it was necessary to institutionalize a collaborative culture between stakeholders, that is, the school and relevant government agencies, to build a positive pressure (Lipshitz et al., 2014). The resulting effect of this pressure is the direct motivation of the stakeholders to execute their duties without conflict. Moreover, the positive pressure improved the level of accountability between the school and government agencies to catalyze the desired change. During the collaboration, the stakeholders are empowered to eliminate motivators of poor performance to promote positive feedback (Michael, 2016). In order to accomplish the positive attitude, the school introduced a series of periodic meetings at the beginning, mid-term, and end-term for students, teachers, parents, and government regulatory authorities. These meetings were used to encourage positive bonding among stakeholders and create a platform for discussion of current and expected performance. Through the collaborative change implementation approach, I can attest that the strategy has succeeded in creating a holistic performance-guided education environment.
Conclusion
Apparently, the success of a change plan depends on the ability to integrate effective capacity building, creation of a collaborative culture, and proactive inclusion of socially and action-oriented strategies. The change plan discussed in the paper succeeded because these strategies were integrated into the plan from the initial to the final stage.
References
Fullan, M. (2016). The new meaning of educational change (5th ed.). New York, NY: Teacher College Press.
Lipshitz, R., Friedman, J., & Popper, M. (2014). Demystifying organizational learning. New York, NY: Thousand Oaks.
Michael, F. (2016). The new meaning of educational change (5th ed.). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.