This is Alan Blankstein's text Failure is NOT an Option, Chapter 10. He wrote this chapter with Andy Hargreaves and Dean Fink. This chapter is about leadership capacity in schools. This powerpoint is about creating effective leadership teams refocusing on instruction.

1. Creating Sustainable
Systematic School Change
Wafa Hozien, Ph.D.
Virginia State University
whozien@vsu.edu
Based on the Book: Why Failure Is Not An Option

2. Sixth Principle:
Building Sustainable Leadership Capacity
CHAPTER 10

3. Why Build Leadership Capacity?
The Job Is Too Big To Do Alone
• Sustaining high-achieving schools because failure is not an option
for any student – is a big job
• The principal’s job is too big and too complex to be done alone

4. • Shared leadership develops commitment and yields higher student
achievement
Shared Leadership

5. Defining Leadership:
Five Key Responsibilities
1. Shaping a vision of academic
success for all students
2. Creating a climate hospitable to
education
3. Cultivating leadership in others
4. Improving instruction
5. Managing people, data and processes

6. Building Capacity via Institutionalizing
Processes, Routines and Habit
• The formation of habits
includes three elements:
1. A cue
2. The routine
3. The reward

7. Sustainable Leadership (Hargreaves & Fink)
• Focus on:
1. Leadership of learning
2. Distributed leadership
3. Leadership succession
4. Integrating leadership

8. Background of Sustainability
• Implementation
• Institutionalization
• Maintainability

9. The Meaning of Sustainability
Sustainable leadership is characterized by
• Depth of learning and real achievement
•Length of impact over the long haul
•Breadth of influence
•Justice in ensuring that leadership actions
do no harm
•Diversity that replaces standardization
•Resourcefulness
•Conservation

10. Discussion of Implications
1. The future of leadership must be embedded in the hearts
and minds of the many and not rest on the shoulders of a
heroic few.
2. Educational systems should see leadership as a vertical
system over time.
3. The promise of sustainable success in education lies in
creating cultures of distributed leadership throughout the
school community, not in training and developing a tiny
leadership elite.

11. 4. Recruiting new leaders means focusing on their potential
rather than recycling their existing proficiencies.
5. Sustainable leadership requires strategies of integrating
development across school systems and networks, not just
preparation of individuals. Sustainable leadership is
systematic leadership (Hopkins, 2008).
Implications

12. Positive Interconnectedness of Sustainable
Leadership Occurs in Several Ways:
1. In networks of
accreditation and
evaluation.
2. In networks of
learning and
improvement.
3. In area-based crossschool collaboration.

13. Ten Things That Are Sustainable
About You
1. Refocus your curriculum, use of materials, and school
design to include ecological sustainability as a core
aspect of teaching and learning for all students.
2. Begin all discussions about achievement and how to
raise it with conversation and reflection about the
learning that underpins the achievement.
3. Insist that all school improvement plans contain
leadership succession plans.

14. 4. Make it a condition of professional employment that
every teacher and leader is part of a learning team
5. Write your own professional obituary.
6. Form a three-sided partnership with a lower-or-higherperforming district or school
7. Establish a collaborative of schools in your town or city,
across district boundaries, to commit to community
development initiatives
Sustainable You

15. 8. Create a system where principals and leadership teams in
successfully turned-around schools can take on a second
school or third
9. Coach a teacher who looks like they have little capacity for
leadership
10. Spend more time in schools as a way to develop genuine
interest in, curiosity about and knowledge of what teachers
and students are doing
Sustainability

16. Education is the most powerful weapon
which you can use to change the world.
- Nelson Mandela

17. • How does leadership spread through distributed
leadership?
• What does sustainability mean practically?
• As a leader and educator, how will your influence live on
after your departure?
Questions

18. • Blankstein, Alan M. (2004). Failure Is Not an Option:
Six Principles That Advance Student Achievement in
Highly Effective Schools. Thousand Oaks, Calif. :
Corwin.
References