What it Takes to Change a School

The Harvard EdCast

Changing a school can be challenging, but possible when you have a group of folks committed to making change, says Justin Cohen. He is a writer and activist who authored, "Change Agents: Transforming Schools from the Ground Up." As part of his research, he spent time speaking to educators in various schools that had successfully implemented change to better understand how they were able to do so. There's no real secret to making change, he notes, but rather there were key steps that these schools did including being open to change and giving the teachers the keys to drive and implement it.

"Teachers know more than anyone what needs to happen," he says. "It's when the outsiders and the people with clipboards and the policymakers who haven't set foot in a school, since they dropped their kids off at private school, have a take. That's what I think gets people's backs up. And so when educators come together and talk, they know the challenges. They are deeply aware of what needs to happen, in a lot of cases, and are pretty disempowered when it comes to enacting or adopting the changes."

Sometimes that even means going rogue from the district, he admits. In this episode of the EdCast, Cohen shares the habits of schools that have managed to implement change and how you can too in your school.