TLN blogger Renee Moore (TeachMoore) writes of miguided education funding priorities and their impact on those citizens who most need access to a quality educational experience:

As our state and federal governments put less funding into education generally, they insist that our nation must rise again to the top of global educational attainment. The Secretary of Education proclaims we must learn to do more with less. I know I'm not alone in finding that statement deeply disingenuous, if not downright insulting to those of us who have never been given proper or equal resources with which to educate the children for whom we are responsible. 

When children at one elementary school in town can have a library with books and computers, while those across town have to settle for some donated older books on a cart — when one high school has a fully functioning science laboratory where students can engage in hands-on learning — while at the other, teachers have to buy a single lab kit out of their own pockets to show their classes an experiment — as long as these and many other inequities are allowed to continue unchallenged, we are lying to those children in those poorer conditions when we tell them we value them or their education.

Read her complete post at teacherleaders.typepad.com

Enhancing RTI: How to Ensure Success with Effective Classroom Instruction & Intervention
By Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey
(ASCD, 2010)

Reviewed by Elizabeth Stein, NBCT
Special Education Teacher (NY)
Teacher Leaders Network

It's easy to get lured into Enhancing RTI: How to Ensure Success with Effective Classroom Instruction and Intervention, by Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey.

Within the first few pages, the reader is asked to “choose an adventure” that begins with a brief profile of Adam, “a fifth grader in a public school somewhere in the United States.” His educational experience is put in the hands of the reader, as we decide which learning conditions will serve Adam best. It isn’t too difficult to figure out — so long as the reader has moved beyond the traditional teacher-centered, “students as passive learners”, mentality.

Authors Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey combine their expertise to share knowledge and practical ways teachers can plan the learning experience within positive cycles of instruction. “This cycle—from assessment to instruction—enables teachers to observe students’ responsiveness to the targeted interventions and to proceed with instruction that is supported by ever-evolving performance data.”

Throughout Enhancing RTI, the authors make a clear and comprehensive case for the value and necessity of not only adopting an RTI mindset, but a strengthened model of RTI, so students can succeed. And their backgrounds and in-depth experience in the area of literacy add to the book's practical approach.

One of the many valuable points the authors make clear is the distinction between intervention and instruction. As I read, I was reminded of the many discussions I’ve had with colleagues who have felt that RTI is all about providing interventions to those students who struggle. This book reminds teachers that the thrust of RTI is really all about high quality core instruction at the whole class level before students struggle.

The authors introduce readers to a powered up model of RTI that shines a spotlight on formative assessment and high quality core instruction. The focus is on effective whole-class instruction that can minimize the tendency to fall back on various layers of intervention. The authors call this more unambiguous model of RTI, "Response to Instruction and Intervention."

They suggest that teachers should not wait to see if students will eventually respond to intervention; they must first become aware if students are responding to everyday classroon instruction. I think this distinction is critical for teachers who may not have a clear understanding of the premise of RTI. The authors include the following components for their strengthened model of RTI:

• Making sure that the core instruction (at the Tier 1 level) is responsive, standards-based, and data-driven;

• Making sure that Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions provide a continuous flow of instruction that is aligned to the core instruction;

• Analyzing instruction around a three-way feedback loop that incorporates formative assessment results that inform the teacher and the students;

• Making sure that collaborative efforts are established so educators and families work together successfully.

Each of the eight chapters is like a rung in a ladder leading to complete awareness of the RTI framework. Some chapter topics include:

Defining and refining the RTI process
Quality core instruction (Tier 1)
Supplemental Interventions (Tier 2)
Intensive Interventions for high risk learners (Tier 3)
The role of sssessment and necessity of progress monitoring
Progress monitoring in action

Each chapter ends with a summary, or what the authors call “the takeaway.” This takeaway allows the reader to validate his or her reading of the text and begin to build a deeper understanding of what it takes to apply the comprehensive cycle of instruction described here.

After reading this book, the reader is ready to implement RTI with a clear focus and understanding that high quality core instruction is at the center of it all. The authors provide instructional planning tools, assessment rubrics, and pacing guides that are sure to make readers confident and ready to apply concepts right away. This book is perfect for those with and without a prior understanding of RTI. It will deepen any reader’s understanding and ability to implement the instructional cycles that define the RTI process.

The close of the book also brings to a close the particular adventure the authors have encouraged their readers to take. Adam, now entering 6th grade, has developed into a confident student. Adam's story serves as an apt metaphor for the deep learning that can take place for every student when a school’s mission becomes aligning instruction, assessment and intervention to drive the learning process.

Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us
by Mike Rose
(The New Press, 2009)

Reviewed by Kenneth Bernstein
High School Government & Social Studies (MD)


Teacher Leaders Network

How we think about and voice the purpose of school matters. It affects what we put in or take out of the curriculum and how we teach that curriculum. It affects the way we think about students — all students — about intelligence, achievement, human development, teaching and learning, opportunity and obligation. And all of this affects the way we think about each other and who we are as a nation.

Perhaps it may seem odd to begin the review of a book with its final words. Yet is also appropriate, because to answer the question Mike Rose poses in his title, it is necessary to consider the destination towards which we head. It is especially appropriate for this book, because this final observation explains succinctly the concerns Rose attempts to address in Why School?:

• what is in the curriculum and why
• how we teach
• how we frame what intelligence is, what we value, in school and society
• issues of opportunity for all, including appropriate remediation
• issue of common obligation that should be part of our culture as a democratic society.

Rose is in many ways uniquely qualified to take on this task. He teaches in the Graduate School of Education at UCLA. He has taught at many levels. His personal background is from working-class roots and he has maintained a sense of respect of the requirements — including intellectual — of what too many dismiss as manual labor. He is very committed to the democratic ideal that allows people to rise above their origins as he was able to do. He is a superb writer and an even better story-teller, not afraid to use stories to teach, to help us understand.

Before going on, let me provide some specifics. Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us is published by The New Press, which is based in New York City, and which was established two decades ago as a not-for-profit alternative to large publishing houses. The publishing house

operates in the public interest rather than for private gain, and is committed to publishing, in innovative ways, works of educational, cultural, and community value that are often deemed insufficiently profitable.

I quote those words from the page containing the copyright information for several reasons. First, this book definitely meets the test of educational and community value, as I hope this review will demonstrate. Next, the mission of the publisher is very much in conformity with both the purpose of this book and the focus of Mike Rose’s life work, which is to have us committed to a broad sense of common purpose. And finally, I truly think this book may well disprove the notion about being "insufficiently profitable."

On that same page Rose informs us that the essays in the book are reworked from a number of previously published pieces on which he holds the copyright. Had one not read those words, or the words in the introduction where he explains the purpose of the book, one might well think this was a book written at one time with one purpose. In that sense it is consistent with much of the work of Rose in his writing and his teaching.

I am more than tempted to offer extensive quotations because Rose is so fluid and insightful a writer. I will offer some to illustrate key points.

Rose begins by telling us a story about Anthony, a young man enrolled in a basic skills program at a community college where Rose was then teaching. He recounts an episode of someone who greets Anthony, a brain-damaged man in his 30s who could barely read and write but who was self-educated. It turned out the man was a dean, but had also once been Anthony’s parole officer. Anthony may not be the kind of person about whom we think when we discuss educational policy, but even twenty years after that encounter Rose helps us understand why it should. Anthony is in the program to better be able to guide his daughter, to continue his self-education, “To create a new life for himself, nurture this emerging sense of who he can be” (p. 4). Rose tells us that the chapters in the book deal with the topics that inform Anthony’s story. Then on that same page we encounter a remarkable paragraph that I feel I must quote it its entirety:
 It matters a great deal how we collectively talk about education, for that discussion both reflects and, in turn, affects policy decisions about what gets taught and tested, about funding, about what we expect schooling to contribute to our lives. It matters, as well, how we think about intelligence, how narrowly or broadly we define it. Our beliefs about intelligence affect everything from the way we organize school and work to how we treat each other. And it surely matters how we think about opportunity - that phrase is a core part of our national story. But opportunity is determined by public attitudes and public policy. Yes, in a sense and at times, we make our own opportunity; that self-reliance is another part of our national story. But from large-scale initiatives and programs (the G. I. Bill or Head Start, for example) to the funding for a coach in a local park, opportunity is created through some form of specific and deliberate action.
Mike Rose was kind enough to talk with me about the book. He decided to write it in 2007 because he was very worried about the nation's future educational policies. It was a time when there was serious discussion on reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which in its current incarnation was commonly called No Child Left Behind (after the Bush proposal of that title). He felt that too many of those whose voices were being heard were oblivious to a number of things, many of which had been a consistent part of his own 40 years of teaching. The perspective of the student was missing. The reality of the impact of poverty upon the lives of students was rarely seen. The different reality of rural schools was totally ignored. There was also a shocking devaluation of the learning and skill required for many working class jobs, and a concomitant restricting of the curriculum for the children from working class and immigrant families in order to raise their test scores. Having written on a number of these issues in the past, Rose felt he could start with his previous pieces and rework them as part of a coherent attempt to address some of the issues he felt were either being ignored or not fully and honestly perceived.

Thus while Rose greatly values the opportunity education has provided — and views his own life as an example thereof — he reminds us in his introduction that
education alone is not enough to trump some social barriers like racist hiring practices or inequality in pa based on gender. Furthermore, for disadvantaged populations - particularly the most impoverished - education must be one of a number of programs that would include health care, housing family assistance and so on (p. 13).
He revisits this idea in the chapter titled “No Child Left Behind and the Spirit of Democratic Education” where he reminds us that
The rhetoric of “no excuses” - though it has a legitimate point to make - can deflect our attention from the plain, brutal reality of so many young people’s lives (pp. 30-31).
In “Politics and Knowledge” and “Reflections on Intelligence in Workplace and the School,”, his fifth and sixth (of thirteen) chapters (and there is a conclusion), Rose offers some of his most valuable insights, including his respect for both the capabilities of people of working class background and for the requirements and skill of the work they do. Having come from a working class background, and having studied the thought required to do blue-collar and service work, Rose makes us focus on how we demean and diminish categories of work and the people who fill them, disconnect our schooling from the vocational paths that many of our young people will follow, and perpetuate an unfortunate historical pattern that belittles those not rooted in the academy and the formal professions. As Rose points out, this ignores a crucial part of our past. He reminds us that “Shakespeare was as popular on the frontier as in the city” (p. 68) and “My Uncle Frank, a railroad machinist, would quote Longfellow in his letters’ (p. 69). He writes that
As an ideal, democracy assumes the capacity of the common person to learn, to think independently, to decide thoughtfully (p. 85).
Further, there is a real danger in an attitude that belittles common work as mindless, that the instruction we develop will fail to develop instructional connections among the different kinds of skills and knowledge. And worse:
If we think that whole categories of people - identified by class, by occupation - are not that bright, then we reinforce social separation and cripple our ability to talk across our current cultural divides (p. 86).
There is so much more of value in this book. Rose argues that post-secondary institutions should not be so harsh on the need to provide remedial courses lest we close yet another door of opportunity to those who start with less and whose schooling is insufficient to compensate for that. He writes forcefully that our discussions focused on achievement do not include “curiosity, reflectiveness, uncertainty, or a willingness to take a chance, to blunder” and we rarely hear about “intellect, aesthetics, joy, courage, creativity, civility, understanding . . . think of how rarely we hear of commitment to public education as the center of a free society.” (both quotes from p. 27)

You have already read the final paragraph of this magnificent book, a relatively slender volume (169 pages without the acknowledgements and footnotes), but one that contains much of value. I would hope  all who are now engaged or hoping to become engaged in the making of educational policy would take the time to read and ponder what Rose has to offer. As Rose writes in his concluding chapter, there are a series of questions we must urgently explore:
how to educate a vast population, how to bring schooling to all, what to teach and how to teach it, who will do it, what the work will mean to them — what we can help it mean to them . . .because we haven’t satisfactorily answered them (p. 164).
Rose has a special concern about our troubled history educating children of the working class, a history I would argue is being extended by some of the effects of No Child Left Behind and may well be exacerbated by some of the policies being promulgated by the current administration.

Perhaps you will decide that you disagree with Mike Rose on some of the issues, but if you read this book you will, I can assure you, find yourself considering some of those questions we have yet to satisfactorily answer in new ways. That broadening of our thinking about educational questions is by itself a strong justification for reading the book.

So let me be blunt. Read the book. Urge others to read it as well. I plan to pass on the link for this review to many I know involved with educational policy, from my local school board and superintendent to Members of the House Committee on Education and Labor. That may not remove the volume from the category of “insufficiently profitable” that The New Press uses as part of its justification. I think that would not bother Mike Rose. The book clearly meets the primary test of the publisher, that is a work “of educational, cultural, and community value.” If more people will take the time to consider the issues Mike Rose addresses, I know he will be more than grateful.

In short, read this book. You will not be sorry.

Kenneth J. Bernstein is a National Board-certified teacher of social
studies at Eleanor Roosevelt High School Eleanor Roosevelt High School
in Greenbelt, Md., and a member of the Teacher Leaders Network. He is
nationally known as a blogger on education and other issues under his
online name of teacherken. Bernstein is also a 2010 recipient of The Washington Post’s Agnes Meyer Outstanding Teacher Award.

The ever-resourceful Larry Ferlazzo joined the Teacher Leaders Network in 2008, to our great benefit. Larry was already well-established as a leading edu-blogger, widely known for his daily outpouring of useful (most often web-based) teaching ideas and resources. Larry entered the blogging arena with a tight focus on English Language Learners – a focus he still maintains – but gradually broadened his output to include many other topics, including one close to his heart: parent and community relationships.

Larry’s “first career” as a community organizer in the labor arena has made him not only a passionate but an authoritative advocate for school programs that work to ENGAGE rather than simply INVOLVE families. His long-time interest led to the publication of his first book, Building Parent Engagement In Schools, co-authored by Lorie Hammond, a former middle school ESL teacher with a special interest in school-community gardens, who is now a professor at California State University-Sacramento.

In support of their book, Larry has developed a new blogging site focused specifically on engaging parents in schools. He teaches Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced English Language Learners (as well as native English speakers) at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, California. In this interview, we talk about his parent engagement ideas and also learn about his upcoming books — one on teaching strategies that work with English language learners, and another (smiling) on everything else.

— John Norton, TLN co-founder and moderator

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Larry, it's fairly rare in my experience to find a teacher writing a book about working closely with parents. More often I've seen this kind of advocacy coming from reformers in the outside community who believe schools haven't been responsive enough to parents and families. Why did you feel compelled to write it?

Part of the reason I wrote it is because during my 19-year community organizing career prior to becoming a teacher my primary work with schools was through parents — parents who were working to improve their neighborhoods and their local schools. That experience grounded me in believing that "no school is an island" — that in order for schools to be successful they need to be connected to local residents, and for a neighborhood to be successful, it needs to be connected to the local schools.

As a teacher in a challenging inner-city high school, I can understand how many teachers and administrators feel that engaging with parents in a substantial way is just one more thing that they might not have time to do. I wrote the book to illustrate that, in fact, it can be done with less time that they think and get a bigger "pay-off" — for the parents, teachers, and students — than they could imagine.

How did your background shape your own parent interactions as a teacher?

My current perspectives come out of my direct experience as a teacher participating in the initiatives discussed in the book. After doing thousands of home visits as a community organizer, when I changed careers I naturally gravitated to making home visits to parents of my students. While I was doing them, I was able to use my organizing experience to connect to parents and help them use their energy to initiate projects that benefited everybody. For example, in one of my visits with a recent Hmong immigrant family, the father explained how impressed he was with our use of computers to help teach his daughter, and how he wished they could have a computer and the Internet at their home so he could use it to learn English, too. He shared that he couldn't get a drivers license because he needed to read English in order to pass the test, and the local bus system was not very good so it was difficult to attend adult school. 

I asked him if he thought other parents would share the same concern and, if so, would he be willing to organize a meeting. He agreed, and out of that we were able to develop a family literacy project that provides computers and home internet access to immigrant families so the entire household can improve their English.  Students in the program have averaged improvements in English assessments that are four times greater than those in a control group, and the project was named by the International Reading Association two years ago as the best example of using technology to teach reading — in the entire world.

This whole effort came out of the organizing process of listening to stories; helping people connect to others with the same story; helping them to develop a different interpretation of it and developing a plan to respond to it; and then putting it into action.
 
Who do you imagine to be good audiences for the book?

I think parents, administrators, teachers, and teachers-in-training might find this book useful. It's designed as a book very busy people can read quickly. I also think the framework of parent involvement versus parent engagement can easily be adapted to other aspects of community, school, and organization work.
 
You make a clear distinction in the book between what schools (and many PTO members) have traditionally called "parent involvement" and the more powerful descriptor "power engagement." School leaders often complain about the difficulty in achieving "involvement." Might they have more success with "engagement" in your opinion?

Prior to becoming a community organizer, I ran soup kitchens and emergency shelters on Skid Rows. One day, as I was sweeping our front porch, a police officer pulled up and started yelling at me because we weren't controlling things too well — there were lot of complaints from neighbors.  One man who had passed out in front of our soup kitchen got up and told the policeman, "Officer, Larry tries. He tries hard. We just don't listen to him!"

We can continue to say what people should be doing (as I was doing back then) and feel frustrated about them not responding (as I often felt back then). In other words, we can continue to be "right."  Or, we can look at different ways of doing things and try them out. In other words, we could try to be "effective."

I explain in my response to your next question how I view involvement as different from engagement. I think using the engagement criteria can have far greater results than involvement, and it sure can't be any worse!
 

You devote several chapters to stories about specific initiatives that model the kind of school-home interaction you favor: The Home Visit Project, the Technology and Family Literacy Project, the Community Gardens effort, and community organizing efforts that connect schools with other local institutions that are working for neighborhood improvement. What key characteristics of these projects make them engagements, rather than involvements?

The dictionary defines "involvement" as "to envelop or enfold — take over."  The definition of "engagement" is "to interlock with — mesh." If you look at whose energy drives things, I'd say in involvement, ideas and energy come from the school's "mouth," while in engagement, the energy comes from schools using their "ears" to listen to parent ideas and concerns and to build genuine reciprocal relationships.

In organizing, we talk about the difference between irritation and agitation. In involvement, we tend to irritate more — telling parents that they should do things that the school considers important. In engagement, we agitate by challenging parents to act on the concerns they've voiced in the context of conversations.

In involvement, schools do a lot of one way "communicating"  — flyers, computerized phone calls, newsletters. In engagement, there's more of an emphasis on two-way "conversation."

The purpose of parent involvement tends to focus on improving the school. The purpose of parent engagement is to improve the entire community.

Community partnerships that schools develop through parent involvement tend to be "narrow and shallow" — let's have a police officer assigned to the school, let's get the local business partnership to sponsor a scholarship. In parent engagement, they tend to be more "broad and deep" — let's look at neighborhood safety, let's work with businesses and government to provide support so all high school graduates can attend college if they want to.

Schools that emphasize involvement tend to believe that power is a finite pie -- if parents get some, then schools will have less.  Parent engagement takes the approach that the more people who participate, the bigger the whole pie gets and the more possibilities for positive change are created.

I'd sum up the difference as saying involvement is more a "doing to" and engagement is a more a "doing with."

I want to emphasize, though, that schools, communities, and the real world is not all this or that.  There's a lot of ambiguity out there. Parent involvement is good. I just think parent engagement is better.
 
In our Teacher Leaders Network conversations, our teacher-members often imagine "hybrid" teacher roles that allow teacher leaders to both teach students and do other important work on behalf of the school and community. Can you imagine a role for teacher leaders that would have them leading parent engagement efforts as part of their job descriptions? And if so, why would that be worth the investment of "teacher units" that might be required?

I mentioned earlier the pay-off our home computer project has had for families. Though I'm an advocate of being "data-informed" and not "data-driven," there is plenty of data that also shows how home visits, school-community gardens, and community organizing have had a direct affect on student academic achievement. In fact, school districts in Texas that were very involved in community organizing in the 1990's and then got away from it in the face of standardized testing pressure are now approaching community organizing groups to request that they work with them again. They see it in their self-interest not only for direct student achievement progress, but as a way to rebuild support for more local school funding after recent bond measures have failed.

It is difficult to fit this kind of work into an already overworked teacher schedule. Officially creating time in a workday schedule, I think, could be a great move for schools.

I understand you have other books in the works. Could you tell us about those?

Linworth Publishing, who has published the parent engagement book, is coming out with my second book next month.  It's called "English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies That Work" and shares how I've adapted what I learned in community organizing to teaching ELL's.  It focuses on looking at students through a lens of their "assets" and not their "deficits."  It's very practical (and research-based) and I think teachers will find it very helpful.  Writing it was helpful to me, at least!

My third book will be published by Eye On Education in the spring of 2011, and will share various instructional and classroom management strategies (also research-based) that teachers can effectively use to respond to common challenges in the classroom. Assuming that I can survive writing three books in two years, I might take a break from book-writing after that.

You'll definitely deserve one! Any final thoughts?

I'd like to end this interview, John, as I end most discussions
of parent engagement and parent involvement that I lead. I suggest
that people ask themselves this question:

Do you want to see
yourself as a person who can get parents to help a little bit in
schools; or a person who can help them transform how they see themselves, and how
others seem them, as acting on the world instead of being a bit player
in it?

Leading Change in Your School: How to Conquer Myths, Build Commitment, and Get Results
By Douglas B. Reeves
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) (2009)

Reviewed by Elizabeth Stein
Special Education Teacher (New York)
Teacher Leaders Network

My interest in this book was first sparked by the title. After all, with words like "leading change" and "conquer," any action-minded educator is likely to get drawn in. It was the author who caught my attention next. Being familiar with Douglas Reeves's work on change leadership, including his monthly column in Educational Leadership, my interest was clinched.
 
In Leading Change in Your School: How to Conquer Myths, Build Commitment, and Get Results, Reeves does not promise magic formulas. Instead he aims to instill hope and confidence in teachers and administrators who would like to transform their thinking into actions as change leaders. This is not just another "how to" book that proposes a framework of sequential steps, leaving readers with that "I’ve heard this before" feeling. The author strives to have the reader easily connect to the educators described in the book.

Reeves says,

The Change Leaders described in this book are veterans and novices, women and men; they represent a broad spectrum of cultures and backgrounds. They are introvert and extroverts, teachers and administrators, exceptional and ordinary. You will find, I hope, people like you, sharing similar challenges but perhaps with different results. Their stories are completely authentic.

The reader can easily connect to the reality that change is not an easy task to accomplish. Reeves states that when it comes to leading change there are often overwhelming challenges that lead inevitably to cynicism. As a result of traveling to many schools around the world, Reeves explains that he has found a number of effective change leaders who share common characteristics. For example these effective change leaders:

• engage colleagues rather than manipulate them
• focus on ideas-not personalities
• balance their sense of urgency

Reeves goes on to say:

...these are people who not only implement change successfully, but also appear to thrive on it. Their colleagues are no more insightful, desperate, or well-informed than the average. Rather, these change leaders share a common commitment to the notion that ideas are more important than personalities.

As I read this, I readily grasped the author's attempt to create an "I can do this in my school" mindset. This book is a great read for those who are new to the idea of becoming a change leader or for those who wish to extend their abilities. It is helpful for teachers or administrators who have already succeeded with a few ideas and feel the need to continue making positive changes.
 
Throughout the book, I noticed how skillfully the author brought idealism and realism together. For example, Reeves explains:
 
Sustainable change requires reorientation of priorities and values so that the comfort and convenience of the individual is no longer the measure by which the legitimacy of change is considered. Rather, we respond to a vision of change that is so compelling and whose benefits for others are so overwhelming that we see students and colleagues not as cogs in the machine but as stars in a galaxy that outshines our fears and dwarfs our apprehensions.

At the same time-and this is the key to change leadership-we know that each star in the firmament holds an essential place, and without it, a constellation would be diminished. Thus the paradox of change leadership is the elevation of a vision far greater than the individual and, at the same time, the elevation of the individual to a place that is unique, powerful, and essential.

Reeves blends his poetic ideals with the reality that everyday people can make the choice to be successful change agents. His book describes leaders who are everyday people-in schools across the globe-who have succeeded.

 The book is organized into four parts that include:

1. Creating Conditions for Change
2. Planning Change
3. Implementing Change
4. Sustaining change

Each chapter builds upon the next to allow the reader to absorb realistic views that can be transformed into the actions of successful change leaders. In addition, an appendix provides supporting documents to guide the reader to begin changing rhetoric into reality. Each part of the book is comprised of 3 to 5 chapters that fully outline specific experiences and steps for taking action.
 
Reeves's writing style, along with the information provided in the book, make for an interactive reading experience. For instance, the author encourages the reader to share his own successful change leadership stories by visiting ChangeLeaders.info, which is a noncommercial website devoted to sharing successful ideas and research.

I recommend this book for all who desire to break the barrier of the cynicism of change. The reader can be left with the thought that by applying simple yet powerful ideas, determined educators can enjoy the experiences that result from taking the initiative to be successful change leaders.