Marc Tucker

Change Wars (Leading Edge) Marc Tucker

Winner - 2009 National Staff Development Council's Staff Development Book of the Year Award

Change Wars is the third book in the Leading Edge? series. The Leading Edge series unites education authorities from around the globe and asks them to confront the important issues that affect teachers and administrators the issues that profoundly impact student success. The experts contributing to this anthology do not prescribe one method to transact change. They embrace the mission, trusting that teachers and administrators the true change leaders will venture to the Leading Edge to embrace the challenges and opportunities that will guarantee the success of their students.

In today's era of educational change where reforms proliferate, initiatives abound, legal responsibilities are constantly expanding, and both teachers and leaders complain constantly of overload, the challenge is no longer just how to implement particular changes, but how to choose between changes, prioritize them, and create coherence among all of them. This is a challenge for the teacher in the classroom, the principal in the office, and for policymakers in government. How do we do the right things well, not get distracted by the wrong things, involve and include everyone who is affected, keep the momentum and the impact going, and prevent burnout by ensuring the change agenda is manageable and coherent?

The 13 contributors to Change Wars tackle these difficult questions by offering their own theories-in-action of educational change the changes they want, why they want them, and how they believe they can be brought about and sustained so readers can reflect on change in their own situations and perhaps find areas of broad agreement. Change Wars provides a comprehensive view of the challenges of education reform from system, district, and classroom standpoints and examines the many perspectives of effective reform and implementation. Change Wars contains more theory than On Common Ground and Ahead of the Curve. The contributors are largely researchers and not practitioners. The majority of the contributors focus on system change from a broader perspective than the classroom level.