Being A Change Agent Essay

For the beginning teacher, they may be underdeveloped. Block emphasizes that “creating a vision forces us to take a stand for a preferred future” (1987, p. To articulate our vision of the future “is to come out of the closet with our doubts about the organization and the way it operates” (p. Once it gets going, it is not as private as it sounds.Especially in moral occupations like teaching, the more one takes the risk to express personal purpose, the more kindred spirits one will find.

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On closer examination they are natural allies (Fullan 1993).

Stated more directly, moral purpose—or making a difference—concerns bringing about improvements. In addition to the need to make moral purpose more explicit, educators need the tools to engage in change productively.

Scratch a good teacher and you will find a moral purpose.

At the Faculty of Education, University of Toronto, we recently examined why people enter the teaching profession (Stiegelbauer 1992).

I see four core capacities for building greater change capacity: personal vision-building, inquiry, mastery, and collaboration (see Senge 1990 and Fullan 1993).

Each of these has its institutional counterpart: shared vision-building; organizational structures, norms, and practices of inquiry; the development of increased repertoires of skills and know-how among organizational members; and collaborative work cultures. On the one hand, schools are expected to engage in continuous renewal, and change expectations are constantly swirling around them.

To be effective at change, mastery is essential both in relation to specific innovations and as a personal habit. “Why We Want to Be Teachers.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco.

There is a ceiling effect to how much we can learn if we keep to ourselves (Fullan and Hargreaves 1991).

” This sense dissipates, however, as “the inevitable difficulties of teaching ...

interact with personal issues and vulnerabilities, as well as social pressure and values, to engender a sense of frustration and force a reassessment of the possibilities of the job and the investment one wants to make in it” (1991, p. Certainly calls for reestablishing the moral foundation of teaching are warranted, but increased commitment at the one-to-one and classroom levels alone is a recipe for moral martyrdom.