Building Capacity for Educational Change: A Portrait of Behavioral Patterns of First Year Schools in the Louisiana Accelerated Schools Network

This paper describes the recurring behavior patterns exhibited by first-year schools in the Louisiana Accelerated Schools Network during the evaluation process conducted during the years 1992 and 1993. These patterns are viewed through the lens of one of the three guiding principles of the accelerated schools process--empowerment coupled with responsibility. The paper develops a holistic portrait that shows how school communities build the capacity for educational change. It focuses on how teachers and school administrators in six schools came to understand the meaning of empowerment, and provides information about the feelings and experiences of principals and teachers in their struggles and successes to change from a traditional learning environment to an accelerated one. Data were obtained from onsite observations and interviews conducted with 28 teachers and 6 principals in the 6 participating schools. The schools demonstrated several similar behavior patterns: (1) many teachers and administrators were initially ambivalent toward empowerment; (2) principals found that they had to change their leadership styles; (3) teachers experimented with finding ways to empower students; and (4) principals needed support from other principals in the network to change their leadership styles. Appendices contain the interview guide and patterns of behavior from the 1992 and 1993 evaluation reports. Contains 13 references. (LMI)