Supporting Sites Working Through Leadership Transitions

Date: July 10, 2007

Summary: The Directors Retreat in recent years has attracted a number of leaders from sites in transition, including sites that have recently undergone a leadership change, sites in the midst of one, and those anticipating a transition.

The Directors Retreat, a four-day event held each summer and open by application to NWP site leaders, in recent years has attracted a number of leaders from sites in transition, including sites that have recently undergone a leadership change, sites in the midst of one, and those anticipating a transition.

Often, the new director of an established site attends the retreat with a long-time co-director. Sometimes an experienced director brings along a new co-director to learn more about NWP and to plan together. The team designing the Directors Retreat has focused its mission on developing leadership capacity and on strategies for planning a site's work.

As an extension of this focus, the Directors Retreat Leadership Team sponsored a workshop at the 2006 Annual Meeting in Nashville that dealt specifically with leadership transitions. Gatsinzi Basaninyenzi, Nick Coles, and Nancy Remington, all members of the team, planned the workshop, along with Cheryl Canada, who serves on the team for the New Sites Leadership Institute.

Sharing Stories and Strategies

Three of the planners, who had all had experience with site transition, agreed to present brief case studies of the leadership transitions they had experienced at their own writing project sites. Their articles follow:

Confessions of a Former Site Director
Nancy Remington, former director of the Great Basin Writing Project in Nevada, describes what happens when the founding leader must move on from a site that is only a couple of years old. A strong leadership team and a year of working alongside the new director eased the transition.

Taking Over a Site in Reorganization
Gatsinzi Basaninyenzi, director of Alabama A & M Writing Project, writes about suddenly being asked, as one of his faculty responsibilities, to take on the leadership of a site in danger of losing its funding. By attending the Directors Retreat and learning to put "teachers at the center," he was able to give the reorganized site the ideas and the energy to recover and grow.

The Making of a Teacher-Leader
Cheryl Canada describes her transition from beginning middle school teacher to leading teacher-consultant in the Mid Ohio Writing Project and finally, when the site's founder had to leave, to director. Consistent mentoring by the outgoing director laid the groundwork for each step in Canada's new direction.

Brainstorming Best Practices

Most of the workshop time was spent in writing, sharing, and energetic table-talk about participants' particular stories and challenges. Toward the end, the leaders pulled together some of the strategies for managing a positive transition that emerged in the small groups, and posted them for all to see:

Build structures for teacher leadership

• Teacher-Consultant Council
• Steering Committee
• Advisory Board
• Mentoring new leaders          

Plan for the transition and the future

• Site leadership retreat
• Visioning retreat
• Strategic planning process
• Writing together as a community

Use NWP resources

• Visit other sites
• Contact NWP for support
• Engage TCs in NWP networks and initiatives
• Attend the Directors Retreat or the New Site Leadership Institute
• Use the NWP website and the new directors' resource binder

Communicate clearly about the transition

• Be deliberate and openabout the change
• Put it in writing (e.g., job descriptions)
• Keep records and document decisions

Finally, the group reflected on how important it can be for the writing project as a professional and social community to mark the transition publicly, even (if circumstances allow) to celebrate it. One site leader described a farewell/welcome party that included opportunities to look back at past achievements, to greet and hand over leadership to the new directors, and of course, as always, to eat and drink together.