An important characteristic of school leaders in managing change is:

Concept

Leading change in a school is a matter of building shared capacity, not of issuing instructions. Under the participative or distributed view of school leadership, a new practice takes root only when the people who must enact it share the information, the reasoning and the ownership behind it. The leader's central task in a change process is therefore to widen participation across the whole staff.

Applying the concept to this item

Measured against that principle, the characteristic being asked for is fostering collaboration among all members, because collaboration does three things a change process needs:

• it brings the classroom-level knowledge of every teacher into the planning, so the plan is built on how the school actually works;

• it gives every member the reasoning behind the change, so implementation does not depend on one tier passing orders down;

• it distributes ownership, so the practice continues after the leader who began it moves on — the usual test of whether a change has really been institutionalised.

Contrasting the other characteristics

• Limiting knowledge sharing to senior staff only keeps the reasoning inside one tier of the hierarchy, so the teachers who actually deliver the change receive instructions without the understanding behind them, and no shared capacity is built.

• Avoiding new ideas to maintain consistency is maintenance of the status quo, which is the opposite of the activity the question asks about, namely managing change.

• Focusing solely on individual achievements makes the individual the unit of effort and reward, so the collective practice that a school-wide change depends on never forms.

The characteristic that defines effective leadership of change in a school is therefore fostering collaboration among all members.