A Strategic Plan for Educational Leadership
January 2000 through December 2004

Effecting a Strategic Vision

In practical work, historical thinking guides the Institute. ILT forms its basic objectives through a context of historical reflection. Reliance on historical reflection makes the Institute distinctive as an agency of change in education. The dominant model of educational reform is one of applied educational and psychological research. Instead, ILT grounds its work in historical reflection and cultural interpretation. Effective educational practices are those that prove suitable with respect to complex historical and cultural conditions. Effective innovation rests on insight and understanding, both informed and inspired. The conscious pursuit of change, the design and implementation of an historical pedagogy, arises through immersion in the field of practice, seeding it with educational arrangements that have the capacity to flourish within the emerging cultural ecology. Simply put, in grounding pedagogical change historically, one bases effort, not on proven theory, but on strategic vision.

Effecting a strategic vision in education requires the sustained application of diverse resources in a deliberate manner, according to a reasoned plan. It is to help lay the groundwork for such an effort that the Institute has designed its program of practice. The Institute believes that there are four distinct requirements to effecting systemic educational change. These are:

• a proof of concept, to show that a significant alternative to existing practice is possible;
• a driving force, to provide the historical energy to carry innovations through to full implementation;
• a moving social vision, to legitimate the costs incurred with change and to inspire the efforts needed to effect it; and
• tangible institutional leverage, to enable new practices to alter resistant organizational structures, transforming them from within.

The Institute is developing its program to meet these requirements and to provide a framework for the mobilization of disparate elements in a common endeavor.

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