Professor Faith Dunne:

School change is difficult but not impossible.

YOU'RE NOT LIKE the others," schoolteachers and officials have told Education Professor Faith Dunne when she takes her brand of educational problem-solving into real-world schools. She manages to bypass the resentment that easily accrues to ivory tower types who dare to tell classroom teachers how to teach: she lets people know that her role is to help schools find their own ways to improve.

It helps that Dunne was once a schoolteacher herself. While a Yale grad student she became so fired up after meeting Harvard Education Professor Theodore Sizer that she left her English lit studies and went into high school teaching. She taught near Boston for three years, then, with Sizer's encouragement, went back to school herself, this time for a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Throughout: Dunne's 18 years at Dartmouth she has continued to work with Sizer, including participating in his Coalition of Essential Schools. Dunne recently spent two years in such schools around the country, teaching staffs how to change the structure and function of their schools: identifying roadblocks, understanding patterns of change, setting goals and meeting them.

Proof that the teacher-student relationship is an interaction rather than a one-way flow, Dunne brought back a few lessons that are making their way into her Dartmouth courses and into her new School Leadership Project, which works on transformational change in Upper Valley schools. "I came back from working with the Coalition of Essential Schools with a sense of how difficult it was for schools to change, but also knowing that it was not impossible."