This guide presents practical applications from a research study about the processes that schools use to initiate and sustain reforms. It examines the history of 10 elementary schools in high-poverty settings, including details of behavioral and attitudinal changes. Ten capacities were associated with the stages of successful reform. The foundational capacities were enhancing energy flow among staff, creating collective purpose, and strengthening the evolving culture. The organizational capacities were teaming, creating structures for decentralized decision-making, making structural changes, and piloting. The learning and resource management capacities were creating and maintaining a learning ethic, bringing in information and skills, and orchestrating resources while managing distractions. In the study, the capacities were not developed in isolation, nor did they follow a particular sequence. Not every capacity was present in every school, but they were common enough and important enough to be associated with most of the successful changes in the six schools. Each capacity has an explanation, an illustrative example from a specific school, and questions for reflection about how the concept can be tied to the reader's own experiences. An extended case example of one school provides material for group discussion. (Contains 38 references.) (RKJ)