It may seem strange to say that professional development—educators going to workshops and conferences, and taking courses—bears little relationship to classroom and school improvement. Similarly teachers toiling away as individuals do not add up to school or system success. What really counts is what happens ‘in between workshops’ or what I call learning is the work (Fullan, 2008).
You can’t make people change, and rewards and punishment either don’t work or are short lived—the only thing that works is people’s intrinsic motivation, and you have to get at this indirectly.
So far we have looked at deliberate practice as the crucible of learning, and empathetic resolute leadership committed to making learning better and better. But what is going to motivate the masses? Impressive empathy is a start, but you also need something to actually engage people. The big change problem, then, is how to get people to put in the energy to improve a situation when a
lot of them don’t want to do it. How do you get people to change their minds? Grasping the essence of quality change processes is the focus of this chapter.
Education is overloaded with programs and data. The growth of digital power has aided and abetted the spread of accountability-driven data—adequate yearly progress, test results for every child in every grade, common core standards, formative and summative assessments galore. Each data set shows a full continuum from below standard to exceed standards. Educators need to be able to put FACES on the data at all points on the continuum and, to know what to do to help individual children behind the statistical mask.
Let's put the worries about our new curriculum into perspective. We live in an increasingly challenging, complex, inter-connected and unpredictable world beset by a range of seemingly insoluble problems.
This is the view of Thomas Homer-Dixon (pictured), an expert in peace and conflict studies, who believes these problems arise from "tectonic stresses". He identifies five: population stress, energy stress, environmental stress, climate stress and economic stress (the ever-widening gap between rich and poor people).
This article reviews the history of large-scale education reform and makes the case that large-scale or whole system reform policies and strategies are becoming increasingly evident. The review briefly addresses the pre 1997 period concluding that while the pressure for reform was mounting that there were very few examples of deliberate or successful strategies being developed. In the second period—1997 to 2002—for the first time we witness some specific cases of whole system reform in which progress in student achievement was evident. England and Finland are cited as two cases in point. In 2003–2009 we began to observe an expansion of the number of systems engaged in what I call tri-level reform—school/ district/government. As Finland, Singapore, Alberta, Canada, Hong Kong, and South Korea continued to demonstrate strong performance in literacy, math and science, Ontario joined the ranks with a systematic tri-level strategy which virtually immediately yielded results and continues to do so in 2009. The nature of these large-scale reform strategies is identified in this article. It can be noted that very little productive whole system reform was going on in the United States. Aside from pockets of success at the level of a few districts since 2000, and despite the presence of a ‘policy without a strategy’ in the form of No Child Left Behind the US failed to make any progress in increasing student achievement. In the final section of the paper I consider the early steps of the Obama
administration in light of the ‘theory of action’ of whole system reform identified in this article and predict that there we will see a great expansion and deepening of large-scale reform strategies in the immediate future, not only in the U.S. but across the world.
Charter schools, Teach For America, and the Knowledge Is Power Program may have their merits, but they are not whole-system reform. The latter is about improving every classroom, every school, and every district in the state, province, or country, not just some schools. The moral and political purpose of whole-system reform is ensuring that everyone will be affected for the better, starting on day one of implementing the strategy. The entire system should show positive, measurable results within two or three years. We have done this in Ontario, Canada, where we have had the opportunity since 2003 to implement new policies and practices across the system—all 4,000 elementary schools, 900 secondary schools, and the 72 districts that serve 2 million students. Following five years of stagnation and low morale, from 1998 to 2003, the impact of the new strategies has been dramatic: Higher-order literacy and numeracy have increased by 10 percentage points across the system; the high school graduation rate has risen 9 percentage points, from 68 percent to 77 percent; the morale o teachers and principals has improved; and the public’s confidence in the system is up.
Drawing on a vast range of research, much of it focused on the dynamics of school life, Michael Fullan has distilled rich insights and wisdom of great value to the Irish school system in transition. In this paper he puts the spotlight on the pivotal role of the principal in the Irish education reform movement for the twenty-first century. Its tripartite format identifies how principals make a
difference, what barriers prevent them from realising their potential and what actions need to be taken ‘to create a new irreversible momentum of success’. The paper presents a concise and compelling case for constructive action, which we will ignore at our peril. As he remarks, the paper ‘has a decidedly action bias’, and he directs his specific recommendations to three agencies – the government, IPPN and individual principals. Fullan tells us that his recommendations are ‘intended to build on the strong educational traditions and practices in the Irish system’, but he is unequivocal on the need for action to secure the future well-being of the system.
Schools and school systems all across the world are seeking ways of improving student achievement to respond to the growing public recognition of the importance of education for individual and societal progress and success. Ontario has adopted an exciting approach to supporting school improvement that is research and evidence based. Unlike many jurisdictions around
the world that have adopted simplistic practices, Ontario has recognized that sustained improvement depends on schools, districts, and provinces adopting an aligned approach that builds the capacity of teachers, school leaders, boards, district leaders, parents, and community allies. Ontario is putting that approach into practice in elementary schools through the Literacy and Numeracy Strategy and Secretariat, and in secondary schools through the Student Success Strategy. In both strategies, the Ministry of Education is closely working with schools and school districts to develop common approaches to mean- ingful change focused on improved school and classroom practices. We recognize that within these broad parameters there can be many different ways to proceed, taking into account the diverse demographics and contexts of Ontario schools.
This is the third in the series of short publications by the DfES Innovation Unit, intended to stimulate debate within and beyond the teaching profession on key issues. Previous pamphlets have touched on the importance of networks in stimulating and transferring better practice1; and on how the concept of personalisation has radical potential for transforming our education service2. This third concerns the systemic nature of modern education leadership. It is absolutely appropriate that it should
be authored by Michael Fullan, who has been a leader in the field for over three decades.
Four frogs are sitting on a log, and one decides to jump off. How many frogs are left? Th answer is
four, not three, because deciding is not the same as doing.
This paper is about how an entire system from bottom to top can engage in systematic, deeper reform on a continuous basis — from school and community, through district and regions, to system or national levels. It’s about getting the agenda right comprehensive, coherent, deep focus on teaching and learning) and doing it in a way that results in continuous improvement in actuall practice.
School leaders are faced with the daunting task of anticipating the future and making conscious adaptations to their practices, in order to keep up and to be responsive to the environment. To succeed in a rapidly changing and increasingly complex world, it is vital that schools grow, develop, adapt and take charge of change so that they can control their own futures.This paper will examine the tension that exists for school leaders in relation to data about their schools and their students, arguing that the explicit connections between data and large-scale reforms make it impossible to avoid a critical approach to data, drawing on research in Ontario and Manitoba in Canada, and examining parallels with evidence from research in England, to highlight the challenges involved in using data effectively in different political contexts and mandated policies on the uses of data.
Leadership is to this decade what standards-based reform was to the 1990s. Put another way, if you want to boost achievement scores from poor to good levels, a strong standard-based reform strategy can take you so far; but if the aim is to accomplish deeper, continuous improvement, leadership at many levels of the system is required.
This report focuses on recent Ontario education policies. It is a policy audit of the present state of the public school system in Ontario and a proposal for provincial education policies that will best serve the students of Ontario. Following the most tumultuous decade in Ontario educational history, and seven years after the release of the report of the Royal Commission on Learning,1 we believe it is necessary to examine where Ontario education is now and where the province should be headed in the future.
A critical new theme of the 1990’s was how to achieve large scale reform. In the current decade sustainability has been added as a major concern. These twin concepts represent a radical shift from understanding individual school innovation toward establishing system change that generates and supports continuous improvement on a large scale.
In this paper we use literacy and to a certain extent numeracy initiatives as examples of attempts at large scale sustainable reform. We first describe the sources we use from our own and others work — a lively body of multi-year attempts at large scale reform. Second, we offer a tri-level model— school/district/state, along with evidence to demonstrate what is necessary at each of these three levels in the pursuit of system-wide reform. Third, we identify an agenda of unfinished business in order to take us to the next level of sustainable reform.
This paper provides a brief review of what is involved in achieving whole school reform on a large scale. There have been two shifts in the last decade that are directly relevant to this question. One has been the issue of how to go deeper to achieve substantial reform that is powerful enough to impact student learning in even the most difficult circumstances. The other is how simultaneously to go wider to achieve reform on a large scale.
Technology and the Problem of Change
Educational decentralization is a worldwide phenomenon, but as a concept it hides more than it reveals. It often refers to the devolution of some authority to the local school and community level, but two large problems remain. First, in all cases, key aspects of authority are retained at the regional and central level. In this sense, decentralization is a misnomer. Second, when decentralization does occur, it usually refers to structural elements (such as site- based councils), thereby missing the day-to-day capacities and activities that would make it work for school improvement.
The changes in this book were prepared to serve as a resource document for the National Education Association's (NEA, 1997) Keys project. Keys is an acronym for "Keys to Excellence in your Schools". NEA has identified 35 factors essential to effective schools, and has developed a survey instrument designed to gather data on these items, and in turn to feed back the data to
participating schools. The 35 items cluster into five main domains:
• shared understanding and commitment to high goals
• open communication and collaborative problem solving
• continuous assessment for teaching and learning
• personal and professional learning
• resources to support teaching and learning
Teacher education programs must help teaching candidates to link the moral purpose that influences them with the tools that
will prepare them to engage in productive change.
Teaching at its core is a moral profession. Scratch a good teacher and you will find a moral purpose. At the Faculty of Education, University of Toronto, we recently examined why people enter the teaching profession (Stiegelbauer 1992). In a random sample of 20 percent of 1,100 student teachers, the most frequently mentioned theme was "to make a difference in the lives of students." Of course, such statements cannot be taken at face value because people have a variety of motives for becoming teachers. Nonetheless, there is a strong kernel of truth to this conclusion.
The digital revolution is transforming our work, our organisations and our daily lives. Driverless cars are now legal in three American states. One third of payments in Kenya are made via mobile phones. Wearable computing will soon mean that your jacket will monitor your heart rate (should you want it to). I have seen a violin - played beautifully - that was 3-D printed.
This revolution is already in homes across the developed world and increasingly in the developing world too. And there, it is transforming the way children and young people play, access information, communicate with each other and learn. But, so far, this revolution has not transformed most schools or most teaching and learning in classrooms.