Professional Documents
Culture Documents
DOI 10.1007/s10833-016-9289-1
Michael Fullan1
Introduction
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impact and some jurisdictions began to alter their approach. They toned down
wrong-headed accountability, emphasized collaboration in policy documents
(implementation is another matter), highlighted pedagogy or instruction, and
attempted to coordinate polices. These are turning out to be weak versions of what
could be a set of right drivers. They tend for example to highlight standards for
teachers and others, and even when they play down the accountability dimension
they fail to have much of an impact. Put another way, standards represent a weak
mechanism for causing system change.
I also want to dismiss going to scale as an approach. I don’t know of any
evidence that demonstrates that going to scale is viable as a model for system
change in education. When things go to scale, such as good drinking water, use of
seat belts, reduced smoking, and so on, they tend to involve behaviors that do not
require capacity or skill. Getting back to going to scale, one cannot go to scale when
something involves new and deep capacity. The pilots are not typically replicable
for one or more of the following reasons: the first users are more motivated; there
are not enough resources; solutions in each new situation are not exactly the same;
the program loses momentum as key sponsors move on, or new ideas come along. In
the rest of this commentary I connect to the papers in this collection and then
conclude with what I think is the essence of getting whole system change. As an
advance organizer, let me say that the essence of whole system change involves two
elements: deep pedagogical change based on the relationships among learners (I
include teachers and students as learners) and solutions that successfully address
equity—that is, solutions that serve all, but especially serve the historically
disaffected.
In terms of the six papers, four are based in developing counties and two in North
America. I start with the four developing country papers comparing South Africa
and India, with Colombia and Mexico. As we see in Fleisch’s paper, changes in
‘instructional practice’ is at the heart of change. We can agree with Fleisch that
vague instructional practice will never work or spread. We then get into
controversial terrain when he suggests that ‘specificity’ and a degree of ‘prescrip-
tiveness’ is necessary. I am willing to entertain that this may do some good when
teacher competence is low but I would also argue that its effectiveness is confined to
lower level skills and may in fact not represent the kind of change that can be
leveraged for the future, or for helpful dissemination. My point is that we need
specificity but the kind that spreads does not require prescriptiveness. In other
words, specificity furnishes clarity but does not assume prescription. This is crucial
in our deep change work (Fullan 2016). Best ideas flourish when people learn from
each other. And Fleisch does show that coaching is an effective part of the strategy,
but in this case effectiveness involves the spread of scripted lessons that have impact
on limited learning goals. Progress for me is not ‘weak to scripted’ but rather ‘weak
to deep’. We do need specificity in order to learn about more complex solutions that
would influence our practice, not through imitation, but though innovative
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performance. These recent developments take us more deeply into the matter of
sustainability and deep performance that I take up in the final section.
What’s next
In many ways for me the six case studies represent a transition point in large-scale
system improvement. None of the cases get sufficiently to deep change but they all
focus on pedagogy and gravitate to collective learning and efficacy. The solution for
system improvement for me consist of three matters: deep change in the culture of
learning, local ownership of the learning agenda, and a system of continuous
improvement and innovation that is simultaneously bottom-up, top-down and
sideways. We are indeed attempting to develop such systems in our New
Pedagogies for Deep Learning initiative involving over 1000 schools in 10 different
countries (www.npdl.global). In this commentary I shall contrast briefly what the
nature of successful whole system improvement might and might not entail. Let’s
start with the latter and pursue the question through three stages that I will call
accountability, professional standards, and learning cultures. I have already men-
tioned the ‘wrong drivers’ that represent the worst of the accountability set of
solutions. The evidence is clear these drivers send the system backwards.
As policymakers try to accommodate the problems of the accountability
approach they seem to be evolving into what I will call the professional standards
solution. A good example of this is the recently released report, What matters now
(National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, NCTAF 2016). Twenty
years ago NCTAF published its first commission report, What matters most. It is
accurate to say that the situation (system improvement in the U.S.) has only
deteriorated over these two decades. How likely is the new set off recommendations
to lead to whole system improvement? The report has six main recommendations:
1. Policymakers should establish and broadly communicate a new compact with
teachers.
2. Every state should establish a Commission on Teaching, Learning, and the
State’s Future.
3. States and districts should codify and track whether all schools are ‘‘organized
for success’’.
4. Teacher preparation should be more relevant and clinically-based.
5. States should support all new teachers with multi-year induction and high-
quality mentoring.
6. Education leaders should evaluate ALL professional learning for responsive-
ness and effectiveness.
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the long run due not in the least to weak implementation. Even the causal
mechanisms for daily success in the culture of learning seem vague.
So, what is the solution? I will not be able to spell it out in detail here but I can
identify the nature of the solution and its direction. We need to understand the
messages of the emerging science of networks, combined with what we know about
cultures of purposeful learning. On networks it is clear that they are increasingly
evident, to a certain extent uncontrollable, and yet contain the seeds of a dynamic
solution. The network side of the solution is to realize that on the one hand networks
weaken hierarchies (this is why there are limits to central control), while on the
other hand they both disperse and concentrate learning (Ramos 2016). In our deep
learning work, we are finding that learning disperses among students, teachers and
others (learners outrun leaders), but when it is combined with a culture of
collaborative learning it also coalesces around good solutions. It is this dynamic of
co-learning that, when it reaches a critical mass, creates a system of continuous
improvement and innovation. In play also are some ‘strange attractors’, as
complexity science calls them. I use it here as an analogy (but it also may be
theoretically a true attractor). I mention here two attractors (forces that cause things
to coalesce). One is the fact that humans are ‘wired to connect’. Even though the
forces of dispersal are at work they are inevitably mediated by the human tendency
to connect with one another. Thus the strategy is to establish cultures that enable
connection—such as use the group to change the group, or Hargreaves and my more
complete solution of ‘professional capital’ (Hargreaves and Fullan 2012). The other
attractor that we are finding, especially among young people, is the intrinsic
disposition to helping humanity—indeed to helping humanity evolve.
We are elaborating on this solution in our current work. The evidence of its
power is both empirical (it is happening), and theoretical (wired to connect and
helping humanity) and are natural forces. The system improvement strategy is to
realize that while they are natural they can be promoted or blunted. Whole system
improvement in short involves shaping and cultivating a culture of purposeful
learning that is neither tightly controlled nor too loose. Challenging but exciting—
and doable!
References
Fullan, M. (2011). Choosing the wrong drivers for whole system reform. In Seminar Series 204.
Melbourne, Australia: Center for Strategic Education.
Fullan, M. (2016). Indelible leadership: Always leave them learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
Fullan, M., & Quinn, J. (2016). Coherence: Putting the right drivers in action. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Corwin Press.
Gallagher, M. J., Malloy, J., & Ryerson, R. (2016). Achieving excellence: Bringing effective literacy
pedagogy to scale in Ontario’s publicly-funded education system. Journal of Educational Change.
doi:10.1007/s10833-016-9284-6.
National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future. (2016). What matters now: The evidence base.
Washington, DC: Author.
New Pedagogies for Deep Learning. (2016). www.npdl.global.
Ramos, J. C. (2016). The seventh sense: Power, fortune, and survival. New York: Little Brown & Co.
Rincon-Gallardo, S. (2016). Large scale pedagogical transformation as widespread cultural change in
Mexican public schools. Journal of Educational Change. doi:10.1007/s10833-016-9286-4.
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