Fundamental Change by Michael Fullan

1. Fundamental Change by Michael Fullan • Understanding Change • Tackling Working Conditions • Taking Action

2. More happy travelers – Not from Wichita Falls, TX • Sky Harbor Airport

3. Making the most of the delay • ASU Karsten Golf Course

4. Fundamental Change Fundamental – Serving as a basis supporting existence Change – To give a different position, course, or direction Webster’s, 2001

5. Profile of Michael Fullan • Michael Fullan is the former Dean of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Recognized as an international authority on educational reform, Michael is engaged in training, consulting and evaluating change projects around the world. His ideas for managing change are used in many countries, and his books have been published in many languages. • Michael Fullan led the evaluation team that conducted the four-year assessment of the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategy in England from 1998-2003. In April 2004 he was appointed Special Advisor to the Premier and Minister of Education in Ontario.

6. Understanding Change • Understanding the dynamics of the change process is absolutely the key to success. Fullan • Between the thought and action, between motion and the act falls the shadow. T.S. Eliot

7. Understanding Change • Tri-Level Reform

8. Understanding Change • Change Factor vs. Change Process • Why we change vs. How we change • Called the Pathways Problem – The reason we need systems thinking is to improve our kids and their learning

9. Understanding Change • Change is: New Materials New behaviors/practices New beliefs/understandings Fullan

10. Understanding ChangeKey Insight # 1 • Shared vision or ownership is more an outcome of a quality process than a precondition. • Is everyone on your campus Preconditioned to keep student learning paramount?

11. Understanding ChangeKey Insight # 2 • The size and prettiness of the planning document is inversely related to the amount and quality of action, and in turn, to student achievement. Reeves, 2006

12. Understanding Change Key Insight # 3 • Behavior changes before beliefs. • This was a point of great debate with the Zundy leadership team.

13. Understanding ChangeKey Insight # 4 • Change is not a quick fix and problems will arise. Push through the difficult times.

14. Understanding ChangeKey Insight # 5 – Brain Barriers • Brain Barrier # 1 - Failure to See - The comprehensiveness mistake - The I get it mistake - Illuminate the right thing Black & Gregersen, 2002

15. Understanding ChangeKey Insight # 5 – Brain Barriers • Brain Barrier # 2 – Failure to Move The clearer the new vision the more immobilized people become! Why? Black & Gregersen, 2002

16. Understanding ChangeKey Insight # 5 – Brain Barriers • Brain Barrier # 3 – Failure to Finish People get tired People get lost Black & Gregersen, 2002

17. Understanding Change • Right Thing Poorly The clearer the new vision, the easier it is for people to see all the specific ways in which they will be incompetent and look stupid. Many prefer to be competent at the old wrong thing than incompetent at the new right thing. Black & Gregersen, 2002

18. Understanding ChangeKey Insight # 6 – Technical problems vs. adaptive challenges • Technical problems - The ones for which our current know-how is sufficient • Adaptive challenges – More complex and go beyond what we know. Heifetz & Linsky, 2004

19. Understanding ChangesProperties ofAdaptive Challenges • The challenge consists of a gap between aspiration and reality demanding a response outside our current repertoire. • Adaptive work to narrow the gap requires difficult learning. • The people with the problem are the problem, and they are the solution. • Adaptive work generates disequilibrium and avoidance. • Adaptive work takes time. Heifetz & Linsky, 2004

20. Understanding ChangeElements of Successful Change • Define closing the gap as the overachieving goal. • Attend initially to three basics – literacy, numeracy, well being of children. • Be driven by tapping into people’s dignity and sense of respect. • Ensure that the best people are working on the problem. • Recognize that all successful strategies are socially based. • Assume that lack of capacity is the initial problem and then work on it continually. • Stay the course through continuity of good direction by leveraging leadership. • Build internal accountability linked to external accountability • Establish conditions for the evolution of positive pressure • Use the previous nine strategies to build public confidence Fullan, 2006

21. Tackling Working Conditions All change is successful, or not, at the local level. In most cases this involves establishing new cultures for learning. Fullan

22. Tackling Working Conditions Influences on School Capacity and Student Achievement

23. Tackling Working ConditionsSchool Capacity • The collective power of the full staff to improve student achievement through: Knowledge, skills, dispositions of individuals Professional community Program coherence Technical resources Principal leadership Never send a changed individual into an unchanged environment. Fullan

24. Tackling working ConditionsUpping the Ante # 1 Professional development: A great way to avoid change. Cole, 2004 The second handedness of the learned world is the secret to its mediocrity. Alfred North Whitehead, 1967

25. Tackling Working ConditionsUpping the Ante # 2 • Improvement is more a function of learning to do the right things in the settings where you work. The problem is that there is almost no opportunity to engage in continuous and sustained learning in the settings in which they actually work. • People make fundamental transitions by having many opportunities to be exposed to ideas, to argue them into their own normative belief systems, to practice those behaviors, and most importantly, to be successful at practicing in the presence of others… The most powerful incentives reside in the face-to-face relationships among people in the organization, not in external systems. Elmore, 2004

26. Tackling Working ConditionsUpping the Ante # 3

27. Tackling Working ConditionsUpping the Ante # 4 • A feature of successful experience is the connections that schools and school systems must make with other organizations – public and private – in education and non-education settings… There must be a horizontal network of relationships in addition to a vertical continuum of authority and responsibility. Caldwell, 2006

28. Tackling Working ConditionsUpping the Ante # 5 The real reform agenda is closing the well-being gap – income, education, happiness – in the context of societal and global development. Fullan, 2006

29. Tackling Working Conditions • Problem Redux Working conditions of teachers Working conditions of principals

30. Tackling Working Conditions • Action Frame What aspects of your work are exhilarating? What aspects of your work are boring, depressing, discouraging of dispiriting? What actions by you and others would make your work more exhilarating and less depressing? Caldwell, 2006

31. Taking Action • It has become increasingly clear that leadership at all levels of the system is the key lever for reform, especially leaders who (a) focus on capacity and (b) develop other leaders who can carry on. Fullan

32. Taking Action • Not just Learning by Doing Leadership has to be learning not just by doing it but by being able to gain conceptual insight while doing it. Mintzberg, 2004

33. Taking Action • Wisdom is: The ability to act with knowledge while doubting what you know. Pfeffer & Sutton, 2006 A tool is only as good as the mindset using it. Fullan, 2007

34. Taking ActionLeadership # 1

35. Taking ActionLeadership # 2 • Collins’ Hierarchy of Leadership Level 5 – Executive (builds enduring greatness Level 4 – Effective Leader (catalyses commitment to vision and standards) Level 3 – Competent Manager (organizes people toward objective) Level 2 – Contributing Team Member (individual contribution to group objectives) Level 1 – Highly Capable Individual (makes productive contributions) Collins, 2001

36. Taking Action • Collins’ Flywheel

37. Taking ActionCollins’ Flywheel We must reject the idea – well intentioned, but dead wrong – that the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is to become “more like a business”. The key question is not business versus social but great versus good. Greatness is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline. Collins, 2005

38. Taking Action • Profound Implications Are: For policy For remodeling the profession For leadership For schools and school systems