Change Forces with a Vengenace

In my ongoing quest for knowledge related to leading an educational orgranization in a highly complex environment, I discovered the work by Michael Fullan The book LEADING in a culture of CHANGE by Michael Fullan was the first book I discovered. Click to the link to go Amazon for puchase details. In creating of a summary of that book, I was excited about its potential to provide guidance to our leadership work at the District. In his latest book Change Forces with a Vengenace Michael Fullan provies new insights and lessons of change concerning moral pupose, and what is called tri-level reform - the school and community, the local district and the state. Click on the link to get purchase details.

Certainly, the 110 pages of content is a lot of material to digest. Below are excerpts of some the insights contained in the book:

Chapter 1, New Horizons

Page 4, The evolution of reform strategies over the past four decades: The 70s = Uninformed professional judgement, The 80s = Uninformed prescription, The 90s = Informed prescription and The 00s = Informed professional judgement.

Page 5, If trust, morally purposeful policy, coherence, capacity, knowledge management and continuous improvement are conditions for collectively informed professional development, how do you establish these "facilitative system conditions"?

An essential strand will be to reduce teacher workload, foster increased teacher ownership, and create the capacity to manage change in a sustainable way that can lay the foundation for improved school and pupil performance in the future.

The new question, of course, is how do you foster teacher ownership?

Chapter 2, Moral Purpose Writ Large

Page 11, With all the emphasis on uninformed and informed prescription over the past twenty years, one of the casualities has been teachers' instrinsic motivation or sense of moral purpose.

Parker Palmer's book Courage to Teach calls for teachers to ask themselves the following questions:

• Why did I become a teacher in the first place?
• What do I stand for as a teacher/
• What are the gifts I bring to my work?
• What do I want my legacy to be?
• What can I do to "keep track of myself" - to remember my own heart?

Page 12, I am suggesting that moral purpose must go beyond the individual; must be larger and more collective in nature. Indeed I will claim that the only measure that counts at the end of the day is whether the gap between high and low performers is explicitly reduced.

Page 16, Bricker (a pollster) and Greenspan (a journalist) identified underlying trends of the general public (in this case, of Canadians):

The new mindest on education that emerged over the course of the Neverous Ninties demanded tougher standards, greater discipline, and heightened accountability. Their confidence in education tested, parents felt the need to be able to judget for themselves whether the system was working. But they never abandoned the principles of the public system.... And though the ongoing wars of attrition between the teachers and governments, parents at least, never lost sight of the point of the excerise: to prepare their children to prosper in the economy of the future and make a contribtion to society overall. The new mindset combined with a desire for the system to better reflect the individual needs of children with an understanding that we are all in this together. It believe in choices, but choice in the form of options within a common public school system. And as the decade closed, it became evident that the public continued to view schools as the critical agents for social cohesion, the common glue tha binds society together.

Chapter 3, New Lessons for Complex Change

Page 23, the eventual solution...the vast majority of people in the system must end up "owning the problem" and be the agents of its solution. In common sense terms, we move down the path of increasingly greater ownership and commitment:

• Start with the notion of moral purpose, key problems, desirable directions, but don't lock in.
• Create communities of interaction around these ideas.
• Ensure that quality information infuses interaction and related deliberations.
• Look for and extract promising patterns, i.e. consolidate gains and build on them.

Pages 24-38, Eight Complex Change Lessons

1. Give up the idea that pace of change will slow down.
2. Coherence making is a never-ending proposition and is everyone's responsibility.
3. Changing the context is the focus.
4. Premature clarity is a dangerous thing.
5. The public's thrist for transparency is irrevesible.
6. You can't get large scale reform through bottom up strategies -- but aware of the trap.
7. Mobiize the social attractors - moral purpose, qulaity relationships, quality knowledge.
8. Charismatic leadership is negatively associated with sustainability.

Chapter 4, Tri- Level Reform: The School

Page 51,

• Major new solutions are needed in schools
• There is great uncertainity about what they will look like and how to get there
• Uncertainity causes anxiety, which can have positive effects if channeled
• Successful organizations constantly ask themselves troubling questions, and are deliberately connected to external systems which do the same
• The social attractors enable them to ask and channel troubling questions in ways that produce good new ideas
• Accumulation of results energize people to go even further

Chapter 5, Tri- Level Reform: The Role of the District

Page 55, Everyone has a theory of education and a theory of change however implicit, misguided, or underdeveloped it may be. My argument is that cannot go deeply unless you create powerful new synergies between your theory of education and your theory of change.

Page 56, Districts are making a comeback; inevitably I would say, because of complexity theory (systems needs systems, etc.) The vast majority of districts do not have the conception, capacity, or continuity to be anything more than an episodic aggravation from the perspective of school effectiveness (what Hess termed "spinning wheels and poicy churn").

Chapter 6, Tri- Level Reform: The State

Page 87, The question is how can a government move in the direction of informed professional judgement?

• A deep conception of what is meant by informed profesional judgement
• A clear, public value statement that endorses this direction
• A variety of strategies that create opportunities for teachers to leatn and that create disciplined collective action
• A firm commitment to providing resources in a quid pro quo manner ( quality reform gets more resources)
• An invitation to the profession to engage in dialogue and problem-solving about hwo to implement in an accountable, energizing manner to recreate the teaching profession

Chapter 7, Leadership and Sustainability

Page 91, What "standards" were to the 1990s, leadership is to the 2000s....Sustainability involves transforming the system in a way that the conditions and capacity for continuous improvement become built-in within and across the tri-levels of reform.

Page 93, From the Leading in a Culture of Change I identified five action/mind sets....Effective leaders combine a strong sense of moral purpose, an understanding of dynamics of change, great emotional intelligence as they build relationships, a commitment to new knowledge development and sharing, and a capacity for coherence making. Summary

Page 95, The one area that was most difficult to carry out for education leaders was developing and sustaining teamwork. Fullan cites work from Richard Hackman's book Leading Teams. "Effective work teams" operate in ways that build shared commitment, collective skills, and task-appropriate coordination strategies. He then delves into five conditions required for teams to be effective over time:

The likelihood of effectiveness is increased when a team (1) is a real team rather than a team in name only, (2) has a compelling direction for its work, (3)has an enabling structure that facilitates rather impedes teamwork, (4) operates within a supportive organizational context, and (5) has available ample expert coaching in teamwork.

I encourage each of you to participate in this dialogue. Send me an Email or start a conversation when you see me.

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Last modified: March 29, 2005

Disclaimer: This website is the sole responsibility of Mike McMahon. It does not represent any official opinions, statement of facts or positions of the Alameda Unified School District. Its sole purpose is to disseminate information to interested individuals in the Alameda community.