Education Reform and Management Thematic Group
MICHAEL FULLAN ON DISCOVERING THE JOYS OF LARGE-SCALE REFORM IN EDUCATION
"We know a lot from research about what makes individual schools successful. But our knowledge base on what makes school systems successful is very weak. However, there are some lessons about how to manage large-scale change in education."
Prof. Michael Fullan, Carl Corter and Joanne Quinn from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) of the University of Toronto have been studying the complexity of change in Education and how to manage it for over two decades. These are highlights from their session at HD Week:
large-scale Reformis not a linear and easy process. Because many different things have to be implemented at the same time, it commonly leads to overload and fragmentation; these produce incoherence and confusion. Moreover, the things that are most fundamental and will have the biggest impact - such as the way teachers teach - are the hardest to change. "You can not mandate what matters,"said Professor Fullan. Another key lesson of large scale education reform around the world is that "Neither complete centralization nor decentralization works"; education systems have to strike an intelligent balance.
What are the ingredients of successful schools ?
Professor Fullan summarized the latest research on effective schools. Students learning is highest whenschools successfully launch three key processes "inside the school."
First, they break through the conventional isolation of teachers who work most of the time autonomously anddevelop"professional learning communities." Teachers begin to work collaborativelyon everything from new ways of teaching the curriculum to understanding their students’ family context better.
Second,teachers develop better skills in assessing students' progress. Specific attention to assessing student work and improving the constructiveness of teacher feedback to students is another key feature of successful schools.
Third, in effective schools teachers use diverse teaching strategies,which makes them more effective. Often teachers build up this ability over time through collaboration and observing each others’ classes. Developing better pedagogybuilds teachers' self-confidence and their readiness to collaborate further with their colleagues. This launches an upward spiral of improvement inside the school.
Professor Fullan summarized the three ingredients for success Inside the Schoolas:
1) Professional Learning Community, 2) Pedagogy, and 3) Student Assessment.
How do schools become successful ?
"Education research has analyzed what makes schools successful, but does not tell us very much about how schools get that way," continued Professor Fullan. The new frontier in education research is studying howto make low-performing schools better.
A video of a successful public school in low-income district of Los Angels (the Felton School) provided some concrete examples how changes can occur. With the help of an outside facilitator provided by the school district and a supportive principal, teachers and administrators at the Felton school first worked to create a professional learning community. The facilitator focused on getting teachers to think through a new model (below) in which their attitudes and behaviors were directly responsible for student learning. In most low-performing schools, Fullan observed, teachers explicitly resist this connection and the school culture becomes one of collective alibis, rather than accountability.
Next, the teachers replaced routine administrative meetings with meetings focused on working through key problems and building core skills such as in how to assess student work and strategizing on how to improve student learning outcomes. Teachers working in small groups sharpened their ability to articulate what constituted "superior," "good," "adequate," and "unsatisfactory" samples of student work. After receiving the district student assessment results, teachers devoted a half day to analyzing together their schools’ performance and what could be done to improve weak areas.
Felton School