All Systems Go

The Change Imperative for Whole System Reform

Michael Fullan

• Éditeur: Corwin
• Année: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781452271293
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Education
• Sous-sujet: Educational Policy

Based on Fullan's work with school districts and large systems in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, this resource lays out a comprehensive action plan for achieving whole system reform.

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PART I

The System

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CHAPTER ONE

The Idea and Importance of Whole-System Reform

In this chapter, I sketch the idea of what whole-system reform looks like and then take up the question of why it is so vital to the future of societies. More detail comes in later chapters. All systems go means that every vital part of the whole system—school, community, district, and government contributes individually and in concert to forward movement and success. When it works, and I am talking practically, amazing things get accomplished with less effort; or more accurately, wasted effort gives way to energizing action. Above all, this book is focused on what realistically can be done.

There is nothing in the proposed solutions that we and others have not already done in practice. It is true that politicians tend to go for superficial bullets. The actual solutions, however, are not that much more complicated, but they do require relentless focus on a small number of key interrelated policies and strategies. My purpose in All Systems Go is to capture the set of interrelated strategies that work.

There are some “big ideas” in this book and I should highlight them in advance (see Exhibit 1.1).

Exhibit 1.1 Big Ideas for Whole-System Reform

1. All children can learn
2. A small number of key priorities
3. Resolute leadership/stay on message
4. Collective capacity
5. Strategies with precision
6. Intelligent accountability
7. All means all

Of course, many say that all children can learn, failure is not an option (except that evidently it is), and so on. The big idea in this book is that they really can learn, and all systems go proves that it can be done. All children (95%), except the severely disabled, can learn to a high level of critical reasoning and problem solving. And those who are seriously disadvantaged (physically or mentally) can lead effective lives through inclusionary developmentally based programs typical of all-systems-go reforms.

Second, every successful organization pursues a small number of core priorities (that have leverage power) and does them exceedingly well. We include literacy and numeracy—not the narrow testing of No Child Left Behind, but also higher-order thinking, reasoning and problem-solving skills—and we link them to whole-child development, emotional well-being, music, dance, and the arts. And we pursue high-quality literacy and numeracy into high schools and related higher education and career choices.

Third, we are beginning to appreciate that successful schools, districts, and larger systems have “resolute leadership” that stays with the focus, especially during rough periods, and these leaders cause others around them to be resolute. It is so easy to go off message, and if you do, you lose whole-system-reform possibilities. This is hard, persistent work but it is not overly complex. Resolute leadership is critical near the beginning when new ideas encounter serious difficulty, but it is also required to sustain and build on success.

Fourth, another big idea that is not new but is very much underappreciated is that collective capacity is the hidden resource we fail to understand and cultivate. As Morten Hansen (2009) says, collaboration is not an end in itself. The question is what is the difference between good and bad collaboration, and when are certain kinds of collaboration worse than no collaboration. Hansen calls for “disciplined collaboration,” which my term covers in the use of the word capacity. We will return to Hansen in Chapter 2. In the meantime, you cannot get whole-system reform without counting on collective (as distinct from individual) capacity, and this book is full of concrete examples of this in action. Incidentally, as I will explain later, we have discovered the intriguing phenomenon of “collaborative competition” whereby you simultaneously benefit from both collaboration and competition (Boyle, 2009).

Strategies with precision is another core idea of All Systems Go. I will furnish numerous examples of specificity and precision in particular strategies. When you have precision, as I will show, the speed of quality change can be greatly accelerated. Incredible and convincing transformations can be accomplished in schools in one short year through precision strategies.

Sixth, the failure to get accountability right plagues all reform efforts. All systems go has figured it out through the concept of intelligent accountability. Andy Hargreaves unlocked this door when he observed that “accountability is the remainder that is left when … responsibility has been subtracted” (Hargreaves & Shirley, 2009, p. 102). Intelligent accountability involves a set of policies and practices that actually increases individual, and especially collective, capacity to the transparent point that shared responsibility carries most of the freight of effective accountability; that makes internal and external accountability almost seamless; and that leaves external accountability to do its remaining, more-manageable task of necessary intervention.

Finally, all really does mean all. You can’t solve the problem of whole-system reform through piecemeal efforts that try to get parts of the system improving in order to show the way. System reform does not, cannot work that way—a critique I take up in Chapter 2.

THE IDEA OF WHOLE-SYSTEM REFORM

The School and the Community

Grade-2 teacher Irina Fedra just finished a shared reading exercise with a small group that included two Somali boys and a girl who had arrived at the school 6 months earlier not speaking a word of English. They can actually read, thought Irina. By next year at the end of Grade 3, they will probably meet the province’s high standard assessment in reading and writing.

Of her 15 years of teaching, Irina has learned more about quality instruction in the past 3 years than in the previous 12 years combined. Quality instruction requires getting a small number of practices right. These practices involve knowing clearly and specifically what each student can or cannot do, followed by tailored intervention that engages students in the particular learning in question, and then doing the assessment-instruction-correction process on a continuous basis. This is decidedly not drill and test. In our work in literacy and numeracy in Ontario, the instruction goals include higher-order reasoning, problem solving, and expression, with the associated practices becoming more and more specific and precise.

In systems that go, strategies focus on and drill down to effective instructional practices so that all teachers, individually and collectively, become better at what they are doing while they continue to seek even better methods. This is the domain of expertise that John Hattie (2009) is getting at in his synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses of teaching practices related to student engagement and achievement. High-impact strategies such as structured feedback to students, reciprocal teaching (teaching students to learn cognitive strategies to facilitate their own learning), and observation and feedback on ones’ own teaching all had high impact on student learning. Hattie tells us that the critical change agents are

• Knowledge and skills
• A plan of action
• Strategies to overcome setbacks
• A high sense of confidence
• Monitoring progress
• A commitment to achieve
• Social and environment support
• Freedom, control, or choice

Irina is learning to become a professional exactly along the lines that Hattie is talking about—engaging in specific, precise, evidence-based, high-yield instructional practices. She is learning this because she is part of a comprehensive collective-capacity enterprise. Within the school, she learns from other teachers, the literacy coach, and the principal (and contributes to their learning). They have “data walls” for their use only, where she sees the individual progress for each of her 20 students, and that of the other 40 students in the other two Grade-2 classes. She meets with the team, including the principal who participates as a learner and leader in assessing samples of student work, in order to identify corrective action.

Irina gets a chance to practice new instructional methods with feedback from the literacy coach. She is a member of the school-leadership team that participates in capacity-building sessions with other schools in the district. The school has access to instructional materials, short video clips demonstrating specific instructional techniques, and cross visitations to other schools farther down the track.

Irina is also part of a buddy-day strategy in her school that the district and her principal introduced. Although it started on a small scale, buddy days are now once a month. Every grade-level primary teacher (Grades 1–3) is buddied with a teacher at the junior level (Grades 4–6). The two buddied teachers plan the buddy-day monthly activities together. This allows the teachers to plan a twoday activity. One day, the junior teacher would be supervising the whole group; the next day the primary teacher would be overseeing the group as they complete the activity. Older children have the opportunity to explain and lead the activity with their younger buddies. The buddy days focus on literacy and math. The activities developed are kept in a binder for wider sharing and reference about hands-on teaching with mixed age groupings. All activities are assessed in terms of their impact on student engagement and learning. The principal participates as a learner in all sessions, as part of working with teachers in a collaborative way in order to focus the school on high-yield strategies. The we-we commitment that gets generated among the children and the teachers is enormous. The sense of allegiance to one’s peers and to the school as a whole that gets generated by these purposeful collaborations is palpable. Collective pride and desire to do better is evident everywhere.

All of this works. Irina’s school has gone from 33% of its students scoring high proficiency on the province’s annual assessment of literacy to 82% in three years! As the principal and teachers experienced initial success (one could say as they began to know what they were doing), they began to involve parents and the community. She is involved in the school’s multifaceted efforts that include parent/family town hall sessions, street festivals, heritage and English language classes, food nights, extensive use of the school facilities including the library. Irina and her colleagues also have a keen interest in participating in the province’s new “early-learning initiative,” which includes health, nutrition, and other care for preschoolers (nine months to three years of age), full-day service for all four-and five-year-olds, and extended day for all children preschool to eight-years-old.

Albert Quah is a student success teacher (SST) in a diversely populated high school of 1,300 students. His job is to help kids who might be on the verge of failing or dropping out to reengage in their education, and to connect to those who recently left to see if he can get them back in school. He knows the literature that says that often the difference between staying or going for many borderline students is whether they have a meaningful relationship with one or more caring adults. He also knows that it is not just a matter of caring, but whether these students, many of them bright, have something meaningful at school that interests them. Thus, Albert must care, but he also must help to make program innovations.

Albert and his colleagues have done the following things. The province has a Grade-10 mandatory literacy test called the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT), which students must pass to graduate from high school. He and the instructionally oriented principal and leadership team lead the blitzing of OSSLT preparation. The whole school is involved in after-school programs for small groups of students who need help; within-school small classes for certain groups, and the highly successful PLANT (peer literacy and numeracy tutoring) initiative in which Grade-11 and -12 students are trained to work with Grade-9 and -10 students. The program is a huge success in which both tutors and tutees learn (to the point where several of the tutors get so turned on that they plan to become future teachers).

Albert and his colleagues also run “rescue and recovery” courses for students who are letting certain courses sink. Students must earn a certain number of credits in order to receive a high school diploma. If they get behind in credits in Grades 9 and 10, most never catch up. Through analyzing the data on individual student profiles, the school discovered that as many as 25% of the students were falling behind. Knowing which students in which subjects were failing, Albert’s job as SST is to work specifically on helping students do something about it. They use two innovations—“credit rescue” and “credit recovery.” Credit rescue comes into play before the student has actually failed the course. Working with the particular teachers, faltering students are identified partway through the course and interventions are made that increase the student’s chance of passing the course—activities such as help with personal problems, tutoring, classroom assistance, e-learning, and so on.

Credit recovery takes place after a student has failed a course. The credit recovery team, chaired by one of the most respected science teachers, approves each case. In many cases, students who failed did well on 40% or so of the material. Once a student is approved, a course is designed that has the student working on only those course requirements in which he or she has been unsuccessful. The course is designed specifically for the individual student and must meet the rigor of all other courses. The evaluation process includes course work and a culminating activity.

Albert and his student-success coordinator at the district office have taken the credit accumulation question one step further. Why wait until a student is in need of rescue or recovery? Instead, they have begun to identify those students, by name, coming from their feeder schools into Grade 9, who might be at risk. They know these names in August, before the school year has begun, and they provide targeted support related to both personal and schooling issues where needed. They don’t even have a name for this initiative (credit anticipation?). They know what all successful systems know—intervene early and as often as necessary.

Another more radical and highly successful program innovation is called the high skills major (HSM). New specialties are created for students who find the abstract academic program not to their liking. They have little interest in and are not good at abstract thinking just for the sake of it. Normally, such students get increasingly alienated, drop out, or get streamed to dead-end technical courses. HSM is not just for nonacademic students; many “academic students” are also in the program. This is what sets HSM apart from traditional (and dead-end) vocational programs. The idea is to combine intellectual and practical work in various ways for all students. (As an aside, many so-called academic courses are not all that theoretical or intellectual anyway; good theory must be grounded in practice, and vice-versa).

The HSM programs allows schools and districts to work with employers and community groups to create packages of courses leading to employment and further learning. Albert knows that HSMs have been created in other schools in areas such as mining, tourism, agriculture, and manufacturing, which include links to colleges for further postsecondary learning and credentials. Albert, given the interests of some of his students, proposes and gets approval to offer an HSM in transportation. One of the girls, alienated from most of her courses, becomes interested. It turns out that she and her father race cars on the weekend, and she knows a great deal about engines. Early in the course, she asks her teacher if it would be okay if her father brought their racecar to school. Two weeks later, a flatbed truck pulls into the parking lot with a gleaming racecar that looks like it has been plucked from the Formula 1 Grand Prix circuit. That girl is...

Table des matières

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Dedication
• PART I. The System
• PART II. Getting There
• PART III. A New Era
• References
• Index