2020
Extending Influence Through the Governance Core
Extending Influence through the Governance Core Fullan and Davis
School Administrator
April 2020
Michael Fullan and Davis Campbell
2019
The Battle of the Century: Catastrophe versus Evolutionary Nirvana
AEL 42, Issue 1
Lead Article
The Unity of the Human Race: Our Precarious Future
Part One: Education Week Blog
Peter DeWitt’s Finding Common Ground
Most Examples of Deep Learning Are Not Deep Enough
Part Two: Education Week Blog
Peter DeWitt’s Finding Common Ground
Going Deeper – ASCD
Educational Leadership
May 2019
Michael Fullan, Mag Gardner, and Max Drummy
19_Fullan Going Deeper Gardner DrummyA Unity of Purpose and Action
By Matt Scott
Communicator
July 2019, Vol 42, Issue 11
Michael Fullan addressing attendees at NAESP’s annual conference. Photo courtesy of Lifetouch®.
During the Pre-K–8 Principals Conference in Spokane, Washington, keynote speaker Michael Fullan highlighted his latest research on deep learning and revealed an inspiring message on how students and teachers respond best if they are focusing on global competencies. Fullan engaged, motivated, and challenged school administrators from across the country to lead students in finding their purpose in life by becoming nuanced leaders.
Overcoming Boredom in Schools
Fullan delivered information to school administrators that shed light on the current state of global education. It wasn’t promising: “Today’s students are bored,” he said. He also noted that inequity in our world is widening, and society is giving schools a bad deal. “The world is troubled, and even 10-year-olds know it.”
But Fullan gave us hope with his research on deep learning innovations: Goodness can evolve but only when special conditions are met, and as a human race, we can help create and meet those conditions when we have unity.
Finding a Purpose in Life
Fullan also challenged us to help students define and find their life purpose by leading and guiding them to see themselves as people who can contribute to bettering our world. Research shows that only 24 percent of high school students are pursuing a purpose for their life. Many focus on just getting good grades as a pathway to college and a career.
In today’s world, that’s not good enough. Students need to be good at learning and at life, said Fullan. His recommendation? Change our students with the following phrase: “Engage the world, change the world.”
New Types of Learning
Fullan explained the types of learning we should be transitioning to so we can be the change agents in our schools. It should be “irresistibly engaging, elegantly efficient, technologically ubiquitous, steeped in real-life problem-solving, and involve deep learning—quality learning that sticks with you the rest of your life and learning that engages the world and changes the world.”
Fullan’s book Deep Learning: Engage the World Change the World breaks down deep learning into the process of acquiring six global competencies, known as the six C’s: character, citizenship, collaboration, communication, creativity, and critical thinking.
These competencies encompass compassion, empathy, social-emotional learning, entrepreneurialism, and other related skills to becoming successful in our complex world. Fullan warned, “We will fail to spark the passion of our students if we are not teaching the six C’s.”
Takeaways
To maximize the impact of deep learning on students, Fullan encouraged us to create a shared ownership with teachers and reminded us that successful change processes are a function of shaping and reshaping good ideas as they build capacity. This process comes through the creation of collaborative structures, which must be nourished through teacher learning and development.
According to Fullan, the No. 1 influencer in student achievement was collective teacher efficacy. A successful collective efficacy among teachers can be created in an environment that provides frequent and specific collaboration. He calls it professional collaboration with purpose.
Finally, Fullan redefines the moral imperative as “raising the bar and closing the gap in both learning/academic achievement and in doing well in life.” To close the learning/achievement gap in schools and set up students also do well in life, we, as school administrators, must self-reflect and decide whether we are what he Fullan calls “surfacers or nuancers.” Surfacers treat problems as technical by concentrating on steps to the solutions, whereas nuancers work with key principles that lead to adjustable actions, which involves concepts and practical skills that require deep reflective actions.
Nuanced leaders are curious, humble, loyal to a better future, proud to celebrate success, open, and courageously and relentlessly committed to changing the system for the betterment of humanity, said Fullan. They’re able to connect to people, look below the surface, and change people’s emotions instead of their minds.
Fullan ended his keynote by encouraging us to be leaders who lead, listen, learn, and ask questions. He also encouraged us to model and mentor leadership in others so we could create a collaborative culture in our school to the point we become dispensable. Fullan stated there could be no progress without a unity of purpose and action that involved a sense of collective purpose to make improvements. As nuanced leaders, we can “engage the world and change the world.”
Matt Scott is principal at Creekside Primary in Harvest, Alabama.
California’s Golden Opportunity: Learning is the Work
For the past six years California has been diligently pursuing statewide success in student achievement. They are now poised to go the distance. With a new governor and new state superintendent and an agenda to build on. Read our new report: “California’s Golden Opportunity: Learning is the Work” and see the Six Key Recommendations for success. Watch for one of the most exciting system change possibilities in US education!
19_California's Golden Opportunity Learning is the Work.June3Our Increasingly Troubled World Creates an Engaging Opportunity for Students
Education Week Blog
By Peter DeWitt
April 28, 2019
Today’s guest blog, Part Two of two blogs, is written by Michael Fullan, an international expert on leadership and school systems.
We know that the world is becoming increasingly troubled because of climate change, unclear and diminished job markets, growing inequity, increased anxiety and stress, wild and unpredictable technology, deterioration of trust, and crumbling social cohesion. This has had an incredible impact on education because in many ways this all plays out in our schools. It also provides a great opportunity to transform schooling so that it simultaneously serves students and society. The new moral imperative in education is not just “college ready” but rather becoming good at learning and good at life.
In partnership with schools and systems in eight countries, we (see our team below) co-developed a framework that enabled us to pursue, discover, and develop radically new learning ways for students assisted by their teachers. It starts with six Global Competencies:
Character – Proactive stance toward life and learning to learn, grit, tenacity, perseverance and resilience, empathy, compassion, and integrity in action.
Citizenship – A global perspective, commitment to human equity and well-being through empathy and compassion for diverse values and worldviews, genuine interest in human and environmental sustainability, solving ambiguous and complex problems in the real world to benefit citizens.
Collaboration – Working interdependently as a team, interpersonal and team-related skills, social, emotional, and intercultural skills, managing team dynamics and challenges.
Communication – Communication designed for audience and impact, message advocates a purpose and makes an impact, reflection to further develop and improve communication, voice and identity expressed to advance humanity.
Creativity – Economic and social entrepreneurialism, asking the right inquiry questions, pursuing and expressing novel ideas and solutions, leadership to turn ideas into action.
Critical Thinking – Evaluating information and arguments, making connections and identifying patterns, meaningful knowledge construction, experimenting, reflecting and taking action on ideas in the real world.
To support the six Cs we developed four learning pillars: partnerships, high-yield pedagogy, learning environment, and leveraging digital technologies. Finally, we identified three sets of enabling conditions at the school, district and policy levels.
We have often observed that 80 percent of the best ideas come from leading practitioners. In this partnership, two powerful ideas emerged from the work that were at best implicit in the initial framework: one we ended up calling “engage the world, change the world,” related was the necessary and profound relationship between “learning and well-being.”
Engage the World, Change the World
This is Dewey, Freire 2.0. Deep learning can only occur if the learner is examining the world they live in and having an eye to improving it. It is not so much that this represents a good thing to do, but rather it is the only way to live—the only way to learn in complex society! You can’t learn if you don’t engage the world, big or small. And you can’t learn if you are not intimately linking your learning to how to improve the situation.
Students love to understand and do something about things in the world that need attention—whether it is addressing homelessness, protecting the garden from predatory birds, learning how to address inequity, dealing with severe living conditions, or examining the future of jobs. The best way to learn anything worthwhile is to engage the world with the idea of understanding it with an eye to changing it for the better. It was Kurt Lewin who observed: “If you want to understand something, try changing it.” Our motto is “engage the world as a learner, and you will inevitably find yourself in a change situation.”
If school could become an institution of engaging the world with the natural idea of understanding it, deep learning would flourish. Masses of students would learn more and develop an active penchant for improving things.
Learning and well-being as partners
Getting to college—getting to the best college—has distorted learning. Certainly students and parents can be the worst culprits. The current scandal of Hollywood actors paying their way to get their children clandestinely into the best universities is a case in point. And many a student has expressed and acted in a way that explicitly said: “I’d rather have a good grade than participate in deep learning.” But something else is happening. Stress and anxiety are increasing for all students regardless of SES. The greater the emphasis on learning at all cost, the greater the anxiety. It is not easy to correct this, but such a perverse system serves only about the top 20 percent. And, as it turns out, it doesn’t even serve them well.
We are finding that students and their parents respond to the argument that learning and well-being are intimately connected. They know that you can go through school, get good grades, and still not be good at life. They know that many students who are doing well academically are stressed out and not necessarily heading in the right direction. In effect, they have a deal with the devil. Do well at all costs regardless of the consequences.
And then we have the majority who are not being served by the present system. They suffer from all the prejudices of the present system that limits their opportunity, as well as the conditions under which they live.
Increasingly, all groups suffer in the present system. Students across the spectrum are stressed. One of the natural outlets for addressing the situation is deep learning. Broadly, I think that most students are ambivalent. Many of them want the grades, almost at any cost. But we also have found that once well-being is introduced, there is a tendency to want to develop it. We use the term “connectedness” as a proxy for well-being. In our work, learning and well-being are treated as equal synergizing partners. This is not a matter of ‘”bolting on” SEL to enhance academic grades. It is the recognition that the new moral imperative puts learning and well-being on equal footing.
In short, we see an increased attention to the notion that learning and well-being are natural allies. Students see it, too. They intuitively know that deep learning and connectedness must be integrated as one phenomenon.
All and all, in the two blogs presented, we have the measures required to address the massive and growing inequities that are relentlessly trending in society. Deep learning, as we practice it with our partners, is good for all students but is especially effective for those students who are most disconnected from schooling and society.
Conclusion
Society is becoming increasingly complex. Ironically and worryingly, at the same time student engagement in schools is dramatically decreasing. We need to reverse this trend
The future of humankind depends on the massive mobilization of students as agents of change. Such mobilization requires partnerships with students and adults. This can be done through the two learning pathways discussed in the companion Part 1 Blog (the ‘pedagogical’ and the ‘political’ pathways), combined with the two powerful phenomena discussed in this blog—integrating “engaging the world” and well-being. It is no longer far-fetched to suggest that societal survival depends on these four forces in concert.
Michael Fullan, O.C., is the Global Leadership Director, New Pedagogies for Deep Learning and a worldwide authority on educational reform with a mandate of helping to achieve the moral purpose of all children learning.
For more information from our team, see: Fullan, Quinn and McEachen, Deep Learning: Engage the World Change the World (Corwin 2018), and Dive Into Deep Learning: Tools for Engagement. Quinn, McEachen, Fullan, Gardner & Drummy, Corwin, in press).
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.
Why Pedagogy and Politics Must Partner
Education Week Blog
By Peter DeWitt
April 25, 2019
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/finding_common_ground/2019/04/why_pedagogy_and_politics_must_partner.html
Today’s guest blog is written by Michael Fullan, an international expert on leadership and school systems.
Five years ago, we started to work with education systems on “deep learning.” We did this partly because increasing numbers of students were bored with regular schooling—as many as 70 percent were disengaged.
However, we also found that the world was becoming increasingly troubled because of climate change, an unclear and diminished job market, growing inequity, increased anxiety and stress, wild and unpredictable technology, deterioration of trust, increased inequity, and crumbling social cohesion.
Overall, one could say that far from being an agent of local and global improvement, education was increasingly on the receiving end of a bad society.
Through our work, we co-developed with our partners in schools a framework that enabled and supported the work. It focused on six Global Competencies: character, citizenship, collaboration, communication, creativity, and critical thinking.
To support the six competencies, we developed four learning pillars that support deep learning: partnerships, high-yield pedagogy, learning environment, and leveraging digital technologies. The competencies and pillars in turn were linked to conditions at the school, district (or region), and system levels.
We found that deep learning well implemented gave students a sense of focus and increased their consciousness of being a learner. I will label this the “pedagogical pathway.” Recently, a new strand is emerging that I will call the “political pathway.” Both of these must be pursued and feed on each other as students negotiate their way through life.
Why Pedagogy and Politics Pathways Must Partner
A pedagogical pathway is paved with “engaging (learning about) the world,” and “changing it for the better.” Pedagogical efficacy is not sufficient for all changes in the lives of our students. It will certainly help the individual do better in life. And many individuals and groups will take up aspects of societal improvement after they leave school, but it won’t be enough to change education policy. What now is emerging is the possibility that pedagogical savvy and political action may make for a surprising combination with students as a force for change.
Ontario has long been seen globally as one of the best-performing education systems in the world. Whether it be the results from the Programme for International Student Assessments (PISA) or from the research that has come out of Ontario focusing on inclusion, equity or literacy, Ontario has shown great success.
Conservative populism has taken hold in various places around the world, where ideology takes precedence over evidence. Ontario’s newly elected government is no exception as it continues its attack on critical fundamentals that heretofore have made Ontario a global leader. The government tried to roll back the sex-ed curriculum to a 1995 version but had to retreat due to widespread criticism. Another action that the government took in March caught people’s attention in a big way—especially on the part of students. The government announced that it would increase class size from 22 to 28 students in high schools, resulting in the loss of 3,500 positions, which would be accommodated through attrition. This meant, for example, that students entering grade 9 would experience their entire high school tenure with hardly any new teachers being hired.
In this context, our work on deep learning is critical to a more informed and democratic future. In the case in hand, and seemingly at the speed of light, the students in the province organized a demonstration that resulted in a protest of more than 100,000 students that occurred on April 4 and was reported by the Toronto Star newspaper. The government quickly dismissed the event as organized by teachers’ union leaders that they called “thugs.”
The students became incensed and sent Premier Doug Ford the following letter on April 6:
We, the provincial organizers of ‘Students Say No’, felt it necessary to release an official statement to Doug Ford [Premier], Lisa Thompson [Minister], and the Ford government as a whole in response to their disrespectful, dismissive, and completely false allegations about the origins of our movement.
‘Students Say No’ was founded by Natalie Moore, a grade 12 student from the Avon Maitland District School Board in rural Ontario [the education minister’s own riding (electoral district)]. Natalie decided to start the walkout after hearing about the proposed cuts that she knew would be absolutely catastrophic to the education system we have here in Ontario, as well as to its most vulnerable students. Quickly, the movement spread across social media, and she was joined by the student organization March for Our Education as well as thousands of students across Ontario. There was absolutely no union or adult involvement at all in any part of our journey, and honestly, I ‘m sure you know this. We would greatly appreciate it if you stopped lying to the people of this province in order to discredit our work.
The movement spread quickly because students care about their education and are begging to be heard. To claim that this walkout was organized, orchestrated, or puppeteered by adults is not only false, but extremely insulting to the young people of Ontario. The attempts to diminish these efforts speak for your government loud and clear: You are scared of us. The youth of Ontario are a force to be reckoned with, and we took this opportunity to show you exactly how strong we are, and you’ve made it clear as day that our strength terrifies you.
What you must understand is that this province is a democracy, not a dictatorship. You can’t ignore, discount, and dismiss the voices of people who are telling you that you’re harming them. You’re here to serve us, not the other way around, and we the students will not stand for having our voices and our lives ignored.
You do not sit in these classrooms. You do not have to take these online courses. You do not suffer from these cuts. The people who see the difference in class sizes and online learning and autism funding are telling you that this will not work for the students of Ontario, and you’re making the conscious decision to ignore us. We are smart enough to know when we are being shortchanged for your own gain. And we are tired of being disrespected—being told that we don’t have the autonomy, the power, or the responsibility to organize ourselves. We are the students, and we’re making our voices heard. It would be wise to listen.
Signed,
The letter was signed by two student organizers—the first of whom was Natalie, who goes to school in one of our Deep Learning Districts with all of its 10 secondary schools involved in deep learning implementation.
On April 6, 10,000 teachers demonstrated, many of them inspired by their students but also having their own agenda. On April 10, the Toronto Star published another article with the headline: “Students at North York’s Emery C.I. have always felt left behind. Fighting Ford’s cuts helped them raise their voice.”. The article focused on why the students spoke out and how they felt after they did. There were many great points by the students, but one that stood out is:
“Emery has not been heard before in that way. It really empowers us. It just allows us to say, ‘Well you know, we do have a voice.’ ” And, “We need more than a teacher, we need a student-teacher relationship, because a school is a safe place for us. The school is a place where we forget about our financial problems, we forget about our father being jobless, we forget about our mother being disabled.”
Students, in other words, were speaking for equity and had the sensitivity to know that quality relationships with their teachers are critical factors for their learning and well-being.
Conclusion
The two statements above from students reflect the political pathway of deep learning on the rise. School doesn’t directly prepare students to be political. However, we are finding that deep pedagogical learning (Engage the world, Change the world) predictably makes them more sensitive to their environments, locally and globally. It doesn’t mean that the students will always be right, just that they should be a partner in education improvement that should be taken seriously.
Political sensitivity and action are a natural byproduct of “engaging the world, changing the world.” The stronger the pedagogical base, the more effective the political pathway if the latter is chosen. In this context, our work on deep learning is critical to a more informed and democratic future in dealing with the increasing disrespect for evidence. Is it an accident that those who eschew evidence in relation to their self-serving ideological pursuits seem to disrespect and disinvest in high-quality education that is designed to develop effective problem-solvers. Students in Ontario are serving notice that governments will be held to the same standards of evidence that that they themselves expect as students of a high-quality education system.
Additionally, environments are deteriorating. One item of particular significance is the relentless increase of inequity. We have found that deep learning is good for all students but is particularly good for students who are disaffected. In this domain, the pedagogical and political pathways can combine as a particularly powerful combination. Deep learning students are needed as part of determining societal solutions. The combination of deep learning (the pedagogical pathway) and political action (the political pathway) may turn out to be the strongest force we have ever seen in the cause of social justice and high-quality education essential for the rest of the 21st century.
Michael Fullan, O.C., is the global leadership director, New Pedagogies for Deep Learning and a worldwide authority on educational reform with a mandate of helping to achieve the moral purpose of all children learning.
A former dean of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) of the University of Toronto, Michael advises policymakers and local leaders around the world to provide leadership in education. Michael received the Order of Canada in December 2012. He holds honorary doctorates from several universities in North America and abroad.
For more information from our team, see: Fullan, Quinn and McEachen, Deep Learning: Engage the World Change the World (Corwin 2018), and Dive Into Deep Learning: Tools for Engagement. Quinn, McEachen, Fullan, Gardner & Drummy, Corwin, in press).
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock
2018
The Principalship has Changed:
2020 Here We Come!
Principal Connections
Fall 2018, Volume 22, Issue 1
Michael Fullan
The Fast Track to
Sustainable Turnaround
Educational Leadership
March 2018
Michael Fullan & Michelle Pinchot
2017
2016
Bringing the Profession Back In:
Call to Action
Published by Learning Forward, this 12-page article, written by Michael Fullan and Andy Hargreaves is a call to action. Building on the Canada study, Fullan and Hargreaves outline an argument for meaningful professional learning and development. They conclude with actions for teachers, systems, and Canada to take to establish a culture of collaborative professionalism.
Developing Humanity:
Education’s Emerging Role
This 3-page article, written by Michael Fullan for Principal Connections, the Catholic Principals’ Council, addresses declining student engagement in traditional classrooms, the lure of the digital world, and millennials’ motivation to help humanity. The new leadership required is emerging at the school, district and system levels, in part through the New Pedagogies for Deep Learning (NPDL) and six factors outlined in the article.
Inside-Out and Downside-Up: Global Think Piece (February)
The Global Dialogue Think Piece, by Michael Fullan and Steve Munby, was written to stimulate participants at the Global Dialogue Webinar to debate the challenges and opportunities presented by cluster-based school collaboration when used as a vehicle for school improvement. Following the Global Dialogue event that took place on February 11, 2016, Fullan and Munby updated their paper to reflect reaction and input from John Hattie, Viviane Robinson and hundreds of other school teachers and leaders.
Inside-Out and Downside-Up: Global Think Piece (January)
This Global Dialogue Think Piece, by Michael Fullan and Steve Munby, was written to stimulate participants at the Global Dialogue Webinar to debate the challenges and opportunities presented by cluster-based school collaboration when used as a vehicle for school improvement.