The Power of Unstoppable Momentum. Michael Fullan

Michael Fullan, PhD, is former dean of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Recognized as an international authority on educational reform, Michael engages in training, consulting, and evaluating change projects around the world. Many countries use his ideas for managing change.

Michael helped lead the evaluation team that conducted the assessment of the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategy in England from 1998 to 2003. Later, he was appointed special adviser to the premier and minister of education in Ontario, a post that he still holds.

In December 2012, Michael received the Order of Canada, one of Canada’s highest civilian honors. The Order of Canada was established in 1967 to recognize a lifetime of outstanding achievement, dedication to community, and service to the nation.

Michael bases his work on the moral purpose of education as it is applied in schools and school systems to bring about major improvements. He has written several best-selling books that have been translated into many languages. His latest books include Leadership: Key Competencies for Whole-System Change (with Lyle Kirtman); The Principal: Three Keys to Maximizing Impact; Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School (with Andy Hargreaves); Freedom to Change: Four Strategies to Put Your Inner Drive Into Overdrive; Coherence: The Right Drivers in Action for Schools, Districts, and Systems (with Joanne Quinn); and Indelible Leadership: Always Leave Them Learning.

To learn more about Michael’s work, visit www.michaelfullan.ca or follow him on Twitter @MichaelFullan1.

Mark A. Edwards, EdD, serves as senior vice president of digital learning for Discovery Education. He previously served as superintendent of the Mooresville Graded School District from 2007–2016.

Mark was named the 2013 School Superintendents Association (AASA) National Superintendent of the Year and the 2013 North Carolina Superintendent of the Year. He also served as Superintendent of Henrico County Public Schools from 1994–2004. He was named the Virginia Superintendent of the Year in 2001 and was the recipient of the Harold McGraw Prize in Education in 2003.

Mark was on the founding board of directors of the Digital Promise League of Innovative Schools and AASA’s Digital Consortium. Mark received North Carolina’s prestigious Order of the Long Leaf Pine Award in 2013 and the Public School Forum of North Carolina Jay Robinson Education Leadership Award in 2014.

Mark has been recognized as a pioneer in one-to-one computing and has published two books related to this work, Every Child, Every Day: A Digital Conversion Model for Student Achievement and Thank You for Your Leadership: The Power of Distributed Leadership in a Digital Conversion Model.

Follow Mark on Twitter @MarkEdw22.

To book Michael Fullan or Mark A. Edwards for professional development, contact [email protected].

introduction

UNSTOPPABLE FORCES

Change is inexorable. This is not a revelatory idea, but it is essential for district leaders to understand that the change forces at work in our schools, including rapid technology development, require us to adapt our teaching practices to work in concert with these forces instead of acting as a buttress against them. Indeed, district leaders that embrace whole-system change, continually learning and adapting their district’s methods to the times, better maintain long-term sustainability and accentuate all the benefits that change can bring.

Whole-system change has three core characteristics: (1) it is about changing all the schools in a district, state, or province and not just a few schools; (2) it always zeroes in on changing pedagogy—the way students learn; and (3) it always develops and traces the causal pathways to impact on measurable student learning outcomes.

In this book, we closely examine certain unstoppable forces. But that doesn’t mean that such forces automatically do good things; in fact, this book is about how to harness the powerful dynamics present in our culture and convert them into beneficial, deep system changes. There are four themes underway in education that are unstoppable.

1. Traditional schooling is outdated, and students (and we think many teachers) will no longer tolerate the status quo. Boredom and alienation are big push factors.

2. Ubiquitous digital innovation, coupled with social media and other networks, no longer aligns with the hierarchy of existing governance models.

3. New modes of learning—new powerful pedagogies, if you will—are unleashing motivational forces across the spectrum of students. Indeed, we argue that the combination of new pedagogies and digital resources provides opportunities to engage historically disadvantaged students in ways heretofore impossible.

4. New forms of leadership, which we identify in this book, are bringing about positive change. Some of these forces come from the middle—the layer between the

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