Your school or district has hammered out new vision and mission statements to guide its change efforts. Future trends have been identified, and staff members have been trained in the techniques and processes needed to improve your organization. Now you're anticipating smooth, steady progress toward realizing your vision.
Don't count on it. In a keynote address that raised unsettling questions about the ways we try to bring about change in schools and other organizations, Michael Fullan said that many of the assumptions underlying "systemic reform" efforts are just plain wrong. Real reform will not come about by top-down mandates or efforts to plan change on a massive scale, said Fullan, dean of education at the University of Toronto. Real reform will come about when individuals, guided by a clear moral purpose, join together to work on the issues meaningful to them.
"It's individuals who are going to be the solution to education reform, not systems," Fullan said. "By focusing deeply on the individual, we'll be able to change systems along the way." Fullan's remarks were grounded in "chaos theory" and were liberally sprinkled with findings from research on change and school improvement.
Efforts at systemic reform generally miss the mark in several ways, Fullan said. For one thing, change is not "linear" or able to be mapped out in advance. "No matter how well we plan it...it will not unfold in a linear way; there'll be surprises, there'll be detours, there'll be unpredictable things that happen for better and for worse," he said. Successful change agents "are those poised to learn as the surprises occur."
Another common mistake is assuming that major change will result when an organization develops a common mission and then attempts to "implement" it. "Too many organizations, too many systems, have gotten diverted by trying to develop the vision and the mission statement up front, as if you could `get it right' and then implement it." This results in "a paper product that's held deeply by a few people, but not by the system as a whole." Vision at the system level "is suspect," Fullan said, but "personal vision and moral purpose are essential, and they are the building blocks of shared vision." Educators' moral purpose, he said, ought to be to make a difference in the lives of students.
A third flaw of most reform efforts is that they often rely on top-down mandates to get things done. Yet, "you can't mandate what matters," Fullan said. One can mandate "anything that can be implemented and monitored through strong surveillance," he said. "What we can't mandate are moral purpose, skills, motivation, and commitment." In fact, Fullan questioned whether educators should pay attention to policies and mandates that may conflict with their own moral purpose. "No one in this room should be implementing a particular policy just because it is policy," he said. "That is not a good enough reason for educators with moral purpose."
Systems in general are best for maintaining the status quo, not for generating breakthroughs, Fullan argued. "Systems have a good track record for keeping things the way they are," he said. "Systems don't have a good track record for changing things. Individuals have that track record."
Because it's really not possible to orchestrate systemic change from above, Fullan urged those in attendance to lay the groundwork for change by beginning on their own. "If we wait until top management gives leadership to the change we want to see, we miss the point," he said. "It's individuals, working, first of all, despite the system, and secondly, connecting with other kindred spirits, that will begin to develop the critical mass that changes the system."
