Michael Fullan's Six Secrets to Change

THE SIX SECRETS OF CHANGE 

by Michael Fullan

Secret One: Love Your Employees

Child-first stances in education are misleading and incomplete.  The principal should value teachers as much as children. (in a way that everyone benefits)
Loving and investing in your employees in relation to a high-quality purpose is the bedrock of success.

Secret Two: Connect Peers with Purpose

The solution to the too tight-too loose dilemma in management of a system is purposeful peer interaction.
Just collaborating is not enough to ensure learning and growth in the workplace because of the possibility of groupthink.  Three factors must be present to ensure collaboration is purposeful:

-         Organizational and individual values must align

-         Information and knowledge about effective practices must be openly shared

-         Monitoring mechanisms must be in place

In education, the Ontario Focused Intervention Partnership is a good example of successful lateral capacity building.
When peers interact with purpose, they provide their own built-in accountability.

Secret Three: Capacity Building Prevails
Advice for a new leader: Don’t roll your eyes on day one when you see practice that is less than effective by your standards.  Instead, invest in capacity building while suspending short-term judgment.

Secret Four: Learning Is The Work

Organizations face a consistency-innovation dilemma: How to stay consistently focused on core goals while at the same time learning continuously how to get better.

Consistency and innovation can both be achieved through organized learning in context. (that is, reflective practice – learning while working)  Consistency is achieved by precisely identifying (and adhering to) the key practices that are crucial to success.

Professional development programs and courses, even when they are good, often fail to bring about positive change because they are removed from the setting in which teachers work.

Secret Five: Transparency Rules  

Transparency involves being open about results and practices and is an exercise in pursuing and nailing down problems that recur and identifying evidence-informed responses to them.

Effective data comparisons for schools:

-         Compare a school with itself – the progress it is making when compared to previous years

-         Compare a school with its statistical neighbours

-         Examine school results to an external or absolute standard

Secret Six: Systems Learn
A key reason why organizations do not sustain learning is that they focus on individual leaders.  As individual leaders come and go, the company engages in episodic ups and downs.

In schools, rotating principals creates a perpetual carousel where schools move up and down with depressing regularity.

Systems learn by:

1. Developing many leaders working in concert
2. Having leaders approach complexity with a combination of humility and confidence

Humility results from a healthy respect for uncertainty and awareness that no matter how smart you are, no matter how much you crunch the data, you can never be certain of a positive outcome.

Four guidelines for leaders:

-         Act and talk as if you were in control and project confidence

-         Take credit and some blame

-         Talk about the future

-         Be specific about the few things that matter and keep repeating them

Use integrative thinking: face constructively the opposing ideas and, instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generate a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new (and better) idea.

Restorative Practices



THE RESTORATIVE PRACTICES HANDBOOK

for Teachers, Disciplinarians, and Administrators

In The Restorative Practices Handbook, authors Bob Costello, Joshua Wachtel, and Ted Wachtel of the International Institute for Restorative Practices begin by describing the 5 components of the Restorative Practices Continuum for educators:

1. Affective Statements

These are expressions of feelings by teachers – either pleasant or unpleasant - that are the result of student behavior.  To be effective, they should be specific, and never demeaning.  A teacher might respond to bullying by a student with “It makes me sad and angry when I hear your taunting your classmate.”

2. Affective Questions

Affective questions challenge students to reflect on misbehavior and its impact.  A teacher could ask a student who misbehaved “Who have you affected, and what do you need to do to make things right?"

 

1. Impromptu Conference

A teacher facilitates a discussion between students in conflict in order to resolve a problem before it escalates.

2. Circles

A teacher facilitates a go-around discussion with students in a class – either as a response to wrongdoing or as a proactive process to establish or reinforce classroom norms.  When circles are used to address conflict, perpetrators are invited to take responsibility for their behavior, and victims are empowered to share their feelings and receive communal support.   

3. Formal Conferences

There are 2 types:

1. Restorative conferences are formal responses to wrongdoing in which all affected by an incident come together with a trained facilitator to discuss what happened.
2. Family group decision making is a 3-step process whereby professionals outline a problem or legal situation, a “community of care” (family) for an offending child develops a written plan, and the community presents the plan as a restorative solution.

Ottawa Catholic teachers, administrators, and support staff receive restorative
 practices training - while experiencing first-hand the power of the circle

In chapter 2, the authors make a case for using restorative interventions as an alternative to traditional disciplinary measures such as suspension.    There case is convincing for a number of reasons:

-       Punishment places offending students in a passive position allowing them to avoid taking responsibility for their actions and not requiring them to either understand or repair the harm they’ve inflicted

-       Punishment doesn’t help offending students develop empathy and they are likely to re-offend

-       Punishment alienates and humiliates students at the very time they are most in need of reintegration and community

-       Punishment stigmatizes offending students as “bad”

-       Punishment does little to restore the self-confidence and feelings of security of victimized students

In contrast, restorative measures actively engage young people in the process of addressing wrongdoing.  Rather than DOING things to students, administrators and teachers do things WITH students.

Through the continuum of restorative practices, administrators and teachers help offending students to understand the harm they have caused and repair the relationships they have compromised.   There is nothing soft about this approach – as students are directed to apologize not only through words but also by their actions. (ie. making restitution, performing community service, etc.)  Offending students will experience shame as they come to understand the pain they have caused others; however, the end result of the process will be that they are forgiven and can “reclaim their good name and rejoin the school community”.  For the victim, there is empathy and a growing confidence that the offending student will no longer be a threat.

The authors conclude with some advice for leaders who wish to implement restorative practices in their schools.  First, school leaders must accept that there is a need for change, acknowledging that traditional approaches to discipline have been ineffective.  They must then develop and articulate to their staffs a clear vision for restorative approaches.   Finally, and most importantly, school leaders must work collaboratively with their staffs and use a balance of pressure and support to effectively bring about change.

Restorative practices banner designed by Mother Teresa
student Katie Heffernan - 'Restorative Works!'