Fullan, M., & Quinn, J. (2016). Coherence: The right drivers in action for schools, districts, and systems. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
· Chapter 2, “Focusing Direction” (pp. 17–46)
Fostering moral imperative in others is not about giving inspirational speeches. Effective leaders foster moral purpose when they do the following:
• Build relationships with everyone, including those who disagree, are skeptical, or even cynical.
• Listen and understand the perspective of others.
• Demonstrate respect for all. • Create conditions to connect others around that purpose.
• Examine with staff evidence of progress.
Great leaders connect others to the reasons they became educators— their moral purpose. They make purpose part of the organization’s DNA by creating opportunities for people to make meaning of the possibilities, work on aspects of the challenge, and achieve success. From working together, they build a deeper understanding of their shared moral purpose, a common language for communicating more effectively, and deeper commitment. However, by itself, moral imperative is not a strategy, so leaders will only realize their moral imperative by developing a small number of actionable and shared goals. Then they learn and build capacity and commitment through purposeful doing.
Goals That Impact What Matters Most
The problem is not the absence of goals in districts and schools today but the presence of too many that are ad hoc, unconnected, and ever- changing. Multiple mandates from states and districts combine with the allure of grants and innovations, resulting in overload and fragmentation. The overload results from too many goals, projects, and initiatives. Even
if they are good ideas, the sheer volume makes it impossible for people to manage in a way that gives depth. The second problem is fragmentation. Even when the goals are the right ones, they may not be experienced as connected ideas by the users. People see them as discrete demands with little or no connection to each other or their daily work; scrambling to implement too many directions and lacking a coherent sense of how they connect results in paralysis and frustration.
You can either remain a victim of these—one can almost say natu- ral circumstances in complex society—or you can turn the tables. One could easily say that the bigger system should “get its act together,” but don’t hold your breath. Our framework and the ideas within enable you to take greater control. You can achieve success under current condi- tions, as we will shortly show. And if enough of you do it, the system will change.
We illustrate with three districts that operate within the same politi- cal, funding, and demographic constraints as neighboring school dis- tricts yet manage to provide coherent direction and consistent results. York Region District School Board in Ontario, Canada, has over 200 schools. It created instructional coherence and corresponding individual and collective capacity with a decade-long focus on literacy, resulting in substantial gains for students. The lit- eracy focus guided all decisions, was a beacon for assessing needs and successes, and ensured a common language and knowledge base for everyone.
We see similar patterns in Garden Grove Unified (Knudson, 2013) and Long Beach Unified (Mourshed, Chijioke, & Barber, 2010) in California, where both districts have sustained a consistent, clear focus and strategy for instructional improvement with persistence, despite political, budget, and demographic changes. The solution lies in devel- oping limited goals, persisting, and avoiding distractors. In other words, these leaders turned the table on overload and fragmentation to estab- lish continuous focused direction.
In 2014, the York Region District School Board appointed a new director (superintendent). Although the appointment was from within the district, the new director has a mandate to revisit and renew the vision. We are currently working with the York Region District School Board as they
develop an updated vision and direction for the next period. It will need to be focused, inspiring, and engaging for students and educators at all levels of the system.
As we think about York Region and other districts at the early stage of developing a new direction, we note one of the most important change insights we have learned about visioning and coherence. It is a mistake to overload the front end with massive amounts of input from all constituen- cies in the absence of action. It is much more effective to shorten the front- end process and overload, so to speak, by implementing action, learning from it, and grounding the vision in practice. Once again, it is learning by purposeful doing that counts most.
In another large district, we work with (240 schools, high English- language learner [ELL] needs, and huge diversity), we see the promis- ing struggles in action to overcome a history of fragmented overload. The district has achieved success for students but over the years has initiated a myriad of programs, projects, and initiatives to meet the changing needs of its population. Principals and teachers are proud of the district but describe feeling overwhelmed and unsure what the real priorities are when there are so many. The district recognizes that future success depends on a much clearer focus. This scenario of overload and fragmentation is not uncom- mon and could be happening in any state, province, or district. Figuring out what the small number of ambitious goals ought to be and staying focused on them is a challenge. This means reducing the number of goals and strategies, giving people experiences that show the integration (not just coordination) of the goals and strategies, learning as you go, and con- stantly reiterating the direction and how well you are progressing. Talking the walk is what we call this process.
We recommend a four-step approach to tackling what we have called the problem of “initiativitis.”
Avoid excuses and blame. Review the data, and avoid the “yeah, but” syndrome. Establish norms that resist the blame game of “overload is because of xyz’s focus while my initiative is essential.” Remember that the projects and initiatives were likely implemented as solid approaches to a perceived need at the time. The problem is not the quality but the cumula- tive effect, volume, overlap, and lack of clarity or connections. Be careful not to have a lengthy front-end process.
2. Build a Collaborative Approach
Recognize that finding solutions to complex problems requires the intel- ligence and talents of everyone. Create a task team that is small but repre- sentative of the layers of the organization to strategize a plan and provide leadership.
The senior leadership team must develop a common language and approach that is sustained and communicated consistently across the sys- tem. All parts of the organization, including unions, classified staff, stu All parts of the organization, including unions, classified staff, stu- dents, and parents, must feel they have a place in the process. Collaboration during initial and ongoing implementation is especially crucial.
3. Develop a Clear strategy: Reduce, Reframe, Remove
Reduce the clutter and overload by listing (on sticky notes, for example) and examining current initiatives with a view to reducing and clustering them:
• Avoid the temptation of trying to realign them or cluster them into a new picture of the old way. Start with student learning. Ask, “What learning do we want for our students?” instead of starting with, for example, “How do we implement the Common Core State Standards (CCSS)?”
• Identify the umbrella focus that captures this vision. It may be 21st century learning, literate learners, college and career readiness, literacy, or others. The process needs to be inclusive enough to involve everyone.
• Name the two or three ambitious goals you will need to pursue if you want to attain this vision,
4. Cultivate Engagement
Communicate often, and listen even more often. Avoid overreliance on print or digital media, and instead, engage all groups with the goals and strategy, allowing rich conversations to develop meaning for everyone. Use social media to reinforce these discussions. Cycles of sharing and revision will lead to a common language about the direction, deeper understanding, and commitment.
Build opportunities to check with all groups regularly over time—for example, assistant superintendents can begin all main meetings with prin- cipals or schools by articulating the goals and strategy (we witnessed this in York Region; it takes fewer than 10 minutes) then checking progress by asking the following: What is going well? What do we need to be worry- ing about or taking action on? Giving an authentic forum for consistent,
Clarity of Strategy
Clarity and coherence are not just about goals; crucially, they are also about strategy. Clarity is subjective—is it clear in people’s minds and actions? Can people talk the walk with ease and specificity? We define coherence as a shift in shared mind-set rather than alignment, which is about getting the structures right. Alignment on paper does not generate clarity. New cultures do. For example, a district or school could use the steps just given in the last section and create a set of goals and strategy that was carefully aligned on paper. The strategies and resources could be conceptually linked to the goals. None of this will give participants the experiences and capacity to become clear on what it means in practice (in this sense, clarity follows capacity more than it precedes it). In other words, developing new skills (capacities)—especially
with others—increases clarity and, in turn, commitment. Getting traction on coherence in whole system change means building purposeful and continuous interaction over time with an expectation for all schools to improve learning for all students. Clarity, thus, precedes coherence.
As we stated in Chapter 1, successful change processes are a function of shaping and reshaping good ideas as they build capacity and ownership. This can be demonstrated by cross-connecting explicitness (the ideas) with change climate (the change process) as we do in Figure 2.2. Coherence becomes a function of the interplay between the growing explicitness of the idea and the change culture.
Figure 2.2
Change Quality Quadrant
Let’s examine the four combinations and the results.
superficiality
Starting with the top left-hand quadrant—low explicitness and a good cli- mate—people are getting along okay, but they are not doing much. We call it superficiality. If the strategy for improvement is not precise, actionable, and clear, we may see activity but at very superficial levels.
inertia
In many ways, the bottom left-hand quadrant represents the history of the teaching profession—behind the classroom door, where teachers left each other alone. What this means is that teachers had a license to be creative, but they also had a license to be ineffective (and perhaps not even know
it). In the former case, innovative teachers receive little feedback on their ideas, nor do these ideas become available to others. In the case of iso- lated, less than effective teachers, they get little help to improve. We call this inertia—people keep on doing what they are already doing.
Resistance
The bottom right quadrant is also interesting because in this scenario pol- icy makers and others have invested in developing specific innovations (or they buy detailed programs off the shelf)—perhaps with a high degree of explicitness—but they insufficiently involved teachers in developing ownership and new capacities. If the programs in question are sound, they can result in some gains in the short run (tightening an otherwise loose system), but because teachers have not been engaged in shaping the ideas or the strategy the innovation wanes due to lack of ownership. When con- ditions for change are weak, there is low trust or collaboration; therefore, When this is combined with a very directive strategy that makes heavy demands or mandates, resistance and pushback escalate.
Depth
The optimal environment combines a strong climate for change with an explicitness of strategy. When people are operating in conditions of high trust, collaboration, and effective leadership, they are more will- ing to innovate and take risks. If we balance that with a strategy that has precision, clarity, and measures of success, we see changes imple- mented with depth and impact. We will see more of this in Chapter 4 on deepening learning.
This organizer builds on and extends the concept of flow that sug- gests that optimal experience occurs when challenges are balanced with skills (Csikszentmihalyi, 2008). We propose that organizations need toWe propose that organizations need to find this intersection of high explicitness and strong ownership if they are to challenge and engage high performance. This takes a coherent force of leadership at all levels to set and sustain the new direction and to create the conditions to support growth. At the district level, this may be a coalition of 3 to 20 (depending on the size of the district) key leaders.
who interact continually to have a similar grasp of the core goals as well as the strategies that will be used to implement them. At the school level, teams of teachers and principals play a vital role in designing imple- mentation strategies, building capacity, and monitoring progress. The interplay between a strong climate for change and an explicit strategy for achieving the goals promotes and sustains trust, communication, con- nectedness, and meaningful work.
Change Leadership
The pace and complexity of innovation and change today—combined with the emergence of instant digital connections—is shifting our notions of an effective change process to a much more fluid dynamic. ; however, the new process of change shifts from a notion of sequential, discrete stages of the traditional alignment of policy, resources, skill development, and supports (getting the pieces aligned) to a more organic process of dif- fusion and continuous learning. Under these conditions, the ultimate question is this: How do we help people through the change process and get greater coherence while we are at it? This is the sophistication of change leadership.
It has long been stated that change is a process, not an event. The leader’s role is to manage the transition from the current to the future state. We use a metaphor of two fishbowls to describe the challenge of shifting individuals and organizations from current to future practice (see Figure 2.3).
The difficulty of shifting practice or moving from bowl to bowl is compounded by two additional factors of confidence and competence. Some do not believe they have the ability to make the leap from what they know to the new way of thinking and doing.
The difficulty of shifting practice or moving from bowl to bowl is compounded by two additional factors of confidence and competence. Some do not believe they have the ability to make the leap from what they know to the new way of thinking and doing. Even if they are good swimmers in the current bowl, they do not know if they have the skills to make the leap or be swimmers in the new way. They lack confidence to make the leap. The question of competence is a closely related problem. Some are not good swimmers or leapers and are fearful for good rea- son; others may not have the skills to swim in the new way of thinking.
We have learned a great deal about the ins and outs of change leader- ship by working with leading practitioners. Such leaders understand and foster the new change dynamic where progress is not linear. The big find- ings are as follows:
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The best leaders use the new change dynamic to move their organi- zations forward and “participate as learners.” They balance and integrate push and pull strategies. They build vertical and horizontal capacity and integration.