Interview with Michael Fullan transcript 2007

INT:   

Michael, thank you very much for being here with us today, and can I start by asking you what are the key factors associated with success in raising student achievement?

MF:

Well, we’ve been working on this in Ontario for the last four years, other places too but Ontario has about two million students, seventy-two districts, forty-nine hundred schools, so it’s quite large scale change.  And this is consistent with other research that we know, but we’ve been putting it into practice.  So number one is to have a small number of ambitious goals, I’ll call them, but a small number.  We have literacy and numeracy as the core, surround it with the wellbeing of students, which has to do with health and child development, but basically literacy and numeracy instead of trying to do everything at once. 

Secondly, you have to figure out how to have a partnership between I’ll say the government and the Ministry of Education on the one hand and local authorities and schools on the other hand, that sense that there is … it’s a joint agenda.  So a lot of trust and communication and development has to go. 

Three, invest in capacity building, which is the individual and collective skills and competencies of teachers, in this case to teach literacy and numeracy effectively, but it’s skills in working together, professional learning communities within the school.  And learning across schools, which we call lateral capacity building.  So that’s another key one. 

And the final one on my short list is, I guess I would call it transparency, but it’s about data, it’s about results, it’s about accountability, but it’s also about using information on student learning in order to make instructional improvements in the classroom.  So it’s a strategy for improvement as well as accountability.  And once people get used to data being out in the open, and it can be misused by the newspapers and by others, but once it’s more out in the open … we’re trying to have principals, teachers, district people get more and more assessment literate is the term I would use, to be able to explain results, to use results, to combat misinterpretations, all of those things. 

So once you get all these things together you really over a short period of time I’d say, within four years in our case, have got a strong sense of ownership between the government and the local authorities and the schools.

INT:   

Given that, what do you think are the strengths and weaknesses in the Scottish Reform possibilities as you see it?

MF:

Well, I’m not much of an expert on the Scottish Reform.  I was over in May a few months ago where we worked I think with five hundred school heads and district people across three cities, so I have some feeling for it.  But I think first there is an affinity between Scotland and Ontario, you know, Ontario has thirteen million people so it’s not as large, but one of your Ministers, Peter Peacock, was over three years ago and we had a lot of discussion about the common approaches, which is not really heavy handed government intervention, but more partnership, more cooperation and so forth.  And so I think there’s an affinity in that sense, there are a lot of good things here on the ground that Learning Teaching Scotland resources, the resources on qualifications, the assessment for learning, our assessment literacy, there’s lots of activities and expertise in the system. 

I think the two things I would say that I would want to see sharpened I guess, one is the Curriculum for Excellence is a great document but it doesn’t have the small number of ambitious goals standing out.  I think you can read that, be excited by it, but not know exactly what are my priorities, where do I start?  So I think it’s really interpreting that document into much more specific terms that’s needed.  And the other is to – I mentioned transparency of data – to focus more out in the open on standards, on results, on attainment.  I know that people are wary, as we are, of league tables, so it’s not about that, but it is about having the standards more specific and having that as something to strive for and having it very specific.  So I’ll talk in the keynote about some of these things, but I think those two areas are ones that I would say should be developed more.