Michael Fullan Keynote transcript 2007
Thanks very much, Heather, and thank you for inviting me back. It’s great to see such a large crowd. I was here in May, I probably worked with about five hundred and district LEA people in three different cities, so I don’t consider myself an expert on Scottish education but I feel an infinity between Ontario, where I’m based, and some of the approaches that you have in educational reform. And what I’d like to do today is update – actually the title is probably better re-stated. It certainly is about turning around systems, but since I was here in May I wrote a book called The Six Secrets of Change, and this is about … well, you’ll see when each of these … I think the puzzle question is, when is a revealed secret still a secret? And my answer is when they’re heavily nuanced. So these are secrets in the sense that they’re not very deeply appreciated by reform strategists, and what I’d like to do in the course of this next forty-five minutes or so is use those six secrets as a way of illustrating what we’re doing and looking at their meaning. And by the time we’re finished as well to draw out some of the details of the strategy we’re using in Ontario, as well as comparisons with Scotland, although I say that with a little bit of humility since I’m not expert, but I do want to say some things about where I see the strengths and things to be developed, so that will cover all of that.
I have been for the last four years the Special Advisor to the Premier and the Minister in Ontario, so we’ve had this golden opportunity to use the ideas in practice. Ontario has about thirteen million people, so not quite three times as large as you are. We have seventy-two districts, publicly funded districts, four thousand primary schools, nine hundred secondary schools. So what we’ve been doing the last four years is orchestrating a strategy and a partnership between local authorities and schools on the one hand and the government on the other hand to move the system forward. And I’d like to say about this knowledge base that when you do this and you use the knowledge you can improve a large system within one election period is the way to express it. You can’t do it overnight, but within three or four years you can make some strong developments.
So let’s take a look at the secrets. I’ve also tried to interpose some short video clips, I’m looking for a video clip for each secret so it’s somewhat uneven, but video clips to bring the ideas more alive. I want to start with you’ll see the Tri-Level Reform image on the screen now, and that’s just really a reminder that this is about bringing together the tri-level. I mean, you can break it down more than that, within a school you can have classroom school differentiation, but the big units I think are school community, district, LEA and government. And the idea is to figure out how to get a rapport across those three levels where there’s a sense that the streets are two way - they’re two way in communication, they’re two way in influence - and there are also a lot of horizontal, within levels, activities going on. So that’s the picture, it’s just a way of getting at it.
And I want to start with secret one – they’re not in order of importance, all six are important. And I’ve drawn these incidentally by looking at I’d say three-quarters of the material I looked at was in other sectors, health sector, businesses, as well as education, and they really jibe across these levels when you really get them. So some of the language is business book language but you’ll know what we mean. In the first one, “Love your employees as much as your customers,” I mean, in our case this is about teachers as well as students and parents. And it seems obvious to say that, except that there have been a lot of ways in which large-scale systems have tried, not quite to bypass teachers, but to hold up the student as paramount, which in one sense is true, but as another set of ideas that I’ve been drawing on recently, the McKenzie group, where Michael Barber has done in the last eight months a study of what they call the top performing schools, public systems in the world, places like Finland and Singapore and Hong Kong and South Korea and several others, and they’ve drawn out some lessons from that. And one of the South Korean policy makers said, “The educational system cannot rise above the quality of its teachers,” in other words the quality of teachers is as central I’ll say as the impact.
And I want to give you just a notion of this. It is about investing in the quality of teachers, it is about the respect for the profession and their high expectations, and just to give you a statistic or one of the indirect findings on this, prior to the government, in the last four years in Ontario the liberal government, there was a government previously for about eight or nine years, that I’ll say actively disrespected teachers. I mean, they didn’t do it every day, but they certainly didn’t invest in it, they saw teachers as part of the problem. There was all kinds of mutual acrimony between the government and the teaching profession during that period. And when we started our strategy we said this is going to change, this strategy is about respecting teachers, but it’s also about high expectations of performance, and we’ll get to some of that later.
And to give you two pieces of research, our Ontario College of Teachers conducts research routinely on the teaching profession, and at the beginning of the career, let’s take it that way, from 1990 to 1999, during that bad period as we would call it, the number of teachers in the first three years that were dropping out of teaching, in their first three years in the profession, ranged between twenty-two to thirty-three per cent on any given period, if you took any given year and took a three year cohort. Since in the last four years that figure now is well below ten per cent, usually around eight per cent. This is a big indicator of teacher morale, teachers coming into the profession and wanting to stay, and those that drop out in the past if you have a bad regime drop out under … some of the best ones drop out because they feel they can’t make a difference.
At the other end of the continuum, at the end of their career, teachers in Ontario can retire on full pension usually around age fifty-five, and quite a lot do, so full pension, it’s very attractive and so forth. But that figure also has changed, in 2006, the last data we have, there were fifteen hundred more teachers who could have retired that didn’t retire compared to, say, five years ago. This incidentally cost the government about six million Canadian dollars because senior teachers get paid more than a junior teacher, beginning teacher. But that’s another indicator that good teachers are staying on because they know they can continue to make a difference. So that’s one of six, to make sure that that’s really understood.
Another reference here that I want to highlight, there’s a book written by some business professors, Sisodia is the first name, S-i-s-o-d-i-a, and they call the book with a cute title, they call it Firms of Endearment. And Firms of Endearment is a study of twenty-eight company that have persistently high performance with an investment in their employees. This is Starbucks and Whole Foods and twenty-six other companies, and they … a lot of this material I used in my book on the six secrets because it maps on so well. But one of the things they did was they compared those twenty-eight companies with the eleven companies from Jim Collins’ famous book, From Good to Great, and these companies on a year by year basis out-performed the so-called eleven great companies on the same data by about threefold, and just in terms of profit. So there’s a whole number of multiple pay-offs coming from this, it’s not just because we like teachers by themselves, it’s because it feeds into so much activity, and it’s pretty obvious to say that the key to successful reform is whether teachers and school heads are motivated to put in the energy to get the results, to put in the commitment and so forth. So that’s the first one.
Second one, “Connect peers with purpose.” That’s the short way of saying it, but it is about purposeful peer interaction, it is about getting transcending the top-down/ bottom-up distinction. We all know that top-down change doesn’t work because when it’s imposed people rebel, and they have lots of ways of not implementing what they’re told to do. But on the other hand, if you go to school based management, the so-called “Let a thousand flowers bloom,” if that’s the basis of your strategy it turns out a thousand flowers actually don’t bloom, and those that do bloom are not perennial, they come and they go, because there’s nothing holding together to make it cohere, to make to move forward.
So the strategies that we’ve been advocated are the two-way street strategies, trying to get joint ownership. And I would say if we ask people about what’s the characteristic of the Ontario strategy, they will say that you got direction from the centre plus local ownership right, that is flexibility and ownership in those too. That’s about peers with purpose, and the nuance here is that if you ask the question, how does a large system cohere, how do you get cohesion when you have such a multiple system as yours and ours? And the answer to that is not by having direct goals from the centre that hold it together, it’s by having purposeful peer interaction. In other words, purposeful peer interaction is the cohesive glue that holds together systems that tend to be fragmented. So this is why it’s an indirect strategy. And you know the strategies, professional learning communities at the school level, collaborative cultures, they hold the school together because of the peer interaction, not because they’re led in a forceful way. The same occurs when schools interact with each other. We have in our seventy-two districts, we worked a lot on district cohesiveness. New York region, which is one of the largest districts we worked with that I’ll refer to later, this has a hundred and forty primary schools, thirty of so secondary schools, in the past five years, multi-cultural district, lots of reasons why it might be fragmented, but quite cohesive because of the investment of peer interaction. Every strategy that works is based on social interaction but purposeful around knowledge, around motivation. So that’s the second one.
The third one, “Capacity building trumps judgementalism.” This is also subtle. A lot of systems have tried judgementalism – I want to call it that way I’ll mention in a moment – so the name and shame, the targets, and US “No Child Left Behind,” all of that system is motivated by moral purpose presumably, but its actual strategy is counter-productive because it uses judgement as the main lever to get changes. And by capacity building, and I want to relate it to judgementalism in a moment, capacity building is that investment in developing the collective effectiveness of a group of the whole system to actually get more reform in teaching and learning and student results. And we usually think of three things we’re investing in, three concrete things. One of them is new skills and competencies, or additional skills and competencies; second one is resources, ideas, materials, but money, new money as well; and the third one is motivation as a capacity, when people are motivated the capacity goes up to get something done. So a very big focus on capacity building.
The trick here is to not get involved in judgementalism, and by judgementalism I don’t’ mean that you don’t assess something as ineffective, it just means it doesn’t come with stigma, it’s not pejorative. And I’ll say a little bit later about our policy on intervention, that is intervention in schools that are performing less effectively. So there’s no question that they’re performing less effectively, but the attitude that we take to it, the Premier, the Minister, the Deputy Minister, all of our attitudes, if we see under-performance we do not assume that it’s caused by the people in that situation, we assume that it’s lack of capacity. So once you have that attitude you get a sense of if you don’t reduce the stigma you can’t get the development, and I’ll come back to the harder part of that development later. But standing back from judgementalism, eventually a school or a situation is persistently bad you have to act, if it’s egregiously bad in some ways and abusive obviously you have to act, but overall as a strategy this better be an invitational strategy, it better focus on capacity building, and then the judgements take care of themselves in the sense they get built into the system.
Now here’s my first video clip, I’m going to show you a video clip to say that one needs to develop their empathy to lack of capacity, and I want to take you back to when the book was first introduced as an innovation. Five hundred years ago, you know, so literacy wasn’t a problem, the people who were getting the books were already writers and readers, but this was still an innovation. So let’s see what happens when this was introduced.
[Video clip entitled “Introducing the Book”]
Okay, empathy to capacity building.
The secret for “Learning is the work.” This is a … Richard Elmore has been one of the best articulator about this secret where he says you have to learn in context, learn in the setting in which you work, not outset the setting in which you work, and that much of the professional development that goes on – and I’m not against this but it’s not the main point – goes on in workshops and courses. There was an interesting article that was written by one of our Australian colleagues a couple of years ago, Peter Cole, and the article was called, “Professional Development: A Good Way to Avoid Change.” And in the article he talks about the inadequacies of just doing professional development and not doing professional learning. In the book we did last year, Breakthrough, with Peter and Carmel Crévola on getting breakthrough literacy results, we had a triple P core model which was personalisation and precision, and that was about getting the teaching right, and the third P was professional learning - deliberately chosen as professional learning, not professional development. Professional learning is what goes on day after day. All of the evidence I looked at was the difference between the effective organisations and the less than effective ones as they had cultures where teaching and learning for the adults was a core part of the everyday culture. We know it when we see it, professional learning communities is one example of that, trying to do it, although I would say when I look at the number of schools in North America that claim to have professional learning communities, I conclude that the term travels better than the concept. Lots of people are calling it professional learning communities, but it’s really not getting inside the classroom, it’s not getting at the day to day work of teachers and making that improvement so significant. The reason we use the word precision rather than prescription is that teachers need to be able to precisely, all the time, day after day, get the instruction right for each and every child, and that must be possible to do without it being on the backs of teachers. So there’s a number of things that surround it.
Let’s take a look at another version – I don’t have all these videos precisely aligned, but this one is the problem when you learn out of context, that when you go to a workshop one or two teachers get excited about ideas and they come back to the school, and the school is less than plugged into those ideas and they don’t go anywhere. So here I’m going to give you a little test, I’m going to ask you to identify which penguin has been at the latest workshop.
[Video clip entitled “The Latest Workshop”]
No prize for getting it right. When we talk about leadership we say one of the great … one of the things that effective leaders do is that they energise the group, they’re energising. And not that they have energy themselves - that’s true too - but they actually go about things in a way that people’s energy increases. And you saw in that penguin that lone innovators have a lot of energy, but not only are they not energising, they’re annoying, because if they’re the only one like that and the rest of the people are slogging away it doesn’t go off very well.
Number five, “Transparency rules” is the way I want to say it. And transparency is about the openness of not only results but also practices, teaching practices. And I don’t know what you think about the research on I’ll say behind the classroom door, but it certainly is our experience now that despite the fact of almost, I don’t know, forty to fifty years of research going back to the sixties, and Judith Little when she talked about collegial schools and the deprivatisation of teaching, we are still finding that behind the classroom door is the last frontier where it becomes deprivatised in the sense that all teachers feel that it’s normal and desirable to be observed at teaching and to observe others, and that that’s a basis for improvement. So the transparency rules is about getting access to practice, but it’s also about data, about results and attainment and achievement.
And I’ll just mention again, we’ve been here, some of the strategies we’ve done in Ontario, not to advocate them literally but to show how concrete this is, these rules are in practice. When we started in 2003 there was a very limited, certainly inaccessible database, around literacy and numeracy in the four thousand primary schools. The independent assessment agency, which is called Education Quality and Accountability Office, annually assesses grade 3 and grade 6, 8 year olds and 11 to 13 year olds, on reading, writing and math for each of those grade 3 and grade 6. So those results were obtained but they weren’t available, they weren’t really used, they gave annual reports, nobody paid much attention to them, teachers disregarded them and devalued them in any case. And so we decided to use this rule, I guess I’ll say, as part of the strategy, and these are interactive. If you don’t have secret 1, “Love your employees as well as your customers,” and you have transparency, doesn’t work. It’s the combination. If you don’t, if you have judgementalism and you have transparency it doesn’t work.
So what do I mean by transparency in these case for achievement? We now have all four thousand schools on a public database where their annual results in reading, writing and math are available, and this database we have certain ground rules for the policy makers, that is they have these ground rules. One is that when we look at results we will have the capacity building assumption, not the judgemental one. Secondly is that we will not interpret results very literally one year at a time, but think of three years, is it a moving result up or down, is it stagnant and whatsoever, and we get behind them. But I think from the point of view of the schools, and now that they have come to trust and be interested in these data, the three comparisons that they should make, they do make increasingly are these: one, we want schools to compare themselves with themselves. Where were you three years ago on literacy and numeracy? Where are you now? What is the movement? What are the reasons behind it? How do you get out of it and do something about it? So that seems like a fair and reasonable comparison. Secondly, we want schools to compare themselves with other schools in similar circumstances, comparing apples to apples. We have our database organised into four bands, they’re called LICO – low income cut off – but band one is those schools that are facing the most challenging circumstances, two in the middle, and the fourth one the least challenging. And so within those bands, to get used to saying how are we doing compared to others, and we also have in our strategy ways of getting at effective practices and spreading them laterally. And then the third comparison that people should do is to compare themselves to some absolute standard or external standard. It could be PISA results, it could be a hundred per cent, a hundred per cent success, but something that puts you not just comparing in your own subset but in the bigger picture. So if you put all these together you get a very active set of results, just as last two weeks the results for 2007 were released, and schools and school districts were actively using them to interpret what they do. Still there’s lots of, and essential, lots of assessment for learning going on day to day, the assessment literacy part, but as this develops people start to have more trust into it. I say transparency rules for two reasons: one is it’s inevitable, you can’t get away from it because the public wants it, the flat world opens everything up. And secondly it’s desirable. There certainly can be abuses of it, newspapers can abuse the reporting of it, but the way to handle that abuse is not to hide from it but to get better at dealing with it and getting more expert literally at assessment literacy.
So let’s take a look at a couple of video clips here. One of them is … just want to comment on targets. I’m not necessarily a fan of having targets, and certainly if you have them I like them to be aspirational rather than literal, so when England had their targets of seventy-five and eighty per cent they were too literal, they were too important, so to speak, they were the tail wagging the dog. In Ontario when we started in 2003, given our assessment system, the Premier did set a target of seventy-five per cent – this is hard to compare these across jurisdictions, but in our case the proficiency levels are quite demanding, so we were at the time around fifty-four per cent on the average of eleven year olds, just to take that figure across the four thousand schools. Seventy-five per cent, we’re now at about sixty-five, sixty-six, so there’s been in the face of five years of flatlined from 1998 to 2003, there’s been a steady movement upward. But I want to be wary about targets, they’re not so literal, they are aspirational. You don’t need them, as long as they’re jointly set, I guess I’ll say, although we have this umbrella figure of seventy-five per cent the actual targets are negotiated, I guess I’ll say, and not ordered, but certainly between our Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat, which is the entity in the government we created to lead the literacy and numeracy strategy, and the schools and the districts, they annually massage the targets. So here I want to give you an image here of what I don’t mean by target setting.
[Video clip entitled “Targets”]
Okay, that’s not what I mean. Assessment, literacy, data driven decision making, although I prefer Andy Hardgrave’s term “data informed decision making,” not driven, but informed. And let’s take a look at a version of that.
[Video clip entitled “Data Driven D-M”]
So there is such a thing as clear data driven decision making. Don’t try that at home incidentally!
The last secret is “Systems Learn,” and this is an abstract concept but I mean it again very operationally. I think Ron Heifitz in his Leadership on the Line put it best, he said, “These days leaders have to be able to be on the dance floor and the balcony simultaneously.” They have to be plugged in inside their organisation, but they have to be aware of the bigger picture. And I think systems learn when you get this tri-level support underway, certainly within a school if you think of turnover of heads, school heads, the main problem with turnover is not turnover itself but discontinuity of good direction. So the issue about systems learning is how do you get continuity of good direction, building on it but still that degree of continuity. And I think systems learn when they … and the way I would express it is, I call it the “we/we principle.”
Let’s start at the school level. We know this from the research and professional learning communities. When teachers interact purposely and are well led in a school, individual teachers stop thinking about my classroom only and start thinking about our school. That’s an example of system learning because our school has many people working on that image and has continuity beyond the individuals. When schools start to interact with each other, something we call lateral capacity building, individual school principals stop thinking about my school only and start thinking about our cluster, our network, our district or LEA. It’s not so much that they fall in love with the hierarchy, it’s they fall in love with their peers, that the peer interaction generates as an identity beyond themselves, and that’s again how a system learns. And if you can go all the way and get, as we have in our strategy, to other levels, two other aspects involved at the so-called third level, we’ve invested in strategies where districts learn from each other, the districts are in about six regions of eleven districts, and the money has been provided for and leadership facilitation so that districts and schools within districts, cross districts learn from each other again about literacy and numeracy. So that’s another identity. When they do that they get that identity with the whole strategy, again not because they embrace the government only but because they embrace the bigger picture. And that notion that school principals, school heads, have a responsibility to contribute to overall policy development, to other schools, and the strategies that are now being elaborated were quite complicated in some ways, but school heads running two or three schools at a time with executive heads. It’s not the particular models but the notion of getting some movement going so the overall system has some continuity. Let’s realise however that there is no silver bullet in this, I think the principles, the six that I mentioned for example and some others that I’ll tease out from the Ontario strategy, are sound enough to get this and to see it applied in a lot of situations. When Ken Leithwood and his colleagues produced the paper last year for the National College of School Leadership in England they called the paper “Seven Strong Claims for Leadership.” And one of those claims was that the core characteristics of effective leaders are the same across the world, so to speak, but they play themselves out differently depending on the context. So the things that are the same are leaders developing other leaders, fostering use of data, collaboration among teachers, all the basics are the same and that’s the way I feel about systems learning, that the core concepts I’m talking about are showing up, are evidenced in a lot of situations which are in fact effective. Still there’s no silver bullet, so I’m going to disabuse us of that by showing this video where the object in fact was silver and it did a lot of different things, but that type of solution is not available to us.
[Video clip entitled “No Silver Bullet”]
Okay, no silver bullet for us, but a lot of good ideas nonetheless. I’d like to close by a more systematic account of the Ontario strategy I’ll call it, and then some remarks about Scotland education reform. I’ve written about this and others have as well, Ben Levin, the Deputy Minister who just finished his term as Deputy, continues to write about what we call the Ontario strategy. You can see one account of it in the fourth edition of “The New Meaning of Educational Change” that came out a few months ago. So these are – I’ve already alluded to several of this, but just pull it together – this is the strategy that the Premier of the Province can articulate as well as I could, so to speak, the Minister can articulate in saying this is what we’re doing. So let’s take each of these.
The “Guiding coalition” is the notion that you have the top leaders at the centre who are on the same page about the strategy, those top leaders in our case are the Premier, the Deputy Minister, the Minister of Education, a few other key people at central agencies, that have … and we call our strategy, the shortest form of our strategy is called capacity building with a focus on results. Ben Levin calls it results without rancour. So this is the capacity building centrality but making sure that it’s linked to expectations and activities that lead to results. So the guiding coalition, we meet every six weeks. The discussion is … there’s a lot of sub-meetings in between, bilateral connections. But the way to illustrate this is to say if you took four of these people and put them in four different rooms and had an aggressive reporter ask them a tough question about the education reform and they couldn’t consult with each other, you would get essentially the same directional response. And not only would they not have consulted with each other, they wouldn’t even think they would have to. The guiding coalition, this means that the communication that goes out is consistent, more consistent, it means when there are decisions to be made about money you’re more likely to get decisions for capacity building, money allocated in that way. So there’s a real sense that … and you can’t keep this, these are politics so we understand that, but if you set out to realise that it does matter if there’s consistency from the centre. Sometimes you can get bad consistency, so we have to judge whether it’s good or bad consistency, but that consistency is important. Incidentally, we have an election on October 10th, so all of this if that government is not re-elected the direction will continue a little bit more because it’s so rooted in the system, in the schools and the districts, but the overall guiding coalition will disappear.
We also pay a lot of attention to distractors, I guess I will call them. Distractors are big issues that divert the energy and the fiscal resources away from the core purpose of teaching and learning into other domains. Our biggest distractor when we started was bad relationships between the unions, the teacher unions and the government and the districts. There had been a number of strikes and walk outs and work to rule industrial action that ate up an enormous amount of energy 1995 to 2003. It’s a complicated thing, but to make the point very brief, and we set out and did within twelve months four year agreements between the government and the districts on the one hand and the teacher unions, there were a hundred and twenty-two different agreements across the forty nine hundred schools. And those agreement were for four years, they’re just coming up next year for finalisation, for renewal, and they included teacher salaries. I’m not saying you can accomplish all this easily, but this put a context of what we call peace and stability as a context for the reform to enable you to look at the other things that were involved. The Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat, when we started the government, the Ministry of Education did not have any capacity to relate effectively to local districts. We created that capacity, we hired one of the top District Superintendents, Avis Glaze, to head the unit, and we populated it with a lot of people from the field, secondments and other permanent appointments, some people from the Ministry. They’re in seven different teams, six of the teams are regional so they relate to each of the sets of eleven districts. The seventh team is a research team whose job it is to monitor and provide stimulating research these.
Just let me comment on the research very briefly. One of the things we did last year, we said well, let’s take a look at which districts seem to be doing well, that is they have a good strategy underway and they’re getting results three years running. We didn’t know how many we would identify, but we ended up with eight. We did, that is the Secretariat research wing, did eight case studies of these districts and we did across case analysis – you can find this on my website, it’s called “Unlocking the potential of district wide reform.” My website’s very straight forward, www.michaelfullan.ca. You can also find it on the Literacy Numeracy website along with other reports, but it’s the transparency of results, when we fed those results back to the eight districts it was partly an eye opener because although they had strategies they weren’t necessarily as explicit about them until we teased it out, interviewed them and put it together. It also went out to other districts, so that there’s friendly competition going on and ideas and that. We didn’t lord them over other systems, say, “Why can’t you be more like your brother, these eights brothers or sisters?” It was about, it was about stimulating the whole system.
The Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat does the following three things on this list: they negotiate the aspirational targets, so each year there’s target setting. It’s in relation to where you were last year. It’s not the stand alone question, it’s a separate one, integrated should I say to the capacity building. They invest a lot in capacity building, you can find documents that they’ve generated now that show practices that moving schools are using. There’ll be a resource like that, some of this is web cast, some is hard material. They target resources, invest in addition to a lot of direct money that schools got for capacity building. The Secretariat also invest money into the spread of idea, I guess I’ll say.
And then the evolution of positive pressure; this comes back to the transparency of data. And it is about having it out in the open, so everybody can see including yourself, how are you doing, how have you done the last three years. Trying to take care of the abuse of those data through constant reminders of what the purpose of this is, and getting … and if I take the OFIP strategy – Ontario Focused Intervention Partnership – this is a strategy of turnaround school strategy, one could say. There are currently eight hundred and fifty of the four thousand primary schools in that group, and they receive extra money and they also receive support from the outside and facilitation, mainly to build local capacity, so it’s both the district and the schools that are engaged in this. If you take any five of these eight hundred and fifty schools out of a hat and ask the principal and teachers if they feel stigmatised by being in OFIP, their answer will be four to five times or more, “this is a resource, we’re getting somewhere.” In our last round of results that came out in June 2007 that were just reported a few weeks ago, the OFIP schools moved ahead faster than the average school in terms of where they were even last year. So this is an important part of the strategy. If I go to the McKenzie report that just came out, will come out this month, on the top performing systems, they have a small number of key policy findings. One is that the small number of ambitious goals, the second is invest in teacher quality, the third is make sure you work effectively on the development of school principals, school heads, the fourth is early intervention in under-performance, all of these things in combination. So I think the evolution of positive pressure, is the pressure part of it comes when you have transparency pressure takes care of itself. And if you have capacity building along with it, it allows people to do something about it. You can’t avoid mere … you can’t avoid the pressure, I’m going to say, of mere transparency, and that’s one of the reasons why we like it along with other things that you have to invest in that I talked about.
And then finally, “Connecting the dots with key complementary components.” I did talk about literacy and numeracy as the small number of ambitious goals. We surround it with the attention to the wellbeing of students, all of those things about health and safety and social and emotional development, but in terms of the debate about well if you focus on literacy and numeracy don’t the arts and physical education, other things, suffer? The answer is no if you do it in a good way, that is to say that this is not about narrow literacy and numeracy, it’s not just about mere reading. It is about comprehension, expression, it is about in the case of math problem solving and reasoning, an in all cases the other parts of the curriculum, the cognitive parts, benefit. If you add in the wellbeing of students, we have a great programme, not ours ourselves but based in Toronto, called Roots of Empathy, which sounds strange but if you’re interested in this you should look for Mary Gordon’s book called Roots of Empathy, she’s the creator of it. And they used babies and their mothers as the curriculum for teaching emotional intelligence to children. Emotional intelligence comes from the science of emotional intelligence I’ll say, but the babies and their mothers a couple of times a month watching the evolution from let’s say two months of age to eleven months across that one year, with great results in terms of reduction of bullying and the increase of academic achievement because it’s pretty obvious to everyone if you achieve better you feel better about yourself, if you feel better about yourself you engage more in learning, all of those things come together.
So the connecting the dots, and this is where I’d say we are for the second term if the government is re-elected on October 10th, is to introduce more forcefully, more thoroughly early childhood development, to add on other issues around community involvement, parent involvement, the integration of Social Services, which is really the hardest part of this because it’s enormously complex, things that you and others are moving towards and engaged in. And I don’t know whether complementary components is the right way of expressing it, but definitely the agenda gets wider and deeper. But you have to get somewhere first I think, and the fact that we are somewhere in terms of motivation, the fact that we are somewhere in terms of literacy and numeracy, frees up additional energy to go further on the harder stuff and the additional stuff, all of it which comes together.
And then finally if I say a couple of words about Scotland. I don’t know, I’m not an expert in Scottish education reform so I don’t claim to be that, but I have that passing familiarity. I said before that there’s a lot of affinity between how you like to approach change and how I think the Ontario culture is. We both don’t like heavy intervention from the centre, so that’s there a … we don’t like punitive accountability systems and so forth. So there are a lot of good things in common. The assessment for learning, expertise in this country that I came across in May and other times, very strong. Some of the movement on other parts of the curriculum very strong. The agencies that you have are also part of the good resources.
I would say maybe the three things that I would worry about, and this is not a criticism but an expression, I invite you in the course of the day when we might talk otherwise to disagree with me. One of the them is Curriculum for Excellence is a great document, but it’s also general and vague, and the small number of ambitious goals is hard to interpret. It’s not against the document, it just is how do you convert the document into the small ambitious goals that I referred to before. A second is around the questions, and I wouldn’t even say targets but standards and transparency of data, having that as a prominent feature of the future. And a third is around leadership development, what are you doing, and I know you have the qualifications framework, but I must say again that passing the qualifications framework, or meeting the requirements of the framework, is not learning in context, it’s learning on the way to context. And the other part of it is how do you get leadership development strategies that really build in learning and context effectively.
I say all that with compliments to the system. I very much appreciate being here today with so many of you, and I look forward to during the day and also to additional times when I’ll be in Scotland. Thank you very much.
[Applause]
[End of Recording]