Articulating the process of change
The other day I was searching my bookshelves for my much-thumbed 1991 edition of Michael Fullan’s 1982 classic, The (New) Meaning of Educational Change. It wasn’t there. Now in it’s fifth edition, Fullan’s masterwork continues to be an inspiration for Heads of School and Masters candidates alike. The genius of the Ontario-based writer is that his ideas about effective change are so practical and are based upon observations about what really happens in schools: his empathetic perspective sees things from the ground up rather than from on high.
One of the most useful ideas Fullan has developed is ‘The Implementation Dip’. A school has planned a change carefully, everyone seems to be ready, the time has come to do things differently and then it goes wrong. What was meant to improve the impact of teaching on learning can even be completely derailed.
To Fullan of course, this situation is not a surprise. The school has run into ‘the dip’. After doing things for such a long time in a certain way procedures get ingrained and people are comfortable. You know where you are. Staff have to change the way they operate and the ‘dip’ takes hold. People are always uncertain about a new regime and have to find their way in the dark. Colleagues are experiencing similar difficulties and things seem to get worse, not better.
Fullan’s strong advice of course is that you tell people in advance that this is going to happen, so that it can be anticipated and faced. Successful change is not, however, the result of a quick fix. It depends on cultivating great professional relationships and the habits of trust and collaboration that support them. I was reminded of this recently when in conversation with Vanita Uppal, the Director of The British School, New Delhi. She was speaking about the idea of ‘creative autonomy’ which perhaps is one of the keys to the evolution of a great school. As Fullan has shown, good ideas have legs and don’t go away.
And my copy of Fullan’s tome? Long gone. I suspect I must have lent it to someone who I hope has found it as useful as I did. What I did find was a copy of a handbook from a 2008 conference in Bangkok led by the great man himself. It is copiously annotated in my pencil scrawl including a ‘note to self’: ARTICULATE THE PROCESS AS WELL AS THE VISION.
Quite.
And to my delight I found that I had had the wherewithal to ask Professor Fullan to sign and date my copy of the conference handbook, giving me a small personal link to one of the greatest educational thinkers of the last fifty years. And like all his good ideas, he’s still going strong.