Systemic Change

A podcast produced by John Merrow’s Learning Matters group and distributed by PBS. It is a 10 minute interview with a parent in the D.C. Public Schools about issues of community feedback, stakeholder participation in reform, and the power of information:

Merrow’s podcast homepage http://www.pbs.org/merrow/podcast/index.html

mp3 of this interview(11.6 MB): http://www.pbs.org/merrow/rss/media/93.mp3

This recent chapter by British policy maker and school reformer David Hopkins gets at the role of leadership in systemic change, an area of clear importance in efforts at improving schools. I thought a brief review of this chapter might be useful for folks.

 He cites three reasons for the failure of most school reforms:

1. Focus on the wrong variables (often excluding parents and students and failing to expand the teaching/learning repetoires of teachers and students).
2. Ignoring local organizational conditions (the organization may need to change in order for teaching and learning to improve)
3. Lack of systemic perspective (thinking “system-wide” and “system-deep”)

 He suggests three features of an educational system in which all schools are great schools:

1. Pedagogy redesigned to enable virtually all students to reach their potential.
2. Systemwide focus on independence, innovation, networking, and lateral responsibility.
3. School-level leadership that works for the success of all schools, not just individual schools.

Hopkins notes the need to strike a balance between top-down (prescriptive) and bottom-up (professional) approaches to reform. This is a good example of the Both/And thinking we have talked about a great deal in our division. The central problem leading to this false dichotomy of top-down/bottom-up reform is that while purely top-down reforms don’t work, there has been a lack of capacity at the local level to engage in bottom-up change. Hopkins cites four areas where capacity should be built: personalized learning, professionalized teaching, collaboration, and intelligent accountability.

He goes on to note that these are not merely technical problems for which known answers can be applied to local contexts, but complex problems which require learning and adaptation. Hence the need for school leaders who are learners, not technicians.  He defines principals who do this as “system leaders.” They “are those headteachers who are willing to shoulder system leadership roles: who care about and work for the success of other schools as well as their own” (p.169).

More specifically, these leaders focus on increasing achievement and decreasing gaps between subgroups, they focus on improving the teaching and learning process, and they see and engage with the system on classroom, school, and external levels. While this is certainly not the description of an “average” principal in the UK (or the USA), it is a worthy bar for us to shoot for. Imagine if all of our principals could answer the questions that Hopkins lists on page 172 (from Barber, 2005):

• Who are your key stakeholders in the local community? Do they understand your vision? Are they committed to it? How do you know?
• Is each pupil working towards explicit short- and medium-term targets in each subject?
• How do you ensure that every young person has a good, trusting relationship with at least one significant adult in your school?
• What do you and your school do to contribute to the improvement of the system as a whole?

Developing leaders with this systemic perspective should be a goal for those charged with preparing future school leaders. Hopkins’ chapter, while short on specifics for implementing such changes, provides a noble vision for guiding our efforts.

References:

Barber, M. (2005). ‘A 21st Century self-evaluation framework’, Annex 3 in ‘Journeys of Discovery: the search for success by design’, keynote speech, National Centre on Education and the Economy, Annual Conference, Florida, USA, 10 February. 

Hopkins, D. (2007). Sustaining leaders for system change. In B. Davies (Ed.), Developing sustainable leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: Paul Chapman Publishing.