Systemness & Organisational Leadership

1) Michael Fullan advocates a Triangle of Success that underpins a successful educational system, i.e.
Deep Pedagogy, Systemness and Leadership

This is fully elaborated in the 2012 issue by Ontario Educational Leadership bulletin during which Michael Fullan shares his views about the importance of systemness and organisational leadership in transforming school systems.

http://www.michaelfullan.com/media/13557615570.pdf

Collective capacity is when groups get better – school cultures, district cultures and government cultures. The big collective capacity and the one that ultimately counts is when they get better conjointly – collective, collaborative capacity, if you like. Collective capacity generates the emotional commitment and the technical expertise that no amount of individual capacity working alone can come close to matching... The speed of effective change increases exponentially.

So in that sense we are competing with Finland and that’s a good thing. Because we want to outperform them, not for the sake of surpassing them, but because we want to do better and better and because the world will be better as a result. And so, I think that’s the spirit of collaborative competition.

What leaders do to generate the favourable conditions for powerful professional learning to occur:

• Create an atmosphere and context for change • Develop and communicate a shared vision for

change • Plan and provide resources • Invest in professional development • Check progress • Give continuous assistance.

Schools do well when teachers work in a purposeful way – focusing on instructional improvement and student achievement and well-being. If teachers are to work together successfully, the leader has to help ensure that they are moving in the right direction.

Professional learning communities need architecture or design if they are going to be productive. They have to be organized and arranged. Teachers’ commitment to their work, teachers’ feelings of cohesion among themselves including positive school climate, really depend on having clarity about the focus of their work and their role in it.

Leadership practices that are often referred to as “transformational” with those that have been termed “instructional.” And I think above and beyond those two we also have organizational leadership.

The rule is that intervention is inversely proportional to how well you’re doing – the less well you’re doing over time the more intervention you need. And if you take our non-judgmental approach – which is important, because being non-judgmental means that you give people a chance to grow without assessing what they do every step of the way – if you give people 

a chance to grow, and you see that there is no improvement over a year or two or three or four, then of course that’s a call for more support.