The Principal 2.0 with Michael Fullan - The Authority 75
Ross Romano: [00:00:00] Welcome in listeners to another episode of the Authority Podcast on the Be Podcast Network. We are here in our second new episode of 2024, and it's going to be my conversation with Michael Fullan. And so what a great way to start this new year. Our previous episode with Lacey Robinson, today with Michael Fullan, really a powerhouse duo.
I'm sure many of you have. Learned a lot from Michael's books over the years and his various initiatives. He really is one of the [00:01:00] leading international authorities on educational leadership. And it was really a privilege and an honor to have him here on the show. I also, before I get into introducing Michael and introducing our episode here.
I want to thank you all once again. Thank you for the tremendous 2023 heading into the new year late in last year in December, I learned that the authority now ranks. Among the top 5 percent of all global podcasts, more than 3 million podcasts in production, and we're ranking the top 5 percent for the listenership we're reaching.
And that is you, that's you that is doing that. I of course thank our guests and. Everything and all the insights they brought to the show, because that is what makes the content valuable and makes it something that you want to listen to. But certainly, I really thank all of [00:02:00] you for listening, all of you who have been subscribers and given us reviews on Apple Podcasts and all the things that really help us to get the content out there and hopefully help.
Educators, parents, and other stakeholders in the space and really advance productive conversations. So as I said, I'm here to introduce the conversation that I had recently with Michael Follin. He is the former Dean of the Ontario Institute for Studies. In education and the Professor Emeritus of the University of Toronto.
He's also the co leader of the new Pedagogies for Deep Learning Global Initiative. Fullan served as Premier Dalton's Special Policy Advisor in Ontario from 2003 to 2013. He received the Order of Canada in December 2012 and holds five honorary doctorates from universities around the world. The goal of this work focuses on the humanity paradigm, a deep care and commitment to all [00:03:00] living things, including equity and equality in the service of helping all humans cope and thrive in complex societies in the 21st century.
Michael Fullan 's latest books are Spirit Work and the Science of Collaboration, which he wrote with Mark Edwards in 2022. The Principal 2. 0, which we'll be talking about today, and The Drivers with Joanne Quinn in 2023, that also will come up in today's conversation. So, in 2014, Michael set his sights on the daily needs of school leaders in his best selling book, The Principal.
This updated edition, The Principal 2. 0, shows how the Principal's role continues to change. alongside our changing world and how we can embrace the transformation in short order. So that really is the core of this conversation that we had. There's three keys to maximizing impact and they're really all new from the 2014 edition.
About 90 percent of the book [00:04:00] is new material from the original edition. So really Michael identified, particularly over the past five years, certainly a lot of that related to the pandemic. But also a variety of other factors, how there have just been such significant changes in the world in geopolitics, in society, in climate, in economics, and in education that the principal's role and the impact that school leaders can have on the future of our society let alone today's students.
has just transformed so much. And he really dives deep into that. It's a truly interesting conversation, one that I think you'll really enjoy. So I hope you do. And if you do, let us know, send us a note let us know what stands out to you from this conversation, anything you find valuable and Anything in the future that you think we should cover here on the show.
We want to make sure that we bring a variety of voices that have a lot of value to you as the listener. So without further ado, let's transition now [00:05:00] into my conversation with Michael Fullon, everybody. Enjoy.
Michael, thanks so much for joining me on The Authority.
Michael Fullan: Great. I can't wait to talk about the book.
Ross Romano: It's a real pleasure to have you here. And as I mentioned in the intro, we're talking about the Principle 2. 0 today, but the title of it may not totally indicate the fact that this is basically 90 percent new material from the Principle that was came out less than a decade ago.
Right? But there's been a lot of change over that time. Wanted to start with just having you talk about some of the events that Caused you to undertake such a significant revisitation of the material. And I think particularly the past five or so years, right? You referenced so much change that, that warranted going back to this and really taking another look,
Michael Fullan: Good. Yeah. I'd be glad to get into it in terms of setting the framework of it. I did the 2014 original book called The Principal Three Keys for for Managing [00:06:00] Change. And it was a significant message that basically said The system was trying to get it right by laying down specificity on the principal.
So the system was saying, we're trying to improve instruction. Principals should be instructional leaders. They've got to be with their teachers, give feedback etc. And so they really, from my point of view, went overboard on that because it wasn't possible for most principals to do that kind of rounds all the time when they had 20 teachers, let alone more.
And furthermore, they weren't all that skilled in all those subject areas, so they weren't credible. So there was a mismatch, and I said their role has to be different, and we won't dwell on the 2014. By the time we got to Last year, when I was doing the next version that prediction of mine, I guess I'll say, took its toll, so nobody, the principal got less and less satisfied in their role, and then we began to see some examples of positive versions of [00:07:00] what I had in mind, so I can talk about those in relation to the book, as there's a lot of, there are eight cases in there that describe that, but also I was able to sharpen the message And say, essentially you're on the wrong track, anybody at any level, if you think the principal's role is mainly to implement what the district and the system wants.
That is the wrong track. So that's how it's set up. We can talk about the right track, but that's the wrong one.
Ross Romano: right? And yeah. And you, right. Right. That there's, I guess, forces at play, right? That traditionally have boxed principles into a narrower role than
Michael Fullan: Yeah,
Ross Romano: could and should have. Yeah. Can you expound on what some of those are? Is that system level? Is that things that districts are placing?
Is that principals own understanding or misunderstanding of what their role could be?
Michael Fullan: right. I can say that I want to say that the principal is by the system boxed into an impossible role [00:08:00] and I want to say why it's impossible and why it's becoming almost ridiculous, but here's the answer, and working back from the answer, the main role of the principal is to develop the local system.
The local system is the school, the students, the teachers, the parents, the that's the local system, the community and main role is not to implement government policy in a linear downwards fashion, so now we put the onus inside the school with the principal. That's the main role, and the reason why it's essential, it's an interesting way of saying it, is the school system has evolved in the last, let's just take 20 years since this century evolved to the point where the majority of students, and the proof is so clear and so widespread, the majority of students do not find interest in normal schooling.
They're alienated or they're bored. So the majority of students. If the majority of students, there's only one thing that's worse than [00:09:00] boredom and alienation, and that is if you have to teach the bored and alienated people, and that's the teacher. So now we have creeping up in the last ten years or five years, let's take that distinction between the two books.
You have creeping up, boredom and alienation on the part of students. Less, more and more dissatisfaction on the part of teachers that the job is not like it was supposed to be. It's getting worse and worse, more and more late on kind of bureaucracy. We better do this and this that are compounding, making a adding insult to injury.
And so the whole thing is is wrong because nobody's happy. That's within the school, that is, and the community. So we, we've been trying to get success. And I just say about myself, I was an academic for the first 20 years of my career. Sociologist, I did that armchair sociology, write books.
And that, and then in the last 20 years, I've been hands on working with districts and I was advisor to the government in Ontario for 12 years. At the beginning of the century, [00:10:00] we did a lot of things, so it's a hands on role. Myself and my team do. And that's why we're able to pull out the findings that we did.
The case examples, the structure of the argument that basically says your job as a principal is to be a we've said it, a lead learner. What does that mean? It means you have to pay attention to what we call spirit work. It's really kind of the deep purpose of learning, so that's one thing. Contextual literacy is another thing.
You have to really understand the culture where you're looking at. And a new con that's a new concept. And a third new concept is connected autonomy. Not just collaboration, but connected autonomy. People are autonomous. If they're isolated, they do poorly, but if they're suffocated by the group, they also do poorly, so the answer is connected autonomy, and we get lots of examples in those principles in the book, the eight of them are very successful, four different countries.
And this is the [00:11:00] nature of the change, it's very hands on, and we're doing that now, finding those people, in fact, co developing that role.
Ross Romano: Yeah, and one of the things that's, is interesting about it, and as you just referenced, is that both the challenges and the solutions such as it is, or the the, practices and approaches. There's evidence of them globally, at least in Western schools, right? U. S., Canada, England, Australia, New Zealand that there's consistency in what's working and what's challenging.
And you reference student alienation and disengagement and some of these things. I mean, was that what you expected to find? Is that what a lot of Do most people find that to be I don't know common sense when you talk to them, or are they surprised to hear about some of those things that are so consistent across what can be relatively different environments?
Michael Fullan: Yeah, it's I don't think they're surprised once I articulate it. They, what I do is put [00:12:00] words to what people are experiencing, and we have good vocabulary we call it precision of of of description, or sometimes I call it precision in position so that you get into the details.
So once you get into the details, it's not surprising. The reason that people knew it, and I'll just use the metaphor here, basically, the emperor had no clothes. You know that emperor, the emperor didn't know that he didn't have clothes. He was fooled into prancing down the street. So, so this was, the school had no clothes.
And again, everybody knew it, but they weren't talking about it, they weren't labeling it, they weren't getting it out in the open, and people were trying to run around running a system as they were naked, but they didn't, they knew something was wrong, but everybody's pretending it's okay.
So with COVID, the reason that COVID is valuable as a byproduct is not that it co caused bad things it did and not that it even provided particular [00:13:00] solutions, but it took off the the roof off the schooling system and now everybody could see, actually, you, each other were thinking the same things, they just didn't know it until it got more out in the open.
I made that book get it really out in the open.
Ross Romano: Yeah, and one of the things that I think that there's been a lot of discussion about here, say, domestically in the U. S. around COVID and its impacts on education is it did, right? It made clear, oh, there's a lot of things we already should have been doing. Doing investing in paying attention to and this made that obvious that we might have been able to cover it up before, but now it's clear.
Oh, you know what? We should have been doing this all along. Globally. I mean, that's one of the interesting things, right? Is that. Every country went through that same pandemic. Different schools may have handled it differently. There may be different insights from that, but it's something that was a commonality and [00:14:00] those disruptions are forcing the hand of change, right?
And saying, look, you either have to change things in one way or another, and it can turn out. to be a much better path forward, or it can turn out to be worse. And a lot of that, as you write, depends on that evolving role of the principal and what they do with it. Has there been more of a change in your eyes with respect to your definition of what the role of the principal should be?
Or is it more of an urgency for the role to evolve into what it was always supposed to be? And now we're seeing clearly, look, we either need to get this role right, Or you know, or we're going to have negative outcomes.
Michael Fullan: Yeah there's definitely and I'm going to say this, I'm going to use the reason. In the last three months or so, there's definitely been a recognition we've got to do something and I had in exchange one of the other people I work with who works in Milwaukee, actually, and [00:15:00] we've worked together a number of things about the teacher.
I said to her they're actually all of a sudden in the last two months, November and December that they're, when I'm talking about these things people at the district or even the state level. Are connecting, contacting me and saying this sounds right, what you know, talk to us about what we should do.
So they have that for the first time at the system level, but system level, I mean, district and state, they're coming to me with that question. And I'm saying, this is good. This is why now what's happening? And when we had that conversation, when I had the person said, well, yeah, that's true.
The reason that's happening. Is that people, we think, higher up, which means district and state, we're all, we're probably increasingly realizing it wasn't working, but now, when she used this word, I love it, I quote her for it, but she said, now people are certain that it's not working. That one word, we are certain that it's not working.
This opens the door to Principle 2. 0. [00:16:00] And and it doesn't give the answer as to what they should do. We have a lot of examples of that, but we definitely have nailed what not to do. Now we go into the positive, and this is why we look forward to 2024, we've we can go beyond COVID, there's lots of scars, but we can also begin to craft, if it's not too late, it isn't too late a different kind of a school system, and now we're working with school districts, and some policy makers to try to make that happen.
Ross Romano: Yeah. And yeah, you referenced that clarity around what not to do. And also there's you know, it's mentioned in the book, right? About how it's easy to, it's easy to do the wrong things when situation present themselves. And I don't know if sometimes that's a consequence of a bias toward action or when there's a lack of clarity around the role and what. One should be doing, well, I have to do something and often have to do something [00:17:00] leads to not the right thing. But it perhaps that also contributes to why it's so important to really focus in on. What are the areas of potential and impact and maximizing that and where to do things and in other areas to be patient or wait until evidence presents itself.
Michael Fullan: I think that our strategy is to identify it, it's in a given school, there's eight case examples, And then look for how did that happen in that particular case. And then, in our other strategy, start to create networks of schools that learn from each other laterally. So, the, because you have to get at specificity, so you, you identify the individual cases as we did.
But now what's working for us is schools are learning from each other within a district. And even better than that, the most recent development in San Diego County, which is where we work also, districts are forming consortia of, let's say, eight, nine, ten districts. And they're [00:18:00] learning from each other. So you, if you want the answer, you have to learn laterally.
If you want the enabling of it, you have to examine the vertical.
Ross Romano: So, you referenced a few of these earlier, we'll get into them in some more detail that the three keys to maximizing impact that are the core of this book. But I wanted to contextualize that by asking in your. What is impact to you? What impact are schools supposed to have right, in the big picture, and then how is the principal's role in maximizing that impact?
Michael Fullan: Yeah let's take it in two steps. The there's a great book that Jal Mehta, who's from Harvard, professor, And Sarah Fine, who's from the University of San Diego, wrote about four years ago, it's called In Search of Deeper Learning. That's the name of the book. Award winning book, actually. The data they had for the book was a big grant they had four or five years ago.
to go into to identify high schools that had deep learning. Deep learning is learning that I [00:19:00] can define in a few moments, but it's more than superficial learning or no learning. It's more than regurgitating sufferers tasks, etc. So we'll come to what the definition is, but the point is, they went out and they did, they only selected schools that had claimed to have deep learning.
And so they went in there, they didn't find much of it, and they called their book, In Search of Deep Learning. We searched for it, we couldn't find it. So I said we got snippets of it in the after hours programs in the the odd classroom, etc. So that's how they kind of represented it. And then when you think about the next the next step, then it is what is deep learning and how do you get it?
And they have one they did an article I love, but there's a particular graph in there or the table that says there's a yawning gap. That's the title of it. between what schools do and what students are interested in or want to do. So this gets us into, if you want impact, and we'll have to use hard nosed and soft nosed stuff, impact is [00:20:00] a sense of purpose.
Sense of contribution, learning with others, doing something significant, all the wellness and belonging stuff go there for what students these days want, and the more they see the world deteriorate, the more they say, what can we do about it as young people? So that's the kind of feed in. And then what we have developed as a solution is a role for students and teachers.
That is the opposite of the yawning gap. And what does that mean? It means that, and we have all this, we have evidence of school systems that look exactly like this, we wrote about them in the newest book on the drivers that it means then that these districts or schools, it could be individual schools.
have developed things where they focus on what we call the global competencies. So the competencies are character, citizenship, and then the four that are normally talked about that are just the, not just, but they're kind of the academic ones of critical thinking, [00:21:00] communication, creativity, and self collaboration.
So, so now we have competencies. If you trace these back for at least 20 years, Employers have said, we don't care about the test scores of a given kid coming in here. We care whether they can work as a team member, whether they're creative, can they problem solve. This is like being in the mismatch forever, and we keep churning out test scores and everybody complains, including the people that get the test scores.
Even the successful ones, one of the books called them the wounded winners. They graduated, but they weren't really fit for life, and they weren't even really interested deeply enough in what they had been working on. So, so here's your answer to the question. The impact is that students feel a sense of belonging and meaningfulness and connection.
They work on the on the global competencies, and as they develop those skills, they develop their literacy, numeracy, they graduate, they go on to a better part of life. And that [00:22:00] very good example because we they took this this district I'm going to mention in a moment, took this work, started to do their version of it then five years ago, then three years ago, they connected with us and we were doing it together now.
And it's Anaheim Union High School District. It has 26 schools, 20, 20, 000 20, 20, 000 students, I think, 26 schools. So, what they did, they took our 6Cs, they clapped 5 and 6, and called it Compassionate Citizenship, but it's just Character and Citizenship mushed into one, and the other 5, and they built the entire system.
Around that, and now that those students are they study the competencies, they put them into practice, and now with artificial intelligence, you're able to track them together, the students and teachers together, they have a pipeline to post secondary work that gets them into jobs, all of those things.
So now you see the real impact happening with those students. And it's it's having it's a I guess I'll say a tangible [00:23:00] example of the complete model. And they also have data that show explicitly, here's our, here's the they have a way of measuring each competency, which is sort of beginners, intermediate, and excellent, so they're able to track the five competencies that way, and they say, okay, here's their evidence about that, but let's tell you about a second piece of evidence, our scores on academic matters, like literacy, numeracy, high school graduation, going on post secondary, They're higher, because California has the dashboard that measures those things.
Our scores on those are higher than our neighboring districts, who are better off financially than we are, but we're doing better than on academic things. But that's not the first point. The first point is the the deep learning, and the competencies with the academic as part and parcel of that. Does that make sense?
Ross Romano: Yeah and and it is consistent with something that's made clear in the book, and you also referenced the the new book, The Drivers, [00:24:00] that's the system change from the bottom up, I know, and you can talk too, if you, about how those, that fits together with the principal, but and it's fair to say the way things are presented in the principal and the role of the principal and the impact is, Also, this bottom up view of that it's You know, not about it's about establishing impact at the local level, but that feeds all the way up to the global impact, right?
I mean, because you're not shy about referencing these issues around climate change or societal conflict or war, all all these things that are the major challenges existential challenges of our society. And this is what. Hopefully, today's learners will be solving, right, as they go up
Michael Fullan: I think they're attracted, I think the students, I know the students are attracted to that change
Ross Romano: yeah, right, and those skills are developed and [00:25:00] sustained and they're able to keep adding to those skills when they're engaging in deep learning and when they're truly I mean, they have to be engaged, right, in what they're doing, but it's deep learning. It's about skill development.
It's about the acquisition of knowledge, learning how to learn all of that versus necessarily sometimes some of those superficial measures around test scores that may or may not indicate future potential or future interest.
Michael Fullan: Yeah, that's exactly right. And employers and parents, once they see it, love it.
Ross Romano: Yeah. Yeah. It's truly interesting. I mean, I've noticed it a lot, Yeah. Recently in, in, and I think this is another thing that has been accelerated a lot due to the pandemic and then some of the things that it has opened up, but in the entrepreneurial economy and in that landscape with a lot of the things that have changed with you know, companies going online and remote work and all these things where [00:26:00] there's, The traditional one end of the spectrum, right, where there's these certain legacy companies and different industries that only recruit and hire from a very narrow set of prestigious institutions of higher learning.
At the other end, in this more entrepreneurial economy, they're, I mean, they're not even interested in whether or not you went to college or anything, right? It's all about skills and experience and what can you prove that you know how to do. And, of course, there's a lot of other things in between there, but it's interesting to see how quickly that has accelerated because I think
Michael Fullan: Yeah. It's been quite
Ross Romano: five or so years
Michael Fullan: that and interact with that work. We just a couple of nights ago, one of the authors of a book, I'm just going to mention in a second, that's like that. Was giving a speech from out of town at the Business School at University of Toronto, where I was Dean at the education, so they have these open nights once a month for people with new books and [00:27:00] I, we went down and the author's got, his name is Andy Andrew McAfee, and he's at MIT school, Sloan Business Management.
And he wrote a book called The Geek Way, G E K, he said he just used it a bit playfully, he said me and other people like me, they're sort of started off as geeks, but we're not really geeks, we're really doing great things, and here's the, here's what we do, and the whole book is about things that are examples.
A round of four pulse elements, and the, what he identifies, they're pretty consistent with what we're seeing should happen and so he's finding it in kind of, Silicon Valley and every, everywhere else, there's a certain amount of crudeness to some of that knowledge but anyway, you gotta look at it closely, and, but the point is that there's a parallel here, and it's very different than the stodgy school that we set up 200 years ago, and still employ years later. [00:28:00]
Ross Romano: Yeah, I mean, it just, I think it has added to the urgency of schools and a lot of this, particularly in universities, I mean, higher learning but also that should hopefully trickle down to K 12 to really clearly and compellingly define their value proposition, not 12. You know, what are you, what is your structure, what's your history, but what are you doing, what impact are you having what outcomes are students having after they're graduating and matriculating to the next level, and and that needs To be rethought and and sometimes there's, right, there could be that narrow focus on those right now things around, well, what's the proficiency level and what's the test scores and things like that and not that they don't.
necessarily have any meaning, but we need to make meaning of them and decide what are they really indicating for what's next, [00:29:00] and especially as far as, yeah, that continued interest and engagement. Are students who are having high levels of achievement here, are they interested in continuing to pursue that?
Are they disincentivized from continuing to learn more about a subject where they're already highly proficient because they're led to believe that's All they need to do, right? When there's a lot more they could achieve. But yeah, so I wanted to kind of get back to these three keys too.
And again, you referenced a couple of them earlier, but it's really interesting the spirit work one that's a new one. And it's probably not a coincidence that was, that's the first one listed of the three. And I'll give the brief definition here of how it's listed in the book, but The actions and accomplishments that leaders and members of school districts undertake to help their members cope and develop under the complex and adverse conditions of modern society.
Again, going back to how there's, this was [00:30:00] consistent evidence of this globally in the different countries that you studied and the school leaders you talked to, I think is really interesting, right? Because It might not always occur to us that these complex and diverse the conditions of modern society that there is so much commonality across different environments and what specifically schools and school leaders can be doing to make an impact in environments that, that may have differences that are And we believe that this is an opportunity for us to take a look at how these you can really see that there is a lot of complexity around it.
more superficial than they may seem. And on the surface, it might look very different, but you might realize, well, in fact, the challenges and the actions here you can have the same impact by doing some of the same things, but yeah, if you could talk more about why the spirit work came out as such a prominent, important piece of the role in your recent
Michael Fullan: Good question. Love it. So, we had let me start with [00:31:00] the, the new learning goal that comes out of this work, we call it producing students that are good in society and good for society. That's the dual definition. So, you're equipped to do well as you're, as yourself, but you're also committed, as they are, they want to be, to what impact am I having on society.
So, it's both of those. That's the dual change agent role. Now, once you put it that way, You start to look at what's going to enable that, and we I guess I'll say in a way, we stumbled on the concept of spirit work. When Mark Edwards, who was an award winning superintendent of Mooresville in Northeast U.
S. He and I had worked together, we, in a lot, ten years ago, we'd produced a couple of books from his work, which was great, but he came to me just before you know, this is, goes one back a book earlier than than the Principal 2. 0 and said, I'm noticing, he said, some districts around the country, because I'm very close to the Association of School Administrators, [00:32:00] and we're seeing some really good stuff, and these things have not been identified and not been brought out in the open.
He said, could we do a book on, well, to identify X number of districts that are different around the country? But they all have this kind of common success with a whole bunch of students and parents and community. So we did that and his, it was his idea. So he, we said, okay, I've said I'm working on things that are like that.
We used to call it moral purpose, which is not strong enough. It's raise the bar, close the gap. It's too narrow, I'm going to say. So we We selected seven districts. They're named in the book, The Spirit Book, you can read it that way, and they're named and they range, they go from the east, west, coast, south, north, and they have some of them might have 30 schools, some have 200 schools, so they're big range, and we started to collect the data, interview it, and we said this is like, there's spirit work here, and then there's the science of collaboration, which I now call connected autonomy, and going on that's making this the whole they're motivating [00:33:00] the entire group when it's big, and and so we, when we, these seven superintendents, we're not using the term spirit work, but we said, this is what we found, and we want to call it spirit work.
What do you think? And within a nanosecond, I'm going to say, each of the seven, completely independently from each other, Okay. said almost like a Eureka, that's it, that is what we're doing. We are committed deeply to the care of students that are not doing well in the community, regardless of who they are.
This is spirit work, the way that indigenous people would use it, for example, and the way, we don't mean it religiously. We mean it like this is shared humanity, basically. So, that's how we wrote that book. And the answer to your question is that jumped out. It's a even now, not even now, and now, we find people saying to me, Spirit Work, that's fantastic, tell me more.
That sounds like the right answer. Now, Spirit Work is the driver, in a sense. But then, what is it we'll get to the other drivers the three keys. The other two keys. You [00:34:00] have to have other action that fulfills and makes spirit work effective. So that's spirit work.
Ross Romano: Yeah, and I mean, and given, right, that the conditions and the changes over the recent years, and you had written in the introduction piece about the pandemic shocks, right there's, I think it that makes it clear why this rises to the top here,
Michael Fullan: Yeah. Very good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Ross Romano: Really challenging, I think, leaders to be much more proactive in things than the evidence was there before, but then again, the way that some of those shortcomings were really magnified in the pandemic that it's a challenge to, for example To not just try to intervene on disengagement, but to truly engage in the first place as a foundation, right?
Engage students interests, their heart, [00:35:00] their spirit their their whole selves. You know, that kind of whole child well rounded approach, right, to seeing them as people and seeing that we need to get them in here with a real that's our job versus just waiting and seeing, okay, well, once we see who's not really into it, then we'll kind of do something about it.
Michael Fullan: And also when you think of it, it's not like, spirit work. You get kids going from junior kindergarten to grade 12 and graduate, and then they become spirit work aficionados. It's not like that. It's like, it has to be built into the learning. The spirit work is a label. But the substance of the learning is how do I get better as a person, as a learner?
What about what's going on in the world? What about climate? What about poverty? What about my own community? All of that then becomes, it's all part of the global competencies, becomes all of a sudden very relevant to everybody. And they start to build, and this is why we have to move then to the second piece of that book, which is the science of [00:36:00] collaboration.
which causes spirit work to flourish.
Ross Romano: Right. Yeah, absolutely. And then you know, the second key here is that contextual literacy. And and that then connects in the relevance of the unique settings in which individuals are leading, right? So we there's these commonalities that are happening across schools and these common challenges and these common approaches, but there's also is.
uniqueness within a school setting. And it's, it really is incumbent on the leadership there to understand that, tap into that, and and be able to be successful within that context, right?
Michael Fullan: yeah, there's a p, once you get the spirit work sort of, in the frame you start to then look at your own community differently, whether it's 200 schools or 30 schools, that we call it contextual literacy, that basically says if you're a leader in that system, you have to learn about the culture in which you're leading.
And if [00:37:00] you come from someone else, from somewhere else, you're an expert because they hired you, you've got some things, but you're also an apprentice because you don't know that culture. So to get to know the culture is you're a learner and you understand then what makes that culture tick, and you also become committed to improving the culture as part of the definition of what a leader is, a principal in this case.
So that contextual literacy is a, it's a new concept and we kind of stumbled on it, but it's perfect, I think I'm going to say, for this purpose, because it says I need to understand and care for the community that I'm leading. And I can only do that if I interact with them and learn to understand them and learn the combination of share and help foster shared commitment to do better.
Ross Romano: how does one
not just develop their contextual literacy because you referenced that right, but I [00:38:00] think shift their mindset, I guess, toward even really. Buying into the importance of that and understanding that if you made you've moved from one school to another district that there's, this is such a critical piece that there's a large amount of what you already know how to do that will translate, but there's a lot that you need to reestablish and reconnect because you're in a new environment and a new context.
Michael Fullan: I think it it, I mean, in some sense, it's whether we're talking about this student learning that or the principal or the superintendent, whatever, the only way to learn it is to be a learner. aS well as you've got some good ideas, but there's many examples where superintendents are hired or principals, they come in, there's great reputation, they said, okay, here's our mission statement, and we've got to get going and implement it, but the others are not understanding or owning it in a deep way.
[00:39:00] So you have to have good orientation, the spirit work direction, and then you have to figure out with people that are there. What does that mean specifically operationally, and how do people get better at it, and when they get better at it, they understand it more, right? So that you don't, you may, it's kind of a chicken and egg question.
You don't understand it just because you were at a workshop or you've read something and say, oh yeah, I get this. You understand it because you put your hands on it and you try to figure out how to make it work, and it's that learning. So we have we have the flow of the, that is joint determination of the direction with the leader having good ideas.
Experiencing the implementation of it, where you learn the specificity of it, and you lock in those things that are working, and you jettison what's not working. And then the accountability is understanding whether you've accomplished something, and it's transparent. non judgmental, the accountability becomes because it's transparent, not because there's a somebody looking over your shoulder.
So there's a whole integration of three or [00:40:00] four factors that makes it work synergistically.
Ross Romano: Yeah, I mean, it seems to me that there's a lot of relationship between this idea and between what we talked about earlier around. It's easy to do the wrong things when you are
Michael Fullan: And not know it, not know why
Ross Romano: right. I was, well, I was brought here to make change or I was brought here to do something.
So I need to come in and start taking action. And I and I, it may not just be me as the principal who feel, but I may feel there may be pressure that feels like it's putting, well, we brought you here to make a difference, right? And making a difference means showing us that you're actually taking action.
And realistically though, I need to know what actions are going to make sense and be effective where I am. And also seems as though two way communication is really critical to this. Of course, there's the piece of coming in and
Michael Fullan: yeah, and I think if you have what we see elsewhere, you see a [00:41:00] lot of leadership at the district level who want principals to do things that are not actually not going to turn out to be effective. So what does the principal do? They try to do them and they're not effective, so everybody fails.
But they also, you can't just you can't just complain about it, even though you know it's wrong, so you're annoyed by it. But what so what you have to do is and you don't have to be in your face rebellious. You just have to start doing some of the right things. And when you do the right things, and this is what the principles in 2.
0 did, once you do it and it starts to be successful, I'm going to put it this way, you gain political power professional power. The professional power is you know what you're doing, it works, you can explain it, everybody likes it. And then the political power is the students and the parents in the community like it so much that the hierarchy is not going to have much of a chance of undoing it if that combination of community is really for it.
And then eventually the hierarchy says, Hey, there's some good things going on here. We should have more of that. And that's what the [00:42:00] seven districts in the spirit work book did. They were districts, not individual schools.
Ross Romano: Yeah. So the third key is the elusive systemness. But you do put practical definitions around that. Can you describe that one?
Michael Fullan: Yeah, it's a tough one. I've actually shifted the way I present it now in the developmental work. Yeah. Let's leave it aside just for a second, and now the new third one is called Connected Autonomy. So, now we've got the spirit work, you've got learning and context, connected autonomy, that makes it work.
And then, the final two pieces that I put on top of that, sort of surrounding it, one is systemness, and and in And doing a lot. The second one is called Leadership Legacy. So that's just easy to dispense of for a moment because we're backwards to system work. So we the second one about Leadership Legacy, it means that as a leader, I model leadership.
So my my [00:43:00] principals, I'm talking about a district now, that people are seeing that they're liking what I'm doing, I'm helping them develop. And then the indicator of this, It is a usual impact on learning. But the second indicator is how many good leaders you leave behind when you leave, let's say after 5, 6, 7 years.
That's leadership legacy. So that's what I want as a wraparound. Now we go to systemness as a wraparound and we have increasingly precise definition, I wanna say, which is. You build the bottom, you strengthen the middle, and you intrigue the top. So, build the bottom is very clear in the Principle 2. 0.
The principle is building the community and the school. And when a district is doing that as 10 schools or 20 schools in the case of Anaheim or whatever the number is they are building schools and interaction as a culture of schools, so they're strengthening and they become a good district like Anaheim, like Ottawa Catholic that we work with in Ontario.
They've become great. Everybody knows it. They've got professional and political [00:44:00] power and and so that's locked in as a system component. And then the third one is trickier. It's, I call it, I now call it Intrigue the Top. So now the top is the state. And so Intrigue the Top I'm, and I, it's a bit playful because of just that phrase, Intrigue the Top.
You basically say, we want the Senate to like it but not run it. We don't want them to endorse it because that's more trouble than if they just leave us alone and enable it a little bit. And then, but then you get, we get serious about system change, and then this is really where we're entering now in 2024.
Because the whole system and the whole world is crumbling in some ways. Bigger systems have to be, whole countries, whole states have to be good at this. So now we have more system leaders are saying, we know we have to change our role if you work backwards from your work principle 2. 0, and then building it into the district and then into policy, how do we do that?
And that's what we're doing in California, but [00:45:00] it's unfinished business, obviously, but I'm going to say that the next Decade. The next three or four years will take longer, but let's say three years. There's going to be a shift towards this positive agenda in getting the whole system. Districts for sure, but in the case of San Diego County, we have 42 districts, 500, 000 students.
That's big. And the goal is to have that whole thing change.
Ross Romano: Yeah. And so with the connected autonomy, if I'm not mistaken, I mean, that. That works both within the school, but then across the entire system.
Michael Fullan: Yeah, it's everything. It's, first of all, the connected autonomy is a is a single concept. It's not a continuum. It's not like, oh, I'm autonomous over here, and now I'm connected. It's on any given day, you're simultaneously connected and autonomous. That's the dynamic equilibrium. So that is that has to be like that.
And then you you have to see it, then one version of it is I'm a teacher in the school, connected autonomy. I'm the principal in school, connected autonomy. [00:46:00] I'm the superintendent connected autonomy. I am I'm a student and I'm connected autonomy in my in my inner school life, but also in my community or wherever I'm in a job.
So it is per, it's, it is comprehensive across it. And it's the more that everyone is connectedly connected autonomously, the more ideas will be generated. The autonomous connection part, and the more that consolidation would happen when you do the connectedness.
Ross Romano: Yeah, that's excellent. Michael, so we have you know, we talked a lot. I mean, we talked about some of the challenges, but also a lot of the solutions, but wanted to end on a, an even higher note but some of the reasons for optimism about the future, as we see this evolution in the role of the principal, the school leader in the schools and hopefully this changing perspective on goals and how to get there, right?
Are there some things that stand out as causes to really have optimism about where that's headed?
Michael Fullan: It's a mixture, and I'm going [00:47:00] to say it depends on your your philosophy of life, I guess I'll say, is that there's not so much a clear empirical answer to that question, but I think my my worry is that things are really getting decidedly bad. So we have the conflict in the Middle East, where it's almost normal to kill children.
It's almost normal. So that's humanity gone to the depths of, if possible. So there's a lot of things, but I think at the same time, there's a, if you think of it, because I study a lot of evolutionary theory and and the stuff that we're doing with neuroscience where people are connecting and it's built into your brain development.
That, that gives me optimism that kind of mechanism to accomplish the connection, plus the the values that a lot of students have and others in society, we've got to do something. So there is definitely, in the U. S. especially, something has to be done to deal with the macro divisiveness. [00:48:00] Which is killing the country and and yet I think the micro interactions that we're talking about building from the bottom middle upward and then the response of leaders who will pick that up and then be intrigued enough to take political credit for developing it further, you've got something worthwhile.
So my optimism is That is a natural way to reverse what we've been doing, and there are ideas around and examples around that show what that looks like in particular.
Ross Romano: Well, listeners, so the book is The Principal 2. 0. You can find it from Wiley, Amazon, Barnes Noble, wherever you get your books. You can also learn more about it on Michael's website. We'll put the link to that below. Michael, is there anything else listeners should check out more about what you're working on currently?
Michael Fullan: Just the to pay attention to 2024, 2025, the examples that are moving in the opposite direction to what we have been criticizing. And there are examples there are several districts. In the the driver's book, there [00:49:00] are five case studies now at the more at the system level state, district, usually.
So that, I think take a look at the specificity and be inspired by the overall goals, which are, in fact, inspiring. For negative reasons, we're getting, going to hell in a handbasket. For positive reasons, this could be fabulous. Turnaround for society, but then then to get the concrete examples to inspire you operationally.
Yeah,
Ross Romano: Yeah, excellent. Yeah, so. The power is in your hands, right? Yeah. I mean,
Michael Fullan: It would go for it. Yeah, exactly.
Ross Romano: Yeah the job you're doing as school leader really will make the difference and and yeah, the last handful of years here have really presented both the challenge, but the opportunity to really reshape the future, I think, in
Michael Fullan: And the last line I think is. That when this opens up, teachers and principals say, This is why I came into the profession. [00:50:00] When they experience it, that's the hope. That takes, that's a catalytic kind of expansion. Because now they, they no longer believe it's possible to be that fulfilling.
And when they're experiencing it, it's complete wow.
Ross Romano: Yeah, totally. Awesome. Well, yeah, listeners, check that out. We'll put the links below where you can learn more and buy the book and all these resources. Please also do subscribe to the authority for more in depth author interviews like this. We have more coming up every week and please visit bpodcast.
network to learn about all of our shows. I'm Michael Fallon. Thanks so much for being here.
Michael Fullan: Great interview. Thank you, Ross for the preparation. Thanks.
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