Book Review: The New Meaning of Educational Change

As the title suggests, this book is a current compendium of school change. Its author, Michael Fullan, offers readers a map and moral compass for the shifting education landscape and arms them with the knowledge to cope and thrive.

The book was written to help make sense of the change processes and the relationship between the big picture and the local context where change must be implemented. Players at all levels of the system will find insights into their particular roles and those with whom they must interact.

The New Meaning of Educational Change is organized into three main sections: an overview of the history and processes of school change and the implications for dealing with it, a discussion of roles and reality at the local level, and the future of educational reform. Fullan writes in refreshingly direct language, honouring the complexity of change, while making it understandable with powerful insights and illustrations. The text is richly embedded with examples from the research, with a list of 250 references at the end of the book.

Fullan contends that a brief history of educational change is a prerequisite to understanding change, and this is the purpose of Part I. Despite spawning a myriad of innovations, the early decades of school reforms were characterized by a stubborn failure to replicate. The large-scale government initiatives which followed also yielded ‘miniscule’ results. This inability to translate ideas into widespread practice at the local site level revealed that education reform was a far more complex process than contemplated. As the pressure for school improvement mounted in the 1990s, understandings began to emerge about implementing deeper and wider change, not through command and control, but through changing the culture. The final chapters of Part I provide lessons on coping with multiple colliding reforms; the adoption, initiation and sustaining of change; and understanding the dynamics of learning and improving organizations.

Part II turns to the actors at the local level. A chapter devoted to each major player captures the daunting environment in which they must function, provides examples of success from the field, offers advice about lurking dangers, and summarizes the research on practices that will generate most progress.

Fullan begins with teachers because ultimately, education change depends upon what teachers do and think. Finding the profession to be at a critical crossroads, he suggests teachers must increase their capacity to deal with change or continue to be victimized by relentless external change forces. Ending teacher isolation and developing collaborative, interactive, reflective behaviors in the school setting is key to reinventing professional practice and rebuilding teacher morale and efficacy.

Administrative roles are also more complex than ever. The chapter addressing principals describes the leadership characteristics essential to the improving school. For district leaders, Fullan draws on the research base about improving, stuck and declining districts to present the organizing principles for a local re-culturing to support continuous progress. Through multiple examples, he shows how effective superintendents have used these mechanisms to leverage the work of school leaders.

Succeeding chapters deal with school boards, parents and community, students, and other players, and the importance of relationships and common goal alignment among them. He devotes a chapter to the growing role of external agencies participating in school reform. These new partners - such as consultants, non-profits and foundations -are providing research, evaluation, resources, and opportunities to pilot and monitor innovative new school organizational structures.

Part III returns to the big picture to reflect on the role of governments and the need to modernize the teaching profession. Drawing from the international evidence on system reforms, Fullan describes those policy frameworks which have the most impact on building local capacity for positive and enduring change. He devotes the final chapters of the book to the urgency of transforming the teaching profession for the new millennium.

Every reader of this guide to educational change will bring away deeper understandings about the ongoing journey to better schools.