I just finished reading Michael Fullan’s The Six Secrets of Change, one of several books my new superintendent recommended back in August for insight into his leadership philosophy. It’s a quick and an easy read. I read it in a single weekend while watching football and playing with my kids. I’d recommend it to anyone in a leadership role in education today. Here’s my quick summary of his secrets.
Secret 1: Love your Employees
Be proud of the faculty and staff you have and treat them with the care and respect they deserve. Hold them accountable for their actions because you care about them and want to help them grow. Don’t punish or pay them as motivation to change. Show them that you care by being present in their work and giving them opportunities to grow and develop into stronger educators.
Fullan quotes Barber & Mourshed (2007): “the quality of the education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.” The lesson here is that while “Put Students First” is a great vision statement for a placard on the wall of a high school, it’s missing a key component. Putting students first requires the maintenance of a highly educated and self-motivated faculty and staff. It doesn’t require putting teachers last.
Secret 2: Connect Peers with Purpose
This secret can be summed up in a single sentence: Collaboration is important for getting teachers to share and learn, but only when focused on work that matters. You can’t simply require that teachers meet in teams once a week and expect wonderful things to happen. They must be engaged in work that has purpose to them. Otherwise, there is no reason for them to meet.
This is a great reason to implement Professional Learning Communities, which encourages the use of protocols to build efficiency and meaning into every teacher meeting.
Secret 3: Capacity Building Prevails
Effective leaders are not judgmental of individual failings. They treat every misstep as an opportunity to build capacity in their employees (and their students). This goes back to loving your employees a bit, but it’s an important point. If you are a judgmental leader whose methods of school improvement are punishment and fear, you will never know half of the things that go on in your school. No one will tell you anything out of fear of getting in trouble.
Secret 4: Learning is the Work
Gone are the days of bringing in an outside expert for staff professional development. Unless, of course, that expert is addressing a very specific need, more benefit comes from encouraging teachers to reflect on their practices and student data to improve the work they do every day.
If a high school math department implements a plan to help increase semester test scores for socioeconomically disadvantaged kids, and the scores remain unchanged, something in the plan needs to be changed. No blame. No hurt feelings. Just constant incremental growth and learning.
Secret 5: Transparency Rules
Transparency about the school teaching methods and the student data provides the positive pressure to grow and change. For example, we have been Writing Across the Curriculum for two consecutive years now. Our writing test scores have increased by 10%. Or, they haven’t. Here’s why. What are we going to do now?
Secret 6: Systems Learn
Fullan advocates for strong visions and policies and a commitment to fostering leadership throughout an organization as a way of ensuring continuity from year to year. He cites several successful companies who have been successful because they’ve created a culture of success, not because they had a bold and charismatic leader.
The point here is that it’s not enough for individual leaders to impress their faculty and staff by implementing the first five secrets.
Conclusion
If you love your employees (which you better), you’ll want them to collaborate in ways that are meaningful to them. When mistakes are made, you suspend judgement and build capacity by recognizing the weak points and finding ways to strengthen them for the future. And, you make their lives easier by giving them time and methods to learn from their work. When you have nothing to hide, you should share your methods and results with others. And, last but not least, share these secrets with as many people as possible to inform your theory and build capacity in future leaders in your school.