Why Teachers Must Become
Change Agents
Michael G.
Fullan
Teacher education programs must help teaching
candidates to link the moral purpose that influences them with the tools that
will prepare them to engage in productive change.
Teaching at
its core is a moral profession. Scratch a good teacher and you will find a
moral purpose. At the Faculty of Education, University of Toronto, we recently
examined why people enter the teaching profession (Stiegelbauer 1992). In a
random sample of 20 percent of 1,100 student teachers, the most frequently
mentioned theme was “to make a difference in the lives of students.” Of course,
such statements cannot be taken at face value because people have a variety of
motives for becoming teachers. Nonetheless, there is a strong kernel of truth
to this conclusion.
What happens
in teacher preparation, the early years of teaching, and throughout the career,
however, is another story. Those with a clear sense of moral purpose often
become disheartened, and those with a limited sense of purpose are never called
upon to demonstrate their commitment. In an extensive study of teacher burnout,
Farber (1991) identifies the devastating effects of the growing “sense of
inconsequentiality” that often accompanies the teacher's career. Many teachers,
says Farber, begin their careers “with a sense that their work is socially
meaningful and will yield great personal satisfactions. ” This sense
dissipates, however, as “the inevitable difficulties of teaching ... interact
with personal issues and vulnerabilities, as well as social pressure and
values, to engender a sense of frustration and force a reassessment of the
possibilities of the job and the investment one wants to make in it” (1991, p.
36).
A Natural Alliance
Certainly
calls for reestablishing the moral foundation of teaching are warranted, but
increased commitment at the one-to-one and classroom levels alone is a recipe
for moral martyrdom. To have any chance of making teaching a noble and effective
profession—and this is my theme here—teachers must combine the mantle of moral
purpose with the skills of change agentry.
Personal Vision-Building
Working on
personal visions means examining and re-examining why we came into teaching.
Asking “What difference am I trying to make personally?” is a good place to
start.
For most of
us, the reasons are there, but possibly buried. For the beginning teacher, they
may be underdeveloped. It is time to make them front and center. Block
emphasizes that “creating a vision forces us to take a stand for a preferred
future” (1987, p. 102). To articulate our vision of the future “is to come out
of the closet with our doubts about the organization and the way it operates”
(p. 105).
Inquiry
All four
capacities of change are intimately interrelated and mutually reinforcing. The
second one—inquiry—indicates that formation and enactment of personal purpose
are not static matters but, rather, a perennial quest. Pascale (1990) captures
this precisely: “The essential activity for keeping our paradigm current is
persistent questioning. I will use the term inquiry. Inquiry is the
engine of vitality and self-renewal”(p. 14, emphasis in original).
Mastery
Mastery is a
third crucial ingredient. People behave their way into new visions and
ideas, not just think their way into them. Mastery is obviously necessary for
effectiveness, but it is also a means for achieving deeper understanding. New
mind-sets arise from mastery as much as the reverse.
It has long
been known that expertise is central to successful change, so it is surprising
how little attention we pay to it beyond one-shot workshops and disconnected
training. Mastery involves strong initial teacher education and career-long
staff development, but when we place it in the perspective of comprehensive
change, it is much more than this. Beyond exposure to new ideas, we have to
know where they fit, and we have to become skilled in them, not just like them.
To be
effective at change, mastery is essential both in relation to specific
innovations and as a personal habit.
Collaboration
There is a
ceiling effect to how much we can learn if we keep to ourselves (Fullan and
Hargreaves 1991). The ability to collaborate on both a small- and large-scale
is becoming one of the core requisites of postmodern society. Personal
strength, as long as it is open-minded (that is, inquiry-oriented), goes
hand-in-hand with effective collaboration—in fact, without personal strength
collaboration will be more form than content. Personal and group mastery thrive
on each other in learning organizations.
In sum, the
moral purpose of teaching must be reconceptualized as a change theme. Moral
purpose without change agentry is martyrdom; change agentry without moral
purpose is change for the sake of change. In combination, not only are they
effective in getting things done, but they are good at getting the right
things done. The implications for teacher education and for redesigning schools
are profound.
Society's Missed Opportunity
Despite the
rhetoric about teacher education today, there does not seem to be a real belief
that investing in teacher education will yield results. With all the problems
demanding immediate solution, it is easy to overlook a preventive strategy that
would take several years to have an impact.
Currently,
teacher education—from initial preparation throughout the career—is not geared
toward continuous learning. Teacher education has the honor of being the worst
problem and the best solution in education. The absence of a strong publicly
stated knowledge base allows the misconception to continue that any smart
person can teach. After visiting 14 colleges of education across the U.S.,
Kramer (1992) concludes:
Everything [a person] needs to know
about how to teach could be learned by intelligent people in a single summer of
well-planned instruction (p. 24).
In a twisted
way, there is some truth to this observation. It is true in the sense that many
people did and still do take such minimal instruction and manage to have a
career in teaching. It is true also that some people with a strong summer
program would end up knowing as much or more as others who take a weak yearlong
program. In her journey, Kramer found plenty of examples of moral
purpose—caring people, committed to social equality. What she found wanting was
an emphasis on knowledge and understanding. Caring and competence are of course
not mutually exclusive (indeed this is the point), but they can seem that way
when the knowledge base is so poorly formulated.
Key Images for Teacher Preparation
With such guiding principles, and some experience with them through our
pilot projects, we at the University of Toronto have recently begun redesigning
the entire teacher preparation program.
Every
teacher should be knowledgeable about, committed to, and skilled in:
1. working with
all students in an equitable, effective, and caring manner by respecting
diversity in relation to ethnicity, race, gender, and special needs of each
learner;
2. being active
learners who continuously seek, assess, apply, and communicate knowledge as
reflective practitioners throughout their careers;
3. developing
and applying knowledge of curriculum, instruction, principles of learning, and
evaluation needed to implement and monitor effective and evolving programs for
all learners;
4. initiating,
valuing, and practicing collaboration and partnerships with students,
colleagues, parents, community, government, and social and business agencies;
5. appreciating
and practicing the principles, ethics, and legal responsibilities of teaching
as a profession;
6. developing a
personal philosophy of teaching which is informed by and contributes to the
organizational, community, societal, and global contexts of education
(University of Toronto, B.Ed. Restructuring Committee, 1992b).
We are now
developing the actual program, curriculum, and teaching designs. Everything we
know about the complexities of change applies in spades to the reform of higher
education institutions. Nonetheless, after four years, we have made good
progress and look forward to the next four years as the ones when more
comprehensive and systematic reform will be put into place (see also Goodlad
1991, Howey 1992, and the third report of the Holmes Group, forthcoming).
Redesigning Schools
One of the
main reasons that restructuring has failed so far is that there is no
underlying conception that grounds what would happen within new structures.
Restructuring has caused changes in participation, in governance, and in other
formal aspects of the organization, but in the majority of cases, it has not
affected the teaching-learning core and professional culture (Berends 1992,
Fullan 1993). To restructure is not to reculture.
The
professional teacher, to be effective, must become a career-long learner of
more sophisticated pedagogies and technologies and be able to form and reform
productive collaborations with colleagues, parents, community agencies,
businesses, and others. The teacher of the future, in other words, must be
equally at home in the classroom and in working with others to bring about
continuous improvements.
A New Professionalism
Teacher
professionalism is at a threshold. Moral purpose and change agentry are
implicit in what good teaching and effective change are about, but as yet they
are society's (and teaching's) great untapped resources for radical and
continuous improvement. We need to go public with a new rationale for why
teaching and teacher development are fundamental to the future of society.
