Educational Leadership
Volume 50 Number 6 March 1993
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The Professional Teacher
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 professionÑand this is my
theme hereÑteachers must combine the mantle of moral purpose with the skills of
change agentry.
Moral purpose and change agentry, at
first glance, appear to be strange bedfellows. On closer examination they are
natural allies (Fullan 1993). Stated more directly, moral purposeÑor making a
differenceÑconcerns bringing about improvements. It is, in other words, a change
theme. In addition to the need to make moral purpose more explicit,
educators need the tools to engage in change productively. Moral purpose keeps
teachers close to the needs of children and youth; change agentry causes them
to develop better strategies for accomplishing their moral goals.
Those skilled in change appreciate
its volatile character, and they explicitly seek ideas for coping with and
influencing change toward some desired ends. I see four core capacities for
building greater change capacity: personal vision-building, inquiry, mastery,
and collaboration (see Senge 1990 and Fullan 1993). Each of these has its
institutional counterpart: shared vision-building; organizational structures,
norms, and practices of inquiry; the development of increased repertoires of
skills and know-how among organizational members; and collaborative work
cultures.
But we are facing a huge dilemma. On
the one hand, schools are expected to engage in continuous renewal, and change
expectations are constantly swirling around them. On the other hand, the way
teachers are trained, the way schools are organized, the way the educational
hierarchy operates, and the way political decision makers treat educators
results in a system that is more likely to retain the status quo. One way out
of this quandary is to make explicit the goals and skills of change agentry. To
break the impasse, we need a new conception of teacher professionalism that
integrates moral purpose and change agentry, one that works simultaneously on
individual and institutional development. One cannot wait for the other.
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).
Personal vision comes from within.
It gives meaning to work, and it exists independently of the organization or
group we happen to be in. Once it gets going, it is not as private as it
sounds. Especially in moral occupations like teaching, the more one takes the
risk to express personal purpose, the more kindred spirits one will find.
Paradoxically, personal purpose is the route to organizational change. When it
is diminished, we see in its place group-think and a continual stream of
fragmented, surface changes acquired uncritically and easily discarded.
Inquiry
All four capacities of change are intimately
interrelated and mutually reinforcing. The second oneÑinquiryÑindicates 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).
Inquiry is necessary for forming and
reforming personal purpose. While the latter comes from within, it must be
fueled by information and ideas in the environment. Inquiry means internalizing
norms, habits, and techniques for continuous learning. For the beginner,
learning is critical because of its formative timing. Lifelong learning is essential
because in complex, ever-changing societies mental maps "cease to fit the
territory" (Pascale 1990, p. 13). Teachers as change agents are
career-long learners, without which they would not be able to stimulate
students to be continuous learners.
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
collaborationÑin 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 educationÑfrom
initial preparation throughout the careerÑis 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 purposeÑcaring 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.
Teacher education institutions
themselves must take responsibility for their current reputation as laggards
rather than leaders of educational reform. I will not take up the critical area
of recruitment and selection in the profession (for the best discussion, see
Schlechty 1990, chapter 1). In many ways an "if you build it, they will
come" strategy is called for. It is self-defeating to seek candidates who
turn out to be better than the programs they enter. What is needed is a
combination of selection criteria that focus on academics as well as experience
(related, for example, to moral purpose), sponsorship for underrepresented
groups, and a damn good program.
Teacher educators like other would-be
change agents must take some initiative themselves. Examples are now happening
on several fronts. At the University of Toronto, we embarked on a major reform
effort in 1988. With a faculty of some 90 staff and 1,100 full-time students in
a one-year post-baccalaureate teacher certification program, we piloted a
number of field-based options in partnerships with school systems (see
University of Toronto, Making a Difference Video, 1992a). In 1991 I
prepared a paper for our strategic planning committee, taking as a starting
point the following
premise: Faculties of Education
should not advocate things for teachers or schools that they are not capable of
practicing themselves. Using a hypothetical "best faculty of education in the
country" metaphor, I suggested that such a faculty would:
1. commit itself to
producing teachers who are agents of educational and social improvement,
2. commit itself to
continuous improvement through program innovation and evaluation,
3. value and
practice exemplary teaching,
4. engage in
constant inquiry,
5. model and develop
lifelong learning among staff and students,
6. model and develop
collaboration among staff and students,
7. be
respected and engaged as a vital part of the university as a whole,
8. form partnerships
with schools and other agencies,
9. be
visible and valued internationally in a way that contributes locally and
globally,
10. work collaboratively to
build regional, national, and international networks (Fullan 1991).
To illustrate, consider items 3 and
6. It would seem self-evident that faculties of education would stand for
exemplary teaching among their own staff. Faculties of education have some
excellent (and poor) teachers, but I would venture to say that hardly any have
effective institutional mechanisms for improving their own teaching.
Regarding item 6, many faculties of education advocate collaborative work
cultures for schools, and some participate in professional development schools.
This leads to two embarrassing questions. First, to what extent are teacher
preparation programs designed so that student teachers deliberately develop and
practice the habits and skills of collaboration? Even more embarrassing, to
what extent do university professors (arts and science, as well as education)
value and practice collaboration in their own teaching and scholarship?
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.
Our Restructuring Committee has proposed that:
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).
To summarize: Faculties of education
must redesign their programs to focus directly on developing the beginner's
knowledge base for effective teaching and the knowledge base for
changing the conditions that affect teaching. Sarason puts it this way:
"Is it asking too much of preparatory programs to prepare their students
for a `real world' which they must understand and seek to change if as
persons and professionals they are to grow, not only to survive" (in
press, p. 252, my emphasis). Goodlad (1991) asks a similar question: "Are
a large percentage of these educators thoroughly grounded in the knowledge and
skills required to bring about meaningful change?" (p. 4). The new
standard for the future is that every teacher must strive to become effective
at managing change.
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.
I do not have the space to
elaborateÑindeed many of the details have not been worked out. The general
directions, however, are clear. In terms of pedagogy, the works of Gardner
(1991) and Sizer (1992)Ñin developing approaches to teaching for
understandingÑexemplify the kinds of knowledge and skills that teachers must
develop and enlarge upon throughout their careers.
Beyond better pedagogy, the teacher
of the future must actively improve the conditions for learning in his or her
immediate environments. Put one way, teachers will never improve learning in
the classroom (or whatever the direct learning environment) unless they also
help improve conditions that surround the classroom. Andy Hargreaves and I
developed 12 guidelines for action consistent with this new conception of
"interactive professionalism":
1. locate, listen
to, and articulate your inner voice;
2. practice
reflection in action, on action, and about action;
3. develop a
risk-taking mentality;
4. trust processes
as well as people;
5. appreciate the
total person in working with others;
6. commit to working
with colleagues;
7. seek variety and
avoid balkanization;
8. redefine your
role to extend beyond the classroom;
9. balance work and
life;
10. push and support
principals and other administrators to develop interactive professionalism;
11. commit to continuous
improvement and perpetual learning;
12. monitor and strengthen
the connection between your development and students' development (Fullan and
Hargreaves 1991).
We also developed eight guidelines for principals that focus their energies on reculturing the school toward greater interactive professionalism to make a difference in the educational lives of students. However, as important as principals can be, they are a diversion (and perhaps a liability) as far as new conceptions of the professional teacher are concerned. In a real sense, what gives the contemporary principalship inflated importance is the absence of leadership opportunities on the part of teachers (Fullan 1993).
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.
Above all, we need action that links
initial teacher preparation and continuous teacher development based on moral
purpose and change agentry with the corresponding restructuring of universities
and schools and their relationships. Systems don't change by themselves.
Rather, the actions of individuals and small groups working on new conceptions
intersect to produce breakthroughs (Fullan 1993). New conceptions, once mobilized,
become new paradigms. The new paradigm for teacher professionalism synthesizes
the forces of moral purpose and change agentry.
References
Berends, M. (1992). "A Description of Restructuring in
Nationally Nominated Schools." Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of
the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco.
Block, P. (1987). The Empowered Manager. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Farber, B. (1991). Crisis in Education. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Fullan, M. (1991). "The Best Faculty of Education in the
Country: A Fable." Submitted to the Strategic Planning Committee. Faculty
of Education, University of Toronto.
Fullan, M. (1993). Change Forces: Probing the Depths of
Educational Reform. London: Falmer Press.
Fullan, M., and A. Hargreaves. (1991). What's Worth Fighting
for in Your School? Toronto: Ontario Public School Teachers' Federation; Andover,
Mass.: The Network; Buckingham, U.K.: Open University Press; Melbourne:
Australian Council of Educational Administration.
Gardner, H. (1991). The Unschooled Mind. New York:
Basic Books.
Goodlad, J. (1991). "Why We Need a Complete Redesign of
Teacher Education." Educational Leadership 49, 3:
4Ð10.
Holmes Group. (In press). Tomorrow's Colleges of Education. East
Lansing, Mich.: Holmes Group.
Howey, K. R. (1992). The Network of Fifteen. Columbus:
Ohio State University.
Kramer, R. (1992). Ed School Follies. New York:
Foss Press.
Pascale, P. (1990). Managing on the Edge. New York:
Touchstone.
Sarason, S. (In press). The Case for a Change: The Preparation
of Educators. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Schlechty, P. (1990). Reform in Teacher Education.
Washington, D.C.: American Association of Colleges of Education.
Senge, P. (1990). The Fifth Discipline. New York:
Doubleday.
Sizer, T. (1992). Horace's School: Redesigning the American
High School. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Stiegelbauer, S. (1992). "Why We Want to Be Teachers."
Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research
Association, San Francisco.
University of Toronto, Faculty of Education. (1992a). Making a
Difference Video, Toronto, Ontario.
University of Toronto, Faculty of Education. (1992b). "B.Ed.
Restructuring Committee Report," Toronto, Ontario.
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Michael Fullan is dean
of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
of the University of Toronto.
He is the author of Leading in a Culture of Change, the Change Forces Trilogy, and The Moral Imperative of School Leadership.
www.michaelfullan.ca