We all have heroes. When I was a young postgraduate in Chemistry my hero was Isaac Newton, a proverbial giant in his own right. He didn't need "shoulders to stand on" and transformed scientific thought with his experiments, his intellect, and his single mindedness. One of his most bizarre experiments has to have been sticking a needle into his eye to examine properties of light!
Later, when I was studying psychology, I had several heroes including Ed Schein, Peter Senge and David Nadler, all associated with organisation development generally, and the latter two with systems thinking specifically. Their thinking and approaches changed my career and my life; from narrowly focused development work into wider aspects of organisation development and culture change, from being employed to being self-employed, from being told what to do into advising others into how things could be better.
We all need heroes, people we can admire, look up to, learn from.
I have just found another; Michael Fullan is a professor emeritus at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. His website is http://www.michaelfullan.com/ and I encourage anyone seeking to understand how to transform education systems to visit it. The site is resource rich, here is someone who believes in sharing his thoughts on the widest scale; take a look at and download his articles on The Power of The Principal, Learning is The Work, Motivate The Masses, Professional Capital. The one that has interested me the most is Wrong Drivers For System Reform which seems to contain most if not all of what I presented to some senior staff at Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Kathmandu last April. Here are some extracts from what Fullan says:
"The key to system-wide success is to place educators and students at the centre. This means aligning the goals of reform and the intrinsic motivation of participants. So policies that foster strong intrinsic motivation across the whole system are required, as are strategies that develop
increased capability. Both strong motivation and enhanced skills on a large scale are required."
"Capacity building, group work and deep pedagogy, accelerated by technology, are processes that support all schools engaging in improvement of practice. Systemic means all elements of the system are interconnected and involved, day after day. Systemic is experiential not theoretical. Thus, the four wrong drivers are not ‘systemic’ by this definition."
"The solution involves using the four big effective drivers:"
1. The learning–instruction–assessment nexus.
2. Social capital to build the profession.
3. Pedagogy matches technology.
4. Systemic synergy.
"First, ensure the centrepiece of action is based on learning and instruction. Relentless development of ‘capacity building’ is the main agenda. Integral to this is commitment to the moral purpose of raising the bar and closing the gap for all students.
Second, use groups to accomplish a learning–instruction culture. Approach the solution as a social capital proposition to build the teaching profession. This requires building collaborative cultures within and across schools.
Third, power new pedagogical innovations with technology. They make education easier and more absorbing — learning and life become more seamless.
Fourth, the set of good drivers must comprise a coherent, interactive whole."
I sincerely hope that enough people are reading this in Nepal to at least give these issues some consideration. They are not just the words of an education expert, the sort of person too often appointed to advise on changing an education system. They are the words of someone who understands organisational change, systems thinking, and whole system change. As I have also consistently advised, using the wrong drivers and pulling the wrong levers will NOT lead to systemic change. But it COULD lead to systemic collapse!
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