Colorado Christian University Classroom and School Wide Coherence Plan Paper in their book Coherence – The Right Drivers in Action for Schools, Districts,

Colorado Christian University Classroom and School Wide Coherence Plan Paper in their book Coherence – The Right Drivers in Action for Schools, Districts, and System,Michael Fullan and co-author Joanne Quinn present their “Coherence Framework” consisting of four components:

● focusing direction,

● cultivating collaborative cultures,

● deepening student learning

● securing accountability

The authors identified each component as a “driver” calling teachers and administrators to action, ultimately leading to the improvement of student learning.

In this paper, using the Fullan and Salina texts, texts and Reference section documents, describe the process of collaboratively employing each driver within the context of a preferred future teaching assignment or current teaching assignment (see Introductory Paragraph below).

Introductory Paragraph

Briefly describe your future teaching assignment’s grade level (elementary school) student demographics, district and school characteristics (e.g., size), and community/neighborhood context. (https://www.sanjuan.edu/cms/lib/CA01902727/Centricity/domain/141/sarc/2015sarc/2015_School_Accountability_Report_Card_CDE_Oakview_Community_Elementary_School_20160106.pdf )

Fostering Direction – Developing Shared Purpose

This section addresses the concept of the “moral imperative” of teaching. Fullan states that educators “must first understand their own moral purpose and be able to combine personal values, persistence, emotional intelligence, and resilience. This is essential because their moral purpose will be reflected in all their decisions and actions” (p. 18). To clarify one’s moral imperative, Fullan recommends that educators answer the following questions (p. 19):

o● What is my moral imperative?

o● What actions do I take to realize my moral imperative?

o● How do I help others clarify their moral imperative?

4.Begin this section with a description of the moral imperative of teaching supported by the course’s textbooks and articles listed in the syllabus Reference section.

5.Conclude this section with a discussion of developing a shared moral purpose among you and your colleagues that guides your collaborative instructional planning process.

Fostering Direction – Developing Shared Learning Goals

In the section entitled “Goals That Impact What Matters Most”, Fullan and Quinn state that “(t)he problem is not the absence of goals in districts and schools today but the presence of too many that are ad hoc, unconnected, and ever-changing” (p. 19). Employing Fullan’s recommendations for developing a limited number of goals (see pages 21 – 24):

1.Identify and briefly describe three school-wide general learning goals (e.g., citizenship, collaboration, initiative taking) and how they may positively impact student learning.

2.Then describe the collaborative process with your colleagues resulting in the identification of the goals and their school-wide implementation within your school context described in your opening paragraph.

Creating Collaborative Cultures – Developing School and Parents Collaboration

In this section, describe the process you and your colleagues could employ to develop effective collaboration between your grade level (elementary school) or department (middle/high school) and parents.

1.Begin this section by defining the nature of effective collaboration with parents.

2.Conclude this section by describing ways to develop effective collaboration within your teaching

context described in the opening paragraph.

Creating Collaborative Cultures – Developing Teacher Collaboration

In this section, describe how you and your colleagues could create a collaborative school culture that supports improved instruction and student learning in the school context you described in the opening paragraph.

Deepening Learning and Securing Accountability

1.In this section, begin with a description of the “Lesson Study” process in which teachers collaboratively plan, teach, observe, and revise a particular lesson.

2.Next, describe employing the “Lesson Study” process with your grade level colleagues (elementary school) or department colleagues (middle/high school) within the school context you described in the introductory paragraph. Clearly identify an instructional objective or objectives, appropriate instructional pedagogy and assessments, and proposed instructional modifications directly based upon anticipated assessment results designed to improve subsequent instruction.

Schools demographic

https://www.sanjuan.edu/cms/lib/CA01902727/Centricity/domain/141/sarc/2015sarc/2015_School_Accountability_Report_Card_CDE_Oakview_Community_Elementary_School_20160106.pdf 20
COHERENCE
inchecked bied leads
if they are good ideas, the sheer volume makes it impossible for people
manage in a way that gives depth. The second problem is fragmentation
Even when the goals are the right ones, they may not be experience
connected ideas by the users. People see them as discrete demands will
little or no connection to each other or their daily work, scrambling
CHAPTER 2. FOCUSING DIRECTION
AIN
UGH
NGE
21
implement too many directions and lacking a coherent sense of how the
connect results in paralysis and frustration.
You can either remain a victim of these-one can almost say naty
ral circumstances in complex society—or you can turn the tables. One
could easily say that the bigger system should “get its act together,” bu
don’t hold your breath. Our framework and the ideas within enable you
to take greater control. You can achieve success under current condi-
tions, as we will shortly show. And if enough of you do it, the system
will change.
We illustrate with three districts that operate within the same politi-
cal, funding, and demographic constraints as neighboring school dis-
tricts yet manage to provide coherent direction and consistent results
for their students. York Region District School Board in Ontario
,
Canada, has over 200 schools. It created instructional coherence and
corresponding individual and collective capacity with a decade-long
develop an updated vision and direction for the next period. It will need to
be focused, inspiring, and engaging for students and educators at all levels
of the system.
As we think about York Region and other districts at the early stage
of developing a new direction, we note one of the most important change
insights we have learned about visioning and coherence. It is a mistake to
overload the front end with massive amounts of input from all constituen-
cies in the absence of action. It is much more effective to shorten the front-
end process
and overload, so to speak, by implementing action, learning
from it, and grounding the vision in practice. Once again, it is learning by
purposeful doing that counts most.
In another large district, we work with (240 schools, high English-
language learner [ELL] needs, and huge diversity), we see the promis-
ing struggles in action to overcome a history of fragmented overload. The
district has achieved success for students but over the years has initiated a
myriad of programs, projects, and initiatives to meet the changing needs of
its population. Principals and teachers are proud of the district but describe
feeling overwhelmed and unsure what the real priorities are when there are
so many. The district recognizes that future success depends on a much
clearer focus. This scenario of overload and fragmentation is not uncom-
mon and could be happening in any state, province, or district. Figuring
out what the small number of ambitious goals ought to be and staying
focused on them is a challenge. This means reducing the number of goals
and strategies, giving people experiences that show the integration (not
just coordination) of the goals and strategies, learning as you go, and con-
stantly reiterating the direction and how well you are progressing. Talking
the walk is what we call this process.
We recommend a four-step approach to tackling what we have called
the problem of “initiativitis.”
focus on literacy, resulting in substantial gains for students. The lit-
eracy focus guided all decisions, was a beacon for assessing needs and
successes, and ensured a common language and knowledge base for
everyone.
We see similar patterns in Garden Grove Unified (Knudson, 2013)
and strategy for instructional improvement with persistence, despite
and Long Beach Unified (Mourshed, Chijioke, & Barber, 2010) in
California, where both districts have sustained a consistent, clear focus
political, budget, and demographic changes. The solution lies in devel-
oping limited goals, persisting, and avoiding distractors, In other words,
these leaders turned the table on overload and fragmentation to estab-
lish continuous focused direction.
In 2014, the York Region District School Board appointed a new
director (superintendent). Although the appointment was from within the
district, the new director has a mandate to revisit and renew the vision. We
are currently working with the York Region District School Board as they
1. Be Transparent
Acknowledge and get clarity on the issue. Consider quick, transparent
assessment methods (surveys, focus groups, interviews) to identify the
perceptions of staff, leaders, school board members, students, parents, and
community
18
COHERENCE
Figure 2.1 Focusing Direction
ORMING
ROUGH
HANGE
leads
CHAPTER 2. FOCUSING DIRECTION 19
1. W nay moral imperative?
2. Wuctions do I take to realize this moral imperative?
3. How do I help others clarify their moral imperative?
4. Am I making progress in realizing my moral purpose with
students?
Focusing Direction
Purpose Driven
• Goals That Impact
• Clarity of Strategy
• Change Leadership
Cultivating
Collaborative
Cultures
Fostering moral imperative in others is not about giving inspirational
speeches. Effective leaders foster moral purpose when they do the following:
Leadership
• Build relationships with everyone, including those who disagree,
are skeptical, or even cynical.
• Listen and understand the perspective of others.
• Demonstrate respect for all.
• Create conditions to connect others around that purpose.
• Examine with staff evidence of progress.
Securing
Accountability
Deepening
Learning
and the other three elements of focused direction is a process as much
as it is a state. The challenge is to turn chaos into focus. Hargreaves,
Boyle, and Harris (2014) call this critical component “dreaming with
determination” a deep, relentless purpose accompanied by an equally
strong learning mode.
Great leaders connect others to the reasons they became educators
their moral purpose. They make purpose part of the organization’s DNA
by creating opportunities for people to make meaning of the possibilities,
work on aspects of the challenge, and achieve success. From working
together, they build a deeper understanding of their shared moral purpose,
a common language for communicating more effectively, and deeper
commitment. However, by itself, moral imperative is not a strategy, so
leaders will only realize their moral imperative by developing a small
number of actionable and shared goals. Then they learn and build capacity
and commitment through purposeful doing.
How Does This Happen?
Leaders must first understand their own moral purpose and be able to com-
bine personal values, persistence, emotional intelligence, and resilience,
This is essential because their moral purpose will be reflected in all their
decisions and actions.
To clarify your own moral imperative, consider your answers to four
Goals That Impact What Matters Most
questions:
The problem is not the absence of goals in districts and schools today
but the presence of too many that are ad hoc, unconnected, and ever-
changing. Multiple mandates from states and districts combine with the
allure of grants and innovations, resulting in overload and fragmentation,
The overload results from too many goals, projects, and initiatives, Even
COHERENCE
nies leads to
22
Avoid excuses and blame. Review the data, and avoid the “yeah, bur
syndrome. Establish norms that resist the blame game of “overload
because of xyz’s focus while my initiative is essential.” Remember that the
projects and initiatives were likely implemented as solid approaches to
perceived need at the time. The problem is not the quality but the cumula
tive effect, volume, overlap, and lack of clarity or connections. Be careful
CHAPTER 2. FOCUSING DIRECTION
ING
GH
23
i lop a strategy for achieving the goals. Identify the supports
re needed. Do not just try to fit all the current programs and
isa latives under the new goals. Rather, identify what is needed and
review current projects or supports to determine fit.
not to have a lengthy front-end process.
Reframe the connections between the goals to overcome fragmentation:
GE
. At this stage, the designers or task team may see the connections
and overall plan, but it does not have meaning for the users. You
need to develop a coherent picture, visually and in words, of the
pieces and how they connect.
2. Build a Collaborative Approach
Recognize that finding solutions to complex problems requires the intel.
ligence and talents of everyone. Create a task team that is small but repre-
sentative of the layers of the organization to strategize a plan and provide
leadership
The senior leadership team must develop a common language and
approach that is sustained and communicated consistently across the sys-
tem. All parts of the organization, including unions, classified staff, stu-
dents, and parents, must feel they have a place in the process. Collaboration
during initial and ongoing implementation is especially crucial.
Remove distractors, which may be mandates or alluring innovations:
3. Develop a Clear Strategy:
Reduce, Reframe, Remove
Reduce the clutter and overload by listing (on sticky notes, for example) and
examining current initiatives with a view to reducing and clustering them;
Identify the time wasters and inefficiencies. These are often man-
agement issues that take time away from the learning focus and
keep the system off balance. For example, the Hawaii Department
of Education created a task team with the goal of reducing by
25 percent the paperwork, forms, and demands on school leader
time to support leaders in focusing on literacy. Within three months,
they had reduced the requirements by almost 50 percent by identi-
fying duplication across departments, data collected but not used,
and other inefficiencies. This sent a strong message to the field that
they were serious about focused direction.
• Give leaders permission to say no. Once the goals and strategy are
clearly understood and manageable, leaders have a rationale for
saying no to the multitude of requests that bombard schools and
districts.
• Avoid shiny objects and other alluring possibilities. Distractors
can be very useful and effective projects, initiatives, or supports.
The key is in discerning the relevance of the new addition to the
goals and current strategy. It may be a great innovation just not
at this time.
• Avoid the temptation of trying to realign them or cluster them into
a new picture of the old way. Start with student learning. Ask,
“What learning do we want for our students?” instead of starting
with, for example, “How do we implement the Common Core State
Standards (CCSS)?”
• Identify the umbrella focus that captures this vision. It may be 21st
century learning, literate learners, college and career readiness,
literacy, or others. The process needs to be inclusive enough to
involve everyone.
• Name the two or three ambitious goals you will need to pursue if
you want to attain this vision,
Kirtman and Fullan (2015) have a chapter on “moving compliance to
the side of the plate.” The idea is not to be a rebel for the sake of it but to
change the game from compliance to purposeful focus.
24
COHERENCE
4. Cultivate Engagement
Communicate often, and listen even more often. Avoid overreliance
RMIN
ROUGE
HANGE
CHAPTER 2. FOCUSING DIRECTION 25
with oth increases clarity and, in turn, commitment. Getting traction on
coherent whole system change means building purposeful and continuous
interaction over time with an expectation for all schools to improve learning
print or digital media, and instead, engage all groups with the goals
strategy, allowing rich conversations to develop meaning for everyone
Use social media to reinforce these discussions. Cycles of sharing and
revision will lead to a common language about the direction, deepa
understanding, and commitment.
Build opportunities to check with all groups regularly over time-fot
example, assistant superintendents can begin all main meetings with prin-
cipals or schools by articulating the goals and strategy (we witnessed this
in York Region; it takes fewer than 10 minutes) then checking progress by
asking the following: What is going well? What do we need to be worry-
ing about or taking action on? Giving an authentic forum for consistent,
meaningful conversation about the goals and the strategy will reinforce
the common language and understanding of the direction as well as build
ownership for results.
Once the purpose and goals are identified, it is critical that everyone
perceive that there is a clear strategy for achieving them and be able to see
their part in that strategy. People need to get better and better at “talking
the walk.”
for all students. Clarity, thus, precedes coherence.
As we stated in Chapter 1, successful change processes are a function
of shaping and reshaping good ideas as they build capacity and ownership.
This can be demonstrated by cross-connecting explicitness (the ideas) with
change climate (the change process) as we do in Figure 2.2. Coherence
becomes a function of the interplay between the growing explicitness of
the idea and the change culture.
Figure 2.2 Change Quality Quadrant
High
Explicitness
Low
Change Climate (vertical axis):
High
Depth
Superficiality
Describes the degree to which a
culture supports change by fostering
trust, nonjudgmentalism, leadership,
innovation, and collaboration
Change Climate
Explicitness (horizontal axis):
Describes the degree of explicitness
of the strategy, including precision of the
goals, clarity of the strategy, use of data,
and supports
Resistance
Inertia
Low
Clarity of Strategy
Let’s examine the four combinations and the results.
…….
Clarity and coherence are not just about goals, crucially, they are also about
strategy. Clarity is subjective-is it clear in people’s minds and actions? Can
people talk the walk with ease and specificity? We define coherence as a shift
in shared mind-set rather than alignment, which is about getting the structures
right. Alignment on paper does not generate clarity. New cultures do. For
example, a district or school could use the steps just given in the last section
and create a set of goals and strategy that was carefully aligned on paper. The
strategies and resources could be conceptually linked to the goals. None of
this will give participants the experiences and capacity to become clear on
what it means in practice in this sense, clarity follows capacity more than it
precedes it). In other words, developing new skills (capacities) especially
Superficiality
Starting with the top left-hand quadrant-low explicitness and a good cli-
mate people are getting along okay, but they are not doing much. We call
it
superficiality. If the strategy for improvement is not precise, actionable,
and clear, we may see activity but at very superficial levels.
Inertia
In many ways, the bottom left-hand quadrant represents the history of the
teaching profession-behind the classroom door, where teachers left each
other alone. What this means is that teachers had a license to be creative,
but they also had a license to be ineffective (and perhaps not even know
28
COHERENCE
bies leads
SFO
Figure 2.3 Shifting Practice
THA
CHAPTER 2. FOCUSING DIRECTION 29
a catalyst to have honest conversations about their worries, desires for
change, and their needs for support.
o
We have learned a great deal about the ins and outs of change leader-
ship by worlong with leading practitioners. Such leaders understand and
foster the new change dynamic where progress is not linear. The big find-
CH
ings are as follows:
• The best leaders use the new change dynamic to move their organi-
zations forward and “participate as learners.”
• They balance and integrate push and pull strategies.
• They build vertical and horizontal capacity and integration.
Familiar
Unknown
HE
As we consider the bowl on the left, most fish feel
comfortable in their bowl because they are familiar
with their circumstances, even though they may be
dissatisfied.
The expectations of the kind of swimming are
traditional and known.
The level of collaboration is the status quo-they know
who is in the bowl and how to interact
The current rewards are understood, and they know
how to survive.
Contrast that with the bowl on the right, which is
full of unknowns.
The expectations of the kind of leaping and
swimming required in the new bowl are unclear.
Collaboration is not yet established, so they have
few friends or colleagues and the support structures
are unknown.
Rewards are distant and often lack specificity while
the dangers of leaping are in the present
1. The New Change Dynamic
Managing the transition in this complex change environment calls for a
more fluid change process dynamic, which is detailed in Figure 2.4.
Directional Vision
Directional vision emerges from working in partnership to develop a
shared purpose and vision and by engaging in continuous collaborative
conversations that build shared language, knowledge, and expectations.
and doing. One can see for both confidence and competence that both
capacity building and a supportive climate are crucial. Effective change
leaders know that.
The fishbowl metaphor provides clues to how we support others to
shift practice:
Figure 2.4 The New Change Process
Directional
Vision
Focused
Innovation
• Foster clarity of the purpose for the leap and specificity of the
destination
• Support the early leapers, and learn from their attempts.
• Build the capacity of others to leap with support,
• Create a culture of collaboration where leaping can be nurtured.
• Recognize successes at leaping at all points of the journey,
Diffusion of
Next Practice
We don’t want to carry the metaphor too far, but it underscores one
final issue: we need to make the journey of change vivid for people-bring
it to life. Connect it to what they know (the simple fishbowl example) as
Sustained Cycles
of Innovation

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