 Thanks very much Harriet and it is I am really honored to be a fellow of with NEA and to be here today with with you. As Harriet mentioned the work I'm going to represent and you know in this time slot I'm going to set the stage for the next half hour and then invite the the three leaders from Long Beach to join me and then we'll show how that how Long Beach is an example of what I'm talking about and then we'll have a half hour or 20 minutes at least to hear from you and the audience to the panel including myself. So it should be a good hour and a half. I want to say one main thing which is everything I'm going to share with you are things that we and others are doing. This is no longer armchair research or distant research from a university. This is doing something and then writing about it doing more and learning more writing better back and forth and almost everything I've learned is from practitioners. I have a way of saying it that feeds it back to them in a succinct way but it is coming from the field. I don't know whether you know the incurable academic who was a professor of education who was taken out to a highly effective school and shown around all all day and at the end of it shook his head and said well that's all well and good but will it work in theory. So we're not doing that we're not doing that. Kurt Lewin said there's nothing so practical as good theory. I prefer to say there's nothing so theoretical as good practice. So but it's action oriented this and I want to really emphasize the doing action part the results part and you'll see the title and I'll put my website up in a moment or email where you can contact me if you like for more of this but I want to just emphasize the two parts of the title. The first part which is the moral I'm going to go second and then up to the top the moral imperative realized. There's a very the moral imperative is important because it's the commitment that we have in all the work we do with system change to raise the bar and close the gap of all subgroups and I mean all so that is the marker but when you add the word realized it says moral imperative isn't worth the two words unless you're getting somewhere. It's not a moral imperative it's not an imperative unless you're getting somewhere. So I don't I guess I'll say Shania Twain who's a singer in from Northern Ontario in one of her songs you'll know she says that don't impress me much was one of her lines and so big plans don't impress me much that they have to actually lead to something and so realized we're going to keep pushing that element and certainly Long Beach represents realization. The other part is whole system reform and this means that the work we are doing is improving classrooms and schools system-wide and by system-wide I mean the minimum size the district but we actually prefer to work with more clusters of districts whole states whole provinces whole countries but at least the district minimum size. So let's take a look at this the work I'll use the word we a few times and it really means that it's a team I have in Toronto mostly in Toronto. There's about 10 or 11 of us some of them are policy people Ben Levin who works with me a lot Michael Barber who's actually not in Toronto but also policy we have system capacity building design trainers who are basically curriculum instruction people and in a couple of others so we have been working on this in Ontario for the last this our ninth year and I'll just give you a snippet of that but I'm not going to dwell on Ontario and I won't even say that we've invented these ideas in Ontario in fact we borrowed from England we borrowed from this country and others and putting this together when we started 2004 but we had the chance to put it systematically into practice and I'll say Ontario is not Finland and it's not Singapore it's like you in many respects and some differences but basically we're talking about this is doable on a large scale I spent a lot of time in in this country back and forth I am working with Chris and and the core group it's called the California Office of Reform and Education but it's basically eight districts sizable districts that have had success and want to not only get continued success of their eight districts but spread spillover to other districts so again we're making yards on the system itself and and we've worked we're just about to start into trying to influence the next 10 years in New York City with by saying the last 10 years have not been very good for reform the wrong drivers problem and so we're working with the New York City Commission on Excellence to try to influence the next mayoral stint which will be about a year from now so I can say more about the various places of this but all in all cases it's this interest in bigger reform this is just my website and and my email do feel free to email me after today I handle my own email I'm glad to respond to you and hear from you about things that you're doing a few watch words motion leadership is one of our themes that we write about and do about motion leadership is the kind of leadership that causes positive movement in individuals in schools and in school systems so the game the whole system reform that actually the good the leadership that causes movement by mobilizing other leaders the gold standard for motion leadership for me is when you cause someone to change who is against the change and then they thank you afterwards for having done it so it is about real movement not just getting those that already agree on board the skinny is another theme we use the skinny the phrase in the second World War don't give me complicated explanations what's the skinny what's the essence of this so we have a lot to we're trying to actually pair that down so that you get a small number of really powerful things related to that is simplexity obviously not a real word but simplexity means there actually are a small number probably for me six eight things that you have to get right so that's the simple part getting them right is the complex part the chemistry getting it to gel with complex groups across the whole district for example and then whole system reform I've already mentioned a key to this and you've heard it this morning quite a few times is the motivation that people the energy that comes from motivation so I'm going to show you just a short video clip probably a minute long which is a depiction of somebody who's evidently in it in an occupation that's not very motivating so she has to make it up so let's take a look I observe the accused make a left-hand turn at 314 p.m. contrary to section 144 sub 9 of the HTA could you please read back the last few lines the rain is falling hard on the hood of the cruiser officer Duffy looks at his watch it's just past three when he sees the black convertible make an illegal turn close up on officer Duffy what do you think you're going punk the punk pulls a gun from his jacket to hell and I'm taking you with me so we don't want to we don't want students and teachers fantasizing to get through the day and so let me just reinforce this and I'll get more positive in a few minutes but one of my colleagues Lee Jenkins in this country sent me this graph that we already know this but it's dramatic when you see it and it's data that he has been collecting from two or three thousand teachers over the last few years of different grade levels where he asked them what percentage of students in your class or in your grade are enthusiastic about schools and there are actually other studies of surveys that are similar to this but I like his graph and if you take a look at it you'll see that it goes it starts very high kindergarten and it goes down down down by time you get to grade nine thirty seven percent this is an average obviously in the good schools that are working in the districts are different than this but this is kind of the big picture and it blips up a bit near the end and 37 percent this means a lot of disengaged students to contend with the MetLife survey that just came out in March also tells a actually a dramatic story because of the decline in the in the two-year period that from 57 percent teachers that are pretty satisfied to 44 percent that's a hell of a decline in two short years it's incredible and the number of teachers that might be thinking of leaving the profession is going up as well so this is as we say in professional capital it's a function of the way that the profession is treated and the way it's shaped and this is where it's leading to but I guess the way to say this and this is the big problem to start with is that there's a vicious circle here with board students and alienated teachers so it means lots of people who are there in a school that would rather be somewhere else that's what it means and that's why the innovations that we're talking about the mobilization of these things have to crack this and reverse this trend and make it incredibly engaging and that's what I'll talk about as we go through a moral imperative I've already emphasized this so I'm not going to say much other than to remind you that the center of gravity for this work needs to be the moral imperative realized in other words the center of gravity is what progress are we making on this and in our workshops I'll just give you some questions we use and you can do this on your own if you like but if we were in a real workshop now I'd ask you individually to finish these following four sentences if you were to think moment focus on yourself and say my moral imperative is how would you finish that sentence if you were then go to the second one is and say to what extent is my moral imperative shared not only at the school level but at the district level maybe you'll find a big discrepancy there or not and then so on and those other two questions so this is usually where we start because we want people to be front and center on the moral imperative and we want to set the expectation that this is about movement this is about realizing it and do something about it you have in your packet a shorter version of the policy paper I did last year which is called choosing the wrong drivers for whole system reform and also I want to get into that I'm shifting as we go through this to more and more what are the right drivers and how do you make sure the right drivers are carrying the day but since most politicians tend to gravitate towards the wrong drivers for some reasons that I'll mention in a few minutes we have to worry a lot about that so what is on this driver notion what is the concept of driver it's pretty straight forward driver is this combination it is a policy and associated set of strategies that are designed to make a positive difference driver makes a positive difference a wrong driver is one that purports to do that but there's no evidence in the world that actually could happen and you might ask well why would a politician choose the wrong driver when there's no evidence ask Julia Gillard who is the premier the prime minister of Australia who when they decided three or four years ago to do the major system reform across the country her main advisor was Joel Klein like why would you why would you think of moving into the driver territory by taking examples that probably don't work why wouldn't you go and take examples that do work that's a bit of a complaint so that's the the wrong driver the right driver is the flip side of that it is how things really make a difference and that and that they're actually policies that and drivers that do that that all surface for you when I say wrong driver I just want to be careful about the language here I mean wrong as a driver I don't mean wrong wrong wrong and you'll see in a few minutes when I show you the paired drivers the four four pairs that the right drivers if they're in the driver's seat then they can use the other drivers to get there or the other elements to get there but it has to be that the dominant part has to be the right part and the other part has to be at the service of the right part whereas politicians have turned it around the criteria I've used to set this up and in other words to judge these policies is does the policy if you put it into practice foster the intrinsic motivation of teachers and students not necessarily the next day but does it kick in pretty soon does it does it engage teachers and students to be part of a process of continuous improvement does it actually inspire teamwork or does it undercut teamwork because we know and I'll come back to social capital teamwork is the one that has the most impact if you're focused and that's very clear it's been clear for 40 years and and so so so that so we're thinking about this because this is about the big policies we're talking about here's the set and if you go down the left-hand side punitive accountability external accountability individualistic strategies teacher appraisal being one of them that actually combines two wrong drivers in one punch with you when you do it with in a negative way technology we've been actually working with technology very positively in the innovative work we've done in the last year and it's clear in this work that at least we're doing that pedagogy is in control and technology helps us get there a lot faster and that's the reverse side and similarly with system is versus fragmented strategies so let's tackle accountability because every system has to deal with accountability when we started in Ontario in 2004 the public wanted some accounting for the investments for the results that we were said we were going to get and here's what good accountability entails it's a function of good data but data that are used primarily as a strategy for improvement primarily dominantly as a strategy for improvement secondly it's it's done in a way that has non-judge mentalism a bit of an odd word but non-judge mentalism is when you look at in effectiveness and you don't immediately blame the people that are in the situation you actually go to capacity building as the main response and you'll see in the high-performing systems like Long Beach and Sanger which is another member of the core group that we filmed that they have they're very relentless about the agenda they're really serious in your face about the agenda but it doesn't have the flavor of negativism it doesn't have the judgmentalism it has how are we going to get better and we do get better we celebrate it this is a very important part of motivation actually a non-judge mentalism undercuts motivation in an obvious way and then all of this produces what Richard Elmore called internal accountability to the group itself that again because we have Long Beach here they they are accountable to the state system but they don't need the state system to tell them how to be accountable they're accountable to themselves as a group the board the union the teachers and principals and all the schools it's built in and so that that's an important part and what this does we also use a lot of data when you call it infusing faces on data infusing it with instruction if you here's what here's my conclusion about accountability if you prove if you pursue it indirectly which this is you actually get better public accountability that's what's hard for politicians to to to understand I think they get better accountability if it's like this so why do politicians choose wrong drivers we can think of perverse reasons and there are some I'm sure but well but at least two of the more obvious ones is they want quick fixes so they they act quickly but the the other is they can control legislation so they legislate it neither of those quick fixes or legislation is much of a lever for change for real change yet they keep repeating that and there are deeper reasons which might be that some of them are not interested in a strong public school system they're not they're not their values are such that they're not committed to a strong public system so what we've done with accountability is balance it with capacity building it's it's a pretty straightforward proposition capacity building is anything you do to improve the knowledge skills competencies and motivation of individuals but especially groups to do the core work of of instructional improvement and student achievement and so we we in our all of our strategies everyone every success you will see you will see the collective capacity building underway on thinking about the the individual part here here's the here's the reverse again take personnel policies that these successful systems work away at the emphasis on implementation and then they reverse it by by back it up is a better word by selection and mentoring of new people coming in whether it's principals or teachers so they're gaining on it all the time but their main route is not to get so-called individuals in there their main route is to do the work and then reinforce it with the individual part of this so third one human and social capital very important part in you many of you have the professional capital of teachers human capital is the quality of the individual qualifications of the teacher social capital is the quality of the group and there's a neat little study that Kerry Leanna did she's a business professor at University of Pittsburgh in New York City she took a sample of 135 elementary schools she measured only three things one was the human capital the qualifications of teachers on paper a lot of them had qualifications she gave the school a high score on human capital and then social capital she asked questions like to teachers to what extent do teachers in this school work in a focus trusted collaborative way to zero in on the improvement of teaching link to student achievement if a lot of teachers said yes that's the way we work here she gave this school a high social capital score and then third thing she measured math at the beginning of the year the end of the year you can see where I'm going with this you found just three things several things but I'll just say these three schools with higher social capital did better schools with both human and social capital being high did best for obvious reason I'll come back to the sequence in a minute and she also found that teachers who had low human capital who happened to be in a school with high social capital did better in other words they improve their math just by virtue of being in that kind of interactive learning environment so very powerful stuff if you think of the sequence here a lot of the strategy now that the current administration is using is individualistic praise all of this traction of leaders and that there's some elements in there you can use later but not as a driver because what they will do is they try to maximize human capital and never get there but they're not paying attention to the social capital which is the powerhouse and and it's hard it's in other words it's hard for an individual to change social capital it's very powerful for social capital to change individuals if it's on the right track so this is one we could spend a lot of time on and hope the panel will exemplify some of this and then this work we're doing now on technology and pedagogy is how can we now reverse that so that pedagogy and some of the new work is terrific it's got potential for that boredom and that alienation side the work that basically it's the new pedagogy I want to call it it's the partnership and I do mean partnership between teachers and students partners in pedagogy where students have more control over their learning students work interactively with each other the teacher is change agent let me give you one interesting finding from John howdy's research on effect sizes when his 900 meta-studies he pulled all this out this one that interests me the most is he did a cluster of factors that he put under the label of teacher as facilitator and the effect size was point one seven I'm going to say teacher as mere facilitator then he did another one which was teacher as activator different word and that was point six oh teacher is activators teacher has change agent co-designer right in there interacting with that technology accelerates that if you have the pedagogical definition and development correctly as we are working on now it's very powerful it's a it it is it does it's not that it doesn't exist anywhere but it only exists on a very small scale I'm talking still about whole system reform and then we take a fragmented versus systemic fragmented are these ad hoc policies this is a word from the McKinsey report where they studied 20 entities around the world that were systems that were on the move by by by measurement of impact on learning and they've said they basically said well the ones that are on the move it's a system thing they don't have ad hoc policies they have policies that are cohesive they're into integrated and then more recently we think of it this way most people think of alignment and that's okay to think of you put it things together make sure they're aligned but I don't like alignment because you can do alignment on paper and alignment isn't felt by people that are doing the work so I much prefer the word coherence to what extent if you're in the school does the policy of the district do you experience it as a coherent policy alignment is structure coherence is mindset and it's the mindset that counts and to go back to social capital it's shared mindset and shared mindset is where the power is again because if you have a shared mindset you're interacting with focus you're building on each other's work you're moving forward so let me just say in the last four or five minutes I have the professional capital work that Andy Hargives and I just did we were in New York City yesterday for developing announcing some of this with the teachers college press it consists of three things for us I've already said the first two the third one I want underscore we call it decisional capital but it really means that the group is making the best decisions for the student learning it's the instructional specificity and proficient precision and expertise that comes so it's not just getting together and having shared visions it's getting together and actually causing something to happen and that that's something that's happened is actually pretty specific because it has to be precise it has to be linked into the personal learning of teachers and students it has to develop from there so we're in this book we're putting together the combination of the words we use now emotion leadership are push pull and nudge you can see where those words mean literally and for change to move some people need to be pushed some people are pulled into the vision and want to do it and some people nudge you how to get those three things operating and I'll say because we were fairly assertive about the strategies and whole system reform or to put it in other way we're fairly pushy and my criterion for a pushiness is I want to push as much as I can get away with if I if in other words if it's not working people tell me so this I want to think of and we have action guidelines in this book that has to do with what's the action guidelines for teachers what's the action guidelines for administrators at the school and district level and the third set is for system leaders which include politicians and union leaders and others at the system level so these all are about moving on this agenda the kind of agenda you're talking about in these two days but really mobilizing doing something even if somebody else is not doing it and in our work on I guess on doing this the emphasis is if you want to change the group use the group to change the group this is a powerful social capital atmosphere so this one I just we'll just introduce this stratosphere book the most recent one we did which is trying to integrate technology pedagogy and change knowledge I've already forecast that around the John Hattie research it links into the common core state standards this way that we have standards and assessment if you look at those three legs of the stool standards and assessment are pretty prominent when people think of the common core state standards but the real power is the pedagogy the third stool and it's the one that be to to be at least likely to be attended to well so you need you need pedagogues and let me show you just a very very short clip here that what happens if you don't have a pedagogue when you have an innovation it's in German but you won't need to know German to appreciate this this is a an adult woman who bought her father an iPad you need a pedagogue let me close with the criteria two things the criteria we're using now in relation this innovative work with digital technology and then the summary kind of slider to about whole system reform which will be a segue to the Long Beach group here is our the criteria that I think of as we develop the innovations we're doing now which are digital film related to the common core state standards the solution if you like the educational innovation solution has to be irresistibly engaging for teachers as well as students it has to be elegantly easy to use not so complex that you get lost in the kind of technology of complexity it has to use technology 24 seven even though there are dangers of that it can't keep closing the classroom off from from the information around the clock and remember the other three are also guiding this and for it needs to be steeped in real life problem solving because again that's where the motivation is that's where the higher order skills are a teaming of critical communication problem solving creativity innovation and entrepreneurship all of those things are in there the higher order skills are grounded in steeped in real life problem solving if it's led by these these parts so this is what we're working on now this combination of solutions around make it all about learning take the chance of letting technology permeate and make sure it's a whole system reform focus so let me give you two slides to end with that I'm not going to actually state them because you have them one is about whole system reform there's probably eight things here this is my summary of what we did in Ontario what was behind that and the combination of these eight things is what caused it to work and if these are the types of things you can fool around with the list and use different labels here and there but basically it's the synergy of these things going together and and I think I'll stop with that slide because what I want to say is this is the essence of whole system reform and although I'm using it here to talk about a whole province or state the identical thinking applies to a district so so this is this is the introduction I like the three people from Long Beach to come up I'll introduce them we'll set the stage for the next part so they will join me right now thanks very much for this part