Michael Fullan > Quotes

“Leaders have to provide direction, create the conditions for effective peer interaction, and intervene along the way when things are not working as well as they could.”
― Michael Fullan, The Six Secrets of Change: What the Best Leaders Do to Help Their Organizations Survive and Thrive

“You can’t talk your way out of what you’ve behaved yourself into” (2004), by saying that you can’t talk your way into trust. I mean that you can only “behave” your way into it by naming, modeling, and monitoring your trustworthiness.”
― Michael Fullan, The Principal: Three Keys to Maximizing Impact

“It’s important to remember that implementation plans are not for the planners; they are for the implementers. Thus, as I concluded in Motion Leadership and”
― Michael Fullan, The Principal: Three Keys to Maximizing Impact

“When the school is organized to focus on a small number of shared goals, and when professional learning is targeted to those goals and is a collective enterprise, the evidence is overwhelming that teachers can do dramatically better by way of student achievement.”
― Michael Fullan, The Principal: Three Keys to Maximizing Impact

“Note that trustworthiness goes beyond integrity to include real competence as well. You have to be true to your word, but also very good at what you do.”
― Michael Fullan, The Principal: Three Keys to Maximizing Impact

“the principal’s role is to lead the school’s teachers in a process of learning to improve their teaching, while learning alongside them about what works and what doesn’t.”
― Michael Fullan, The Principal: Three Keys to Maximizing Impact

“In our work in whole-system change, my colleagues and I have shown time and again that if you give people skills (invest in capacity building), most of them will become more accountable.”
― Michael Fullan, The Principal: Three Keys to Maximizing Impact

“coherence making strategies” as the route to success. They focused direction, employed collaborative capacity building, went deep in pedagogy, and secured internal group-based accountability across the whole system.”
― Michael Fullan, Coherence: The Right Drivers in Action for Schools, Districts, and Systems

“In essence, in dealing with their staffs, principals should shift from focusing on one-to-one work with each individual teacher to leading collaborative work that improves quality throughout the faculty.”
― Michael Fullan, The Principal: Three Keys to Maximizing Impact

“Entrepreneurialism does not just pertain to business endeavors. Every time a group tries to solve a social problem (youth crime, homelessness, bullying, and so on), they require the entrepreneurial skills of critical thinking, problem solving, innovative ideas, collaboration and communication, and the qualities of character. The mark of an educated person is that of a doer (a doing-thinker; a thinker-doer)—they learn to do and do to learn. They are impatient with lack of action. Doing is not something they decide to do—daily life is doing, as natural as breathing the air. Along with doing is an exquisite awareness of the ethics of life. Small-scale ethics is how they treat others; large-scale ethics concern humankind and the evolution of the planet.”
― Michael Fullan, Coherence: The Right Drivers in Action for Schools, Districts, and Systems

“resulting in what we refer to as “becoming good at life” in challenging times.”
― Michael Fullan, The Devil Is in the Details: System Solutions for Equity, Excellence, and Student Well-Being

“The Coherence Framework has four components: focusing direction, cultivating collaborative cultures, deepening learning, and securing accountability.”
― Michael Fullan, Coherence: The Right Drivers in Action for Schools, Districts, and Systems

“CCSS is blanketing most of the United States with a very complex set of demands, and technology is running wild.”
― Michael Fullan, The Principal: Three Keys to Maximizing Impact

“(i.e., being attuned to the hidden barriers that privilege some while disadvantaging others). Learning and”
― Michael Fullan, The Devil Is in the Details: System Solutions for Equity, Excellence, and Student Well-Being

“Ultimately, success involves transforming “the culture of learning” and related changes in “the culture of equity” (i.e., being attuned to the hidden barriers that privilege some while disadvantaging others). Learning and equity together feed well-being”
― Michael Fullan, The Devil Is in the Details: System Solutions for Equity, Excellence, and Student Well-Being

“Probably the two greatest failures of leaders are indecisiveness in times of urgent need for action and dead certainty that they are right in times of complexity. In either case, leaders are vulnerable to silver bullets—in the one case grasping them, and in the other, relishing them.”
― Michael Fullan, The Six Secrets of Change: What the Best Leaders Do to Help Their Organizations Survive and Thrive

“Gaius Petronious nailed this problem almost two thousand years ago: We trained hard... but it seemed every time we were beginning to form up into teams we were reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any situation by reorganizing, and what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.”
― Michael Fullan, Leading in a Culture of Change

“The high-level goals we espouse are excellence, equity, and well-being, and their connection to becoming good at life. We see”
― Michael Fullan, The Devil Is in the Details: System Solutions for Equity, Excellence, and Student Well-Being

“consists of the shared depth of understanding about the purpose and nature of the work. Coherence, then, is what is in the minds and actions of people individually and especially collectively.”
― Michael Fullan, Coherence: The Right Drivers in Action for Schools, Districts, and Systems