Andrew (Andy) Hargreaves, Dennis Shirley - The Fourth Way_ The Inspiring Future for Educational Change-Corwin (2009)

22 The Fourth Way
Dewey’s lectures resonated with educators. Both/and thinking is
common sense for most teachers. They have no need for the purity or precision
of administrators’ plans. Plans are rarely perfect in practice, and
most are discarded the moment power changes hands. In schools, the only
justifiable place for a pendulum is the science lab!
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Phonics or whole language? Actually, you need both in a program
of balanced literacy that reaches all students and the different ways
they learn best.
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Rigor or relevance? Teachers know that inspired children whose
learning connects with their dreams and their lives are the most
likely to push themselves to higher levels of achievement.
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Heroic or distributed leadership? The most charismatic leaders are
those who inspire their communities to lead improvement themselves.
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Improvisation or memorization? In mathematics, music, or drama,
there are times to solve problems or create things anew, and times to
just grind out the multiplication tables or memorize the score or the
script. “To everything there is a season,” and most classrooms are
like springtime in New England—you can and do get all seasons in
one day.
The social theory of the Third Way argued for integrative thinking—
linking the best of government leadership with innovative markets in
educational change. In practice, though, many Third Way policies have
drifted from the Way’s original ideals—alienating students, corrupting
classrooms, manipulating educators, and deceiving the public. How has
this happened?
In Turnaround Leadership, Michael Fullan describes how, with his
advice, the province of Ontario developed its reform strategy in education.
One of the key components was to manage “the distracters,”
defined as “anything that takes you away from continuous focus on teaching
and learning and student achievement.” 4 One “big distracter” was
union and labor strife inherited from the previous conservative government
and its Second Way strategies. This was resolved by signing an agreement
with the unions for a period of peace and stability in which improved pay
and working conditions were traded for union commitment to the reform
agenda. Other distracters involved excessive paperwork and administrative
duties imposed on teachers and principals.
Removing distracters like these is invaluable, but government itself
can also distract us from positive change. Its political agenda—driven
by other concerns, as well as strictly educational ones often assembled
by indivi duals with scant knowledge of the real workings of teaching