The Power of Unstoppable Momentum: Key Drivers to Revolutionize Your District

Your school district can revolutionize its culture to improve student learning. This book details a simple but powerful school improvement plan for integrating educational technology, pedagogy, and deep learning that leads to lasting change. Included are real examples of districts, including Mooresville Graded School District—a lowly funded, 50 percent poverty school district in North Carolina—that attained pedagogically driven, technology-accelerated success.

Benefits

• Study how to form a strong cultural foundation that fosters learning achievement.
• Examine why allocating human capital, social capital, and decisional capital for school improvement in the district plan is essential for sustaining learning achievement.
• Discover the new thinking and actions that must underpin the use of instructional technology in order to achieve the goal of improved education for all students.
• Study eight core lessons from Mooresville Graded School District’s (MGSD) journey that are essential for your education improvement plan.
• Survey encouraging cases of lasting, deep whole-system change from MGSD and six districts that learned from MGSD’s example and are using technology in the classroom.

Table of Contents:
About the Authors
Introduction: Unstoppable Forces
Chapter 1: Learning Is Not About the Technology
Chapter 2: Deep Learning
Chapter 3: Social Capital
Chapter 4: Human Capital
Chapter 5: Decisional Capital
Chapter 6: Lessons From MGSD
Chapter 7: Emerging Models
Conclusion
References
Index

Michael Fullan, PhD, is former dean of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Recognized as an international authority on educational reform, Michael is engaged in training, consulting, and evaluating change projects around the world. Many countries use his ideas for managing change.

Michael led the evaluation team that conducted the assessment of the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategy in England from 1998 to 2003. Later, he was appointed special adviser to the premier and minister of education in Ontario, a post that he still holds.

In December 2012, Michael received the Order of Canada, one of Canada s highest civilian honors. The Order of Canada was established in 1967 to recognize a lifetime of outstanding achievement, dedication to community, and service to the nation.

Michael bases his work on the moral purpose of education as it is applied in schools and school systems to bring about major improvements. He has written several best-selling books that have been translated into many languages. His latest books include Leadership: Key Competencies for Whole-System Change (with Lyle Kirtman); The Principal: Three Keys to Maximizing Impact; Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School (with Andy Hargreaves); Freedom to Change: Four Strategies to Put Your Inner Drive Into Overdrive; Coherence: The Right Drivers in Action for Schools, Districts, and Systems (with Joanne Quinn); and Indelible Leadership: Always Leave Them Learning.

To learn more about Michael s work, visit michaelfullan.ca or follow him on Twitter @MichaelFullan1.

Mark A. Edwards, EdD, serves as senior vice president of digital learning for Discovery Education. He previously served as superintendent of the Mooresville Graded District from 2007 to ­2016.

Mark was named the 2013 AASA National Superintendent of the Year and the 2013 North Carolina Superintendent of the Year. He also served as superintendent of Henrico County Schools from 1994 to 2004. He was named the Virginia Superintendent of the Year in 2001 and was the recipient of the Harold McGraw Prize in Education in 2003.

Mark was on the founding board of directors of Digital Promise League of Innovative Schools and AASA s Digital Consortium. Mark received North Carolina s prestigious Order of the Long Leaf Pine Award in 2013 and the North Carolina Public School Forum Jay Robinson Educational Leadership Award in 2014.

Mark has been recognized as a pioneer in one-to-one computing and has published two books related to this work, Every Child Every Day A Digital Conversion Model for Student Achievement and Thank You for Your Leadership The Power of Distributed Leadership in a Digital Conversion Model.

Follow Mark on Twitter @MarkEdw22.