Whole System Reform for Innovative Teaching and Learning
A bibliographic note on the white paper written for the programme, and the argument it made about scale.
ITL Research is an independent project. It is not affiliated with Microsoft, SRI International, UNESCO, or the former Innovative Teaching and Learning Research programme.
The document
Fullan, M. (2011). Whole System Reform for Innovative Teaching and Learning. White paper prepared for the ITL Research programme (Microsoft Partners in Learning / SRI International).
No copyright or licence notice could be confirmed for this document and no verified archived copy of the file exists, so it is described here and not served. This archive does not hold a copy and does not accept uploaded copies.
What it argued
The paper's subject is the gap between individual innovation and system change. Its argument runs roughly as follows. Innovative teaching appears first in individual classrooms, usually carried by teachers who are willing to redesign tasks without waiting for permission. Those pockets do not spread on their own: they are fragile, they depend on the person, and they disappear when that person moves. Reform that lasts therefore has to work on the whole system at once — the curriculum that defines what is worth teaching, the assessment that defines what counts, the professional development that builds capability at scale, and the leadership that makes all three coherent in a single school.
The practical implication is uncomfortable for technology programmes. Buying equipment and training volunteers addresses none of the four conditions, and can even work against them, because it concentrates innovation where support already exists. The paper therefore treats pedagogy, not hardware, as the object of reform, and treats leadership capacity — the ability to build collective expertise rather than to issue requirements — as the binding constraint.
Context of use
The paper was commissioned as the programme's framing statement on scale, and is cited in development-sector writing about national technology programmes, including the education blog of the World Bank in a discussion of Uruguay's Plan Ceibal, where the same question — what does a nationally distributed device programme change in classroom practice — was being asked from a system-level perspective. That citation is the reason older links to this title still matter: a reader arriving from a policy discussion expects the paper's argument, not a login page.
How to find it
Search the exact title with the author's surname; the paper is indexed in education-policy collections and cited in later literature on whole-system reform, where its argument can be traced even where the file is not available. Public web archives hold captures of the file path only as redirects or HTML, not as a verified PDF.
Citation: Fullan, M. (2011). Whole System Reform for Innovative Teaching and Learning. Microsoft Partners in Learning / SRI International.