19 August 2025

Global education expert Professor Emeritus Michael Fullan joins us to unpack the shift from shallow to deep learning and why South Australia is leading the way. He explains how the Six Cs are redefining what it means to thrive in school and society and why empowering schools and communities from the bottom up is key to lasting change.

Show Notes

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Transcript

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education, and today we're joined by a man who many of you will know from various academic papers and the occasional visit and other things. Michael Fullen, who's the Professor Emeritus of the University of Toronto. He's a former Dean of the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Michael, thanks for joining us.

Michael Fullan: Thank you. You got me described at one level, so I'm happy to jump in with you.

Dale Atkinson: Well, we'll take it. Can we talk first a little bit about deep learning? What is deep learning? What's the philosophy behind it?

Michael Fullan: Well, I can say it two ways. One is that the history of the last, say 50 years of learning has been shallow learning. So, it got caught up in the NAPLAN and the testing and the, uh, that even though it potentially doesn't have to stay there, it was. It was seen increasingly, we have the data now, including from South Australia.

Students were more and more bored as they moved up the, by the time they got to high school, only about 20% of students were engaged. So, the negative story is that the normal education we inherited from the last 150 years got less and less relevant. Or students in, in the 21st century. So, and that, that includes negative from when PISA started in 2000.

It's ironic, I think that from PISA 2000 to PISA 2025, that learning has declined in almost every country. PISA measures, I'm talking. So this is pretty shocking and I think in some ways that people are going through the motions and not getting anywhere. So that's, that's one backdrop. So we switched in 2015 or so to the question is what kind of skills and competencies do students need in 2025 or any of this century actually?

And that's where the six Cs come in. That they are character, citizenship, critical thinking and collaboration. The six Cs, they're actually the skills that people in business communities say, this is what we want from our students. Actually, the parents will say, yeah, I want my student to be like this.

So, there was this obvious comparison. The problem with the six Cs when we started in 2015 was it wasn't operationalized. It sounded good and people, yeah, they got it, but what does it really mean? So, we set about to create the learning. That focused on the six Cs and I can tell you that summative districts that are working with us in Ottawa Catholic, you know about, they've got, 85 schools, thousands of students.

They have said, we'll take the six Cs, but we're finding that two of the Cs are especially high leverage, critical thinking and creativity. So, they built creativity. The other thing to remember about deep learning is that the pedagogy changes. It's no longer, like you don't study the six Cs by here, the six Cs memorise them and tell them what they mean back to us.

You have to learn them, you have to be living them. So, uh, you may know that, we have a partnership with University of Melbourne with Sandra Milligan, where they, about four years ago partnered with us and said we wanna measure the six Cs in a disciplined way, like university style, scientific measurement.

They have developed measures of the six Cs that are highly robust. They've used about a hundred schools or so as their feedback network stuff. And those schools that they're named, you can find them on their website or from Sandra, they're using the six Cs and they're finding that learning has mushroomed for the students and the teachers that are doing that.

So that learning hasn't yet found its way necessarily into where, where do you start measuring them? Myself, I would say NAPLAN is okay. Why not? NAPLAN is okay. Those are the basics. That's keep that going, but don't make it dominant. It's not a driver. But the six Cs are a driver and therefore the measurement of that and the excitement and the link connection to students is well documented by, by Sandra and her group on the new measures they're called.

It's hard to get started. We're now recently working. With school districts in California, as it turns out in in a couple in Ontario where we fully developed it. In fact, we just finished two books that are going to be published in a few months describing this in real districts with 25 schools or 55 schools or 80 schools.

The whole school is doing this and they're producing students who are good for society and good for themselves because they've got these competency skills. We're actually linking them into occupations that parents want, students want, the business community wants. So, it's being, as we're integrating it now, and you can see it in our writing, it all comes from practice.

I'd be glad to tell you more about how to get it into practice, but the nature of it is, the new purpose of schooling is to have skills that are effective. In the 21st century, especially 2025 now onward. So new sets of skills, they call it the kind of North Star, as some people call it, but it doesn't matter what you call it.

It's the purpose of education operationalized by the six Cs. How do you make them come alive for the students and teachers that they're actually present and that they pay off because they do them every day. That's the question mark now, but the nature of them is becoming clearer.

Dale Atkinson: So you touched on a little bit there. I mean, education systems are incredibly complex beasts. What are you thinking about at a system, site and classroom level in terms of enabling and activating this kind of approach?

Michael Fullan: Yeah, I think it comes from the doing. So I wanna say that our team, since 2015 and increasingly in 2025, we have whole systems doing this work in partnership with us.

And so the content of this now is that these are places where they are developing the practices in a day-to-day sense of how to be effective in these, these skills and demonstrations. And they're taking over, I guess I'll say what a graduate from secondary school should be like, they should be capable of dealing with complex society.

We operationalize that, they should be capable of getting new jobs in the way that, well, they call, sometimes you call it career and technical education, but basically it's more tangible, it's more related to what people need to do in life. So, the best part is, there's lots of examples of it. The last thing I would say is that in my, explicit formulation, and I learned this from systems.

We have said that the old system, which is somewhat top down, you have policy, you have the clusters of schools or combinations at regions and whatever, and then you have the individual school communities. We have said that, that is unfolding in that top down description absolutely doesn't work.

I've got tons of evidence in my book, The New Meaning of Educational Change, number six, so that doesn't work. So what I've done, and it's a bit playful, but it's actually powerful, is I've turned the system on its head and said, you have to build the bottom, which is the schools and the community. Strengthen the middle, which are the community combinations of schools or the districts or the regions.

And then the third one, I didn't know what to do with it, so I said intrigue the top. So, it's a bit playful on purpose. They haven't been able to lead it. The history of this is terrible, US is terrible. England now when they've got their new, you know, new landslide, Labor government 12 months ago, they're absolutely flopping around doing nothing.

And I'm, I'm talking about actual data. So, the issue here now is that, and we've just finished two books on this, that will come out in February with actual districts in California and in Ontario, is that if you build the bottom, strengthen the middle, and intrigue the top, you're more in control of your own destiny of learning.

And therefore people, there has to be new roles for leaders, school principal leadership changes. I've written about that. The role of the principal now is how to develop the local system, which is the community in the school. It's not how to implement the hierarchical policy. You have to make the hierarchy less evident, make the action at the school and community level more explicit and prominent, and then spread sideways and upwards.

I don't know whether that makes sense. It does as an image, and we've now got proof that what that looks like. So, it's a transformation of learning and it's powerful and we're at the early stages of it. I would say 2022, 2023, we start to get out of COVID. We start to move in this new direction.

Now there's multiple new problems, around education. Trump is wrecking havoc across the world. Everybody is tired of COVID and doesn't know what to, what to do next, so people are tired out. I happen to think that we can talk about this, that South Australia. In Australia has the best, formulation of this.

We can elaborate on, I'll tell you why, but the formulation is the one I just described. Empower the local part and have the centre enable that empowerment in partnership and then build it deeper and wider into the system, and that's exactly how I see South Australia right now.

Dale Atkinson: Well, as you describe it, it sounds like purpose is absolutely central. Cause that's the thing that appears to be the, the kind of cohesive element to bringing a whole system together. Is that how you view it?

Michael Fullan:: Yeah, I think it's two concepts there. Purpose and belonging. So, purpose, the new purpose. Is to be effective in society and for society, and this is the six Cs, and you don't have to do all six all the time.

As I said, though, Ottawa is critical thinking and creativity as a centre piece of that. Their sense of purpose is to get good at those in relation to what role would they play in society as graduates from that current society? And how would they help transform society for the better? So that's the purpose.

The belonging is obviously connected. If you don't, if you just have a purpose and you haven't figured out how to enable people to belong to the effort to make it happen, you've got only a purpose on paper. So, what I like about South Australia is you have that purpose. I listened to Martin's, podcast and he's describing what I'm perhaps not fully yet, but pretty much essentially, he's describing what I just described, and he's inviting the middle, which are the county or the areas and the individual schools and the middle individual to play a bigger part in determining what's next.

So, this is a big challenge for people who haven't been able to do this yet, but it's pretty obvious that this is attractive for the day-to-day student and teacher and family and community.

Cause that's what they should want anyways. And once they get a taste of it, we think they will have more control over what it, the determination is. They'll be more influential, and they'll be more influence. By their peers, because that's how this works. But also, by the hierarchy,

Dale Atkinson: I guess, when you make any major shift in focus in an education setting, one of the things you're looking for is an understanding of how effective it's been.

What's the interplay between the six Cs and the approach to assessment? What's the new framework around that that needs to be considered?

Michael Fullan: Yeah. The assessment is, we're able to assess. The six Cs, we measure of it and Sandra Mulligan has deeply developed measures of it.

So, assessing it isn't the problem. So, we're able to do that. But I also think that the question is what's the attraction to those that causes students and families and communities? I wanna learn these. We think that the hardest part is getting people immersed in learning them. We can measure them, but I'm not a fan that you measure them.

If you take accountability, accountability has been miscast. It's been miscast in NAPLAN as the outcome. And therefore, by the time you get to the outcome and say, oh, it's not working, then all you have to do, I mean, the option you have, which is not very attractive, well, we've gotta tighten the screws to get those outcomes better.

It's ironic and it's paradoxical, but the less you focus on measurement in the short run and the more you focus on the evolution of what it looks like, paradoxically, you're more likely to get it. My good friend, who’s now passed away a couple of years ago. Richard Elmore, who was actually a big fan of Australia, was there many times and was working with us.

He said, no amount of accountability will be effective. No external accountability will be effective in the absence of internal accountability. So, he says you have all the external accountability you want, you'll never get it if it's coming from the outside only. It has to come from the inside, what he called internal accountability.

And the thing with internal accountability, and now we know some of the attributes of what it looks like. One is it has to be, I'll just mention the combination of three or four things that have to feed on each other. One is, it has to be fairly explicit. What is it? How do you measure this stuff? So that's explicit. One is it, and this is an odd way of putting it, but so true to change.

It can't be imposed, it can't be. Um, said you must, uh, we want you to be accountable and we're gonna look over your shoulder and make sure you're accountable, again, paradoxically, the less you focus on accountability as the driver. The more you focus on accountability as reflecting the progress and you measure it, non-judgmentalism we call it, but you take non judgmentalism plus transparency.

Transparency isn't working. Non judgmentalism is you're not jumping all over people that aren't making it work well because that's not a good lever for change. And then when you turn this thing upside down, as I've described a few minutes ago, you get people then who are doing this and they become masters of their own destiny, but they're sharing laterally and upward. So, it's not like they're keeping it to themselves. They become part of the solution. And that's, it is paradoxical. It's what I call nuanced. It doesn't sound like it should work, but the less you emphasize explicit hardcore accountability, the more you get results.

If you pave the way with the learning and purpose we're describing, and the people who are doing this become the ones that own it, and then they become more satisfied, more developed, and I think that's the pathway that South Australia's on. I looked in my book The New Meaning of Educational Change at the various countries.

And I would say in Australia, that the big states don't get anywhere, the smaller ones, Tasmania has sort of not quite moved that much. South Australia is moving, and I think it's the exemplar for me. It's the one, Northern Territories has, which is a much more different proposition. They're also moving in some direction.

So, I think size matters. The biggest ones, Victoria, New South Wales, they're just too big. They trip over themselves, so I don't know what the answer is there. I've worked in both places, and they sometimes pick up the lead and wanna do it, and then it falters you in the next political tranche that comes in.

So, I'd rather look at South Australia and say, okay, get it right. You're small, but you're not that small. You got like, it's not easy, but let's see what it looks like in South Australia. And that's why I really think it's working well. Posse Salberg is a very close friend of mine and he's been working to support this nature of this change exactly the way I'm describing it.

And if the middle and the bottom, bottom being in the global community and the teachers, if they can gain more and more confidence about this nature, more and more understanding of the specificity, they can actually be increasingly influential about the particulars of getting this to work and be an exemplar, for the rest of Australia,

Dale Atkinson: Michael Fullan, exemplar for the rest of Australia. We'll take that. Thank you very much for your time.

Michael Fullan: Okay, well I'm looking forward to participating in some of the outcomes that you're engaged in.

My best advice. Is that the local part, which are the schools and communities, that they take more chances to take advantage of the opportunity that the South Australia framework is inviting them to do.

So don't be shy about it. Make mistakes, take advantage of it. You're in good hands. Go for it and make it happen. It'll be happening because it happens in the local level. Reinforced by the middle, learning from each other and enabled by the state who is funding and encouraging and leading this direction in partnership with the other levels.

Dale Atkinson: Thank you very much.

Michael Fullan: Okay. I enjoyed it. Keep going.