Thirty—five years ago I wrote my first serious article as a young academic. It was entitled “An overview of the innovative process and the user.” At the time, much of the research focused on innovations; I wanted to focus on the people using the innovations. This led to a career-long pursuit of attempting to get at the meaning of educational change. As I worked through the years.

I realized that we couldn’t make progress if we were only interested in individual meaning. The key to large-scale, deeper reform was embedded in the question of how to obtain shared meaning on a wider and wider scale.

As an academic, I spend 80% of my time working with practitioners-teachers, principals, district staff, staff developers, and lately policy makers and politicians. Rather I should say that I work with particular kinds of practitioners–those who want to make a difference not only in their own bailiwicks, but also on the system as a whole.

Increasingly I have been impressed (and frustrated) by the tremendous amount of pent-up passion and pent-up potential that exist in school systems. Many educators want to break out and make a qualitative difference beyond their own classrooms and immediate settings. Some, if they are frustrated for too long in this endeavor, give up and become cynical. Others experience the excitement of making a difference but find that it does not last beyond the tenure of the group with whom they are working. Most, however, no matter what the frustration never give up; they believe intuitively that better things can and should happen–even if they do not know how.

In various partnerships across the world I have been part of helping to create major breakthroughs in individual schools, districts, and in a few cases, entire states. We are getting a taste of what might be possible. It is a tantalizing proposition: literacy and numeracy of students, for example, improve significantly but then level off or plateau; leadership flourishes, especially with leaders helping to develop other leaders but then it wanes when conditions change.

The books I have written capture much of this journey. They describe and extrapolate on the major themes: The New Meaning of Educational Change; the What’s Worth Fighting For trilogy (with Andy Hargreaves); the Change Forces trilogy; and what turned out to be a trilogy on leadership: Leading in a Culture of Change, The Moral Imperative of School Leadership, and Leadership and Sustainability. In one of my latest books I team up with Peter Hill and Carmel Crévola to see what it would take to achieve qualitatively greater Breakthroughs in education reform (Fullan, Hill, & Crévola, 2006).

Yet, we still have too much pent-up passion and potential. The longer it stays pent-up, the more it dissipates. Passion needs fuel; potential needs to be exercised.

Learning Places is about passion and potential out of the gates. It is about capturing the hearts and minds of all educators. It is a paradox that systems change when people within systems begin to team up and change. People need ideas, tools, opportunities, and other outlets to get started. We believe that the power to change lies closer to ourselves than we realize. It needs to be activated and supported.

I have always teamed up with people who wanted to do more–more than other people thought possible. Along the way I meet some people who are downright irrepressible. I like those who are incorrigibly action-oriented with a reflective twist. This is how I came to join Clif St. Germain. (How could you not work with a guy named “saint,” and one whose first name is short one “f” as if it fell over the edge of what the name signifies?)

Clif has done most of the things we recommend in this Field Guide. But he has only done them in a few situations. I, myself, have lately worked with large systems on what I call the “tri-level solution”–what has to happen at the school and community level as one of the trio; the district or regional level as the mid-tri; and the state or policy level as the third level. We have had some success but have not gone deeply enough to reach the hearts and minds of most people at the school and community level.

Learning Places says that with the right ideas and tools all of us can burst outward to change the very contexts within which we work. We can do it; we just need to know how to get started. And the more we learn the how, the more clear and compelling the why becomes.

Learning Places is, after all, both a point of departure and a destination.