“Teachers absolutely must talk if students are actually going to learn anything worthwhile; the trick is to make that talk as efficient and instructive as possible.”

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Deficit (noun): Inadequacy or insufficiency, an unfavourable condition or position, to be lacking or a shortage. From the Latin – it lacks
Developmental (noun): The act of developing from a simpler or lower to a more advanced, mature or complex form or stage

I received a call this morning from a teacher friend of mine. Claire is a second year out teacher who began her teaching career after a varied and wondrous life journey. Her life is a litany of success and achievement. She has been a nationally ranked gymnast, playwright, leader of transformational seminars, managed sales teams, mother, and carer. She rang me because she needed to talk to someone who understood the life of a teacher but was outside her school environment.

(c) Richard Stine

Claire felt that she was struggling at school. The school had asked her this year to step up to co-coordinate and rejuvenate English at a critical year level whilst taking on managing the school play and teach more classes. The school leadership team obviously thought a lot of Claire and her capabilities otherwise they would not have given her this opportunity. Claire’s challenges echo that of most teachers in the profession – the feeling that there is never enough time to get everything done that you need to do, let alone what others expect of you. Claire was currently experiencing her work as never being complete to her satisfaction, teaching as well as she would like to with a particular group, as well as having times of being overwhelmed. Much of her concern was self-talk about not being enough and that other staff members were judging her performance.

In my experience this is a common feeling amongst teachers. With the relentless day-to-day nature of education many teachers rarely have the time to neither reflect deeply nor acknowledge the progress they make each and every day. The feeling of needing to be constantly driven yet never enough is familiar to many. It is an experience of deficit – and I assert it is symptomatic of the paradigm in which education currently swims.

Recently in my work with a school to create supportive structures to empower and develop teachers I had a blinding insight about what we were actually trying to achieve – and it was far larger than I had anticipated and could explain why “performance” and “teacher evaluation” was resisted by many teachers.

Human beings, for the most part, live in a deficit paradigm. It is everywhere. It is in how we see ourselves, how we see the world, how the media portrays the world, in how politics is currently working, it is endemic in our schools. It is how companies sell us products, programs and desires. We aren’t doing enough, productive enough, rich enough, thin enough, smart enough, careful enough, etc. The recent viral Dove Real Beauty Sketches are a perfect example of how people see themselves from a deficit paradigm and the impact of that viewpoint.

Our education systems are then built upon this deficit thinking. We need to “improve” our schools. We need to “evaluate” or “appraise” our teachers and get rid of the bad ones and pay the good one’s more. Politicians use the language of deficit and impose deficit thinking models on schools and school systems. They look at other countries like Finland and Singapore through deficit eyes. If you just look at the language alone (e.g. ‘appraisal – the act of estimating or judging the nature or value of something or someone’) I am not surprised teachers and schools are resisting this thinking.

If you look at ANY high performing school, school system, team, organisation anywhere in the world, the paradigm that they operate from is one of nurturing, growing, building and development. This is not the language or viewpoint of deficit. There is nothing lacking but something to grow and nourish. Two recent TED talks by Rita Pierson and Sir Ken Robinson both point vividly to this.

Currently, we are immersed in a world of deficit and because of this we develop learning in schools from this mindset and we relate to one another from a deficit mindset. Our school structures hamper and hinder developmental thinking. Teachers need time to think, to reflect, to develop, to grow. Running from one class to another limits this. To improve performance in schools we must create structures for teachers to develop their own meta-cognition as a core part of being a teacher (or as I like to refer to them – master learner).

If we wish to create and transform the education system to unleash the potential of young people (and of ourselves) it is critical we create a developmental mindset and view the world through the eyes of “developing from a simpler or lower to a more advanced, mature or complex form or stage”. When something is developing it experiences stages of growth and stages of challenges. It needs to be nourished and watered and fed to grow.

The real battle we need to be fighting is one of context.

Inside a developmental paradigm there is empathy for the stage of development people are currently at. There is not judgement just an acknowledgment. It allows for acknowledgement of progress, and celebration. It realises there are muscles to build, and capacities to grow. In the realm of agriculture one does not judge the value of a plant and ask it to improve. We create an environment for it to flourish and grow. That is what we are actually trying to do with students and staff in schools – aren’t we? In fact, I assert that wherever you find a great teacher, a great school, great parents, great coaches, great teams and high performance – you will find this paradigm. Not surprisingly you will also find habits, structures, practices and actions that develop and grow learning.

My coaching to Claire was simple. As we spoke she became clear how hard she was on herself. She saw that she could have a lot more empathy for herself and also share and communicate with people at the school what she is dealing with right now and what support she would like. She left clear and empowered.

How does deficit thinking play out in your school? Where do you struggle with deficit thinking? Where do you see developmental thinking?

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“You cannot have performance breakthroughs without cognitive dissonance … in other words … challenging what you think you really know and believe is the truth.”

The more that I work with schools, the more I realise how important it is to coach teachers and school leaders in having personal performance breakthroughs as part of the journey to creating a high performance learning culture in a school. What I have been finding is that it is the unconscious limitations a person imposes on themselves and/or the individual’s ingrained habits and practices that can limit or slow down the building of an authentic learning culture.

In my coaching one of the first tools I use I gleaned from Steve Zaffron and David Logan’s book called “The Three Laws of Performance”.  The Three Laws are:

1. How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them
2. How a situation occurs arises in language
3. Future-based language transforms how situations occur to people

So what influences how situations occur to people?

Let me delve a little into the neuroscience here. In the simplest description, our brains are pattern making machines that, through trial and error of experience and learning, create a template or mental model of how the world is so the individual can successfully interact with the world around it. As a short cut to operating in an increasingly complex environment, the brain creates unconscious habits and practices for those actions that are ritualised. For example, most of us don’t have to think about walking. We just walk. We put one step in front of the other not consciously recognising the extraordinary coordination required of our brain and body to have this happen. For those of us who drive to work, many of us drive home from our normal place of work mostly unconscious because our brain “knows” where it is going.

As we grow up there are there spans where we undergo large physiological and neurological changes. These include the period from being a baby / toddler to a child (gaining of language), a child to a teenager (puberty), a teenager to an adult (pre-frontal cortex and executive decision making). These neurological developmental changes are critical periods in our lives as it is at these times that we lay down certain foundational or fundamental ways of being (mental models or templates). Based on these templates we build our interpretation and reaction to the world around us.

My experience in coaching people over the past 15 years is that in areas where individuals lack performance they have not overcome the programming that originated when they were children. Have you ever experienced an adult who still throws tantrums like they were 6? Have you noticed that some people can’t seem to organise themselves and still act like they are teenagers in managing themselves and their time? Have you noticed the emotions and feelings that come up when you are confronted by conflict in the workplace (most teachers avoid constructive conflict like the plague)!

In those areas where you experience being challenged to develop yourself or you lack performance, your actions are logical and consistent with a childhood perspective or viewpoint of that situation. How a situation occurs to us is correlated to our fundamental way of being or mental model that originated when we were quite young.

Conversely, in those areas you do perform, at some point in your life you challenged your childhood mental model and “grew up” in that area. You went through a period of cognitive dissonance and challenged and re-circuited your hardwired habits and practices in that area.

Let me give you an example. I come from an Italian family and my viewpoint of my father when I was young was that he was not very communicative, he didn’t really show his love for me like my mother did, and that when I did something wrong (which being the middle boy of three boys we always got up to some mischief) he yelled at us and we occasionally got smacked. So I decided at quite a young age that I would “never be enough”. When you look at my behaviour over a long period of time it is not surprising that I am always out to prove myself and succeed in whatever I do. I have three degrees including a Ph.D. I taught Aerospace Engineering (including … yes … rocket science). I came second A LOT, in sport as well as academically, and it frustrated me no end. I know myself as someone who, no matter what I am given, will figure it out and become successful at it. Within this fundamental way of being I have developed particular habits and practices that enable me to learn and develop myself. It isn’t surprising that education is one of my fields of interest.

The problem with the Fundamental Way of Being is that until I became become conscious to how it was driving me in everything, and the cost it had to my well-being and just being able to be in relationship with people, I had no power to choose to behave in a different way. I was very hard on myself and overanalysed everything. My brain was always whirring and busy so I found that I was constantly exhausted to make up for NEVER being enough. I was quite often surrounded by “fools and idiots” and became frustrated with people when they didn’t understand me. I lacked empathy for others.

The Fundamental Way of Being is not a bad thing as it has you gain a certain success in life. But like any ritual habit it drives you to behave in particular ways in circumstances that other ways of behaving are more appropriate. You cannot begin to change a habit until you have become present to how it is driving you. Until then you are the passenger in the car that is your behaviour.

When I coach teachers and people in leadership positions I give them two pieces of homework involving reflective journaling.

1. At least 2-3 times per week spend 5-10 minutes reflecting on their day and write down experiences from the day that they felt driven by their fundamental way of being. It will feel uncomfortable at times. The intention of the first piece of homework is to have them become self-aware of when their machinery, that is their ritual behavioural pattern, is operating.
2. The second piece of homework is to write down, what they would do differently next time in each situation that arose that day. They could also acknowledge any victories where they took a different action from the one normally given by their mental model. The intention of this part of the homework is to start challenging the ingrained behavioural patterns so that they can create new patterns. In some ways this is about growing up to be an adult!

What I have found is that, over time, people start to produce remarkable results and shift their behaviour in those areas where they felt stuck or unable to develop and grow.

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Have you ever had a pebble in your shoe or sandal? It’s annoying isn’t it? It doesn’t really hurt but it moves around and is quite irritating. Have you noticed that when the pebble moves under the arch of your foot you can still feel it but it is not quite the irritant that it is when it is under your heel or between your toes? When the pebble really becomes an irritant we can’t do anything apart from stop, take off the shoe, and remove the offending pebble.

The pebble is a metaphor for what gets in the way of schools performing. What I have been finding as I work with schools is that they spend a lot of time on big school actions and forget about the pebbles in our shoes.

I was recently coaching a primary school and a secondary college that are in the process of implementing frameworks to support teachers moving into a developmental and performance mind set. Each school has developed a staff rubric to articulate expectations at differing levels in areas such as being professional, being self-reflective, team work, etc. [1]

The rubrics (one a primary rubric and the other a secondary college rubric) were designed by the school staffs drawing upon what they identified as the behaviours staff would be displaying at each of the four levels (essential, consolidating, established, exemplary). T-he rubrics were modelled upon the thinking exhibited in the development of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers.

Seemingly fine – right? What was unusual was that they did not see empowering their colleagues to perform as part of what is necessary to empower the students to perform. Whilst the school demonstrates great caring and team work in many areas of operating as a school, fundamentally the school context is one of individuals – a team of champions not a championship team. High performance organisations operate within the musketeer motto – All for one and one for all.

As a result of the inconsistency in context (remember this is the small percentage of what is holding this school back from creating an exceptional performance environment) pebbles have lodged themselves in the operation of the school. Some of the hindrances (pebbles) the team identified included:

• Mismatched expectations between each other
• Differing expectations of adults compared to students
• Lack of empathy for adults?
• Teacher capacity is diminished due to juggling many things
• Whether or not the other person showed a willingness to grow and change
• Lack of self-awareness on the part of the individual
• Avoidance of conflict
• React to situations rather than be pro-active
• Avoidance of righting wrongs and thus a lessening of trust between people

What we have gone to work upon in the school is built upon Stephen M.R. Covey’s work in his book The Speed of Trust. The staff in positions of leadership are using the 13 Behaviours of Relationship Trust identified in the book to begin exploring any areas they are not building trust with their teams.

Next Time: How an individual’s Fundamental Way of Being can get in the way of performance.

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A study by Duke Medicine published recently by JAMA Psychiatry has pointed to the long term psychological effects of bullying. The lead author said that ”This psychological damage doesn’t just go away because a person grew up and is no longer bullied. This is something that stays with them. If we can address this now, we can prevent a whole host of problems down the road.”

The study also suggested that bullying is also a problem for bullies as well as the victims. This reminded me of a recent article in Slate written by a woman who used to be a bully.

Now bullying comes up reasonably often in the media and quite often the finger is pointed at the individuals involved. Yes … they are responsible for their actions but they exist within the norms of the groups, family, schools and teams they are participating in. Human beings are social creatures. If bullying is occurring within a school then it is a school culture issue as much as an individual issue. Research shows that societies and cultures that are egalitarian and based on equality report less bullying. If the school culture is a powerful reinforcement of community then bullying is unlikely to occur.

What do you think?

Image: Shutterstock

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Human beings, like all species, are very physically oriented. Up to 70% of the brain is devoted to movement and operating in a complex environment. So it comes as no surprise that research in the latest Behaviour and Brain Functions journal that adding movement to rehearsal can improve performance.

Whilst the study does look at high jumpers, the thinking is scalable to many other fields. It can point to the importance of dry runs for developing skills. Dry runs are done in many fields before big events but how often are they performed and timed into student learning? This is one of the structures I talk about with teachers in their planning.

However, it also can be related to the performance of boys. Most teachers know that boys like to move. They fidget, they move around, they slouch, they get distracted, they are active all the time. If we took a time lapse video of a class of boys you would see the ballet of movement they exhibit. Yet this can impact the perception of teachers about the ability of boys to learn. Masterful teachers take into account the physicality of boys in their learning. Yet there is increasing evidence that there is an underlying unconscious bias of teachers that centres around differences in behaviour and learning between boys and girls.

This is an issue close to my heart as I saw my son’s performance at school slow down after two years of being in a graduate teacher’s class who was not keyed into what he needed for his learning. We realised it in hindsight and when he started high school this year we made sure he went to a boys college who has the mission of developing young men and they realise the importance of movement and self control. We are at the beginning of the journey of bringing my son’s self-belief back up and partnering his school by giving him structures and strategies to approach his learning. It is challenging.

My point is, whether you have boys or girls in your class, what structures and systematic approaches are you using to develop skills and to allow for performance? Are you consistent with them? Are they embedded in the way the students operate in their learning? We have found that the more intentional you are about embedding these strategies and structures into the learning environment, the more powerful the learning experiences.

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Quite often, developing powerful and meaningful key understandings is an area that teachers struggle with as they create and plan authentic rich task units. This is a critical step that many teachers can gloss over in planning but can make a profound difference to having clear, powerful units that provide great learning opportunities.

What we have experienced when teachers have begun the process of extracting “understandings” from the Australian Curriculum (or any curriculum documentation for that matter) what results is a long list of statements, understandings, and facts being written down. This is an important step in the process but it is not the final step. Quite often it is treated as a final step because the teachers themselves are used to teaching students “knowledge” rather than having the students learn. This is a consequence of the Industrial Education paradigm that has existed in our society for the past 200 years. If the teachers just use the lengthy list of “understandings” in their planning documentation without sequencing the “understandings” into a coherent and consistent whole, then there is a subtle but long reaching impact.

What we have found is that teachers take this mass of “understandings” and, with the mindset of they have to “cover” all this and make sure the students “learn” this, crowd the unit with too much material. All of this is with the hope that the students will gain the “understandings” articulated in their planning documents. This is shotgun learning.  This approach fundamentally undermines the opportunity students can gain to frame their understanding inside a powerful context. If we, as a teaching profession, want to develop students to be performance oriented in their learning, we must first clearly and logically articulate what we are intending the students to understand and what skills they are to develop and then align the learning to accomplish those goals.

Key understandings are created to clearly define the purpose of the learning within the unit. They articulate the fundamental deep learning that the unit is being created to achieve. The key understandings not only have the scope of addressing what the Australian Curriculum achievement standards require to be understood, but also the passion and self-expression of the teaching team, as well as the values and expression of the school.

Clear key understandings will allow teachers to create authentic essential / fat / fertile questions that can be used to guide and challenge student thinking in particular directions. The sequence of understandings also allow for an authentic and meaningful sequence of learning throughout the unit. Teachers and students alike will actually know what they are fundamentally out to learn in the unit and what would indicate successfully achieving that understanding.

The following document highlight the process and the thinking behind designing powerful key understandings as well as the overall process to creating great authentic rich-task units that allow for differentiation and student centred learning. The document includes a range of actual teacher designed examples from Grade 1 through to Year 10.

Download Designing Key Understandings

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I thought I would write a short note to congratulate and highlight the performance of one school we have the pleasure of connecting with – the John Monash Science School. We have yet to work with this school, although Cathryn Stephens (one of our consultants) does have the pleasure of spending quite a bit of her time filling in at the school for teacher leave.

The John Monash Science School, as the website blurb states, “is a co-educational school devoted to the pursuit of excellence in Science, Mathematics and associated technologies. It is the result of a unique partnership between the Victorian Government and Monash University, and is located in a purpose-built facility on the university’s Clayton Campus.” The school is a select-entry school for students in Year 10 – 12 and thus can pick and choose the quality of its students entering into itself.

One thing I want to highlight is not the select entry nature of the school – although this does give it some advantages. What I would like to highlight is the pedagogical approach followed by the teachers at the school. Peter Corkill (the school principal) had the opportunity upon the founding of the school to put together a first class approach and team to deliver learning. What Peter chose was a team of teachers who were willing to work together to team teach and have the students be responsible for their own learning. The essential pedagogical model of the school is project-based learning.

The students participate and drive the curriculum which was “co-written with Monash academics and informed by the latest research in the sciences as well as in learning and teaching.” 2012 was the first year of students completing through to Year 12 and the results indicate that the school instantly became one of the top public or private schools in Victoria.

One comment from a teacher as the school indicates that “team-teaching can work at Year 12″ – indicating that it is possible for other schools to follow suit.

Well done to Peter and the team!

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As many of you who read this blog know it is the week before the school year starts in Australia. It is a great time to reflect about last year and to begin creating the year before the students hit the classes.

As a way of beginning your year without stressing you out too much but giving you something that will inspire you and help you set a context for the year we decided to fill this first blog of the year with resources, through provoking articles, and inspiring videos. If you haven’t figured it out yet … this is how we work with schools – that’s why we get such great results and feedback!

Wright’s Law
This is a fabulous video which shows the heart and soul of a Physics teacher who truly engages students in Science but also tells the story of his life about why he Science is so critical to him.

Motivating Boys
Boys experience particular challenges to learning. My son is just hitting the teenage years and his ability to be distracted and avoid doing what needs to be done around school work (whether in the class or at home) is legendary in my house! Thankfully we have friends who put them onto Barry McDonald’s blog and books. The January newsletter of Mentoring Boys (Motivation_Jan2013) discusses some ideas behind how parents (and teachers) can support a boy’s internal motivation to achieve. Barry uses a lot of learning references we also use in our work.

Choice Words and Acknowledgement
As a reinforcement of the concepts covered in Barry’s article, the following two articles highlight how teacher’s use of language and acknowledgement can develop students to become empowered learners. Choice Words explores how teachers can support student identity by the language the use. Use Acknowledgments More Than Praise discusses the importance of acknowledgement rather than praise as a way of empowering the self-esteem of a young person. If you self-reflect as a teacher, you will find it is on those occasions you emphasised and recognised effort and persistence, that your ‘struggling’ students started to shift. It is worth passing on some of these articles to your parental communities.

When Students Seem Stalled
One of the key conversations we have with teachers is to discuss with them what structures they have in place to develop students to think in the way that they (they teachers) want them to think. Quite often the teaching cohort identify quite a few structures but what they often realise is that the teaching team is not consistent in codifying and applying the structures to build particular thinking in the students. In this article from Educational Leadership (When Students Seem stalled – cognitive development), Betty Garner discusses the importance of developing cognitive structures to support those students who just “don’t get it”.
As a short anecdote, one teacher that Adrian coached last year shared how it was a Year 10 Maths teacher who sat down with her in Year 10 and listened and gave her the way to think about her maths that inspired her to become a teacher – and she is a brilliant teacher!

Adolescence – a biological essential?
We have often heard (and experienced in some cases) the challenge of dealing with teenagers. Why do we have a teen phase in our evolution? We have heard other ways of expressing this which haven’t been quite so diplomatic! The research report Adolescence – critical evolutionary adaptation covers a lot of ground but it examines the biological necessity of adolescence in the survival of the human species. It also points to the importance of cognitive apprenticeship as a learning approach for this critical time in a young person’s life. I have also attached an article about what Cognitive Apprenticeship actually means – making thinking visible.

If you are interested in what we can provide for you and your school check out our 2013 Scope of Works document, or simply contact Adrian at adrian@intuyuconsulting.com.au. It is a no commitment conversation and if we can’t assist you then we certainly can point you to someone or somewhere you can find out more.
If you don’t know much about Intuyu Consulting check us out at our website, our facebook page,  or even on twitter.

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