Middle leaders act as the conduit between teachers and the school leadership team. In their roles they communicate the values and the strategic vision of the school to teachers and support them to enact curriculum and pedagogical change. However, middle leaders in many schools often rise into their positions without necessarily being trained and developed to be effective in their roles. Their actions then mostly reflect their unexamined beliefs about leading teams and what they have previously seen in the school. If schools are committed to developing effective middle leaders who strategically lead their teams to accomplish school goals and embed an empowering school culture then there are certain structures that can support them.

Over the next few blogs we will be exploring elements of how middle leaders can plan to lead their team effectively. Today’s blog is about designing vision statements.

Vision Statements

The vision statement in your middle leadership position has two parts.

1. We are deeply passionate about …
2. What we want to be known for …

The first part describes the visionary outcome for students. It describes what your team is aiming to produce in the students. It is a product.  It expresses the outcomes you desire for the students from interacting with your team. It is a short statement that captures the essence of what you team is particularly passionate about

The second part expresses the HOW. It describes the particular qualities and aspects that your team will focus on to deliver what you are deeply passionate about. It is again a short statement that captures the key elements of what your team will be focusing on.

The best approach to generating these statements is to brainstorm your answers as a team to each of the two parts. From the words and ideas created during the brainstorms work together to come up with short statements that captures the intent and vision of the team. The final statement is reached when the team can say “that statement captures what I am passionate about and want to be known for”.

• Note: be careful not to get hooked by having the exact right words otherwise you will spend a lot of time generating these statements. The statement should capture the sentiment of the team and can be refined over time. The vision statement will be used to guide and focus the strategic thinking and planning of the team.

The following are some examples of Vision Statements produce by school middle leaders:

English

The English team are deeply passionate about our students maximising their potential and striving to be highly literate and successful participants in a 21st century context.

We want to be known for being an innovative, highly motivated and collaborative team; inspiring students to apply these valuable skills in the classroom and beyond their school-life.

Health and PE

In Health and PE we are deeply passionate about our students and staff being healthy, resilient and active members of society (mind, body and spirit).

We want to be known for providing a safe and supportive learning environment that caters for all individual learning styles, models healthy lifestyle habits and allows students a variety of opportunities (diverse range of activities) to succeed and become team players.

Mathematics

The Maths team are deeply passionate about producing individual critical thinkers with skills that enable them to be lifelong problem solvers.

We want to be known for providing a supportive and engaging environment, which enables all students to learn and develop an appreciation of mathematics.

Context for doing this

The research literature shows that effective leaders engage their teams in a vision that everyone buys into. The vision speaks to the team and effective teams work towards accomplishing that vision together. Quite often school teams can devolve into DOING stuff, especially in these times when there seems to be an increasing amount of administration matters being required of schools. Effective school leader are strategic in their thinking and harness the power and good will of their team by collaboratively articulating clear vision statements and then planning and leading their team from the vision as the team takes the required actions. This is especially important in schools as schools are relational organisations.

The design for the two parts of the vision statement came from the research of Jim Collins which he wrote about in his book Good to Great. Collins found that organisations that went from good to great had disciplined people who had disciplined thought and took disciplined action. The disciplined thought stemmed from the organisation / team having a very clear vision of what they were passionate about and wanted to be known for. This vision guided and focused the organisation / team on what was important to them and to develop the discipline in their planning and action to focus on specific key areas they wanted to deliver. In this way they began the journey to being great. This journey often took years but was the result of being disciplined in the three identified areas.

References

1. Review of contemporary  research on middle and teacher leaders, Dr Maureen O’Rourke and Dr Peter Burrows, Bastow Institute of Educational Leadership (2013)
2. Extraordinary Leadership in Australia & New Zealand: The five practices that create great workplaces, James Kouzes and Barry Posner with Michael Bunting, Wiley (2014)
3. Hardwired Humans: Successful Leadership Using Human Instincts, Andrew O’Keeffe, Roundtable Press (2012)
4. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t, Jim Collins, Harper Collins (2001)
5. Good to Great, Jim Collins, Fast Company (2001) http://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/good-to-great.html
6. Know your why, http://smartblogs.com/leadership/2016/03/31/know-your-why/

If you are interested in discussing with Adrian the possibility of running in-school workshops on developing middle leadership please email him at adrian@intuyuconsulting.com.au

We recently finished a month of running workshops around Australia on “Practical Steps to STEAM” and “You Can Teach Coding” and we learnt quite a few lessons that are worth considering as you prepare to implement the Technologies Curriculum.

Lessons

• The future we are preparing our students for should not be based on the way we prepared students in the past. Mike Lloyd (the international STEAM expert we brought in to deliver the workshops) showed a range of current examples of how the automation of human effort has been going on for millennia and how it is now replacing knowledge and expertise in a range of areas (rather than just human effort). It then begs the question “What are schools for?” A piece in Medium by Scott Santens titled Deep Learning Is Going to Teach Us All the Lesson of Our Lives: Jobs Are For Machines challenges us to ponder what would thus be the role of humanity in the future. Our perspective is that creativity, problem solving and innovative thinking is going to be a critical aspect of the future lives of our students and children.

• There are some great challenges for schools that have nothing to do with the technology. Firstly, as recently pointed out, teachers lack confidence and competence in their own digital skills and thus feel unable to deliver the curriculum. The workshops we provided went some way to addressing the basics of digital competence and building teacher confidence but there is a long way to go. The teachers we presented to are the early adopters in schools – there will be a large percentage of teachers out there who struggle with ICT skills let alone what is required in the Technologies Curriculum. This will be quite a challenge given that schools are mandated to be implementing the Technologies curriculum by 2017. This is why we will be running many more of the introductory workshops through the remainder of the year and beyond.

• A second challenge arises from how teachers perceive the Technologies Curriculum. What we gleaned from the sessions was that teachers saw the Technologies Curriculum as “yet another thing to do on top of an already packed timetable and curriculum”. If this viewpoint is not addressed then it will be a long arduous journey to implement the technologies curriculum. The point we made in the workshops is that the Technologies Curriculum works best when it is infused into the already existing curriculum. It can replace already existing activities and “ways of producing” without necessarily requiring extra time or effort. In fact, over time, a school can begin to build a bank of learning activities and approaches that have been designed by its own students. Our expectation is that it will take schools between 4 – 5 years to develop teachers, as well as strategically implement and resource the Technologies Curriculum well.

• The Digital Technologies curriculum is different than ICT curriculum (a general capability). The ICT aspect of the Australian Curriculum involves the consumption and use of already existing software for the purpose of enhancing outputs – whether they are presentations, graphing, documents, or whatever. The Technologies Curriculum’s focus is on creativity, critical thinking and problem solving. Both the Design and Technologies Curriculum and the Digital Technologies Curriculum focus on developing a framework for learners to think from – whether it is Algorithmic Thinking or Design Thinking. Exploring and enacting the Technologies Curriculum from this perspective will be transformative for schools. It will literally shift the way that schooling is thought about let alone done in that there will be a much greater focus on metacognition and learning rather than covering content.

• Schools need to spend more professional learning time developing teacher capacity to effectively backward plan curriculum. It is a critical piece missing within schools as many teachers are not trained in Design Thinking as a process and the importance of planning with the end goal in mind. Approaching planning this way will allow teachers and schools to not only figure out together HOW to meet the curriculum but also allow for the long term development of learner centred learning. If this is not done then what can occur over time are teachers and schools focused on the delivery of content rather than the development of learning and life-long learners. If students are not leaving their schools as flexible adaptive learners who can identify problems and/or opportunities, research and problem solve, and create their own solutions then they are not being prepared for the future. I can honestly say that most schools are NOT structured and oriented towards achieving this. This is why a large percentage of our consulting work is focused on develop teacher capacity around rigorous evidence-based planning.

• Finally, one of our biggest challenges we found was working with technology to teach teachers about how to enact the Technologies Curriculum. Each state and each school has an entirely “innovative” and often restrictive way in which they set up their technology. Some States lock down the laptops provided to their state school teachers so nothing can be added. Some States restrict access to cloud based collaborative services such as Dropbox and Google Drive as well as a broad range of websites that have fabulous digital technologies software and curricula. Some schools have challenging Wi-Fi access paths for visiting guests. Given the requirements of the Digital Technologies Curriculum the technological policy barrier for many schools – particularly government schools – is going to become a major hurdle – NBN or no NBN. Whilst this is being sorted out Mike will be creating a complete offline solution for us so we can provide all the schools with a simple way to address the Technologies Curriculum.

What Next

If you are interested in finding out more about our future Practical Steps to STEAM and Teaching Coding workshops that we will be delivering around the country, we are now taking expressions of interest from teachers and schools. Email us at office@intuyuconsulting.com.au for more information.

“If I wanted to become a better carpenter, I’d go find a good carpenter, and I’ll work with this carpenter on doing carpentry or making things. And that’s how I’ll get to be a better carpenter. So if I want to be a better learner, I’ll go find somebody who’s a good learner and with this person do some learning.”

Seymour Papert

Last year I was asked to create a presentation unpacking metacognition for a school. Given that I had been talking around and about this topic in one way or another for several years I thought I had a fair idea of what I wanted to talk about. However I decided to dig a little deeper and expand my understanding of the topic.

My usual research routine when I am deepening my understanding about particular concepts is to gather information from a range of sources into one folder on my computer and then to read through and extract the key ideas and concepts. My goal during this phase is to gain a clear enough picture of the ideas and concepts so I can build a narrative for teachers that they can easily grasp the concept. This strategy of reading broadly and narrowing down ideas and concepts until I have clarity was something I found worked at high school and its value was reinforced at university due to the amount of reading we had to do.

As I read and gathered the ideas and concepts I had one of those “Ah ha” moments that transformed the way I thought about learning and teaching. Let me take you through a quick summary of some of what I put together for the presentation

Metacognition

Metacognition is broadly defined as “thinking about thinking” and includes activities such as:

• Learning about how people learn
• Developing an awareness of one’s own learning processes
• Monitoring one’s learning strategies and assessing their effectiveness
• Consciously managing one’s own motivation and attitudes toward learning
• Making adjustments to one’s learning strategies when appropriate

Attribution Theory research indicated that high academic achievers had particular beliefs and habits. They were clear that it was the application of strategies and effort that lead to success, that failure was the result of the incorrect application of a strategy or lack of effort, and high achievers formally used many strategies. Low academic achievers on the other hand attributed success to luck and failure to lack of ability (fixed mindset), and either were quite informal or didn’t use any specific learning strategies.

This led me to explore what were the habits of effective self-regulated learners.

Two strengths of Self-Regulated Learners

Two of the habitual strengths of self-regulated learners are that that are able to self-monitor and self-modify their behaviour to achieve their goals.

Self-Monitoring Learners know what they are trying to achieve (they are clear what they are working on), they have identified a strategy they are going to use to achieve that goal (and can transfer these strategies across learning areas), and they monitor their progression towards that goal.

Self-Monitoring learners ask themselves questions such as:

• “Am I making my points clear and understandable?”
• “Am I getting closer to a solution or farther away?”
• “Have I convinced my reader?”
• “Does this solution make sense?”
• “How can I keep track of what I know?”
• “How do I decide which paths to go down?”
• “How long should I try this approach?”
• “When should I switch to another strategy?”
• “What should I try next?”

Self-Modifying Learners:

• Monitor their progression towards a goal
• Use self, peer and teacher feedback to adjust their strategies to more effectively progress towards their goal
• Self-modification behaviours can be taught in minimal class time (literally a matter of minutes over the course of a semester) and can improve students’ performance in the short term and long term
• Once the behaviours are internalized, students continue to use them but focus their attention on the content they are learning.

What this means

What my reading of the research implied to me is that we can teach meta-cognition and develop all our students’ capacity to be effective learners. My “ah ha” moment actually was that this is exactly what WE SHOULD BE DOING in every class. My thought was …

Where else in your life do you learn to be an effective learner if not at school?

What teachers can do in their classes to develop meta-cognitive, effective learners includes:

• Clearly articulate the student learning goals and success criteria (and support students to set their own personal goals and success criteria)
• Support students to identify their fundamental beliefs about learning (growth versus fixed mindset) and shift their beliefs
• Discuss and highlight to students the range of strategies to achieve those goals, and
• Provide students with sufficient opportunities to monitor their progress, receive feedback and, modify their strategies

If a school took on the above aspects in a consistent, coherent and progressive way, rather than hope the students gain these skills by osmosis or do it naturally (as they high academic achievers mostly do anyway) then the overall learning performance of the learners (students and teachers) within the school will improve.

Other worthwhile articles to read (and videos to watch) include:

• Using Metacognitive Strategies and Learning Styles to Create Self-Directed Learners
• Teaching Metacognition: Insight Into How Your Students Think Is Key To High Achievement In All Domains
• The Development of Metacognition in Children and Adolescents
• How To Weave Growth Mindset Into School Culture
• Help Students Train their Inner Voice
• Austin’s Butterfly – Building Excellence in Student’s Work
• The Learning Challenge – James Nottingham

The Influence of a Framework for Thinking

When I was 15 I changed the sport I played. I left playing junior football and began umpiring it – which was odd given that I didn’t like running long distance all that much! I think I didn’t want to lose the feeling of being part of a community and participating with a team. Being an umpire was certainly a growing experience for me as a young adult – especially when I had to deal with the comments being made by parents on the sidelines.

Looking back now, however, it wasn’t umpiring per se that made the biggest difference for me for the direction of my life. At one of the weekly team coaching meetings I happened to sit next to another young umpire who had just bought himself a smallish personal computer. I was fascinated. I asked lots of questions. I talked to him about what he did with it – how did he program it? This happenstance meeting sparked my interest in the world of computing and the thinking that being able to code required. By the time I was 16 I had bought my first computer, mainly from the money I had saved up from umpiring. The year was 1982.

That moment influenced my career decisions. It led to me to gaining Science and Engineering degrees with majors in Computer Science, Maths and Mechanical Engineering. My PhD blended all three disciplines to create a program to speed up the analysis of dynamic stresses in structures. I even ended up teaching Aerospace Engineering.

What I learnt

Along the way the 3 disciplines taught me a specific way of thinking – every problem has a solution and there is a process one goes through to figure it out. This is what design thinking is all about and what Coding and STEAM aim to do within a school context. The design thinking framework outlines a simple process and consistent language that can be use in every classroom to develop students to be self-regulated learners. Along the way students will develop skills such as resilience, problem solving, questioning, creativity and critical thinking – because there is a solution out there and they will need these skills to figure it out. It is a key thinking framework increasingly being used to adapt to a rapidly changing world.

The challenge most schools face is that they perceive STEM / STEAM and Coding as something separate TO DO. It can be but that is doing it the hard way. The best way to begin is by infusing design thinking and STEAM / Coding approaches into your current lessons. This is what attracted us to working with Mike Lloyd and the way he presents STEAM and Coding within schools. You get to plan for a progressive infusion into your learning areas and discover how you can practically enact STEAM and Coding gradually and progressively through the years – both primary and secondary. One feature is to spark student interest and create those transformational moments much like I experienced all those years ago.

If you haven’t yet booked into the March Workshops we are running in Brisbane, Ipswich, Melbourne, Geelong, Ballarat or Perth

Good questions drive learning and thinking. They arise from the outcomes of learning we are intending for our students and they form part of a dialogue we have with students to prod and probe student thinking. They give our classrooms its feel and energy and, as such, questions are culture builders. Good questions are only half of the equation, we must listen deeply as well so that we can put forth questions that push students to elaborate and clarify their thinking.

Using Questions to Achieve Thinking Goals

Ron Ritchhart, in his article The Real Power of Questions, identified how teachers could use questions in different contexts to achieve four specific goals around thinking:

1. To model intellectual engagement with ideas
2. To promote and nurture ongoing inquiry
3. To support students in constructing understanding
4. To help students clarify their own thinking to themselves and others

Ritchhart unpacks each of these with case studies (the article is well worth reading) and then ends by suggesting that our questions are an “outward manifestation” of our context about learning, its purposes, and its processes.

But what makes a good question and what is a good approach to creating an environment that accomplishes these four goals?

Research Findings on What Works

Kathleen Cotton in Classroom Questioning summarized the research into classroom questioning and found the following:

General Findings

Instruction which includes posing questions during lessons is more effective in producing achievement gains than instruction carried out without questioning students.

Oral questions posed during classroom sessions are more effective in fostering learning than are written questions.

Asking questions frequently during class discussions is positively related to learning facts.

Increasing the frequency of classroom questions does not enhance the learning of more complex material.

Cognitive Level of Questioning

On the average, during classroom interactions approximately 60 percent of the questions asked are lower cognitive questions, 20 percent are higher cognitive questions, and 20 percent are procedural. Therefore, only 20 percent of the questions we ask students involve intellectual engagement with learning, inquiry, or developing understanding

Lower cognitive questions are more effective when the teacher’s purpose is to impart factual knowledge and assist students in committing this knowledge to memory

In most classes, a combination of higher and lower cognitive questions is superior to exclusive use of one or the other

Simply asking higher cognitive questions does not necessarily lead students to produce higher cognitive responses.

Increasing the use of higher cognitive questions (to considerably above the 20 percent incidence noted in most classes) produces superior learning gains for students

Teaching students to draw inferences and giving them practice in doing so result in higher cognitive responses and greater learning gains.

Wait Time

• The average wait time teachers allow after posing a question or hearing a student’s answer is one second or less. If teachers can extend their wait times to 3 or more seconds then there are improvements in student achievement, retention, length of responses, and higher cognitive responses (amongst other outcomes)

Questioning Strategies

To accomplish the goals of questioning we need to be clear about and articulate the learning goals we are trying to achieve with students, we need to be aware of the frequency we ask questions (and the students ask each other), and we need to provide a framework for the questions students ask.

Below you will find links to a range of resources you could explore to develop your capacity to create a culture of questioning. If you are interested in accessing the full set of material please just ask!

A Typology of Classrooms Questions

Blooms Taxonomy Question Stems

Einstein’s 55 minutes

Teach Like a Champion Summary

Teaching Students to Ask Their Own Questions

Austin’s Butterfly  – a beautiful example of how we can develop student capacity to deliver excellence through questioning within a framework

 “Change is the point. It’s what we seek to do to the world around us.
Change, actual change, is hard work. And changing our own minds is the most difficult place to start.
It’s also the only place to start”, Seth Godin

I have been working across 10 secondary colleges recently as part of some work we are doing. The position is essentially being a critical friend as teams from each of these schools enact curriculum and pedagogical change projects. The schools cover the span of the metropolitan area and also have students from a wide spectrum of socio-economic backgrounds.

It has been a learning journey for me as well as for each of the teams. I feel I could almost write a book on managing change within schools from the lessons I have learnt for being part of this project. However today I want to focus on one small aspect that was uncovered during one critical friend meeting that has a MAJOR impact in schools.

In one school the project team has been working on enacting diagnostic testing and embedding formative assessment techniques into the planning and teaching of Mathematics and English courses at two year levels. As part of their research the team triangulated data to assess the current “level” of their students. The triangulation data involved NAPLAN, PAT scores, Common Assessment Tasks and classroom observation (on-balance judgement). The on-balance judgement had the participating teachers writing down the relative levels for each student using a progression grid the team produced with support from Narelle Wood (one of the Intuyu Consulting team).

What the team found was that in the cohort of students there were 2 students below standard by 1-2 years, 9 students 1-2 years ahead of standard, and the remainder were a mixture of at-standard and just above standard. Yet, the whole cohort of students (except for one student) received at-standard on their end of year reports the previous year. The one student who did not receive at-standard was reported as being 6 months above standard.

When I asked why there was a discrepancy the teachers told me that it was school policy that teachers had to justify giving students grades above or below standard. In other words, if you as a teacher wanted to put a below-standard or above-standard grade on a student report then you had to provide evidence. On the other hand giving a student an “at standard” grade did not require any evidence. I then began inquiring across a wide range of schools that we work with and found this policy or practice was quite common across most (if not all) secondary schools.

I think this is a cane toad of a policy and schools have not explored the impact this common policy / practice has had on hindering effective curriculum and pedagogical change within secondary schools.

Consequences

Let’s unpack some of the potential consequences that such a policy / practice can have within a school:

Why should a teacher expend any effort to rigorously track the “level” their students achieve if they are not held accountable for it? Since they are held accountable for justifying above or below standard grades why give anyone those grades? It would appear to teachers that it would be time consuming to track each and every student and justify the level the students achieved so why bother?

How could they identify the actual level of the student anyway? They would need to have de-constructed the Australian Curriculum (or AusVELS or the curriculum in your state) and have an agreed upon progression of knowledge, skill, and capabilities across the levels for the subject area. That’s a lot of effort for an individual teacher and the school does not have it so why bother?

How would we measure that anyway? Our assessment is not designed to measure student progression against the Australian Curriculum (AusVELS, etc.) and we haven’t structured our teaching and learning based on progressing students from their current level so why bother?

This blanket “at standard” practice also intrinsically leaves students with gaps in their knowledge, skills and understandings because teachers have not expended the effort to identify and come to an agreement of what “at-standard” looks like (let alone below or above standard).

Teachers don’t actually know if their teaching actually makes a difference to the learning progression of each and every student because they don’t have an articulated “what it looks like” for being below, above, or at-standard.

Even worse, why would teachers expend a lot of effort to differentiate for student point of need if they can give a blanket “at standard” at the end? They teach to the middle and hope that it is enough. Teaching equals learning doesn’t it?

Students performing above and below standard will also be impacted. If a student came into the school as an academic high achiever, over time they will stop putting in the effort to do better because the best they can get is “at standard”. Equally for students with gaps in their understanding and knowledge they will still get “at standard”. Is it surprising that an area of challenge for most schools is supporting the progression of academic high achievers?

Finally, why should a teacher change their practices if there are no accurate measures of the impact of their teaching?

I have no doubt that when a school really explores this there will also be a cascade of other impacts they could identify (e.g. perhaps teachers mis-attributing the source of why students are not progressing with their teaching?)

The Way Forward

What would I do to shift this? I would begin by making it policy that in one year’s time teachers have to justify the level they have assigned to each student. Then over the next year I would resource the teachers to:

de-construct the Australian Curriculum (or AusVELS or the curriculum in your state) and have an agreed upon progression of knowledge, skill, and capabilities across the levels for each subject area

develop teachers ability to use formative assessment practices to elicit evidence of progression and become data informed

support the teachers in redeveloping both formative and summative assessments

develop the capacity of teachers to backward plan

change the reports

tell parents this is what you are doing and why

Unless this policy / practice is changed, all the great evidence based practice suggested by educational researchers such as John Hattie (What Works Best in Education) won’t stick.

 “Change begins with a culture where everyone is elevated to the status of learner”

 Sarah Brown Wessling

In the last blog I shared about the research that David Gurr and Lawrie Davidson from Melbourne University have been doing around successful leadership in Australian Schools. Since I wrote that piece I have been discussing their research (and my interpretation of it) with a number of schools and their staff. The discussions have been fascinating to say the least!

Over the next few blogs I am going to dig a little deeper into what each level of leadership needs and wants to empower them to be effective in delivering student outcomes. My assertion is that schools that are successful over a long period of time have certain structures that not only provide what each level of leadership needs and wants but builds a particular empowering culture.  In this newsletter I am focusing on Teachers. Please feel free to challenge or add to my thinking!

Level 1 Impact

Classroom teachers have a direct impact on student learning. They are directly interacting with students each day and create the experience of learning and the school for each and every student. As Hattie pointed out in his 2003 paper Teachers make a difference – what is the research evidence?

 “It is what teachers know, do, and care about which is very powerful in this learning equation.”

“Teachers can and usually do have positive effects, but they must have exceptional effects. We need to direct attention at higher quality teaching, and higher expectations that students can meet appropriate challenges”

Hattie and Jaeger reviewed all the literature and identified five major dimensions of excellent teachers.

“Expert teachers

• can identify essential representations of their subject,
• can guide learning through classroom interactions,
• can monitor learning and provide feedback,
• can attend to affective attributes, and
• can influence student outcomes”

We know that pre-service teaching does not create expert teachers – they are often just beginning their teaching journey. Where teachers develop their expertise is through practice and professional learning in their school environment. So what structures and processes would teachers require within a school to support them to progressively develop their capacity to become “expert teachers”? The following are some of my thoughts:

• A spiral curriculum that outlines the progressive development of concepts, skills, understandings, and affective attributes across subjects through the years of schooling at the school. The aim is to provide a clear progression for teachers so they not only know the expected levels but also the connection across and within subjects. It also allows for a coherent and consistent approach to scaffolding and gradual release of responsibility over the year and through the years.

• A clear instructional model so teachers know what to focus upon and what works best in curriculum planning, pedagogy and whole school affective and general capability development. Given the amount of evidence based research now available schools can articulate a model which captures what works best. This would include clear planning templates and planning and reflection processes.

• Time for teaching teams to plan curriculum using a backward planning model (e.g. UbD). Petra Leitz in her 2009 ACER report pointed out that there is more variance in performance within Australian schools than between schools. My assertion is that a big part of this is because teachers do not have a shared common understanding of the “essential representations of their subject”. Time to plan and collaborate together on developing the written, enacted and assessed curriculum is critical to creating an aligned team and each and every teacher being clear about the learning goals and success criteria. In countries where there is significant teacher planning and discussion time (e.g. Finland) there is minimal variance within schools.

• A well thought out framework for teachers to collaborate Team meetings often can devolve into administrivia rather than focussing on the core aspects of influencing student outcomes. Having clear structures for meetings and how teachers can work together to influence all the students is an important facet. This goes beyond cooperation and into teachers being data informed and working together to address each and every student.

• Well thought out and progressive development processes for teacher capacity building (e.g. structured self-reflection, Individual Learning Plans, instructional and cognitive coaching, professional learning – individual and whole school). I find that most professional development within schools is piecemeal. Once a school has articulated a spiral curriculum and a clear instructional model then the school strategic plan should lay out how, over the coming years, the teachers will be building their expertise from their current level of expertise. This plan answers the question “How are we developing expert teachers that reflect the vision, values and foci we want for the school?”

• An induction program for teachers new to the school so that over time the teachers are mentored / instructionally coached into thinking from and operating from the articulated school approach. A lot of focus has been recently been put on pre-service teacher training. Whilst I dislike the “Teach for Australia” approach in principal I believe one of the things they got right was the strong coaching structure embedded into their processes. A structured instructional coaching approach that progressively develops teachers new to the school will ensure that expert teachers and leaders are being grown

• A school culture that values learning from mistakes and encourages teachers to experiment and evaluate their initiatives. We all learn by trial and error and this is critical for teachers to adapt to the varied needs and level of competence, knowledge, skills and dispositions in their classes. Unless everyone is working within a developmental mindset and are, at heart considered learners, then progress will be slow.

I would love to hear your thoughts about what I can add or change to the above at the level of teachers. Next time we will look at what is needed and wanted at the level of middle leadership.

Transformational and Instructional Leadership

“Leadership only arises when people are given the opportunity to lead”

This was the main insight I took away from a recent professional seminar I was involved in at the University of Melbourne. It was an important insight for me because it connected some thoughts and ideas that I had been mulling recently about some of the schools we had been working with. I left the seminar wondering how much opportunity for leadership teachers and people in positions of leadership actually had within the day to day running of a school.

In my experience when teachers took on positions of leadership they were generally given time in lieu to be operating as leaders. However the complaint I have often heard when coaching individuals in these positions is that this time was often filled with administrative issues – not leadership. Even when people in positions of leadership had dedicated time to lead they weren’t necessarily automatically good at leading teams – they lacked a framework for leadership.

Effective School Culture

This has led me to think that the opportunity for the leadership that schools need and want will only arise within a well thought out strategic framework for leadership. Even more so, as I have read in Leithwood and Day’s research – at different stages of school cultural development differing leadership is need. Furthermore, if a school is interested – as I believe they should be – in developing an effective professional culture, then at different levels of leadership within the school there are different foci that are important.

This is a critical point that struck me when I spoke to David Gurr, a lecturer in school leadership from the University of Melbourne. David used the diagram below to point out the different needs and opportunities for leadership at various levels within a school.

The following descriptions I outline are completely my interpretations of the discussion I had with David – not David’s. You can read more about Lawrie Drysdale’s and David Gurr’s model of successful school leadership here.

Teachers

Classroom teachers (Level 1) have a direct impact on student outcomes as they are directly interacting with students. At this level the work that mostly needs to be done with teachers is instructional. The support they need to develop their capacity revolves around developing effective curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. Just giving them time to do this is insufficient unless the teachers are highly effective planners working within a clear instructional model and instructional plan. More often than not the teachers need to be working within a framework that leads them to grow and develop their instructional capacity. They definitely need time to discuss curriculum, pedagogy and assessment and come to shared common understandings as a teaching team but within an effective instructional framework. Classroom teachers often don’t have many opportunities in their busy schedules to develop leadership. I am not saying they cannot be leaders but that leadership cannot develop without there being opportunities for it.

Middle Leaders

Middle leaders lie between Level 1 and 2 because they are moving into leadership. The challenge in most schools is that when one is appointed into a position of middle leadership there is rarely an effective structure for developing the leadership capacity of these individuals. Middle leaders have a less direct impact on student outcomes but they do have the opportunity to create the professional environment of learning and development for the classroom teachers to be effective.  I have found that middle leaders are given time to “lead” but they often fall into the pitfall of becoming administrators and managers rather than leading the way. Thus they unconsciously become the barrier to change and growth within a school. Middle leaders transfer the school values and strategic vision into action at the level of the teachers. Thus having an effective leadership development program for middle leaders is crucial to developing a professional learning culture within the school.

Senior Leadership

Senior Leadership within the school lie mostly at Level 2 impact where they have an even less direct impact on student outcomes however they set the context and capacity of the school. It is their role to articulate the vision and direction of the school and facilitate the relationships and conversations such that a powerful learning and development culture arises. Without their visionary role and guidance the school can flounder. It is critical that these individuals think from the whole school perspective. One of the consistent pitfalls that I see often at this level is that they don’t plan strategically or effectively for the long term. At this level one cannot just focus on the day to day – which is vital to the short term success and running of the school – one needs to be planning for and playing the long term game of the school. The development that is needed here is building the capacity of the senior leaders to strategic plan and create what John Kotter calls the “guiding coalition” to have the strategic vision become alive within the school. Senior leaders need to develop their understanding of causing and managing change within a relational organisation.

Finally, great Principals not only have strengths at Level 2 but also Level 3. They set the context of the entire school and partner the senior leadership team to strategically plan and enact the school vision. Their job is NOT to micromanage the change but to empower leadership throughout the school. The principal is also the buffer between the external influences on the school and the school. They are the voice of the future to the community (internally and externally) whilst filtering the requests and demands of the educational system within which the school exists such that they minimize upheaval for the staff and students.

In the Part II I want to share a little about my journey of discovering the importance of effective school leadership and connect what we are seeing with the thinking above. In the meantime, some useful articles and research around this topic include:

What We Know about Successful School Leadership – Leithwood and Riehl (2003)

Are You Leading Change or Building a Platform for Change? – Bruce Dixon

Leading for Growth – Connected Principals

Recently I wrote an article about the importance of failure in developing what Carol Dweck calls a growth mindset. Being able to see failure as a step to success is one of those perceptions or dispositions we could / should develop in ourselves as well as our students. The more we can be with the meanings we attach to failure and not make it something personal about ourselves (like we are not good enough or talented enough, etc)  the more we can learn to see failure as an opportunity to learn.

But how do we do this? It is easy to say that is what should be done but what actions would lead this disposition to be developed?

One possible approach clicked for me over the recent school break as I watched (and listened) to my teen son play one of his Xbox games. On a number of occasions he was so close to beating the bad guys (I think it was actually bad dogs on this occasion) in his game that he was willing to go back to the start of that mission to retry and retry until he learnt what he needed to learn to overcome the situation. I have noticed this myself when I play those games – that failure was OK when I saw I was close to winning. Widening this thinking further – in my life I have always been driven to keep striving and growing and learning because I often had “near wins”. These days I play the game of life to win although I know that I won’t always win and there is something to learn each and every time.

Near wins – overcoming failure

Then I read this wonderful article from the recent ASCD conference of a talk by Sarah Lewis on the importance of near wins in reaching for mastery. I then found that Lewis has also presented a TED talk in 2014. Lewis found that the greatest artists and innovators in history thrived on near wins – “the gap between where they are and where they want to go”. Lewis encourages teachers to

Give students a “private domain”—a safe space to play and explore. ”Make no question foolish,” implored Lewis, and always integrate time for innovation, creativity, and play. “Play is what allows us to maintain a sense of wonder [and] sustain the journey required for mastery.”

So in this coming term have a go at creating an environment where the students can play and have near wins. Perhaps for those students who just missed out on getting the next grade in an assignment – have them re-submit and go for the higher grade. Perhaps you could gamify your classroom somewhat and have your students see learning as a game. Perhaps you give your students time to play around with ideas – concepts – understandings rather than rushing through content. Whatever you try reflect on the near wins in your teaching as you go and see what arises.

How much change has been occurring in your school of late? What is your experience of the change?

If we asked those questions of teachers in your school what do you think their responses might indicate? Would they respond in a joyful and empowered way or perhaps respond “yep yet another change”? I suspect for many teachers and leaders in schools there always seem to be some change initiative or another going on. Education appears to be undergoing a period of constant change, as it has for many years, and I don’t believe that this is going to be different for many years yet to come.

Given the constant changes occurring in our schools – whether they are driven by political, curriculum or pedagogical drivers – it is surprising to me that we consistently find that one of the biggest areas that schools seem to struggle with is managing the change that is occurring. Most school reforms or change initiatives fail because we don’t examine the underlying context or beliefs that exist within a school.

Let me give you some examples from our experience:

1. A school has experienced a high turnover of senior leadership members in the past five years and have experienced “micromanagement from above”. The staff teachers indicate they have “change fatigue” and have little faith or trust in leadership at this point. Embedding new initiatives to improve student learning outcomes has been extraordinarily slow.
2. A school has recently changed its senior leadership after a long period of stability and the new team wants to bring in a raft of much needed curricula and pedagogical change given the significant drop in student numbers at the school. However, there is a lot of “baggage” and resistance due to the “wrongs of the past”. Unless staff members have the opportunity to address and complete past issues again change will be slow.
3. A school has a large number of teachers who have been at the school, and only that school, for decades. Whilst many of them are good to excellent teachers they aren’t necessarily interested in changing the way they teach or assess.

I could go on with a variety of examples but my point is that each and every school has individual challenges that need to be addressed to empower and enable positive change to occur. Some schools occur as fortresses against change, others are beginning to take down their walls, and others are flowing rivers where change has teachers meander from one initiative to the next and nothing gets embedded.

There is a wonderful old Sufi tale that tells of a man whose neighbors come upon him on his hands and knees under a street lamp. The man explains that he is searching for his lost keys. The neighbors immediately join in the search, but without success. When they ask the man if he’s sure this is where he lost the keys, he replies, “No. I lost them outside my door—but there’s more light here!”

Schools need to stop looking where the light is and start strategically searching in the most likely areas. They must uncover the invisible actors at play within a school – whether they are school structures, policies, past practices, teacher beliefs, parental beliefs, student beliefs, etc.  What are the causes of the way things are? What are the teacher beliefs about their students? What are the parental beliefs about their children? What are the staff beliefs about leadership? The more a school makes visible the underlying beliefs and context the more it can actually enact change appropriately within the school.

Case in point, Judith Lloyd Yeo in her book “Teaching in Mind: How Teacher Thinking Shapes Education” pointed out the following specifically about teacher beliefs:

• Teacher’s beliefs profoundly influence their understanding of attempted reforms
• The same words or phrases might signal quite different things to different teachers
• Each teacher operates from a set of unexamined beliefs about the nature of teaching and learning, about knowledge, and about the purpose of education itself.
• Teachers base their thinking and behaviour on unconscious values – personal, professional and those of the culture in which they live and were raised. Often personal values conflict with values of the school, school leadership, and even with a teacher’s own values regarding students.
• Some practices never take root or cannot be sustained because the underlying beliefs have not changed.

For those of you who have worked with us before this is why we often start our professional learning workshops with inquiries that unpack teacher beliefs and habits. If you are interested in further reading here are some great articles for you to explore!

Cultivating Teachers’ Beliefs, Knowledge and Skills for Leading Change in Schools

Teacher Beliefs

How Teacher Thinking Shapes Education

Teaching Practices, Teachers’ Beliefs and Attitudes

The Beliefs-Behavior Connection: Leading Teachers Toward Change

Leading Change – Why Transformation Efforts Fail