Culture: Who do we want to be, together?

Posted on January 26, 2023 by Dr Deborah M. Netolicky

I have talked with staff this week about together creating the conditions for all of us to grow as a community of learners, through fostering an environment of high support and high challenge. Our staff have been preparing for the return of students and coming together to work through the idea of organisational culture, including hearing from students about their experiences of and insights into our school culture.

We have been wondering: Who are we now, and who do we want to be and become?

Peter Drucker famously said that “Culture eats Strategy for breakfast”, implying that strategy falls flat without a positive culture that empowers and supports the people in an organisation to enact the strategy. While most would agree that culture is important in organisations, it is one of those fluid, nebulous, and slippery terms that evades clear definition. Richard Perrin defines organisational culture as “the sum of values and rituals which serve as ‘glue’ to integrate members of the organisation.” The metaphor of glue is central; culture binds individuals together as a collective. Culture is about those things we share, consciously and unconsciously. When I think about culture, those things we share, or aim to share, include:

Purpose – Our shared why.
Values – What underpins our beliefs and actions.
Stories and symbols – What we say about ourselves, to ourselves and to others.
Relationships – How and who we are with each other.
Behaviours – How we do things around here.
Language – How we talk around here.

Herb Kelleher famously said that “culture is what people do when no one is looking.” We perform culture through our presence and our actions, seen and unseen, accepted and challenged. As Lieutenant-General David Morrison’s oft-cited message goes: “The standard we walk past is the standard we accept.” We become enculturated through our immersion in a culture and our observations of how a place and its people present, interact, and operate. As a new principal to a school this year, I am at the outset of my own journey of enculturation; of absorbing, being influenced by, and being initiated into, an existing culture.

In their work on culture this week, our staff were guided by organisational psychologist Hayley Lokan, from ISC Consulting, who described culture and both intangible and palpable. She shared Robert Kreitner and Angelo Kinicki’s definition of culture as “the set of shared, taken-for-granted implicit assumptions that a group holds and that determines how it perceives, thinks about, and reacts to its various environments”. Hayley likened culture to an iceberg and challenged us to look beyond the visible aspects of culture to interrogate our deep-seated assumptions. It reminded me of one of the findings from my PhD study: that in order to change our behaviour we often need to change our beliefs. In order to shift culture we need to challenge our norms, and our accepted attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours. Story, symbols, rituals, and traditions are important markers of and continuers of culture, but we need to be honest about those things that we allow to continue that are not aligned with our moral purpose or current community. Context, as always, is Queen, and our communities and their needs change over time.

This week’s staff workshops and student panel on culture revealed insights into the school. Staff described the school’s culture as supportive, caring, welcoming, inclusive, kind, collaborative, friendly, aspirant, dedicated, proud, respectful, hard working, and with a mixture of tradition and trailblazing dynamism. Students in a panel discussion described the culture as safe, caring, close-knit, empowering, inclusive, and one in which students feel encouraged to be their best while being supported during times of difficulty. In exploratory discussions about the future of our culture, staff began to wonder about how we might elevate wellbeing, agency, and celebration of the diversity of the individual, to strengthen what is great about our culture and to grow with our community.

If we can build and maintain a culture of trust in which there is openness, honest and gracious feedback, diverse voices, varied aspirations, and a commitment to lifting each other up, we can all learn, lead, be well, and be in community with one another. We will continue to ask ourselves, our students and our wider community:

What about our culture do we want to keep?
What about our culture might we like to change or develop?
What are our next steps to move forward with intentionality?

Threads of 2022: Wellbeing, inclusion and agency

Posted on December 4, 2022 by Dr Deborah M. Netolicky

2022 has been a year in which we have immersed ourselves in deep reflection on the realities of the present, and pushed ourselves to think radically and realistically about the possibilities of the future.

The realities have been largely distressing: pandemics, war, climate events, economic instability, rising inflation, financial stress, skills shortages, and threats to democracy. Concerns about climate change, geopolitical turbulence, and health, abound. Technologies are providing risk and opportunity. Some professions are in crisis, while some industries are reinventing ways of working and pioneering hybrid alternatives.

In 2022, schools dealt with huge amounts of staff absence, largely from Covid-19, as well as significant profession-wide teacher shortages, and increasing student and staff wellbeing concerns. We have also seen young people and school staff rise to meet challenges, and hope-full conversations, research, and practice interventions at local, national and global levels.

The wellbeing of students remains paramount, with schools implementing multi-layered approaches to equipping students to lead fulfilling and flourishing lives. Many schools have been busy reviewing or introducing strengthened wellbeing programs, as well as bolstering human resources to support students’ physical, emotional, and relational wellbeing. Initiatives that focus on service to others are being integrated with work that focuses on knowledge of and care for self.

The wellbeing of staff, too, remains a top priority for schools. The ‘great resignation’ and ‘quiet quitting’ trends of the last couple of years have employees in all sectors asking themselves why they are doing the work they do, and what their alternatives might be. With teacher shortages and crises of teacher recruitment and retention, the workload and workforce conditions of teachers have been under the spotlight. At an education policy level, well-meaning but insufficient solutions have been tabled, such as reviewing initial teacher education (again), paying some teachers more, and providing pre-made teaching resources and lesson plans in an attempt to ‘unburden’ teachers of some of their work.

Schools have been digging deep into their cultures. They have been moving beyond bolt-on wellbeing initiatives and viewing wellbeing as a solely individual pursuit, to working on the complexities of community, belonging, and meaning, as ways to envisage and address wellbeing. Schools are focusing on clear strategic priorities, combined with cultures in which each person is supported as an individual who valued for who they are while being nestled as part of a connected whole.

Those of us leading in schools have been increasingly considering how we can make our workplaces sites of connection, purpose, wellness, and hope. This might be through considering the administrative burden on teachers and seeing what can be taken away – such as subject report comments, expectations of extensive written feedback on every assessment, and co-curricular expectations. Many schools have attempted to streamline communication through platforms such as Teams in an effort to stem the unmanageable firehose of emails. Parent teacher interviews, information evenings, and other meetings, have often moved online to enhance flexibility and accessibility. Some schools are building meeting times into the school day, rather than holding these after school hours. Schools are implementing responsive learning technologies, automated marking and feedback systems, and collaborative planning technologies. Reducing the number of summative assessments, and increasing student ownership over reflection and feedback on formative tasks, is one way to simultaneously support learning and reduce teacher workload.

As we watch corporate sectors reimagining their workplaces in ways that allow increasing flexibility for workers, the school as workplace is also being reconsidered, albeit more slowly. Some schools and systems have been generous in their leave policies and leave conditions, while others have been unable to do so due to financial constraints. Professional learning budgets are being spent on providing time for meaningful planning and collaboration, and on coaching and mentoring, as well as on opportunities for networking and connecting with those beyond the school gates and local community. While school timetables are notoriously inflexible, schools are considering how to allow staff more flexibility about how and where they work. It isn’t yet usually possible to offer teachers regular ‘working from home’ days. However, within the available parameters many schools are negotiating job-share and attractive part-time arrangements for teachers.

A focus on student and staff wellbeing has been bolstered by a focus on inclusion and agency. Education organisations have been interrogating the inclusivity of their language, physical spaces, policies, and practices. A focus on addressing the diverse needs of learners has led to continued work in differentiation and appropriate adjustments. Many schools are engaged in exciting work on increasingly one-size-fits-one approaches to learning, to success pathways, and to ways of demonstrating achievement. Students and staff are being offered opportunities for meaningful collaboration and a voice in positive change. Personalisation, voice, and choice, are being increasingly woven into the fabric of learning, leading, and working.

As we move towards the end of 2022, and into 2023, wellbeing, inclusion, and agency will continue to be issues with which schools grapple.

Metaphor as a way of considering future alternatives for educational leadership

Posted on October 9, 2022 by Dr Deborah M. Netolicky

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting a keynote to the Australian Council for Educational Leaders National Conference in Sydney. The presentation was based, in part, on the edited book Future Alternatives for Educational Leadership.

In exploring what leadership looks like now, and what it might look like next, as the book does, I shared some unusual metaphors for leadership, from educational scholarship, that could help to move our thinking beyond normalised paradigms of leadership as largely male, white, and about the individual. These were:

The Cheshire Cat (Netolicky, 2019) representing the deliberately visible-invisible leader who navigates fluidity of role, and intentionally provides others with what they need at any given time.
The punk rock principal (Heffernan, 2019) as the leader who sees themselves as part of a band, and who is willing to consider and potentially resist compliances and expectations.
Network leadership (Azorín, Harris, & Jones, 2021) in which leading is collective, networked, and a social practice.
Leadership as a social movement (Rincón-Gallardo, 2021) in which leaders participate as a learners, craft strategy, forge collective commitment, shape the public narrative, and ignite others to action.
Leading as salvaging (Grice, 2021) as a practice of hope and sustainability that involves collecting, saving, selecting, respecting the value of resources, and repurposing or returning to purpose.
Wayfinding leadership (Netolicky & Golledge, 2021) in which leaders know and reflect on self, know and respond to their environment, navigate roadblocks, use instruments fit for purpose, and balance tensions by simultaneously applying systematisation and intuition, strategy and empathy.

The theme of the conference was ‘inspiring hope, leading our future’, and my takeaways for the audience were that we benefit from:

A focus on leading as a practice for all, rather than the leader as a person or title.
Knowing that context is queen, including knowing our people and honoring tradition while engaging in futures thinking.
Applying reflexive practice by examining self and evaluating impact.
Seeing ourselves, as educators and leaders, as collaborators rather than competitors, working together across stakeholder groups and systems.
Redesigning for diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Considering sustainable practices, for our schools, our staff, ourselves, and the planet.
Creating and feeding the conditions for an ecosystem of high trust, high support, high challenge, and respectful disagreement.
Empowering, building the capacity of, meaningfully inviting the voices of, and co-designing with others.

A core belief of my presentation, and of the conference, was the importance of humanity at the centre of our work as teachers and school leaders.

My slide deck is below.

Reflections on teaching and school leadership during Term 1 2022

Posted on April 13, 2022 by Dr Deborah M. Netolicky

Term 1 2022 may have occurred at and for about the same time as it usually does in Australia, but it felt like an especially long for educators.

In Western Australia, with more restrictions in place than some other states, signature experiences of Term 1 included the following.

Mask-wearing for school staff, and for students in Years 3 and up.
Classrooms with air purifiers, CO2 monitors and open windows.
Schools taking on the role of contact tracing and communication.
Restrictions to gatherings at schools, resulting in parent information, parent teacher interviews, assemblies, and activities being held online, outdoors, or in small groups.
The latest iterations of remote and hybrid learning as students and teachers were absent from school due to isolation and illness.
Teacher absences and shortages.
Teachers classed as potential ‘critical workers’.
The hard border into WA softening.
The acting federal Education Minister making remarks about “dud teachers” “dragging the chain” and “not delivering the learning gains our children need”.

The administrative requirements of Covid-19 directions for schools, combined with restrictions on getting together in person, meant that educators’ experiences of the term were largely transactional, operational, and cumulatively exhausting. School leaders and teachers worked to keep school communities safe, informed, and with a sense of calm normalcy. We put one foot in front of the other, complied with requirements, and ensured that learning and pastoral care continued for students. But we missed some of those things that buoy us in our work: relationality, community, and connection.

At my school we employed as many relief staff as we could to take the pressure off our teachers. We offered opportunities for staff to work flexibly or from home when we could. We scaled back and reimagined meetings, doing these differently or not at all, according to their purpose and our community’s needs. We carefully considered administrative requirements and evaluated the effectiveness, efficiency, and flexibility of assessment tasks and feedback practices. We interrogated the reasons for our ways of doing things, generated alternate ways to achieve our aims, and questioned whether the aims themselves needed to be rethought or relinquished. What was important during this time? What could we do differently? What could be let go?

We found small ways to connect with one another. There were no whole-staff meetings or morning teas, but we met in smaller groups (on balconies, in the quadrangle, in well-ventilated spaces). We held some free coffee Fridays where drinks at the coffee van were paid for by the school, facilitating incidental outdoors conversations between colleagues, as well as offering a gesture of thanks to our hard working staff. We thanked individuals for specific contributions. I called most teachers who were home isolating or ill, to check in and see how they were. We introduced a Staff Appreciation Award so that staff could recognise colleagues for their support.

While it was tempting to hold off on all but the most essential work, we knew that engaging with our professional selves, professional goals, and core purpose was key to staying connected and uplifted. We held our annual goal setting meetings and booked into professional learning experiences. We provided opportunities for staff to collaborate in small groups and teams to have energising, productive conversations around practice, with each other and with external experts. As well as teaching our students, it was pockets of meaningful collaboration that sparked moments of professional delight. Working together with colleagues and engaging in robust dialogue, thoughtful reflection, and collaborative planning, provided a lightness, an energy, and a reminder about our shared moral purpose: educating each student in our school community.

None of this is perfect, but we are doing our absolute best. We remain committed to the learning, care, safety, and success of our students.

Someone asked me recently what I have been proud of, and the first thing that came to mind was: showing up. The challenge for those in schools is to maintain enough wellbeing, community, connection, kindness and belonging, to sustain us through what will continue to be a challenging year. During this break between terms, I hope that educators around the country are filling their empty cups by finding time to regenerate and to connect with themselves and with their families and friends.

Evidence-based practice for sustainable school change

Posted on October 20, 2021 by Dr Deborah M. Netolicky

Graphic representation of my keynote presentation, drawn live by Pat Grant

Yesterday I presented the final keynote at the Association of Independent Schools NSW Evidence Institute’s two-day Education Research Symposium: Wrong way go back: A wayfinding approach to evidence-based practice for sustainable school change.

The keynote was based in the current context in which schools are operating; one of relentless global uncertainty, disruption, and disunity. Teachers and school leaders are tasked with working towards change within schools that is meaningful, sustainable, and best serves the current and future needs of our students and communities. So I sought to draw theory and practice together to articulate how I approach school change that sticks, energises, engages critically with evidence, brings the community along, and improves education for the betterment of students.

My keynote explored the metaphor of wayfinding—a purposeful, directive process of determining and adjusting our route between an origin and a destination—as a framework for guiding evidence-based educators. This metaphor is one co-author Claire Golledge and I explored in our recent chapter ‘Wayfinding: Navigating multiple identities for sustainable school leadership’, in the book Future Alternatives for Educational Leadership: Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, and Democracy. While anchoring ourselves in where we are and what previous research can tell us gives us a starting point for our work in schools, change that is meaningful and sustainable needs to also engage in futures thinking and wayfinding practices so that we might navigate the complexities and tensions of the current education landscape.

This presentation provided insights into what it means to be an evidence-informed educator and the definitions, possibilities, and pitfalls of evidence-based practice in education. I recommended Gary Jones’ excellent, sense-making book Evidence-based school leadership and management: A practical guide. I explored how a wayfinding approach to evidence-based practice can allow educators to act with a balance of systematisation and responsiveness, drawing together research and evidence with practice, futures thinking, and deep knowledge of context.

It was wonderful to be part of a line-up of speakers including Christine Grice, Mark Rickinson, Connie Cirkony, Jenny Donovan, Mary Ryan, Pasi Sahlberg, Jim Tognolini and Amy Graham.

My slides are below.

Staff wellbeing: Time and money

Posted on February 20, 2021 by Dr Deborah M. Netolicky

In 2019 I blogged about the increasing concerns about teacher and school leader wellbeing. I’ve lately been thinking a lot about wellbeing in education. It was brought into stark focus during the pandemic reality of 2020. I wrote in this journal 2020 article in the Journal of Professional Capital and Community that:

At this time more than ever, we must consider humans before outcomes, students before results and wellbeing before learning.

I discussed wellbeing in this 2020 contribution for the special edition e-book Education Disrupted, Education Reimagined: Responses from education’s frontline during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond, published by the World Innovation Summit for Education, Salzburg Global Seminar and the Diplomatic Courier. In it, I stated the following.

We need to put safety, health, and wellbeing before formal education, curriculum, pedagogy, and especially assessment. Community, connectedness and relationships need to be at the forefront of education decisions and practices. This is a time to focus first on the humanity in education, from a position of seeking to understand and accommodate for the complex circumstances of those in our communities.

Wellbeing continues to become a hotter and hotter topic in education.

Wellbeing is noted as part of a ‘right driver’ in Michael Fullan’s new paper ‘The right drivers for whole system success’ in which he argues that wellbeing and learning are inextricably integrated into a foundation based on equity, knowledge, engagement and connection to the world. The Association of Independent Schools of NSW has just launched a 12-18 month program on navigating whole school wellbeing. This week the Gallop Inquiry released its findings around the complexity and workload intensification of teaching, and the need for teachers to have more time to plan, collaborate, and monitor student learning. Ask any teacher what they need more of and the answer will be: time!

Yesterday, a UK educator tweeted about the use of school funds to send care packages to staff while they are in lockdown and working from home. A long thread of replies ensued, with a range of responses from ‘school leadership do/should pay for gifts and wellbeing initiatives for staff out of their own pockets’ to ‘this is improper use of school funds’ and ‘staff wellbeing is more than buying treats’. Many tweeters invoked the Nolan Principles, suggesting that buying food or paying for things that might be considered wellbeing initiatives for staff constituted unethical or dishonest use of school funds, or that every dollar or pound spent in a school needs to have a direct impact on student outcomes.

In my view (although it is something most of us do or have done), teachers shouldn’t be expected to buy classroom materials out of their wages, nor should school leaders have to provide staff wellbeing initiatives out of their own salaries. Teaching is a caring profession, but the trope of the hero teacher who sacrifices their own needs, money and health for the good of their students is unhelpful. Educators need to give themselves permission to fit their own oxygen masks first, so that they can serve others. Schools should be able to consider ways in which they can take care of their staff, appropriate to their own budget and context. Looking after staff takes time and money. A school leader’s time spent checking in with a staff member; a thank you card; tea and coffee in the staff room; providing relief cover for a teacher’s lesson so they can collaborate with colleagues, attend a course or address a personal matter; a morning tea; the flu (or coronavirus!) vaccine; investing in professional learning. At what point does spending money on staff and on developing the wider culture of a school, become controversial?

Wellbeing is one of the pillars of my school’s new strategic plan, so we are having robust discussions about how to support the wellbeing of all in our community, and about what being well really means. Our discussions are about culture, feel, belonging, workload, teamness, a sense of purpose and togetherness. Wellbeing and learning are the foundation of my school’s framework for our K-12 learners to explicitly engage with those attributes found to be those of people who continue to learn and engage in meaningful work throughout their lives.

Wellbeing (as well as learning and teaching) is at the heart of our new staff development suite, which is based in Martin Seligman’s PERMA framework, as a way to support staff’s (P) positive emotions, (E) engagement in valuable work, (R) rewarding relationships, (M) meaning in their work, and (A) achievement and feeling of accomplishment. The suite of staff development options is based not on evaluation and surveillance, but on a sense of belonging, authentic connectedness, vibrant professional community, purposeful collaboration, central purpose, and meaningful feedback. It is focused on the voice, choice, ownership and agency of staff. It takes time and investment in people. Professional learning, too, costs money, and is part of improving student outcomes and teacher expertise, but also about wellbeing through valuing and growing staff, and supporting them to reach their goals.

When it comes to staff wellbeing, as I noted in the above recent blog post,

Staff wellbeing is more than free food and fitness classes, although these can be nice to have. Nurturing staff wellbeing might take various forms, such as providing initiatives that support staff health, modelling sustainable work-life behaviours, maintaining predictable timelines, ensuring clear policies and procedures, streamlining communication, considering workload issues, ensuring a range of internal and external support mechanisms are available for staff, recognising staff efforts, celebrating staff achievements, leading with empathy, and making decisions with the needs of staff in mind.

Trust, too, is key to the wellbeing of the teaching profession. Schools need to cultivate cultures of trust. Teachers need to be trusted by parents, the media, and government. Trusting teachers to be the professional experts they are allows teachers to focus on their core business of teaching and supporting the students in their care. Looking after staff is key to retaining them within positive cultures of people working together for the good of their community. Nuanced attention to staff wellbeing takes intentionality, thoughtfulness, a framework for decision making, time, and often money.

Distance Learning 3.0: Ready to launch

Posted on August 24, 2020 by Dr Deborah M. Netolicky

source: pixabay WikiImages

Today I shared with teaching staff our school Distance Learning Plan 3.0. While Western Australia continues—for now—in a bubble of semi-normality, we are aware, as other places in the country and the world show, that COVID-19 is an illness that can explode in a community at any time, despite the best precautions.

At my school, we enacted distance learning during Term 1 for a period of about three weeks, and then were ‘locked down’ during the two week school holiday break before students began returning to school for Term 2. We generated feedback from our community at that time, which suggested the following for our next round of distance learning.

We need to ensure we are differentiating our approach. Distance learning needs to look different for different ages and stages, and for different subjects. As a kindergarten to Year 12 school, students (and their parents!) require varied approaches to distance learning, relevant to developmental age and capacity for autonomy in learning. Older children are more likely to cope with increased opportunities for flexibility and independence; younger children need scaffolds, structures, technologies and resources appropriate to them. Subjects that are more content heavy and theoretical require different approaches to those that are more practical. We need to fit the pedagogical and technological tools to the learning purpose.
We need to support student organisation, structure and routine. For example, by setting out for students a clear structure to the day, and a clear plan for the day and week in advance so they can plan accordingly and be flexible and autonomous in their work.
We need to provide live video lessons and pastoral video check-ins, for learning and connectedness.
We need to provide a range of teaching and learning content, blending modes and approaches.
Predictable and streamlined communication works best. The Goldilocks approach is what we are aiming for here: not too little and not too much.
Workload needs to be manageable for students and teachers. My understanding from colleagues in Victoria and overseas is that long term lock down–including working, teaching and learning from home–is exhausting for all. Especially in the early years, set work for children needs to be manageable for parents.
Wellbeing is essential. Ill-being, trauma, anxiety and inequities have increased in our world during this global pandemic (which was preceded in Australia by a terrifying bushfire season). We need to build in time and encouragement for nutrition, hydration and physical activity, and regular breaks from screens and from the relentlessness of a life in constant lock down.

The main elements of our Distance Learning 3.0 model are the following.

Teacher instruction: in short bursts of 15-30 minutes, delivered synchronously (live) and asynchronously (for students to access in their own time).
Student collaboration: through virtual and online platforms.
Student independent work: in which students manage their own time and work autonomously.
Student reflection: in which they are encouraged to use metacognitive strategies, reflect on own learning and set clear targets for improvement.

All of these elements are underpinned by trust in the professional capacity and professional judgement of teachers as experts in curriculum (what they are teaching), pedagogy (how to teach so students learn), and their students.

key elements of our Distance Learning Plan 3.0 – wellbeing is central

Wellbeing is at the centre of our distance learning model. We have deliberately built in a focus on the wellbeing of our students, parents, and teachers by integrating the following.

Shortening lesson times and increasing break times during periods of distance learning.
Including one Student-Directed Learning Day per week for Years K-10. This day is a ‘non-contact’ day of learning in which students organise their time to complete set work, and teachers prepare, mark and respond to student queries. The day will be cycled through the days of the week, depending on when distance learning begins (e.g. Monday one week, Tuesday the next, and so on).
Paring back content to the essentials and rethinking the way students can engage with content.
Reconsidering the ways in which students can show their learning, and redesigning or rescheduling assessments where appropriate.
Continuing to act with kindness, compassion and empathy.

Our Distance Learning Plan 3.0 is the plan we hope to never have to use, but as I explained in my last post, it’s the plan we would be irresponsible to be without.

5 anchors for leading in a time of crisis

Posted on April 4, 2020 by Dr Deborah M. Netolicky

image source: krystyna-rawicz.blogspot.com

At times of volatility, catastrophe and trauma, we often feel like ships in a stormy sea, searching for something to hold tight to, a way to steady ourselves. Here are five anchors to steady and guide school leadership in this time of pandemic-induced global emergency.

Vision and values

In simpler times—when we could leave our homes for any reason at all, congregate in groups of any size, travel far and wide, and find any grocery on any shelf of any supermarket—school leaders thought a lot about vision. Schools have always sought to develop commonality of vision and purpose, while school staff have sought to align with their school contexts in terms of their own beliefs, identities and the purpose that propels them in their work.

Shared vision remains more important than ever, and school leadership in a time of crisis means holding strong to values, principles and vision, as anchors to our decision making.

Navigating tensions

Leading during a pandemic has brought to the forefront of my thinking one of the findings of my PhD: that leadership involves a tightrope-walk between priorities. Leaders constantly navigate tensions: the collective and the individual, accountability and autonomy, the bottom line and the greater good.

Leaders simultaneously make decisions with a view of the dance floor as well as from the balcony, (or, if you like, from both the trenches and the war room). They must consider a range of impacts (individual, organisation, wellbeing, learning, service provision, performance, staffing, financial implications, management of resources, sustainability of business) while keeping all of their individual people in mind. To make effective decisions, they must know the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of their contexts, but also best practice occurring elsewhere and the best available evidence of what is likely to work.

In a time of crisis, leaders must act swiftly and with foresight, but also with careful consideration of options, consequences and side effects of actions taken. They must communicate with clarity and purpose, but also with empathy and humanity.

And in a crisis, perfection is the enemy of progress. As Dr Michael Ryan, Executive Director of WHO, recently explained in regards to emergency response:

“You need to act quickly … Be fast, have no regrets. You must be the first mover. … If you need to be right before you move, you will never win. … Speed trumps perfection. … Everyone is afraid of the consequence of error, but the greatest error is not to move. The greatest error is to be paralysed by the fear of failure.”

Leaders must act quickly, and yet know that they may make mistakes and have to evolve and adapt as advice and conditions change.

Safety before learning

In our independent report Thinking about Pedagogy in an Unfolding Pandemic, my co-authors and I say that now is a time for ‘Maslow before Bloom’. What we mean, of course, is that a time of global crisis, grief, trauma and instability is a time to put health, safety and wellbeing first; before curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. At this time more than ever, we must consider humans before outcomes, students before results, wellbeing before learning.

Learning is, of course, important. Our jobs as school leaders, teachers and educators, are to ensure the very best learning outcomes for our students, within the parameters of the unusual emergency circumstances in which we presently find ourselves. But learning (and especially assessment) should not be prioritised above basic human needs.

As time goes on during this pandemic, all those in our communities will be touched by the social, emotional, physical, mental, financial and human impacts of COVID-19. We need to pull back on notions of accountability and focus our efforts on compassion and togetherness. We need to continue to know our people, check in with them even at a distance, and interrogate how we can best support them through this time. It’s also important for leaders to fit our own proverbial oxygen masks so that we can continue to help and serve those in our communities.

Trusting and supporting teachers

Trust throughout the educational system, and of teachers, is key to ensure a collective approach on all fronts to best serve our school communities during this crisis. Rather than a top-down one-size-fits all approach to education, teachers can and should be trusted to lead.

There are challenges. Time and support are needed to help teachers develop the appropriate competencies and confidence to pivot to, and thrive in, distance learning models. Yet, the nature of a global pandemic is such that the pace of change is brisk and biting. There is little lead-in time and so decision making happens quickly, on the best advice of the day, which can change at any time. Just look at the pace of government announcements. It nonetheless remains important that teachers feel trusted and supported to make the best decisions for the students in their contexts.

In a time of crisis, we need to pare education back to its essentials. Doing less and expecting less goes against the grain of our normal ways of operating, especially in a our profession, in which teachers often measure themselves by how much they provide.

My message to teachers remains similar to my advice on Day 1 of distance learning at my school:

Do your best with what you know and can do. This isn’t like ‘normal’ school and it isn’t going to mirror ‘teaching as usual’. It’s teaching during a pandemic while juggling working from home and schooling our own children; while the parents of the children we are remotely teaching are working from home and possibly dealing with financial hardship, health challenges and family complexities we cannot imagine. Students, too, will be going through a multitude of challenges, many of which we will not know about as we lead and teach at a distance.
Keep it simple. Start with the learning intentions, pare back to essentials, rethink ways to gather evidence of student learning, find efficiencies and set professional boundaries and routines. Less is more.
Trust your professional judgement. Teachers know themselves and their students. Do what works. Be ok with less. Be ok with easing back on expectations of yourself, students and parents.
Be kind to yourself and others. This is distance learning during a global pandemic. It is continuing our students’ education while in the midst of a major health, societal and economic crisis. There will be a multiplicity of very real challenges for students, teachers and parents during this time. Maslow before Bloom!

Community

Schools are more than places where learning happens. The closure of schools around the world has highlighted the ways in which schools help to address inequities, and how schools act as spaces of safety, nourishment, connectedness and support for many. Everyone—students, teachers and parents—is missing ‘school’ and all that it provides (much more, it turns out, than classroom lessons and assemblies). Video conferencing can provide some semblance of person-to-person check-ins, but there is nothing like being in a room with a class and gauging their responses with the rich data that being there together provides.

For many students, families and teachers, the loss of onsite schooling is felt deeply. We know, though, that we are staying at home to keep ourselves, those we love, and those who are vulnerable, safe. It needs to be done and so schooling must innovate.

However, enthusiasm for opportunities for education reform must not overtake the current conversation. Yes, we are rethinking education. Yes, we can later consider what kind of normal we want to return to, and what we are happy to leave behind. Yes, we can be deliberate about continuing some of the current crisis innovation into our future realities. Life, work, school, pedagogy, assessment and university entrance may never be the same again. But we must consider connectedness and community.

While crises can lead to individualistic thinking in which every person is looking out for themselves, we will best survive this by considering the ways in which we can continue to knit together as families, school communities and a global community.

Supporting one another, connecting in new ways and building a sense of solidarity and ‘we’re in this together’ is what will get us through (to use a Game of Thrones reference) The Long Night. So let’s be in this, together, with generosity of spirit, open communication and empathy.

COVID-19 forces educational and societal reform

Posted on March 20, 2020 by Dr Deborah M. Netolicky

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The last couple of weeks have been hectic around the world and the pace of change at all levels has been rapid and relentless. In Australian schools, leadership teams and teachers have been preparing for distance learning. Parents have been making decisions about whether or not to send their children to school. Worry in households and panic in shopping centres have reached climactic levels. School leaders are doing their best to remain calm and methodical while preparing their schools for what seems like imminent closure in the near future.

It is surreal to watch corporate and education reform happen at such a rapid rate. We are reforming the workplace and rethinking how we go about our work. We are reimagining how we interact and collaborate. We are reframing education and redesigning schooling on the fly.

Those who have been calling for the abolition of standardised tests and the rethinking of university entrance are seeing education systems transform before their eyes. The COVID-19 pandemic has meant the cancelling of standardised tests (GCSEs and A-Levels in the UK; NAPLAN in Australia so far) and the consequent abolishing of league tables derived from these tests. Those who have been calling for the end of traditional schooling are seeing the swift move to remote learning and the upskilling of teachers in learning technologies and online platforms.

Australian teachers and school leaders, whose jobs are already incredibly complex, are supporting increasingly anxious students and parents. They are communicating work to students who are not coming to school. They are preparing for a move to teaching remotely. They are considering how learning might look different, authentic and meaningful when done from home. They are considering issues of equity and access for their communities. They are worrying about their own children, parents, families, livelihood, groceries.

Educators are collaborating within schools, they are collaborating with other schools. They are sharing their distance learning plans and teaching resources, because as a profession and as a society, we are better together.

We are one society, one humanity. All of our jobs and job descriptions are now in flux. What does our workplace, our clientele, our society need now, at this moment in time? Grounded flight attendants stocking supermarket shelves? Military personnel assisting surgical-mask-producing and toilet-paper-manufacturing facilities? Consultants training teachers to use online technologies? Office staff filling bottles with hand sanitiser and disinfecting workplace surfaces? All of us rearranging furniture and staying at a distance from one another?

We are needed in new ways, and there is an almost wartime redeployment of labour and a need for banding together as whole workplaces, as a whole society and as a whole world.

This is a time for us all to think about what leadership means, regardless of title or position. We can reach out (from a physical distance) to others and support one another as best we can, even though isolation feels like it goes against our biology. We can consider carefully where we get our information, and how we respond to that information. We can all lead by example, by clear communication with one another, and by clarity of purpose and cohesiveness of action.

During the current crisis, Canadians began a ‘caremongering not scaremongering’ campaign. This week is Kindness Week, a week to think about how we move beyond fear and individualism to compassion and courage. Australia has not yet seen the full force of COVID-19 and its real, human ramifications. There is no more important time to be kind to ourselves and each other than right now. We are in a time of adaptation and evolution, by necessity. When we come out the other side, society, work and education may be reformed for good.

What matters in teaching and learning?

Posted on January 28, 2020 by Dr Deborah M. Netolicky

Teaching is incredibly complex. Source: FreeCreativeStuff pixabay

In this blog post I explore my thinking around what matters in teaching and learning. It is by no means an exhaustive list, but part of a wider conversation.

The student matters.

Students are our common purpose in teaching and learning; our who and our why; the core of our work. Not just ‘students’ plural, but each and every student (with their idiosyncrasies, circumstances, attitudes, abilities and identities).

The decisions we make from the classroom to the board room in schools should all come back to the student. Ultimately in education, we are in their service.

The teacher matters.

The teacher and their classroom practice can make a difference to student learning and achievement. Within schools, the quality of teachers’ teaching is the most influential school-based variable in terms of improving student learning and achievement. (Although more influential than what is within a school’s sphere of influence are students’ attitudes and abilities, socioeconomic context, parents’ education and peers.)

Knowledge matters.

In Australia, knowledge is central to one of our professional standards: ‘Teachers know content and how to teach it.’ Focusing on preparing students for their future pathways, and on character, skills and capabilities, doesn’t mean ignoring knowledge.

Australian Chief Scientist, Alan Fink, has spoken about teachers as trained experts who have a “fundamental duty to teach students content: concepts, facts and principles.” He adds that specialist knowledge is needed:

“No-one has ever said to me: ‘gosh, we don’t have enough people who know how to collaborate’. No, what they say to me is: ‘we don’t have enough specialists in software engineering. We can’t find graduates who are fluent in maths. We have meetings where three quarters of the people in the room can’t critique a set of numbers without pulling out a calculator and slowing us down.’”

Cognitive load theory posits that the human working memory cannot process many new elements at any one time, but the human brain can process very large amounts of stored information. What this tells teachers is that we need to help students to bank knowledge in their long term memory, so that they can use their working memory to learn new things or do higher order thinking. For example, knowing things like times tables or phonics with automaticity and fluency leaves room in the working memory to be able to focus on more sophisticated aspects of problems or language.

Dylan Wiliam, in his book Creating the schools our children need: Why what we’re doing now won’t help much (and what we can do instead), points to long-term memory, arguing that:

“what our students need is more to think with. The main purpose of curriculum is to build up the content of long-term memory so that when students are asked to think, they are able to think in more powerful ways.” (2018, p.134)

Critical thinkers need knowledge on which to build, and creators need to know the foundations on which they are innovating.

Pedagogy matters

How we teach also matters. In schools we should be asking ourselves:

How do we decide which teaching strategies to deploy?
On what evidence do we base our decisions?
How do we know what is likely to be in the best interests of the student?

In a previous blog post I outline what research literature indicates about what effective teachers do. They:

Purposefully design learning opportunities;
Diagnose student progress to inform both teaching and learning;
Fight for their students’ learning;
Personalise learning for students; and
Provide meaningful and appropriate feedback.

Barak Rosenshine’s principles of instruction give one list of teaching strategies likely to be effective:

Review previous learning.
Provide new material in small steps with student practice after each step.
Limit the amount of material students receive at one time.
Give clear and detailed instructions and explanations.
Ask good questions and check the responses of all students.
Provide models, exemplars and worked examples.
Guide student practice.
Check for student understanding.
Help students obtain a high success rate.
Provide scaffolds for difficult tasks.
Require and monitor independent practice.
Provide timely, systematic feedback.
Engage students in regular review of their learning and self-assessment.

In my own classroom, I ask myself:

Who is doing the thinking in our classrooms?
Who is working harder: teacher or student?

These questions are anchors that help me to consider my pedagogy in ways that empower and expect students to be doing the cognitive work.

But knowledge and teaching are not all that matters in teaching and learning. >>>

Relationships matter.

Relationships are also at the heart of learning.

In Australia one of our professional standards states that “Teachers know their students well.” Steve Biddulph says that “boys learn teachers not subjects.” An oft-quoted line, attributed to a number of people such as Carl Buehner and Maya Angelou, resonates with teachers and the student experience of teaching:

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

When I threw the question ‘What matters in teaching and learning’ out to Twitter last night, I received more than 70 replies in 24 hours. Many of these tweets centred around relationships (student-teacher, but also staff and families). Cameron Paterson pointed me towards this video of Rita Pierson’s TED talk in which she says “kids don’t learn from people they don’t like” and “seeks first to understand rather than to be understood.” You can read what Twitter had to say in the thread here.

I like to think about the concept, from psychology, of a ‘holding environment’ in which members of the community or organisation feel ‘held’ in a culture of high support and high challenge. How students feel and relate in our school and classroom matters. They need psychological safety.

Identity and belonging matter.

Like relationships, students need a sense of belonging and of being seen for who they are.

We can consider:

Who are our learners now, and who do they and we want them to become?
To what extent do our students feel and see themselves belonging in our school community?

Context matters.

Research can only tell us what has worked in particular situations. It doesn’t tell us what to do or what might work for our students. Research can, however, help us to make better decisions about how best to serve our students.

Those teachers within a classroom and leaders within a school know their students and community. Those working with students and families each day are the people best placed to serve them.

Culture matters.

Cultures of trust and empathy are key to schools that are able to support the learning and wellbeing of their students and staff. Those cultures can be academic, pastoral, professional and community cultures.

We can ask:

How do we collectively approach teaching, learning and pastoral matters?
What are our students’ work habits and attitudes to school and learning?
How engaged are our families in student learning?
How well do we work together as a staff?

And we can work on culture as a foundation stone of the teaching and learning work we do.

Engagement matters.

Knowledge and skills are central to student learning, but we also want students to be lifelong learners who are curious and driven to learn and to solve problems.

How do we enhance student motivation and excitement about learning?
How do we facilitate learning that matters to students?

Finally, our moral purpose matters.

I recently heard Michael Fullan saying that it is today’s students who will change the world for the better, partly because of their education, and partly because of the anxiety and alarm they feel about the state of the world, that is propelling them towards being agents of positive change.

In 1947 Martin Luther King Junior wrote that:

“Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction. The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.”

Teachers and school leaders have a moral obligation to our students. We can consider our own moral purpose, and how we help students to develop character and their own moral compass and purpose.

How do we facilitate students as lifelong learners, ethical active citizens and empathetic constructive problem seekers and solvers?
How can and do we support students to contribute to a world that’s worth living in?

Asking ‘What matters?’, matters.

In our edited book, Flip the System Australia, my co-editors and I chose the subtitle: What Matters in Education. The book looked beyond a ‘what works’ agenda and asked (and in some ways proposed hopeful possible answers to) questions of what matters, what should matter, and how we can focus our education systems on equity, democracy and inclusion.

Teaching is difficult, complex, human, relational work. So much matters, but if we keep the student at the centre of our thinking, we’re off to a good start.

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Tag Archives: school leadership