learning-is-required-feature

Framing a powerful Professional Learning response…

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learning is required for teachers

Consider this …. you have gathered a considerable amount of achievement data that shows a particular group of students is underachieving compared to the rest of the school in mathematics.  They have come through the school as a group who have consistently, year after year, shown the same trend. All the students in this group have had Reading Recovery and have continued to receive some sort of teacher aide or other intervention support for much of the five years they have been at school. While this group has been on your radar for some years they have not been the ones who have been referred to any sort of resource teachers or special education; as their teacher last year put it, “They are low, not bad”. They do not have individual education plans (IEPs) or any other personalised programme planning, but they do get extra attention of the teachers in the classroom, as they have all tried to get them achieving more highly.

The group’s achievement in literacy is more variable, with some achieving ‘at’, some ‘below’, and some ‘well below’. Teachers find the group quite frustrating and have tried hard to get them engaged and keep them on-task.

What will you do with this group in 2017? How will you make a difference for them? How will you make sure that you are not trying things that have been already explored and have not worked in the past? What new things could you try this year that WILL make a difference?

This is the challenge, or one that is quite similar, that we often face as leaders and teachers in schools and kura at the beginning of each year. The questions we ask ourselves are about how we can finally make some impact on a group of students who have been resistant in the past.

I invite you to use different strands of the eLearning Planning Framework (eLPF) as a scaffold for things to consider, and to explore the range of professional learning opportunities that CORE Education offers to support a targeted and effective response to the challenges you have in your setting.

For those who are not familiar with it, the eLPF is a self-review framework, which, while it focuses on e-learning specifically, is also a great place to start when considering how to respond to challenges in student achievement.

The framework is split into five strands:

  1. Beyond the Classroom
  2. Leadership and Strategic Direction
  3. Learning and Teaching
  4. Professional Learning
  5. Technologies and Infrastructure

As you consider your student-achievement information alongside the other data you have gathered, the following could be questions to ask yourself or your team in these three areas:

 1.   Beyond the Classroom:

  1. How well do you really know these students? Is the programme they are experiencing sufficiently engaging for them to put in the effort required to improve?
  2. Are families and whānau fully engaged with the school and in ensuring that their children succeed?
  3. Do the family and whānau goals and indicators of success align with those of the students, the staff, and the school?
  4. Have you gathered student voice? Do you know what the students really think? What do they have to contribute to the understandings around their success — what are they actually really good at that can be a platform for success?

2.  Learning and Teaching

  1. What changes in pedagogy have been tried with this group? (Not simply breaking the learning up into smaller and smaller steps and getting a Teacher’s Aide to work with them, but doing things in different ways).
  2. How well do the teachers know and engage with the learners?  Do they know specifically where the ‘blocks/barriers’ are?  Do teachers have the pedagogical and content knowledge to address the specific issues the students have?

3.  Professional Learning

  1. Has this group been a specific focus of professional learning for teachers in the past?  Has this knowledge been shared with the new teachers and everyone else who will need to know?
  2. Has a Professional Learning and Development (PLD) response to their needs included the students and their families?

CORE Education specialises in these very areas, and I’ve seen the benefits many times of what such professional assistance brings. Let me show you the kind of offerings and examples of CORE Education can provide.

We are privileged to have here at CORE some of the most highly skilled facilitators in the country, who understand how to ‘get to the bottom’ of learning challenges, and explore possible ways of supporting teachers and other staff to uncover and address what solutions might be. CORE has a range of PLD options that schools and kura can access to help address just the sorts of scenarios described in this post. For example, We can support your team in customised and bespoke ways and also have face-to-face half-day workshops and 20-week online courses that introduce and extend ideas and understandings that our experience tells us are valuable components of effective, personalised, and sustainable school change. If you need courses on a specific aspect of practice, or the opportunity to work independently or together with a team from your school to extend your practice, there are courses that will meet your needs. Developing and extending your professional learning networks, is an added benefit — one that enables you to draw on, and learn from, the expertise and experience of others.

A new initiative from CORE in 2017 is that we have sets of iPads and Microsoft laptops to support schools prototyping 1:1 programmes. If you would like to know more about accessing these, please contact me. Our Apple, Google and Microsoft accredited and certified teams can help with the effective utilisation of collaborative tools, spaces and pedagogies that support student learning.

Transforming practice and implementing Modern Learning (MLE) and Innovative Learning Environment (ILE) pedagogy for teams and whole staff are CORE Education specialties. As an accredited Ministry of Education PLD provider, this support is accessible through MoE funding — and we can support you with your application.

Having coaching and mentoring support for change-leadership teams and leaders can also be invaluable. That external perspective, and someone to challenge and invite reflection, has been hugely valuable to those we have worked with in the past. During 2016, a colleague and I worked alongside a team in a large primary school, prototyping and leading the implementation of collaborative and ILE pedagogy in their school. Feedback from the team and their principal was that the challenges and provocations provided by the targeted and focused questioning, and the models for change and classroom practice we shared with them, magnified both the pace and effectiveness of the changes they made in their practice and in the effectiveness of their support for others. Through the mentoring they could share and ‘bounce ideas off’ someone else and ensure that the things they were considering were planned, well-thought through, and the most likely to have the biggest impact. A target group, similar in many ways to the one described at the beginning of this post, showed greatly increased engagement and outcomes in their learning as a direct result of the developments in teacher practice. Individual students also often made huge progress in their standardised curriculum outcomes.

As you delve into the data on student achievement, we would encourage you to consider the factors that may sit behind and around the information. Dig into it, and dig deep. Get to the influencing factors for student outcomes, and do not just treat the symptoms of non-success. Seek support where you need it and where it can help accelerate professional learning — and of course, we are here to help!

 

Image credit: Learning is required — by a student (Enokson – Flickr) under CC 2.0

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iceberg showing underside

The iceberg of outcomes

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This is the time of the year when both good practice and legislative requirements have schools focusing on their achievement and other student outcomes data. We are looking to see where we have made the biggest impacts so we can celebrate this. We are also looking to see if there are groups of students, or areas of our programmes, or parts of our school that are not making the progress we had hoped for. School leadership teams often spend a lot of time crunching numbers and making the huge mass of collated information meaningful and enable colleagues, staff, teachers, Boards, and sometimes even students to make sense of it. The question is: Are we focussing on the right things?

iceberg showing underside

When we are looking at data we need to consider some important factors

Student Management Systems (SMSs) are making the analysis process a bit simpler if they are used effectively, and if the information being stored and collated is numerical. But, often SMSs are simply repositories for demographic information and a place to keep test scores, NCEA data, and Overall Teacher Judgments (OTJs). A basic understanding of spreadsheets certainly helps make sense of data on scale, and means different theories can be explored and views of data used to try and understand what it really means.

Being “data literate” also means being able to choose appropriate presentation formats for the kinds of data being shared. A table may show everything, but can be confusing and significant things can be lost. A graph is good for showing differences, but attention should be paid to using an appropriate scale, for instance.

Lack of experience with data analysis can lead to making incorrect assumptions. For example: the assumption that a numerical difference is a significant one. By this, I mean, ensuring that the differences in the numbers could not simply be attributed to chance. If numbers are small then the so-called margin of error can be quite large. Think about political polls, for example, that often quote a margin of error of plus or minus something like 3.5%. This means that the actual results could be expected to vary by up to 3.5% bigger or smaller. This is with surveys of over 1000 people. In the school context, we may well be talking about samples of less than 10% of this size. With a sample of 50 or less, the variance of 20-30% in scores could, in fact, be expected simply by chance. This is particularly true if the confidence we have in the accuracy of the measure being used is not that high.

In the school context, we also know that comparing one year group with another is not comparing like with like. Different year groups can have completely different compositions and the students can vary wildly in their engagement, confidence, and ability in different components of the curriculum we may be assessing and tracking.

Positioning assessment data in the decision-making process

‘Data-driven practice’ and ‘data-informed decision-making’ have become real buzzwords in recent times. Both these things require consideration of the factors outlined above. They also require that we position assessment data in a way where it is not the sole determining factor in what we do.

In the same way that good assessment practice means a single-test score is not the only indicator of an OTJ, analysis of OTJ data is not the only indicator of schools achieving successful outcomes for their students. Or, indeed, of teachers being successful in their settings either. Any assessment should be a point-in-time litmus test of the outcomes being aimed for, not the only criteria. Effective schools and individual educators know a lot more about their students collectively and individually than can ever be captured in a single number, or set of numbers. Student outcomes over time are not always well represented on a graph.

I like to think of the things we can put the number on and, therefore, ultimately turn into some sort of graph or table as the proverbial tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things that make up student achievement, outcomes, and success that are ‘below the surface’, but nonetheless hugely significant:

iceberg outcomes

These factors below the waterline are things that the ‘tip of the iceberg’ factors can point to, but often the link may not be a very strong one. They may also be things that the whānau or culture that your students (or a group of students) come from are valued more highly than those above.

As a parent, I am way more proud of my own kids being good people than I am of any of their academic outcomes. I would think many families take a similar perspective.

So, I guess my challenge in this blog post is to consider several different things. As we begin bringing our focused attention onto the year’s data and information to begin making decisions about where we need to focus for next year in our programmes and improvement efforts:

  • Are we examining data in an appropriate way?
  • Are we reading too much into the numbers?
  • Do the numbers show what we are claiming they do?
  • Are the important things captured in the numbers, or, are there other key things that cannot be shown by numbers alone?
  • Are we using the best data and information that you can in your decision-making processes?
  • Are the conclusions we are drawing true for all students and groups of students?

If you would like support thinking about these things more deeply, and/or planning your PLD response to what you have found, do contact us at CORE Education.

 

Image sources

Iceberg photo (top and featured on home page): Image: By AWeith (Own work), CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Iceberg of outcomes graphic: by author under CC-BY-ND-SA

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collective

Memes for change.  Getting out of the CAVE.

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The Internet is a wonderful thing. It has given us everything from dancing babies to cat videos. It is also an astounding place for the creation of communities of practice, the sharing of professional knowledge, and for people who are interested in quite narrow topics to find communities of affinity with others around the world.

One of the quite interesting things to come from the rise of social media in particular is the meme:

‘A meme (/ˈmiːm/ meem) is “an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture”. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.’
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

Memes are exemplified by the fast spreading of things, like the dancing baby above, through social networks and social media. The wondering for me is:

“How do we make effective leadership and school change practices into memes?”

How can we make effectiveness and high performance contagious and for them to spread like some sort of disease that has no cure?  How can we develop the super-bug of effective school change?

Some of the key influencers of the effectiveness of change that I see in my work with schools and in the literature are:

  • Relationships — people need to develop trust and agreed ways of working before the ‘hard stuff’ of change can be a focus.  Only surface and ‘safe’ things can be explored.  There is a saying that equally applies to change:Maslow

This challenges us to ensure we have agreed ways of working and high levels of professional and personal trust before we can get to the really meaningful conversations and change efforts.

  • Understanding — I have written before about getting ideas outside the echo chamber and avoiding the Medici Effect.  Are you really getting to the underlying cause, or simply looking at and dealing with the symptoms? I think we often do this with assessment data – perhaps our literacy results are lower than we would like, so we do literacy Professional Learning and Development. But if we dug a little deeper and explored the information available to us a little more, we may find that engagement or home-school partnerships are larger causal factors than teacher pedagogical content knowledge specifically in an area of literacy. Sometimes, we don’t really understand the underlying causes of the data we are seeing, and, therefore, put our intentional change efforts in the areas that will not give us the best ‘bang-for-buck.’
  • A focus on comfort and happiness — change is often difficult and uncomfortable.  If the index of success is the degree to which everyone is comfortable and happy, then change becomes impossible. Comfort and change are, at least to some degree, mutually exclusive.  Understanding this (perhaps through models like Fullans’ Implementation Dip, or Nottingham’s Learning Pit) is a key element of beginning change processes and ensuring change and improvement are continuous and ongoing processes in a school.
  • Planning and Checking — we often make changes without a clear set of measures for what ‘good’ or ‘effective’ looks like, or what we are expecting to see as outcomes of the initiative. We know we want things to be better than they are now, but without agreed measures how will we know if we are on track or have achieved them?

So we do know what some of the key influencers of change are. We know what works!  We also do know what some of the highly effective processes are. We do know what highly effective practices and outcomes look like.  So this begs the question — ‘Why are we not able to pull things together to achieve the package that makes the gains for students which we are all hoping for’?

Most of the things I see answering this provocation come down to people. How we work together; our mindframes around achievement; and more particularly our mindframes around change.

To simplify things a lot, people tend to sit somewhere on a continuum with respect to change:  From the CAVE mentality to those with a high BIO quotient.

CAVE BIO diagramme

cavemen

So my pondering becomes how to make the BIO mentality sticky and contagious.  How to get people onboard with change.  And conversely, how to get those who live in the CAVE out into the daylight and revelling in the excitement and challenge that highly effective school-change brings.

I would love to hear what people have found works well in your context!  A big part of spreading a meme is enabling the contact and having the conversations.  Let’s share our effectiveness ideas in the comments below.

Image sources:
Maslow quote: Future Classrooms (slide) Dean Shareski CC
Diorama of cavemen — Wikimedia – Public Domain

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snake oil

Avoiding the snake oil

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snake oil

I have written previous posts about how we collaborate, prioritise and ‘make and break’ decisions about school and organisational change. The decision-making process and how we seek different influences to inform it continue to fascinate me. There is no one answer or simple prescription that can be followed in these areas, and, consequently, one thing many schools struggle with is how to allocate the very scarce resources that they have. Each school has only a limited amount of ‘discretionary spend’ in financial terms or in the focus, time and attention of the staff. There are a lot of competing things we could focus on for our professional learning or spend our curriculum, property or staffing budgets on. The question is, how do we make sure we are getting the most positive outcomes possible?

When I was a principal, for example, much of the mail that came across my desk was offering deals on this product or that programme, and contained sometimes quite extravagant claims about the results that could be expected for our staff and students. You have to have a well-attuned filter at times. There are plenty of snake oil salesmen out there who will push hard for you to spend sometimes significant amounts of that discretionary spend on their products or services, when they may not align well with your articulated beliefs. So, how do we make the decision about which things are, in fact, the most important and influential levers for positive change in the outcomes for our students?

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Red team chess

Red Teaming school change

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Red team chess

I wrote a while back about getting out of the ‘education echo chamber’ and challenging ourselves with people who may think differently or come from a different perspective than us. One of the links in this post was to RedTeams.net, who are counter-insurgency and security specialists. I find the whole concept of ‘red teaming’ fascinating, and those I work with will often hear me talk about trying to ‘break ideas’ and thrash plans around while they are still in their formative or concept stage. Red teaming has evolved from the historical Vatican concept of the so-called  devil's advocate – someone whose job it was to try and break ideas or plans, or to argue from the opposite perspective to the status-quo or accepted doctrine. The counter perspective was seen as essential to coming to good decisions and decision-making, just as actively seeking multiple perspectives is central to effective change in education contexts today.

One of my current favourite reads is Micah Zenko’s ‘Red Team — how to succeed by thinking like the enemy’. It outlines the whole concept of Red Teaming, and gives examples from a number of different fields across military and business arenas. He begins by observing:

Institutions — whether they are military units, government agencies , or small businesses — operate according to some combination of long-range strategies, near-term plans, day-to-day operations and to-do lists. Decision-makers and other employees do not simply show up to their jobs each morning anew and then decide then and there how to work, and what to work on. The existing guidance, practices, and culture of an institution are essential to it's functioning effectively. Yet, the dilemma for any institution operating in a competitive environment characterized by incomplete information and rapid change is how to determine when it’s standard processes and strategies are resulting in a suboptimal outcome, or, more seriously, leading to a potential catastrophe. Even worse, if the methods an institution uses to process corrective information are themselves flawed they can become the ultimate cause of failure. (pg: xvi)

To me, that sounds very much like the dilemma schools and centres face each and every day, particularly at this time of the year as they are refining and confirming their strategic planning and day-to-day ways of working for the new year. It also reflects closely the understandings we have about the work we do in Learning with Digital Technologies to support schools and clusters to implement their plans and goals, but with a specific e-learning lens. Planning, making strategic choices, change management and ensuring the smooth implementation of actions promoting change towards agreed outcomes are all crucial elements of what we support schools and clusters to do.

Zenco (in Chapter 1) also describes six critical factors to the effectiveness of any Red Team programme. Once again these things will sound very familiar to anybody who is involved in school leadership or change management. With a specific school or centre context, these factors could look like:

  1. The boss must buy in: The support and engagement of the leadership in the entire programme and its outcomes is the most critical single factor in schools, centres and for Red Teaming.
  2. Outside and objective, while inside and aware: Those leading or supporting any programs or changes must be aware of the culture of the organisation and effective ways of engendering change within it. They must also understand who the official and unofficial leaders are and who it is most effective to work with and through to get the desired outcomes.
  3. Fearless sceptics with finesse: Don’t make assumptions — check them, break them, challenge them, and change them. Dance carefully around and between the things and people that may be blockers or impediments to change. Work carefully and skillfully with those people who may not be as on-board as others.
  4. Have a big bag of tricks: If one strategy doesn't work effectively, good change leaders always have other ways of getting things to happen. They will know who the effective people are to collaborate with, and what strategies are most useful to work with them to get the change they desire.
  5. Be willing to hear bad news and act on it: Once again, effective leaders will be constantly reviewing and checking that they are on track for the outcomes they are seeking. They will be prepared to make changes along the way, and, if necessary, refocus their efforts in ways that will promote the long-term outcomes and gains they are seeking.
  6. Red team just enough but no more: You can over plan! At some point you need to get on with it and implement change, not just plan it and think about it. Fullan often quotes an inverse relationship between the overt ‘quality’ of strategic planning and the ‘quality of the outcomes’.

Redteams.net has a moto of “Plan, execute, vanish”. Again this has a strong education parallel:

  • Plan well and for all contingencies.
  • Do what you planned, and said you were going to do.
  • Re-focus your change management attention and get on with the next thing when you have achieved your goal/s.

So, as you reflect on 2015, and really begin to ramp-up your school or centre development in 2016, what elements of Red Teaming can you include?

  • Do you actively try to break goals and plans while they are at the formative and intellectual stage so you are less likely to be surprised by something you never thought of?
  • Do you actively seek out the wacky and weird ways things that may go wrong – because they often do?
  • Do you seek the perspectives of those you disagree with or ask the dissenters for their ideas?
  • Do you over or under plan?
  • Are you even planning and actioning the right things, the ones that will have the greatest impact?
  • Do you over-labour things and not move on to the next thing you need to do?
  • What will you do if your plan does begin to falter?  Can you bring it back on track because the challenge you are facing is something you have already considered?

What other questions do you need to ask yourself to ensure that you achieve the things you aspire to for yourself, you students and your school/centre this year?

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