too busy

The Curse of Busy — 6 Questions to ask yourself

Posted on by

busy

As the often-shared memes say, being busy is, unfortunately, a bit of a “curse” in education and beyond. From my work in schools, I see some people feel swamped by their workload, others are just managing. Not many, though, seem to feel that the amount they have to do at work is realistic or sustainable.

One of the challenges we all face, then, is where to focus our attention. Where should you put your professional efforts to make sure that you have the biggest possible impacts and influence? In this post I am going to pose six questions for you to reflect on, based on my own experience.

As you prioritise your attention and time, consider:

1. Do you know exactly where the pain points actually are?

One of the big traps is what has been described as the ‘Tyranny of the Urgent’. There are many things that simply have to be done and sometimes the urgent things keep taking the time from the important ones. This means we don’t get the time to make sure we are really clear what the specific issue with a particular child, process, person, or system actually is.

As a general rule, the better we understand an issue or problem, the more cohesively and coherently we can plan and implement a response to it. If we know a child has a problem with a specific part of a process in maths, for example, we can provide strategies and support much more effectively than if we don’t have the detailed analysis. If we have consulted the significantly-impacted people about a decision we have made and why a new programme is not working out as well as expected, we can respond more appropriately than simply going from our own observations.

Often, the surface ‘symptoms’ may actually be the result of importantly different underlying causes than we initially thought, if we take the time to dig a bit further. In my experience as a school leader, time spent consulting and ‘digging deeper’ has never been time wasted.

2. Have you considered all possible options?

It is very seductive to grab on to the obvious and popular solutions to an issue. It is worth remembering that any ‘programme’ will never work for all students/contexts. Also, that applying a solution that has been successful in one setting does not necessarily mean that results will be similar in another.

The challenge is to consider a range of possibilities and then whittle them down to a shortlist of things to work on with others to determine which will have the biggest impact. Also, which will have the biggest impact for the least input of resources — time, attention, money, staffing etc. Once again, consultation and the input of multiple perspectives is invaluable at this stage. Strategies like Design Thinking are a useful way of getting a variety of perspectives and possible solutions to any issue.

It is also important to ask yourself (and others!) if you can ‘break’ the idea well before the implementation begins? Find the flaws in the logic of your thinking, and plan for what could go wrong. Giving someone the role of actively trying to find the flaws and assumptions and providing feedback is a great strategy here, which I have covered in an earlier blog post.

3. Do you have a PLAN?

Failing to plan = planning to fail.
This is very much a truism. You can only ‘wing’ significant change efforts for so long.

Some questions to ask yourself:

  • Do all the people involved, particularly those the change relies on, know what the purpose of the change is and what their role/s are?
  • Are they clear about expected outcomes?
  • Are expectations, actions, and accountabilities clear?
  • Are there clear timelines?
  • Are initiatives sufficiently resourced to ensure they do have a reasonable chance of success?
  • Are enough people involved that, if one or more people do leave the organisation, the initiative doesn’t simply fall over?
  • How will you ensure prototypes are generalised across the setting?

4. How will you know if you have been successful?

This aspect is often overlooked during initial planning stages. How will you know if you have achieved enough success to make the initiative worth continuing? Sometimes things can end up simply different, rather than better, and if you don’t have clear criteria for judging the outcomes, then some people may see things as a failure and others as successful. Clearly articulated and documented desired outcomes (success criteria) make judgements as to what is success easy and clearly understood.

5. Are YOU managing your time well?

This seems a little obvious and, in some ways, is assumed in the points covered above. Nonetheless, this is a key part of ensuring you are not simply busy because you are not very organised and are doing things in inefficient ways.

In my nearly 20 years as a school leader these are some of the key things I have learned:

  • Leveraging Digital: Use the digital systems in collaborative documents, shared calendars, email, etc to keep yourself organised and to be able to find things easily. I always found going completely paperless impossible but use digital systems wherever possible. A key component of this is having a robust backup system.
  • Keep lists: I find this system has been a fantastic way to keep myself organised. I always have a paper spiral bound notebook to keep notes, cards, etc all stuck in.
  • Look after yourself: As a leader, teacher, or anyone in the education system, you give a tremendous amount of yourself to your position and role. As the saying goes, ‘You can’t pour from an empty cup’. To be the best you can be for others, you need to be on your A-Game. This means basic things like getting enough sleep. Also, you have other people in your world who deserve to get you at your best, not just when you are exhausted and wrung-out.
  • Be systematic: Follow a system and deal with things once if you can. There is a heap of places you can get good advice on email systems etc. The key thing I feel is keeping it simple and doable. Don’t have layers of systems that make things complicated.
  • Delegate and build leadership: Building leadership skills and capability in those around you is never a wasted effort. Delegate clearly and with accountability.

6. Does it have to be (only) you?

If you are good, you often get more to do! One of the quotes I like, which has been attributed to both Lee Iococca and Steve Jobs, is about employing smart people and getting out of their way.

  • If you are a leader at any level, then one of the most effective things you can do is delegate in smart and effective ways.
  • Can you learn from the input and thinking of others? Ask yourself the question: “Is collaboration a smarter way to do this than by myself?”
  • Do you have to design a system (or whatever) from the ground up or can you modify something from others or another context?
  • Should I say no to this because I don’t actually have the time, or someone else may actually be better at it than me?

Busy is OK if it is a choice — remember you applied for this job. Too busy is OK, but only if it is for the short term and is ultimately manageable. Ask yourself the questions above and see if the strategies suggested apply to you and your context.

Finally…

In the work that my colleagues and I do in Centrally Funded PLD, uChoose mentoring, and New Pedagogies, in particular, we are often working with leaders at different levels on their workflow and workload management. If this is something you would like support within your context, please do contact us.

I’d also be really interested to hear what things others do to manage their workloads and ensure you are not ‘simply too busy’. Please add in the comments!

read more
Posted in
iceberg

Beyond the tip of the iceberg

Posted on by

“What does ‘good’ look like?” This is a question I am often asked in my work in schools and kura across the country. In any change or improvement initiative, it is getting your head around what it is that is being asked, for that is often the biggest barrier for staff to engaging in the change process. This desire to understand the vision for good and effective is one of the key things that drives the enthusiasm for wanting to go and see ‘it in action’ in other settings. It has teachers and leaders hopping across cities, provinces, the country, and even the globe to visit schools who are perceived to be thought leaders and have the reputation for doing things well.

Visiting others is hugely valuable! One of the real challenges of visiting other settings, though, is that anything you see is always simply a thin slice of the reality. You miss a huge amount just walking around and looking. Even if you get to talk to leaders, teachers, and students you will still only scratch the surface. There is the metaphor of the tip of the iceberg, and the image is often shared of the iceberg with the visible stuff like buildings, routines, policies, etc., being ‘above the water’ and all the other factors like school culture, relationships, etc., being below the surface.

iceberg

The challenge is how to get a sense of all the things that have had an influence on where a school is today but may not be immediately visible in a one-off visit. Things like:

  • History — everything will be as it is for a reason. Events in the past will have influenced the trajectory and pace of change towards the current state. In order to understand where things are now you need to know where they have come from and what has influenced why they look like they do now.
  • Tangata Whenua — who are and have been the significant influencers of the change processes and directions? They may well have been those in formal positions of responsibility and leadership, but they may equally well be those who exerted informal and more ad-hoc leadership.
  • External people — who have been the ones who have influenced the influencers? Those who people have met, listened to, read or read about, or visited themselves. Also, those who the same people have been deliberately trying not to follow. Those who formed the negative examples.
  • Influencing voices — family and whānau, student, and community voices are all often overtly gathered and inform change.
  • Physical realities — things like budgets, buildings, and even which direction the prevailing wind is from, or natural disasters, can hugely influence what a school reality is like in its present form.

The list above could go on and on. The challenge is how to get a sense of these factors and the influence they have had on the reality you see before you, as you step into, and walk around, any educational context. I think of all the things that have influenced me in my career as an educator:

  • thinkers and authors like Sergiovanni, Peter Senge, and Michael Fullan
  • colleagues — both leaders and educators
  • bodies of thought and educational movements like Reggio and Waldorf/Steiner
  • all the settings I have taught in and led, and even my own classroom and other educational experiences.

One thing that has helped me make sense of all these different and competing things are graphic frameworks and models for how systems work. I really like pictures, and largely follow the mantra that if you can’t draw a picture of a system or idea then you don’t understand it well enough yet. Diagrams and models help me make sense of the complexity of ideas and are particularly helpful in explaining things to other people. If I am looking at any new ideas, I am particularly looking for ones that are supported by clear and concise graphics.

In the past few years I have become quite deeply involved in the New Pedagogies for Deep Learning programme led by Michael Fullan. One of the things that attracted me to this programme initially was the cohesive structure and concise diagrammatic outline of what ‘good’ looks like and the key components of effectiveness it describes.

pedagogies for deep learning

For me, and schools I am working with in the programme, the NPDL framework captures key elements of good practice and provides a structure for identifying what both next step and long-term improvement focuses could be. The tools and rubrics also give lenses for examining practices you observe in your own context as well as others you may be visiting. The experience and thinking of the NPDL Global Team, including Michael Fullan, means that there is also tremendous intellectual and practical rigour in the learning and change design processes NPDL uses. A key component is also being able to customise and personalise the NPDL experience to each context and having the ability to moderate and share practice in local, nation, and international forums.

In your context, and as you consider your change initiatives over time, here are some key questions to reflect on:

  • How do YOU ensure that you are getting beyond the ‘tip of the iceberg’ in understanding your setting and its history, people, etc?
  • How do YOU get a collective picture of ‘good’ and ‘effective’ you can move towards?
  • How do YOU measure and manage improvement and change in your setting?
  • How do YOU scale up what you find does work?
  • Can YOU draw a picture of what you are aiming to achieve?

To find out more about how the NPDL programme can support you do these things (and more) get in touch with one of the team.

 

The NPDL NZ Deep Learning Lab is taking place at Stonefields School in Auckland, 19-20 July 2018. This two-day conference will explore deep learning and give you the opportunity to connect with local and global experts. Register now.

 

Image credits:

  • Iceberg: By AWeith [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons
  • NPDL diagramme from CORE blog

 

read more
Posted in
collaboration-feature

Building Collaboration — chicken or egg?

Posted on by

Kia ora everyone

Collaboration and how groups work together fascinates me! What is it that makes it work in some contexts and not in others? Why do some relationships and situations result in highly effective and worthwhile collaborative teams developing and flourishing, when seemingly identical ones don’t? Collaboration sometimes appears to develop in a mysterious, uncertain, and ad-hoc way. Leaders can actively build the conditions for collaboration to develop and it doesn’t; then conversely, highly effective collaborative relationships pop up in the most unexpected places in an organisation. Why does this happen?

Patrick Lencioni, in his Five Dysfunctions of a Team (2012), highlights the fundamental importance of trust in any team environment. Collaboration, I believe, can only evolve and work well in teams that also work effectively. The rest of the characteristics he identifies are built on the assumption that there is a highly trusting and strong relationship developed that is robust enough to support healthy and positive conflict and accountability. These processes also ensure a developing commitment to the goals and outcomes of the organisation as well as the people in it. The illustration below of Lencioni’s framework is based on a blog post where the author describes in detail a highly dysfunctional team.

dysfunctional team

In this video below, Lencioni expands on his thinking to discriminate between ‘predictive trust’, where you know someone well enough to be able to predict their actions and what they will do in any given situation, and ‘vulnerability-based trust’, where you are able to admit you don’t know or understand and able to be vulnerable in front of and with each other.

Patrick Lecoioni Trust

Click on the image will take you to YouTube

The challenge for change leaders in any context is the chicken-and-egg conundrum here. Doing the work and building the collaborative environment in some ways is often dependent on trust and collaboration already being in place. The difficult thing can simply be getting things underway — how to get people to begin working together and ‘suspend their disbelief’ about a process or the benefit of a change initiative long enough to get things started.

I see that strong processes and expert facilitation/leadership can be key here. It can be easier to get people to trust a process than to trust a person or leader. Engaging in the processes (like the protocols in the Learning Talk books for example) can then show people a way forward and lead to developing relationships and trust in leadership. These issues apply to all leaders, whether in formal leadership positions or not, in big contexts, or simply working with one other person.

All this is super messy. It is one of the key challenges of establishing new teams. It is also one of the exciting and hugely satisfying parts of being a leader. These skills and capacities for building trust and developing collaboration are ones that you can learn and engage with regardless of whether you are in a position of leading change in your context, in a formal or informal leadership position, or you are someone preparing yourself for leadership in the future.

So, what things have you found successful in building a team from the beginning? How have you ‘scaffolded’ people into trusting and collaborating sufficiently to begin ‘getting the job done’? How have you continued to build trust beyond the predictive into vulnerability?

read more
Posted in
learning-is-required-feature

Framing a powerful Professional Learning response…

Posted on by

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

read more
Posted in
iceberg showing underside

The iceberg of outcomes

Posted on by

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

read more
Posted in