How to swim naked in the goldfish bowl

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It is a small world. Aotearoa-New Zealand is even smaller. The education sector is a subset of both. The good thing (and the challenge) of working in a goldfish bowl like education is that you really can’t hide, everyone pretty much knows everyone else. This has some real implications for educators.

In this post I’ll outline some things to consider as you manage your personal and professional persona. In an age where most things are able to be found in a basic Google search about any teacher, principal, or student we need to manage what the world knows about us; in ways we never even considered even 10-15 years ago.

I am highlighting these things not to be alarmist or to scare people, just to make sure that we are all considering these issues for what they are in this open and social media-rich age – simply a natural part of our roles as educators.

Four key things to consider:

  1. Actively manage your digital footprint.

    After nearly 20 years in school leadership I would never consider interviewing someone for any position at our school without doing a quick Google search. What I can find, your colleagues and students can find, or the hypercritical parent can find.

    There are any number of stories, of images, or content on social media which have proven to be severely ‘career limiting’. Think before you post, manage your privacy settings on Facebook, consider what you share. Closed groups like the Primary Teachers Facebook page with its almost 33,500 members can and do have parents, BoT, and community people as members, as well as members of the media and professional development providers. (Note: there were only just over 56,000 teachers in the country in 2017 (Education Counts, 2018) so this one group alone has potentially over half of the country’s school-based educators as members). Anything you say in this group for example has a huge potential audience.

  2. Be a learner. Model taking risks.

    Be a conscious and overt learner. Don’t be afraid to have an opinion, but make sure it is one you can back up with research and logical explanations. No one likes a zealot, and don’t be the person who is pushing their ideas on others.

    Social media can be a wonderful place for learning and for sharing of good ideas and effective practices. Remember – people may make judgements about you based on the quality of the questions you ask or comments you make, and especially don’t be overly critical of your school leadership or colleagues. Do say when you are unsure or don’t know. Not knowing is OK; not knowing how to find out or how to begin finding a solution to a dilemma, not so much.

  3. Take the high ground and stay there.

    People are very quick to judge, and quicker to take offence. Be considered in what you say and share in person and online. Decide for yourself and your family how much of your life is ‘public domain’ and how much is personal. Do you know about and follow any guidelines your school or setting may have?

    Educators are always on show. You are always a teacher, and anyone who has ever been greeted by an excited five-year-old at full volume in the toiletries aisle of the supermarket (or as you step out of the hot pools on holiday in your swimming costume) will know this only too well.

    It is essential to model courtesy and respect. Most schools will have values and expectations shared for all to see on posters in classrooms and other spaces. These will be the behaviours all staff model and show at all times at school. Be the person who models them outside of school as well.

  4. Be very careful with the media.

    Increasingly the ‘shocking and startling’ are the headlines that grab our attention. Unfortunately “80% success” is nowhere near as attention-grabbing as “20% failing”. A number of our educator colleagues have had very unfortunate experiences making off-hand or flippant comments to media people that have resulted in considerable damage to their reputations and those of their school.

    I know from personal experience the exceptional lengths some reporters will go to to get a quote, information or a picture. Particularly in highly charged or emotional situations, make sure you follow policy, saying nothing unless it is your role. Know what your school media policy says, and follow it.

There are plenty of places to get advice and guidance for the online spaces – eg. Netsafe, PPTA. Read these sites and your school expectations, and follow them. Have someone in your school who is the media liaison person. Get help if you need it.

Most importantly though, use the media and digital spaces to share the positive and wonderfully creative and exciting things you are doing in your classrooms and schools. Be the voice of reason and calmness, if and when things are getting chaotic. And most importantly, manage and balance your own digital footprint and the image you portray to the world as a person and professionally.

References

Education Counts. (2018). Teaching Staff. Retrieved from https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/statistics/schooling/teaching_staff

Image Credit

Photo by Ahmed zayan on Unsplash

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too busy

The Curse of Busy — 6 Questions to ask yourself

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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!

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iceberg

Beyond the tip of the iceberg

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“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.

 

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

 

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Building Collaboration — chicken or egg?

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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?

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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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