Frimley School
Malcolm Dixon shares his ideas for building a culture of success through teacher professional growth and digital technologies.
Video
Clip duration: 3:41
Leadership style
I am very much a people person. Leadership for me means providing opportunities for my teachers to grow professionally, and for us to grow together as a team. I believe that all principals need to delegate, as we can't hold it all on our own shoulders!
My strengths are in identifying new people who are going to fit into the school climate and who will enjoy teaching at Frimley School. I try to achieve a balance of people that covers experience, age, and gender, and to provide a cooperative and supportive environment where everyone's ideas are listened to and valued.
Risk taking is important. I believe that you need to weigh the risks yourself and that you need to develop a recovery plan in case things go wrong.
You have to get to know the people who make decisions in the central bureaucracies. It is much easier if you can put a face to a person when you want some action or if you want to challenge some decision. I believe that networking can also help to influence change.
I try to find people in other places who are leading successful schools, and to share ideas with them. If you can identify an idea from one school you visit, and add it to your own ideas, then you can grow your own mountain.
Where we are at
"...to take ownership of the direction we're heading."
We are very fortunate at Frimley School. We have children from all walks of life, including children with disabilities, so we represent a snapshot of New Zealand.
When I became principal of Frimley School 10 years ago, the roll was 230 and a number of staff had been there for over 20 years. The school needed an injection of enthusiasm and new ideas. The roll is now 530 and we are attracting both students and staff, and the local real estate agents note the importance of houses being in the Frimley School zone!
There were hardly any computers at school when I became leader, and many teachers had never had one in their classroom. Since then, ICT has become a vital tool in our children's education across all subject areas, and has impacted on the education of the wider school community.
An advantage of being in a provincial town is that everyone in the community knows the school. One of the challenges in managing change is getting the people in our school community to take ownership of the direction we're heading in. The process we have used for this was the development of our school vision, our 'AAA' philosophy: Attitude Action Achievement. For example:
| Attitude: | I need to know these facts. |
| Action: | I need to learn them every night. |
| Achievement: | I know it now and can do it. |
At the end of each year we celebrate our successes through a community flyer to let the community know what's happening.
Where my ideas come from
We are constantly building on our vision, and reflective practices and planning is an important base for that. We are constantly asking the questions:
- Are we doing it right?
- What do we need to improve?
- What are our criteria for success?
- How do we recognise that?
I listen to the ideas and suggestions coming from our teachers and discuss with them how their ideas can be fitted in and where they will take us. It is important that we all feel ownership of where we are going and recognise that every contribution is valued. When someone comes up with a good idea, I take it back to our Strategic Management Team. Each member of the team has different strengths. One has experience, one has excellent organisational skills, and one is innovative and creative. Among the three of us we arrive at what we think is a good product or solution that we develop, and then share back to our staff.
I prefer accessing my professional readings online. For example, I have read extracts from books such as Powerful Thinking by Julia Atkin and the The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life by Parker J. Palmer, from online sources. Many of my background ideas however, arise from finding out about new practices when visiting other schools.
I also believe that teachers and principals need interests outside of teaching. I've learnt a lot from my involvement in New Zealand Rugby Football Union. Through refereeing, I've been able to recognise a range of strategies for marketing and team building that I can apply in my leadership role at Frimley.
What we've been doing
The first thing we needed to find out was where our community was at, and what they wanted with their school. We used questionnaires to make sure we were moving in the right direction, and then we suggested more concrete ideas, obtained approval, and continued to refine our goals. We are determined that our children, parents, and teachers all need to own the vision. Each week we feature one aspect of AAA so that our children understand its central importance and can talk about it to anyone who asks about it.
Introducing ICT as a tool for learning has been a central priority for us. We've conducted a series of after-school in-service courses for teachers. They take the iBooks home to improve their own skill. We are lucky to have three people at school with top-end skills in ICT, and there is always a peer available for teacher support at their level of competence. We go by the principle that, if I am taught something, the expectation is that I have to teach someone else.
Children's learning has really improved through ICT because they can set their goals and see their end product in its final form at any stage. Teachers can help extend children's goals so that they can achieve more than they thought they were capable of – like climbing stairs, there's always another stair!
An innovative aspect of the ICT programme is our school radio station, which has a range of 5 kilometres. When children do work in oral literacy, they get the opportunity of presenting on air to the local community.
We believe that teachers need as much professional development as the school can afford, and that a school-wide approach is the most effective. Seeing what's happening in comparable classes elsewhere is also a strategy that we adopt and we average 20 interchanges with other schools during the year. The most useful interchanges occur when a board of trustee member accompanies the visit, because the board can then be informed about what makes a school successful.
How do we know?
"...your story was good enough to reach radio!"
Frimley School has been very successful. Winning another Goodman Fielder School of the Year Award is a good indicator that we are on track. The school roll has increased over the last 8–9 years, and the number of applicants applying to teach here has increased.
As a principal, I regularly request the mentoring support of selected professional colleagues who help to provide an external perspective of the school and of my role as professional leader.
Being a primary school, we are fortunate that parents come to collect their children, enabling them to talk with the teachers on a daily basis if they want to. The computer room is always open so that children can show their parents what they have been doing. If they have internet access they can go online and look at their child's work.
Teachers write all their individual student reports using a template on the ibook. We're looking closely at children's writing on computer to find out what the children are actually saying – assessing the quality of their writing rather than focusing on their presentation or their accurate spelling. The quality of each child's thinking is what we must be developing.
One of the unexpected benefits of our radio station is the improvement in our children's oral language. The children don't know who their audience is going to be, so they have to think carefully about how they will communicate. They have had some valuable and positive feedback on the telephone. As we are unable to have all our children reading on air together, we have a quality criterion: "Your story was good enough to reach radio."
Where to next?
"...opportunities for our children to teach someone else."
We have travelled a long way by using ICT, and believe that we are at the leading edge of ICT and school developments. We have children learning online, we produce our own films, we have a school radio station, and we have specialist teachers and equipment. For the next stage, we will:
- continue to assess where our children are at in their thinking skills and metacognition, and find out where they need to go
- continue to use the iBook as the tool that teachers will use to enter and download records of children's learning and accomplishments for ongoing formative evaluation
- explore homework facilities so that children and parents can download material from the school's website and transmit their finished homework online
- encourage more children to be involved in team sports and find ways to help our children to generate energy and to be more energetic
- make opportunities for our children to teach someone else as we recognise how much children can learn by teaching other children.
Video transcript
There is no transcipt available.
