Overview

After taking the Russley leadership team through the Tool for In-school Leaders, Rema focused her follow-up meeting on how the syndicate leaders in the team might use the Tool for Teachers with their syndicates.

She used coaching strategies to demonstrate ways to facilitate in-depth discussions about professional practice that would allow teachers to explore what they’re doing, why and how they’re doing it and what the next steps might be if they wanted to make improvements. Rema suggested that Erika lead the second part of this session while she provided guidance.

Reflective questions

• Rema looks at definitions of critical inquiry and then links to these a series of questions that leaders could ask with their teachers. How could you use these questions with your own teachers?

• “Setting up for success” is a key strategy noted by Rema. What will you need to do to set your own sessions up for success? What can you do with your teachers to celebrate where you’ve got so far?

Setting up for success sheet (30 kB)

Transcript

Russley School leaders are coached in ways to use the Tool for Teachers

I decided on a coaching approach to working on the tools with Principal Erika Ross and her leadership team. This involved working alongside them as they unpacked the meaning and practical application of the enquiry and knowledge building cycle.

The self-review tool is about implementing the national standards, so we need to know a little bit more about national standards. So an activity that you might like to try, and we will try it now, and you might like to try it as a staff meeting or in your syndicates, in your teams, the idea of document analysis, have you done document analysis? You look at a section of a document and you look for key themes that might come through, so some of the key themes I thought we could search for is across the curriculum. So someone will go looking in the introductory pages, when that concept of ‘this is about across the curriculum as mentioned’, you highlight it. Another theme might be links to other documents; another theme might be progress and achievement.

Links to other documents, where there any, yes and I only got halfway through the second page but obviously it had the New Zealand Curriculum, it also had things, like it mentioned, the ready to read material, literacy learning progressions, also the Pasifika Education Plan, Ka Hikitea, it had lots more I can see now just going through, lots of references to all those resources we have heard many a times before which is good to see its linking up to them.

So what difference does that make for you and your understanding, when you can see that?

I guess it just reassures us that they are all working towards the same goals and they are all linked.

Do you think that would be a useful activity at a staff level or a team level?

I think you are right about many people not having read this, you jump straight to your level to see what, right, what do my children need to know.

A key point to highlight was the importance of the enquiry and knowledge building cycle.

Right back at the beginning we talked about the concept of critical enquiry, that we could go through the self-review tool on our own tick the boxes and feel good about ourselves but actually does it highlight what we, what our next step could be? and some of the concepts that came through when we were looking at those definitions of critical inquiry were things like persistent effort, looking for evidence, coming to conclusions, looking from multiple perspectives, understandings and wisdoms, that it’s a process it’s not an end product, that were gathering exploring and evaluating, were challenging assumptions, so when we say “yep were doing that”, we need to think I wonder how we know we’re doing that and is it consistent across the school and does everyone have those same ideas that we have, so were challenging assumptions towards decision making, that it’s a reflective process, its active, persistent and careful.

So those were some of the ideas that came out of that look of definitions at critical inquiry, going into some depth about our inquiry process and some of our questions that you might have heard me asking were, things like; so how have you come to that conclusion? What’s the evidence that you’ve used to come to that conclusion? Have we got a range of perspectives here or are we looking at it through one lens? Where would we find that evidence? Do you believe it is consistent across the school? How do you know that? What’s the reliability and so on…. So some of those questions Erika might use as she facilitates for you the self review tool for teachers and last time we looked at those concepts of what are our students strengths and learning needs, what are our professional strengths and learning needs – we looked at them through the lens of you as school leaders. This time Erika is going to facilitate it so you are looking at those concepts through the lens of being a classroom teacher and as you become more familiar with the tool you can facilitate it with your teams.

Ok let’s have a look at our students strengths and learning needs, and what do our students know and what do they need to learn and where would you place us on that continuum? Last time we started from the integrated end and worked backwards because it tends to expose the next steps if we started at basic we could probably tick most of it except for the national standards as reference points. But if you go to the optimum it identifies next steps for us and this is what this is about it’s not pass or fail. It’s about where do we go from here?

That’s a really good point for all of you if we go through the process is you get so deeply into the discussion that when I came to think about leading this discussion I couldn’t actually remember what Reima had, how she’d led us through it because I had become so much part of that discussion. As we’re doing it I guess it’s about stopping every now and then and reflecting what are the questions we just used? And what did we just do there? Because you’re going to lead the next lot of questions.

I think that first point build students assessment capabilities I think we’re using a lot more self and peer assessment and breaking that down into success criteria and learning intentions. I think the children have become a lot more independent at our school over the last, being here for 7 years, when I started now the children are a lot more confident assessing their own ability and I think we’ve set them up to do that, within their learning.

Erika used the tool to demonstrate how assumptions can be challenged. How can you be sure that that’s consistent within your syndicate? With what that looks like within your syndicate?

Just discussions on what people are already doing and trying to maintain that consistency it is going back to those discussions all the time that reminders to see how people are going, because we might have to change things.

And I guess when you go through this with your team there might be something, where we do want to get to that level, that’s where we need to head.

Capturing comments about evidence is important as you go through the tools. So there is a space at the end of each section where you record the sort of evidence you would be looking for so maybe you could think about that as we’re going through this, when you go looking for those, your team meeting minutes. Looking around the rooms, looking at the walls you know looking for the evidence thinking what evidence have we got to insure us we are doing that. And the self review tool is an emergent tool that is opening up the discussion, it’s not saying we’ve got it all solved, it’s a way into the discussion just like it was for you in school, leaders and today as teachers. When you do it with your teachers it is an emergent tool that is helping them.

It’s made me feel we’re half way there, and it’s just those things we need to tweak, manage it within the school. On a scale of 0 to 5 how confident now do you feel to be able to facilitate this tool with your teachers?

Probably for me, I’m still learning, going through it step by step. I’ve got a good team who argue and debate and thrash things out so we’re learning together, doesn’t matter if we’re wrong.

So I just thought it might help to set the next phase up for success and these are some of my suggestions about how that could happen. Firstly to clarify your own knowledge attitude to the tools. So your knowledge of the tools is increasing each time you use the tools and remember that’s the same concepts that we’re looking at we’re just looking at them through different lenses. So you know you’re familiar now with how the tools are structured, you’re familiar with the developing, the basic developing integrated, familiar with the concept of best evidence synthesis, familiar with some of the probing questions you might ask, that we’ve been using all the times, so your own knowledge has improved.

I suggest you give a heads up to your teachers that this is going to happen so don’t arrive at a meeting and say ‘right! We’ll do this’ but you know just ‘this is what we’ve been doing and we’re going to be doing it as a team’, and so on. When you think about timetabling it into a space that’s not too challenging think about what else is happening in your school in your team and find a time where it’s going to be acceptable for the teachers to set aside what they’re thinking and planning and actually focusing on this. You can see the time it’s going to take it’ll be maybe over 2 meetings you’ll phase that, you know your team better than me. Present the process in a positive way. Predict some of the responses that you think might come from members of your team and consider ways of managing those.

I think it’s an opportunity to celebrate those, recognise and celebrate all the things that they have done in terms of their own professional development and learning and in terms of that whole teaching inquiry or teachers inquiry. I don’t think they even understand how far they’ve come. Here’s a base, almost data saying where we started but look where we’re at now. Look how well positioned we are in order to do this piece of work I think this is an opportunity to celebrate.