Transcript

One of the things that I’ve always felt, is that teaching is very rewarding when it’s intrinsic. So, when you’re looking inside yourself, it can be very satisfying if you are improving as a teacher. So with anything that I’ve introduced in the school I’ve had to think deeply about, who are my people? What is it that they come to the table with? What are their personal values? Are they the same as the school’s values? Is it the same direction? Now of course all of that is part of your induction and your appointment process, and you find people that have similar alignment, not always the same but similar alignment.
So the key to that for me was to say to them, "What’s in it for you? What are you going to get out of this?" Of course the big question, the answer to that question is, "You’re going to get better at being a teacher."

So we had also done something similar to that previously, which was around using a digital portfolio. We’d already had the quality learning circle (QLC) set up in the school and we would often talk about some of the things that we had done within our digital portfolio, but we didn’t have the structure to go with it, so that was an addition. For me, and for the team that just seemed the next logical thing to do.

So it wasn’t such a big jump, sometimes when you introduce new things you can get into trouble because you lurch from one thing to the other without really having any connection to them. So the small, incremental steps that you make to improve something, often has a better chance of survival and sustainability really in a school. It wasn’t difficult to get staff to say, "Yip, this is the most logical thing to do," and to show that there were improvements within this new reworked way of working.

We got together as a whole team and I had a session with the staff where we looked at the protocol and what it meant, and how you would go through it, and the timing of it because it’s quite specific. The actual questions we looked at and read through, to get an understanding ourselves as to what the shared language was around that. Then I actually had a group of them that had worked well in QLCs before as most of them had always worked well. We showed them how to do it sitting in a circle. We demonstrated at a staff meeting what it meant to be in a QLC using these questions. One of the most important things about getting people on board is the opportunity for them to observe something. To see somebody else doing it, then to trial it, of course. It’s not a mandated thing that, “As from this moment you will do it.” It’s more like, “Go and try it, see how it works, let’s work on it over time because those things just then become part of the norm, they way you do things round here, really.”