‘Success’ can be a troubling word when attempting to use it to describe a school, such are the many facets of a living, dynamic organisation that a school can be. To unpack the notion of ‘success’ and to recognise the possible building blocks that may collectively provide some insight into the degree of effectiveness, therefore, arguably, ‘success’, a framework has been used and found to be effective at Waverley Meadows Primary School.
Waverley Meadows is an open-space learning school in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. It enjoys a diverse range of cultures, and experiences a degree of transience with its student population. The staffing profile is also diverse in terms of experience ranging from new graduates through to leading teachers.
Our core business is always about student development and progress and improvement of outcomes for our students, with a belief that only through high performing instructional facilitators of learning can we support our students to work towards and achieve their optimum. It is also a belief by leadership and the teachers at Waverley Meadows, that we recognise and characterise our culture and environment as a learning organisation. Our collective understanding of this concept is drawn from agreement that a learning organisation develops continuous capacity to adopt change and that, fundamentally, we are part of a system of inter-relationships with a shared and understood vision (1). Central to that understanding is the way the learning organisation is constructed around professional learning teams where collaboration and joint responsibility underpin the ‘way we do things around here’ (2).
Further, the distributed leadership model that we subscribe to is one that is deliberately actioned, and understood by, the Waverley Meadows teachers and staff. The explicitness and clarity of roles and responsibilities, plus an applied belief that a hierarchical model would be less than supportive of innovation, risk-taking with one’s practice and sharing of ideas, thoughts and practices, serve to be promoted through a flatter management style.
Primarily, this paper is based on a framework that has been used at Waverley Meadows, and one that will continue to be used, for the foreseeable future, which is located in a learning organisation, led in a distributed way and which builds the capacity of all teachers as instructional practitioners. The framework is one that is a core tool the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD) has required schools to use in the creation of a performance and development culture. This initiative was introduced by the department in 2004/05 where all Victorian Government schools were required to work towards and seek accreditation based on demonstration of five elements of a culture of performance and development.
The leadership team at Waverley Meadows recognised evidence of many of our school’s cultural practices when audited against the five elements inclusive of:
The performance and development culture framework has been an enabler and driver for success at Waverley Meadows in terms of improved teacher capacity, as it has progressively become internalised through shared language and understandings to support teaching and learning innovation, progress and professional reflection from which to inform teaching and learning decisions at the macro and micro levels throughout the school. This paper describes how Element 2, 3 and 4 supported renewal and reflection to build greater pedagogical capacity.
The process, in exploring the specific underpinnings of each of these elements was, in and of itself, highly relevant, regardless of the final outcome or product of accreditation. Approached in a methodical and scheduled manner, we systematically explored each element over the course of 12 months, with each leadership team member taking responsibility to support, guide, and facilitate the teachers’ ever growing and deepening appreciation for each of the elements as they pertained to them as individuals and as teams of teachers. This, we consider success in a formative way as the language of performance and development culture was progressively used with more ease and with greater shared and common understandings. The process permitted recognition of that which we were doing effectively and that which demanded greater interrogation and pro-action. The self- assessment process provided an opportunity for the teachers to engage in structured and deliberate collegiate dialogue around the themes of each element.
However, that said, it was important for the leadership team to consider the real possibility of resistance by teachers to the potential changes that the process of performance and development culture demanded. Successful leadership recognises that change management in the learning organisation is arguably juxtapositioned with the loss and abandonment of preferred ways of teaching and learning philosophies. The teachers at Waverley Meadows have had increasingly greater success in learning that to let go of familiar ways of teaching to seek more contemporary and researched based approaches plus researching their own practice through action research, has been largely possible due to our collaborative team construct (3). Adaptive change can seem less threatening to an individual within a team context, concurrent with accountability of the individual to the team to demonstrate fidelity to innovation and attempted pedagogical changes. We risk-take together. Indeed, teaching and learning are a process of joint construction between people (4).
Significantly, Element 2, where the use of multiple sources of feedback to improve practice of individuals and teams of teachers, became a vanguard of change where groups of teachers working in an open plan school became transformed into teams of teachers working and learning together to more capably support the learning and development of our students - teams that became more reflective, more discerning and more enquiring about their practice effectiveness. The cultural shift related to teams of teachers seeking to interrogate the available data in the annual school level report, inclusive of student outcome achievements against state standards, the various opinion surveys from staff, students and parents, plus the state Assessment Improvement Monitor (equivalent to the more current NAPLAN). Added to the array of student data being analysed by teams of teachers to inform practice, was the implementation of peer coaching as a tool to further glean peer feedback on classroom instructional practice. This has proven to be a most powerful, and ‘just in time’ instructional and reflective tool of feedback for teachers. It has enabled them to inquire about an individually identified aspect of their practice, have a trained colleague coach observe them while instructing students in the classroom, followed by a highly objective ‘no praise, no blame’ feedback component. The coaching approach to provide collegiate feedback has enriched workplace cohesion, promoted professional capability building and has enabled advocacy of change and improvement in practice (5).
Element 2, along with the adoption of the DEECD’s initiative ‘Principles of Learning and Teaching’, became the vehicle for our teachers to explore how the process of action research could also enrich their approach to interrogate and draw on feedback about their classroom practice effectiveness. As with the introduction of peer coaching, experts in their fields were drawn on to come into the school to support the professional development of the teachers to use these two powerful reflective pedagogically changing tools. Element 4 relates to quality professional development and features professional learning as being based on the principles of highly effective professional learning, drawing on outside expertise to work within our context, our learning organisation (6).
It allowed tailoring of the professional learning specific to our teachers’ needs, resulting in a much more targeted approach to their developmental requirements. Element 4 promotes the concept of shifting the balance in professional learning where there is a greater emphasis on integrating teacher work and teacher learning and where professional learning is a routine practice and there is group pursuit of the learning (7). Teachers at Waverley Meadows seek collegiate support and feedback, using leading questions and constructive suggestions from their peers. Through a judgement-free approach to seeking answers to their teaching and learning wonderings, questions and problems, teachers have been able to deepen and drill down to a greater depth of investigation and reflection about their classroom practice and instruction. As trained peer coaches, each teacher, regardless of tenure in the profession, is capable and willing to be both coached and to be coached by any one of their colleagues. This has been an extremely successful aspect of a distributed approach to holistic organisational continuous improvement of teacher effectiveness. Because our focus is, without reservation, consistently on student outcomes, there is a collective, yet single minded, professional desire to always seek to improve our own and support our colleagues’ instructional capacity.
Combined, Element 2 and 4 have been powerful channels through which our teachers have been able to explore, articulate, converse about and challenge their practices, pedagogical beliefs and affirm their approaches both as individuals and as teams of teachers.
To further galvanise Element 2 and 4, the third element related to customised individual teacher development plans, based on individual professional developmental needs, student learning and school priorities was also addressed. The school had been using templates provided by the DEECD, and although these had served the teachers’ development well in the past, already supporting the establishment of protocols for regular review of teacher performance and development, Element 3 provided a space and lens through which to view a more relevant and meaningful structure that allowed true personalisation of each teacher’s personalised plan and that which reflected the autonomous approach to the development of the professionalism necessary in a distributed model of leadership across our learning organisation.
Element 3 of the P&DC initiative supported professional dialogue around individual teacher development plans and their purpose, as well as their importance regarding how the nexus of individual teacher development and school and departmental priorities best merge for the sole purpose of improved student outcomes and learning. Success for us at Waverley Meadows has meant that identified links between other DEECD programs and initiatives have been leveraged in order to progress more efficiently as a learning organisation and to add integrity to the school goals and targets. To this end, the DEECD Coaching for Experienced Principals Program, to support leadership capacity building (of which I was a participant) provided an avenue where I could research and engage in collegiate coaching related to my chosen area of interest, that of distributed leadership, which ultimately opened up a forum for revision of customised individual teacher plan development. Through my coach, I was able to consider closely, a range of models of plans that supported greater teacher ownership of the process and their own professional direction while retaining the integrity of the department’s and school’s direction for student outcomes. As a result, and through an iterative process with the leadership team plus all teachers, we are currently trialling a new customised individual teacher development plan document and so drawing on Element 3 of the performance and development culture to continuously improve and seek greater success through this area of teacher capacity building.
In conclusion, the sentiment of a successful school at Waverley Meadows has been a consistency to seek continuous improvement of our teaching practice in order to secure the best possible learning for our students. Teacher capacity building is paramount and a prime priority. It is underpinned by a distributed leadership model which is understood and actioned by the leadership team and all teachers with concurrent accountability to demonstrate professionalism through an organisational culture framework of performance and development.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ms Kerry Clayton is Principal of Waverley Meadows Primary School, in Wheelers Hill, Victoria, Australia.