Half-day Conference on

1. Half-day Conference on Meeting the Challenges of Change – Leadership for Learning 11th June 2010 Education Bureau – Quality Assurance Division

2. Programme

3. The three questions How does it contribute to learning for all? What do we understand by effective leadership? What is the role of self-evaluation in addressing these questions?

7. HOW WE SEE OURSELVES The way we see leadership, learning and the quality of our school is ultimately a product of how we see and think about ourselves

8. Who am I? The hero rescuer The dutiful manager The orchestrator The intermediary The innovator The team player The risk taker

9. Flying below the radar An extra-ordinary generation of school leaders who have bucked the trend, who are not intimidated and oppressed by ‘the centre’ because with imaginative leaders and committed creative teachers they follow their best professional instincts, who don’t say I’d love to do innovation but I can’t afford to because of …….. They’ve just got on innovating, or should I say, transforming, doing exciting things and running very good schools - exciting places for teachers and kids to be in. (David Hargreaves, 2009)

10. THE POWER OF ONE? School leadership is often taken to mean headship. Such an outlook limits leadership to one person and implies lone leadership. The long-standing belief in the power of one is being challenged. Today there is much more talk about shared leadership, leadership teams and distributed leadership than ever before. (Southworth, 2002)

11. GREEDY WORK The task of leading a school in the twenty first century can no longer be carried out by the heroic individual leader single-handedly turning schools around. It is greedy work, all consuming, demanding unrelenting peak performance from super-leaders and no longer a sustainable notion. Peter Gronn, The New Work of Educational Leaders: Changing Leadership Practice in an Era of School Reform, 2003

12. THE DILEMMAS OF LEADERSHIP • Unrelenting change • Stress • Workload • Social factors • Accountability • Bureaucracy • Teacher recruitment • Salary • Lifestyle balance • Intensification (MacBeath and Galton, 2002,2004, 2006, 2008)

13. ORGANISATIONAL LEARNING DISABILITIES ‘It’s a great idea but it wouldn’t work here’ ‘There simply isn’t the time in the day, or week’ ‘If we just had the resources….’ ‘There’s no room in an overcrowded curriculum’ ‘Yet one more initiative for an already overstretched staff’ ‘Not this year, perhaps next year’

14. 11 KEY FACETS OF LEADERSHIP • Seeks out opportunities to learn • Acts with integrity • Adapts to differences • Is committed to making a difference • Seeks broad based knowledge • Brings out the best in other people • Is insightful - sees things from new angles • Has courage to take risks • Seeks out and uses feedback • Learns from mistakes • Is open to criticism

15. COLLABORATIVE LEADERSHIP Leadership is exercised not at the apex of the organisational pyramid but at the centre of the web of human relationships (Joe Murphy 1996) OR

16. Mediated effects School leaders improve teaching and learning indirectly and most powerfully through their influence on staff motivation, commitment and working conditions School leadership has a greater influence on schools and students when it is widely distributed Collaborative patterns beyond the school strengthen the quality of teaching (Leithwood, 2006, Mulford, 2003, Carmichael, 2006) Leithwood et al.

17. Making the connections Leadership and management Ethos and culture Learning and teaching

18. “School is a house of learning. It is a place where diversions and mistakes are allowed, but where evaluation in the form of feedback gives you a sense of direction”

19. Human capital (OECD) International Best Practice The past • Principals who enjoy continuous professional development empowered, accountable and learning centred • Principals who manage ‘a building’, who are accountable but not empowered • Attracting teachers from the bottom third of the graduate distribution and offering training which does not relate to real classrooms • Attracting, recruiting and providing excellent ongoing CPD for prospective teachers from the top end of the graduate distribution • Incentives, norms and funding encourage a fair distribution • of teaching talent • The best teachers are in the most advantaged communities

20. Human capital (OECD) International Best Practice The past • Expectations of teachers are clear; consistent quality, strong professional ethic and excellent professional development focused on classroom practice • Seniority and tenure matter more than performance; patchy professional development; wide variation in quality • Teachers and the system expect every child to succeed and intervene preventatively to ensure this • Wide achievement gaps, just beginning to narrow but systemic and professional barriers to transformation remain in place

21. FROM SINGLE LOOP TO....... assess measure progress set targets

22. DOUBLE LOOP LEARNING assess measure progress set targets Build capacity Evaluate learning Create and share knowledge

23. SMC: from single to double loop • Set school goals and performance targets • Ensure smooth operation in school • Prepare annual school plan & budget • Pilot & evaluate educational initiatives • Promote education to pupils • Establish effective channels of communication • Plan professional development of teachers • Evaluate school effectiveness

24. Appreciative inquiry • Protected learning time at meetings • Story telling sessions from invited guests • Participation in lesson study • Shadowing a class • Shadow a School Review Team • Consultancy on OLE • Focus group with students • Co-teaching

25. WHAT IS THE CAPACITY OF YOUR SCHOOL? Conducting a knowledge audit • Where does the knowledge lie as to: • What motivates and engages students? • The effectiveness of teaching? • Uses and impact of assessment • The value of homework? • Learning in home and community? • Other Learning Experiences? • Agency and change agents? • Qualities of leadership?

26. Evidence from the Impact Study In schools where SSE is more strongly embedded: Membership of the team covers a cross-section of staff with high credibility among their colleagues. The School Improvement Team enjoys scope to exercise initiative and creativity. There is a willingness and capability to ask hard questions and to instil an ethos of accountability.

27. Evidence from the Impact Study (2) • Teamwork exceeds and synergises the professional capacities of all its members. • Initiative and ownership create confidence and shared leadership throughout the team. • There is a vision as to what SSE can achieve and how it can feed into school improvement.

28. DEVELOPING THE INNER EYE • Leadership acts are most likely to occur when attempts are made to understand the circumstances of teachers’ work. This means starting with the practicalities of teaching, developing a language for talking about teaching, and assisting teachers to collect evidence about the contradictions, dilemmas and paradoxes that inhere in their work. This consciousness raising amounts to developing an inner eye so as to penetrate accepted assumptions and, in the process, isolate viable ways in which transformation might occur. • (Smyth, 1986, p. 3)

29. Leadership for Learning – making learning visible The task of leadership is to make visible the how, why and where of learning. It achieves this by conversations and demonstrations around pupil learning, professional learning and learnings which transcend the boundaries of the school. The challenge for leadership is to nurture the dialogue, to make transparent ways in learning interconnects and infuses behaviour. It promotes a continuing restless inquiry into what works best, when, where, for whom and with what outcome. Its vision is of the intelligent school and its practice intersects with the wider world of learning.

30. OECD’s PISA assessment of the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds

31. Extrapolating learning Every three years, OECD tests roughly half a million of children in the principal industrialised countries, and that’s not simply about checking whether students have learned what they were recently taught, but we examine to what extent students can extrapolate from what they have learned and apply their knowledge and skills in novel settings.

32. How the demand for skills has changedEconomy-wide measures of routine and non-routine task input Mean task input as percentiles of the 1960 task distribution (Levy and Murnane)

33. LEARNING INTHE UNFAMILIAR tasks/ problems unfamiliar novel problems in familiar contexts unfamiliar problems in unfamiliar contexts familiar problems in familiar contexts familiar problems in novel contexts familiar contexts/situations

34. LEARNING INTHE UNFAMILIAR unfamiliar tasks/ problems novel problems in familiar contexts unfamiliar problems in unfamiliar contexts familiar problems in familiar contexts familiar problems in novel contexts familiar contexts/situations

35. Learning Science in Informal Environments There is mounting evidence that structured, nonschool science programs can feed or stimulate the science-specific interests of adults and children, may positively influence academic achievement for students, and may expand participants’ sense of future science career options….. Many academic achievement outcomes (1) do not encompass the range of capabilities that informal settings can promote; (2) violate critical assumptions about these settings (3) are not designed for the breadth of participants. Learning Science in Informal Environments: People, Places, and Pursuits,National Research Council, Washington.

36. PLUS CA CHANGE? In the job I’ve just left I got the chance to go to ministerial meetings in so many places, from America to Australia, to China to India, to Egypt to Scandinavia, where Ministers would unfailingly stand up and talk about how the world is changing, its uncertain, technology, global sustainability, rich and poor, economic challenge, movement of people, threats to our civilisation, etc. Then they all say, therefore, what youngsters need to be is adaptable, flexible, ever to cope with change, and words like that. Then, within an hour, all of them are marching to another drum which is about how we hold on to tradition and how we don’t let things that we have traditionally tested drift away because they’re fearful of their electorate thinking that they’ve lost what they thought the electorate matters. (Mick Waters, Former Director, The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority)

37. Archbishop of Canterbury's Christmas sermon Friday 25 December 2009 In the case of children, we shall do our level best to turn you into active little consumers and performers as soon as we can.  We shall test you relentlessly in school from the word go; we shall do all we can to make childhood a brief and rather regrettable stage on the way to the real thing - turning you into a useful cog in the social machine that won't need too much maintenance. The Children's Society's Good Childhood report or the Cambridge Review of primary education.  There has at last been a wake-up call about the ways in which we are crushing and narrowing children's experience; and there is a long and significant agenda there for debate in the months ahead.

38. Entre les murs ‘its naturalistic portrayal of the energy and high tension of the classroom’ the chaos, the challenges to, and idle assertions of authority, the clashes and power struggles, and, the tedium, a wholly absorbing microcosm of human interaction.

39. The tyranny of being right What we do know is if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. And by the time they get to be adults most kinds have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. We stigmatize mistakes and we’re now running educational systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. (Sir Ken Robinson, Chair of Government Task Force on Creativity, 1997-2001)

40. Children come into the classroom to be taught Children come into the classroom to learn

41. from individualism to professional community from teaching at the centre to learning at the centre from technical and managed work to inquiry and shared leadership from prescription of curriculum to capacity-building of teachers (Liebermann and Miller, 2003) Learning teams as initiators in discussion of ‘tough problems and deep mysteries of teaching and learning’. (Mitchell and Sackney, 2000) REFRAMING

42. View of learning Surface passive Deep active Individual detached Individualised learning instruction Personalised inquiry construction Personalised community co-construction View of person Social and relational

43. Who assesses the quality of learning? Others assess student learning Students self assess

44. Teacher and student assessment coincide Teacher assessment is final and definitive Others assess Self assessment is final arbiter There is little or no formative assessment Students self assess

45. Teacher assessment is final and definitive Teacher and student assessment coincide co-construction Others assess There is little or no formative assessment Self assessment is final arbiter Self assess

46. Observing learning What are they doing? What are they learning? What am I learning? What will I do next?

47. What combination of experiences best promote the learning of different people?

48. Knowledge in the head Vulgar and useful Pure and useless Knowledge in the world

49. The singular fallacy Learning and development are frequently presumed to be the result of individual effort and accomplishment, rather than the product of communities, groups, and families. What is all too commonly framed as individual accomplishment is better understood as the result of the coordination and strategic use of learning resources. (Lauren Resnick, 1987)

50. Children and young people live nested lives, so that when classrooms do not function as we want them to, we go to work on improving them. Those classrooms are in schools, so when we decide that those schools are not performing appropriately, we go to work on improving them, as well. But those young people are also situated in families, in neighbourhoods, in peer groups who shape attitudes and aspirations often more powerfully than their parents or teachers. (David Berliner, 2005) NESTED LIVES