Mark Secondment Agreement Made Easy

Mark secondment agreement

uh welcome to our weekly wednesday webinar a bit of a tongue twister on a wednesday night and uh thanks so much to ray boyd for presenting tonight about whole school structures to support highly effective teaching ray is an award-winning and highly experienced school leader from western australia he's done a great job especially at west beach bro and is currently on a bit of a secondment uh helping schools in the health department liaise around the coronavirus so a little bit of a change of pace for ray but thanks so much to rae and um really look forward to your presentation tonight and i'll hand over to you ray thanks thanks very much michael thanks everyone uh getting used to the zoom stuff that we're doing i get to see in the back into everyone's lounge dreams tends to be the way of life or you see kids pop up here and there say um look it's tonight tonight today's session of this afternoon session we're looking at uh whole school structures around uh effective teaching i'm not going to go too much into the various teaching programs that we use although i will touch on that feel free to ask because otherwise what tends to happen is we get caught up in the debate of whether it's an effective teaching or it's not effective teaching we're looking today more about the structures that we need to put in place to ensure or some of the structures this session is not a must do it's more to get leaders to think about things that they need to consider and move away from what we sometimes refer as the survival bias where we have a look at the things that are successful principles of successful schools and go oh great we'll just mimic what they're doing whereas actual fact we need to also look at the schools that have failed to identify the things that they weren't doing to make things successful so and as if we've got time i'm more than happy to address any questions that we've got towards the end of the session as michael's explained i'm from west beach borough primary school which is a level five school in um western australia uh we've got four 500 odd kids here uh we are deemed to be a low sei i mean when we came into the uh into the school we our kids were at achieving well below um well below what was expected of them in terms of demographics and what the system deemed to be acceptable i'll start with one of my favorite quotes because it sort of sets the tone for everything that we're talking about today and it comes from geoffrey canada um and he he goes about saying essentially exactly what says on the screen that education is the only billion dollar industry that tolerates abject failure and i don't mean that in a i use this in a derogatory way but what we tend to do within schools is we see something that's not working and go well you know what that should be working so we'll throw more money at it and we'll keep doing the same thing and then you get caught up in that old cliche if you do what you've always done you're going to get what you've always got and right across the system not just within western australia not australia but the world over we have got into this habit of doing things that we know don't work while there are things out there that do work but we just won't take them on if we were a business as a general rule education would have gone bankrupt years ago but fortunately there's a number of things and a number of people out and about that actually do the right thing and they are a little bit switched on and they look at research and by research too when i refer to research today i'm not talking about we did a survey with four people and three of them said it was good we're actually looking at research in terms of what researchers have looked at across the world they've done analysis etc and they've deemed that to be within the scope of that particular research and methodology to be appropriate i will set the the scene so again from western australia and i'll touch on this very quickly our education act uh outlines and it's up there on the screen for you a number of things that the principal is responsible for so just in case there's someone from overseas watching this gives you a context for western australia basically the principal leads the school so i'm the one that gets wrapped on the knuckles if things go wrong i'm the one that gets a pound on the back if things go right also within that education act is the functions of the teacher and basically it means the teachers teach and you'll see up there also that they are to give competent instruction to the students in accordance with the curriculum with the standards determined by the chief executive officer and the school plan and as the principal my job is to make sure that plan's in place so that's the context for what we're working around today when i talk about the things that we've done within this school and the things that you need to look at while the context may change the concept itself doesn't all right so the concepts still remain consistent rather serendipitously uh i've just read i've just finished reading a book it's it's actually um by galen nelson and betty burks and it's called stop fake work in education create real working cultures that drive student success and this is their uh model for that this is what they look at you can see the cultural ecosystem over the top but within that that culture that schools culture they look at strategy alignment and execution all right now rather serendipitously that is loosely the model that we use across the school and it's the model that i'm going to talk about today that i encourage people schools to even classroom teachers you can apply what we're talking about today to bring about change in your classroom this is the model more so in a nutshell of how we use it okay so you can still see that the culture the the culture of the school remains the same everything that happens within the school affects the culture of it i've kept the blue in there just to show you where those um where nielsen and burke's model sits but what we do is we start with the vision so we identify the vision and within that vision we go all right what do we actually want to achieve as an organization and then we move to an alignment process and going up and down you can see a number of the things that we looked at in our school's context and this is something that schools need to do looked at an alignment process what programs do we have in the school what strategies have we got what policies are in place that drive the various structures and processes of the school do they then match back to our vision that alignment process is also a bit of a cleansing process that is the time where you get anything out that's not working or does not align back to the vision and achieving that vision all right if it doesn't fit in there you move it to the side following on from that you've got we look at support and the support structures that you've got in the school and we'll talk about that today in the school to enable you to have a successful execution of what it is you're actually trying to achieve all right and that is underpinned by instructional framework so your instructional framework matches what the vision's doing it includes your programs your strategies your policies your processes it's got your support in it and then obviously your overall execution now if we take that to the next level it looks a little bit like this so our vision is what is it we're hoping to achieve what do we stand for as a school our alignment is in our case our highly effective teaching model and we've identified some struc some strategies and structures and i'll show you that again later on some strategies and structures that we use across the school that research and by research i'm talking about hattie talking about rose and shine back in 1996 talking about mazano's work we're looking at the stuff that jim knight's put out also considering the stuff that peter dewitt's putting out so all that research from within that we've identified some structures that we call our highly effective teaching model we've shied away from calling it best practice as soon as you call it best practice you start getting slammed left right and center if you don't believe me pop it on twitter and see what happens and this is also the uh the alignment areas also the collection of all your identified strategies when we're looking at support we're looking at your professional learning we're looking at coaching mentoring instructional rounds video reflection and even performance review and then following on from that is your actual execution so how do we implement that when do we implement it what deadlines are in place and what are our accountability processes what a number of schools do across the globe and we were one of these initially is we identify a strategy we say here it is off you go we put maybe one day pd into it and then we wonder why it fails all right that that's basically in a nutshell those schools that do it very well have ongoing professional development and again we will get back to that the hardest bit you have to understand or we have to understand as leaders is not so much the culture of the school when we're doing this thing and you can see how everything's everything um interlocks but the subcultures that go on within the school now if you're familiar with um with fulham's work where you've got you're bringing a change strategy now that could be a something as simple as we're bringing in this spelling program and he talks about the little caboose you've got the people at the front that are happy to drive it and off we go you've got the people in the middle who they're not invested either way and then you've got the people in the back who just they're like the rocks in the river they're not going anywhere so we invest most of our time into those people within the middle caboose sorry the middle carriage because we know we can move them up and it may get us to jump on but we have to remember that it's the stuff that we don't see going on in the school within our cultures that are the biggest threat to anything that we do within us within the school so how do you go about managing that this one okay i'll call it the rule of two if you look at any successful school you look at any successful principle any successful person there is a second person involved all right stagecoach is another one so you've always got someone and that's why i use this imagery here there's always summer and writing shotgun for you now west beachborough primary school my work wife for whatever better description is garl higgins and gail higgins has actually stepped up and she is currently principal of the school while i'm out on second your 2ic is the person that supports you in everything that you do they are your backbone your 2ic will be the person that will challenge you in a closed room but when you leave the room they will give you 150 commitment they are a trusted colleague if you look at a highly successful teacher there will be someone who supports them who has their back you cannot bring about change in a school you cannot bring about change in a system without two people it's next to impossible now you may not see that second person but trust me they exist and if you go through history of all successful people there is always someone sitting in the background be that good guys all the bad guys you also need to be aware of this little fellow here the implementation dip because it causes us the most grief regardless of what you do now i'm an athlete my background is an athlete i've been a teacher all my life but i within my teaching profession as an athlete if i made any change to my running program there was always a period of time in the initial implementation stages where my performance dropped but i understood that if i stuck with it i would come out at a higher plateau on the other side we have to expect the same thing to happen at schools we need to prepare for this when you bring in any change strategy program or anything within your school environment if you expect this and you prepare for this it will make that dip a little bit shorter so that if let's for instance say you're bringing in a new maths program one of the things that's going to be a block going to be a blocker for you is resourcing do we have enough resources do the stuff understand the program what sort of pl have we got in place have i got a lighthouse teacher in the school that knows this program backwards and forwards and sideways so i've already got someone in the school who other teachers can go to is that teacher who knows the program backwards and forwards and sideways are respected colleague within the school do they have everyone else's respect because they know that this person can actually teach what sort of structures have we got in place for that maths program in terms of coming into your classroom and running some sort of instructional framework around okay look this is what you're doing have you tried this have you got mentoring in place do you use instructional rounds and by instructional rounds it might be for example we've got two or three classes that are running this new maths program let's get four or five teachers and go into mrs smith's room and watch what she's doing all right mrs smith's running this really well we'll come out now and within a closed room environment we're going to rip apart what we saw with mrs smith's room what was she doing that was successful could we identify any things in there that were blockers for her taking that program to that next level okay conversation over let's go into mr smith's room we run through the same process obviously to do things like that you need to have a culture of trust within the school so you have to know if i'm going to rip apart and mr smith has to understand we're coming into your room not to not to crucify you in terms of performance manage but to come away and pull apart what you're doing so we can try and identify blockers and accelerators within the program that within the school rather that we can use to support that program within the conversations within that room where you're having those instruction around conversations there has to be a level of trust that what happens in that room does not leave the room because if i happen to say mr smith that was just shocking and it and that gets back to him it's highly likely mr smith's gonna say you know what i don't want you to come in and deserve me anymore because i'm not happy with the level of conversation um but again there's a whole structure around that in terms of getting that into place in the first instance there's an um the gallup organisation has spoken about why change initiatives fail and when we talk about change in issues again it can be a program it can be a whole school approach it can be anything but they they from their research believe that there's about 75 percent of change initiatives fail annually in terms of bringing about change and these three reasons are what they come up with neglecting the why you're doing it the neglect neglection of who's doing it and the neglection of what we're actually doing all right so you need to consider those things flip that around what's our why who's doing it and what are we actually doing within that process and that will also support you in some way shape or form in building a higher success rate in terms of bringing about something all right well let's contextualize the stuff that we did so it gives you a bit of a process um structure for what we actually did within our school 2006 i came in as the principal it's now 2020 and i'll show you we got some changes of our results uh around 2011 all right so we we started thinking with a few things in 206 we had a significant change in 209 and we got we started to get significant bite within our programs in 2011 but you can see some of the issues that we were having in the school that were supporting why we were failing school and and the program when i say failing school we were letting kids down so the excuses were our parents were uneducated they come from a split home and i won't read all those to you but programs was essentially hodge podge let's come back to the alignment bit so in let's use maths that's a really good example in our maths programs i think we're running 9 or 10 programs across the school for maths from kindy right through to year 7 back then so we had wa mathematics we had mts going we had what was the other one wa mathematics signposts uh orego maths so there were multiple maths programs going across the school each one of those programs is a fantastic program every single one of them is a great program but each program has its own scope and sequence so if little johnny goes to mrs smith's room and she's running wa mathematics in year one little johnny gets exposed to whatever sequence was of the curriculum was presented at that time the next year he goes into mr johnson's room and mr johnson's room is using uh rigby maths now rygmy maths has its own scope and sequence so he's being exposed to that new scope and sequence now if we follow that logic what can actually happen is a kid could go through your school and miss key components of the curriculum because they're entering a scope and sequence of that particular program that's being used so we went radio that's useless we are going to identify a single maths program in this school and we're going to run it from kindy right the way through to year seven that way we have a couple of things that happen we have a guaranteed scope and sequence it follows a logical progression it also enables us to target intervention based on one program so um where we might be looking at time so these kids are weak on time these kids it's usually place value we'll grab these kids and do place value so it enabled us to identify a more effective way of dealing with in intervention when and if it was needed it enabled teachers to use and develop a common language of instruction around mathematics so now we've got a common language for instruction in mathematics and co is it coincidentally we actually have a common language for instruction across the school but each program has its unique language so we identified the common language another beauty of the scope and sequence being consistent is it doesn't matter which classroom little johnny goes through the following year the program is still the same in the way that the instructional process works all right so the kids understand i've done that before and this is how it happened because i started that in year one and now it's you two and so on and so on all right the final part of that there is no one actually understood why the programs were being used in the first place and that's not just mathematics that's every program we're doing why are you doing that program because when i came out of teachers college that was the program that my prac teacher was using so that's the one i used or this is a really good one that's the program i was taught with when i was at primary school all right so also is it a good program i don't know it's the program i know so we have to begin with our why why are we going to make changes or why are we going to bring something into the school what's the purpose of that we have to sell that and we know that effective systems and let's transfer the word systems let's make that effective schools have developed integrated measures all right so a suite of processes that show what teachers do and what happens as a result if you want to be an effective school what systems do you have in place that enable you to measure what's happening in the school in the first place and not just measure it but then actually do something about it what can you actually do about it well belief drives behavior so this comes back to the y bit you have to sell it all right now if i if there's any classroom teachers out there listening i know that a number of you every year at the start of the year you will run your welcome to my classroom i'm mrs johnson and this is what i do in my classroom you have to sell to those parents the why of what you do in your classroom this is what i'm doing and this is why i'm doing it and your child will benefit from being in my room at a school level it's this is what we're doing in the school this is why we're doing it in the school and if we can sell that we can start to tap in a person's belief because if a person does not believe something they will not change what they do belief drives behaviour it's not the other way around belief drives behaviour simon cynic's a big one for this belief drives behaviour oh yeah but hang on a sec ray i can use some of you asking it's like a set of statement i've had here but hang on a sec there's more you will say yeah but hang on a sec they started changing their behavior and they got the results and that so it's the behavior that changed no it wasn't they believed initially yes you got them to change their behaviour because if they didn't do something you were going to whack them with a stick they start i can hear when chuckling they start to get the results when they see the results that starts to have an impact and effect on their belief systems once their belief systems are altered i no longer have to whack you with the stick because you believe it is making a difference so you will now take on that behavior and you will start to espouse that behavior all right so how did we do that with data so school improvement process data investigation done initially at in our case we did it initially at administration level wide administration level because the rule of two i need my admin to support me i need us to be singing off the same song sheet we then as an administration team get agreement on where we were at that time or where we are once we've done the data investigation we share that with our staff because we're showing this is what we're doing these are those results we were getting and this is now why we are changing that all right let's go to naplan because everyone's familiar with it i shared this with my staff for us for the staff it was an oh my god aha moment i don't have a problem with naplan all right i do not have a problem with naplan at all for me it's just another test i have a problem with what's done with naplan so i'll get that on the table but let's have a look at this down the far end you can see three columns you've got year three year five and year seven i've kept the year seven stuff in because that was when we had year sevens in year three in 2008 to be at national minimum standard you needed 2 out of 25 in spelling in year 5 you needed 6 out of 25 to be at national minimum i do say it is minimum but at national minimum standard and in year seven you needed three words out of 25 spell correctly to be at national minimum standard now when we start breaking down these figures to this raw data it's actually a little bit eye opening because we're no longer saying our kids average our womcy score or nat plans you score whatever you want to call it is 564. what we're saying is five of our kids can spell two out of twenty five there at national minimum standard got fifty percent at national minimum standard what do you do now let's jump up the spelling line go to 2014 2 out of 25 for a year three three out of 25 for year five and four out of 30 for a year seven nothing's changed now when i went to school if i said to my dad dad i passed i got two out of 25 because that's national minimum standard he would have gone no mate 50 surpass all right and i get all the complexities behind it but you can have a look at quickly and i will make this available to you later uh numeracy's the same uh in 2014 we needed 8 out of 35 at year 3 level to be at standard national minimum standard and bearing in mind there's no scaling of numbers here if you get question 1 right that's one score if you get question 30 right that's there's no two points for question 1 and 14 points for question 5. language convention 7 out of 26 in year 3 2014 and in year 7 you needed 10 out of 28 and then if you go down to reading if you get 11 out of 38 in a comprehension test you're at national minimum standard and in year seven in 2014 if you got 14 out of 50 year at national minimum standard and that could be you know the brown dog jumped over the fence what color was the dog it was brown one mark all right so it doesn't differentiate between whether you're answering high order questions or lower order questions you got one right and those scores are consistent they haven't changed much so we shared that with our staff all right that's raw data and that was eye opening as a result of our changes and you can have a look at again this now this is um looking at your the old acara stuff back in 2008 you can see that we were red and dark red so we were below for like schools and below for all schools all will vary below if you jump now to the two green graphs below you can see that in 2019 for all australian schools where well above or slightly above or close to and close to you can be slightly under or over and against like schools we're knocking it out of the park all right our kids didn't change our clients hell haven't changed what's changed is what we're doing within the school the processes we've got in place so it was our instructional framework that's changed it's our beliefs that's changed it's the things that we're doing in the school to ensure we've got sustainability in terms of our programs and improvement but also in staying sustainability in terms of embedding those programs and raising improving the opportunity for success very quickly through this other data because i don't want to spend too much time on this on the left hand side of your screen 2009 this is the pip starter the blue line uh that sits above is the average for all the kids that that sit these tests in the wider scope of things pips is performance indicators in primary schools with a red line so this measures our pre-primary kids now in wa we've also now got um on entry mandated testing which we use as well and we've dropped pips away but you can see that from the one on the graph our kids started below the state and they finished below the state at the end of the year they improved but we're still below jump to reading in 2011 we are the red line and the blue line is everyone else our kids now in pre-primary start the year above where everyone expects well above and finish well above the same in our maths we were well below but we finished well below and you can see how the gap was widening 2000 2011 different story all right our longitudinal spelling so you can see here 2008 now this is against like schools and this is west western australian data we're scooting along 2008 you can see if you remember i said we started tweaking a bit more in 210 211 and 212. all right and then we go further ahead to 11 12 13 14. so our year threes at one point in 2014 we're actually achieving um above the state average for year three year fives all right okay and then you've got the reading same story 2008 to 2012 the like school averages of the dotted lines where the solid lines and then we follow that on 2013 14 15 16 17 you can see sustained improvement okay now that's not serendipitous there's a lot of work that goes into that with the staff um with our leadership group without our phase leaders across the school so how do we do that we change belief we told teachers that we need to align everything and this is pretty powerful this is really good imagery we went from this and this is where you have to go for as a school where you've got everything to this everyone's pulling in the same direction all right in this one everyone's got their own ideas and that's fine but in this one guys this is the way we're going this is what we need to do to ensure that we're all on the same page and for school leaders out there that's very hard to do when you've got a highly intelligent highly motivated highly innovative highly creative group of people because they want to do all of those things and i want them as a school leader to do all of those things but i want them to be going in that direction not that direction because as soon as we start doing this we get misalignment and once we've got misalignment it's now putting a strain on on our resources on our pl on everything because we have to spread it out too far and there we start to get the failure in terms of the success programs this is probably the easiest thing to do as a school leader the standard you walk past is the standard you accept if you see something happening in a school in your in a classroom and this goes for teachers in the classroom with their kids if it's not the right thing you need to do something about it at that point in which you notice it because if you don't start to make that change immediately it will become embedded and remember what i said earlier belief drives behavior we need to get into this very quickly you need to jump on this very quickly particularly when you're bringing about a new change or a new strategy because teachers will take the strategy and implement it the way they believe it needs to be implemented implemented so you can have one pd and everyone leaves that room with their understanding of what that that sessions about or what that program is about when you start walking around the rooms you'll notice that not everyone was on the same page so you need to do something about that straight away so your pl won't be a one-off it's multiple times so first of all we do one for you do one professional learning with the entire staff including eas all right they work with our most battling kids so they need to understand the program and the language so we spend time with them then we send everyone back and at that point we we being the leadership group so we either observe it or teachers start telling us we identify those parts of the programs that people are struggling with implementation dip and then we target professional learning to strengthen that understanding in the area of weakness so it's ongoing pd once that's embedded and understood by everyone it doesn't get put away there's a cycle we're going to do that pd again in a few weeks or a few months just to refresh everyone and we are having this issue in west beach borough primary school at the moment because dummy's sitting here talking to you at the moment forgot that we had a huge turnover of staff and not everyone understood the why we were doing certain programs so i got a bit of a slap in the face and a wake-up call and we've had to go back and we've had to start catching some of these up sorry i thought i took out the year 10 experience of spinning things obviously missed that one powerful image again it takes a raindrop one raindrop to contribute it doesn't take one raindrop to make a pond but all those raindrops combined now that raindrop can be a positive and or a negative all right the more raindrops you put in the bigger the pond will be so the more effort you put into a successful implementation of the strategy then the more likely you hood you have of being successful this is one of the beliefs we needed to change um and it's a mantra within our school now and a lot of other schools picked it up i can't say it's mine it's something i picked off one of my idols jeffrey counter it again along that demographics do not define the destinies of our students we have to change teachers beliefs and again um this ties into two effects one's called the matthew effect and one's called pygmalion effect so i'll touch on this briefly because you have to be aware of this too belief drives behaviour depending on your community that you're teaching in or the community that your school sits there will be a belief in terms of achievement levels of that particular community so again let's come back to my context and then you can recontextualize it for yourself we're we're deemed to be relatively low sei so the matthew effect is saying that you know these this group of people they're not high achievers they're battlers etc etc that's fine that's the belief the pygmalion effect is my belief as the classroom teacher and what i do with it so little johnny comes into my classroom i know he's from a poor background what am i going to do about it i give him a test he fails it okay yeah that's right they are from a poor community so he's just that test results um has vindicated for me that that's true so what i start doing now is something that's known as the pygmalion effect i lower the standards for little johnny and i don't give him the same experiences that i may give a group of kids if i was teaching in adele keith so rather than give him the skill set to rise i bring the skill set down and i drop it down here and pygmalion my fair lady that sort of thing if the teacher changes their beliefs and they provide kids with the scaffolds and the foundations to enable them to achieve then they will achieve all right so we need to look beyond the actual student this is something we also did within the school and this then ties back to what i gave you with that maths example and it's essentially dylan williams talking about if you've got a bad corelia bad curriculum and you teach it really well that's much better than having a really good curriculum and doing a shocking job with it so we had really good programs in terms of our maths programs but it wasn't done really well so now we've got i'm not saying i've got a bad curriculum now but now we've got one program that's done right across the school everything is poured into that program and as a result of that it's taught really well we changed our belief whole school initiatives in terms of what our kids were trying to achieve we had a belief in effective teaching and we understood that it was going to take time so again we identified the strategy we aligned everything in the school so the vision is our children will reach their highest potential in everything so we're going to give kids the opportunity to reach their potential any program we bring into the school does it support that vision does it enable or will it enable our kids to achieve at the highest possible level at their highest possible level not mine but at their highest possible level okay if the answer to that is no we're not using it there's three other things that that program or initiative has to be able to do one it has to build the capacity of the teacher all the school leaders or whoever so it builds capacity so basically it teaches them about spelling or it teaches them about maths or it teaches them about teaching two it has to come from some sort of proven research background and that may even be we visited 15 schools and every one of those schools was using that program at a high level and the students were achieving and the third one it has to bring about student improvement okay now yes sitting in the background of all that and i don't want to underplay this as kids have to be happy to be able to be learning in the pastoral care stuff and we do that very well in the school and we do it very g'day joe i can see you down the bottom we do that very well in this in the school but we're talking about the other things here in terms of bringing programs um into the school or all change into the school it's got to tick those boxes builds teacher capacity or builds capacity in the school um comes from some sort of proven reach research background and it also brings about student in improvement in terms of the outcomes if it can't do one of those we don't it doesn't come in it has to meet all three criteria okay it's as simple as that and sometimes we will do our own research we will say to a teacher look we've or a teacher will say i've got this program we'll go fine go away and do it first of all we check that it fits in with the vision it aligns with what we're doing in the school yes it does okay go and have a crack at it let's see if there's any any difference going on so does does mrs johnson's kids start to achieve a better result i'll give you an example of that spelling mastery is a program we use across the school it is now mandated in the school but it had an interesting journey at west beach borough primary school it was used as an intervention program so the teachers put the kids into i gave the teachers gave the kids to the education assistants and spelling mastery is a direct instruction program it's follow the bouncing ball we use it we've got it's the only di program we've got in the school so it's e-i-d-i when those kids came back from the intervention with spelling mastery we noticed they're actually achieving at higher rates than the kids who are staying in the classroom oh as a principal okay i like data that's telling me something some of the teachers and all teachers are competitive competitive little buggers when you know what can i have a crack at that and they took it on in their classroom yep knock yourself out away you go what i then noticed and what the leadership team noticed and what the teacher's doing it noticed was those classes that were doing spelling mastery were outperforming so a year three classes doing spelling mastery was outperforming when we did the averages those classes in year three that weren't now i can't ignore that data i can't do it so i've got a group of kids that are performing better than another group of kids and i'm not doing it because i can't ignore the data because i want the kids to perform at higher rates and we get accolades i want the kids to be able to be exposed to the same sort of teaching strategy that's going to give them an opportunity to achieve at a higher rate that's what it's about reach their potential back to the vision so we mandated it but to do that we had to take the staff through pd we had to make sure we had support structures in place to enable them to do it in some cases we had to use coaching all right we lorraine came in and did some lorraine dr lorraine hammond or professor associate professor lorraine hammond came in to work with us as well so we made sure we had those processes in place now we didn't leave it at that we went into some classrooms and went why isn't it working in here ah we found out that some teachers and this is where i love eas to death eas will follow the bouncing ball teachers make assumptions oh the guy i assume the kids have got this i'm going to skip this section or skip this page no guys the program was developed by people who invested considerable time and money in creating it you can't go from page one to page four you have to follow the bouncing ball so we went back and we had to do more work around follow the script and work on it now as a direct result of that if if you look at our rankings if you take our sei we are ranked on in sei they rank us at about 401 all right out of 662 schools in western australia our sei says we should be performing it as 401st school in the state all right in 2015 our year three spellers were the third highest spelling kids in the state del keith and at bertha were the only two schools that outperformed our kids in the state little old west beach borough primary school on average now most of our most of our spelling in year three where we float between 10th through to 28th all right now the rankings aren't overly important but what i'm what it illustrates is our kids are achieving at a higher level so we've opened some doors for them and the same within with reading we've opened doors for our kids remember when i spoke about alignment this diagram here now most schools and we are one of those most schools most schools have a plethora of things going on in the background and that's what makes them great schools but there's one thing that sits in there again this is the world according to boyd there's one thing that sits in there that i can still see you laughing joe that uh that is important to everything because if you can't do it you're not going to be successful and that's those two things there all right they are fundamental to everything in there if you can't read good luck doing inquiry all right if you can't do basic math particularly um what do you call it place value good luck problem solving so initially we targeted on those things we invested everything everything was on literacy and numeracy our pd our policies and structures our finances our resources everything was targeted on that we identified a particular teaching program our teaching structure i do we do you do those who know john fleming would be familiar with that but if you do it a bit of background research it actually comes out of the charter schools in the us and prior to that a little a little school over in bedford uk actually i think it's scott scotland not uk the idea where you do then when we got really good at this we did this all right we realigned everything so we brought everything back in and we invested time into that all right so we had a balance in there they're really important because back in 1986 rose and shine identified these six things okay so we invested considerable time in these six things daily review clear presentation materials write down them weekly so we structured we structured our teaching programs in everything not just maths not just literacy everything around these basic six things okay now hattie talks about him masano talks about him uh dewitt talks about it uh who've i missed in there god todd whittaker alludes to it as well so all that stuff that sits in there these are the programs that we use across the school all right jolly phonics initially uh still rather that goes from k through to year two jolly grammar initially only went up to year three and we were using another program in their words their way we started with across the school then we moved to sound waves and now we use jolly grammar right across the entire school and it creates that common language okay so my year my kindy teacher can talk to my year 6 teacher around the language of instruction because it's the same program if we're doing any intervention around grammar then we've got the same program so we can identify particular areas okay remembering and we keep coming back to this with our staff it's the kids right to a free education in western australia or australia in fact it should be the planet and it's our role as teachers to ensure that we enable our kids to reach the highest potential it's my job as a principal to lead my leadership group and provide everything that we can to enable our teachers to perform at the highest possible level if i'm not doing that we're in trouble so we talk about policies these are some of the policies and processes that we've got in our school everyone knows them i can say that quite loudly and proudly because not everyone's in this in fact no one's in this room so no one can argue with me but everything we've got we've got a document for a single go-to every document though we just haven't produced we've taken staff through it a professional learning our school's operational plan the assessment policy now within the assessment policy we've broken that down to because there's no guesswork and we we basically took uh what's what they use in in universities 50 is a c 50 to 60 is a c a b is 70 to 80 if you're getting 80 to 100 then you're an a grade student and we match that with everything else there's no gray areas there and the reason we've done that is because sometimes and i was giving this as a teacher myself back in the day little johnny who drives me insane is a pain in the backside i'm giving him a c but the kid's actually an a student little susan who's quiet as a mouse and i don't know much about she's a gem she's a lovely kid and she got an eye it removes that personality that tends to to cloud when we're looking at at assessing kids so that's in there as well our reading recover our reading teacher reading recognition program outlines the structures and things that teachers are required to do to achieve at a high level if you can just imagine five six and seven of that diagram there initially i do we do you do that is the model of instruction that we started with back in 2010 i'm going to teach so you guys close your mouth and you watch me right now we're going to do some we do we'll work together and then we move to you do okay there's obviously a lot more in there we spent a lot of time going through with teachers this is what an idol is as soon as i ask a kid a question i've moved away from an idol into a we do and we had to teach the teachers that during the i do we also had to teach teachers the concept of self-talk talk out aloud what you're actually doing and louisa mitch talks about this and i loved it to death because it was a again another light bulb moment for my staff she talked about reading and b and and working through problems aloud so i'm trying to think of a sentence here mary mark and paul went to the shop they bought now as an adult reader i know that they is mary mark and paul there will be kids in my class particularly little kids who haven't made that jump from mary mark and paul to they they will ask the question in their head who's they they's not even at the shop mary mark and paula at the shop not they the cheetah runs very fast it i know as an adult reader it is the cheetah there will be kids out there that haven't made that connection so when we go through reading when we're reading to kids and we're working through comprehension we've taught our staff to read aloud to think it out so the kids can who can't make those connections can see the connections and understand what you're doing so we're modeling it for them okay louisa mitch does a great session on that i um encourage anyone out there who is not familiar with louisa to read some of her works because she's done a lot of work around that all right then we move to the we do now we got we've been criticized as a school because we're we're we use explicit instruction not di we've got a di program but use explicit instruction in terms of we break it down into various steps we do is where we bring in our cagan strategies and our cooperative learning strategies because that's the time where we're seeing if the kids can apply it and where me as the teachers walking around and identifying areas of weakness okay sorry i'm picking a little johnny today little johnny hasn't got it and susan hasn't all right guys stop we're going back to when i do look at me off you go show that again back to we do and we did a lot of work with our teachers around the wedo strategy so again we ran pd we gave them the resources we coached them on it we ran instructional rounds we provided mentoring everything that we could do and it wasn't a one-off we kept coming back to it and the in the current situation in the school and i'm not here um rachel lair is his uh deputy principal and gail higgins is the principal they give this teachers a focus at the start of the year at the start of the week and they say this week when we're coming into your room this is what we're looking for now it's not a whacking stick they go into the classroom rachel goes and watches what the teachers are doing and she gets into every single room in the school and she provides feedback our focus for this was our focus today was positive feedback i love the way that you were talking to johnny and she actually doesn't just say talking to johnny but describes how the teacher was doing it so it's actually constructive feedback for the teacher all right again not a whacking stick and those of you that are familiar with um with instructional leadership again instructional leadership isn't about not instructional leadership um coaching sorry coaching is not about making the teacher the best teacher they can be it's about making them aware of the things that they need to do to raise themselves to being the best teacher that they can be it's the old leader horse to water can't drink all right so let's quickly go over the rest of that stuff we then got introduced to or we'd already done that but we then looked at some of hollingworth and yobara's work and remember when i said we look it's important you do your alignment stuff there's no point bringing something in that isn't going to support what you're already doing hollingsworth and yabara stuff sat in beautifully with i do we do you do because we were activating prior knowledge we had a lesson in tension and success criteria and you can see also see stuff in there that had he's starting to talk about so we didn't just tack something on we said to the teachers look this is what we're going to bring this is what we're going to bring in and this is where it sits within our model because again some of them immediately won't say what's happening to id we do you do well it's still there it's in here all we're saying is you need to give the kids the lesson intention and you need to provide the success criteria and what did we do when we brought that in we went around to the rooms and we made sure that it was happening and if it wasn't happening we asked why not why so we can whack you with a stick but why so is it why because we haven't given you the support is it why because you don't understand what the importance of it is it why because you don't have the resources and we built the capacity of the staff around bringing in understanding why we do lessen intention on the far right hand side is the stuff that had he started doing around visible learning again surface knowledge deep knowledge and transfer of learning we brought that in for the teachers we didn't just tack it on we showed them where it sat so when we're talking about surface knowledge we're talking about one to six deep knowledge is where they move to the you do part because at the you do they're demonstrating that they can actually understand that concept and they can apply it somewhere and then the transfer of knowledge again what he talks about the transfer of knowledge is the problem solving so you can see how our little model of instruction went from one two three i do we do you do to grow to one to nine to then tack on the hatty stuff that supports what we're already doing so everything that we're bringing into the school and everything that we we bring into the school has to come back to i'm gonna jump all the way back here look at that don't get too this structure i could jump out of it but i'd be scared that i'd lose it where we've got everything aligning again so our programs are strategies alignment policy and processes do they all match if they don't then we need to get rid of them okay and then what support do we need in there and then how are we checking that that stuff's actually being implemented in the first place or successfully all right uh let's jump back here we're nearly there sorry for talking at you folks [Music] okay now the final challenge for you and for us was to get the success of your programs to such a state that you just you cannot hold back the power of what's going on and this is where um where you've got this is a hard because where you've got again schools that are full of teachers that are innovative creative passionate and driven the sort of teachers you want in your school you have to make sure that they're still pulling that slay in the same way so again you have to be checking and this is where the failure comes in for most programs we're not checking that everyone's on the same page we're not checking that everyone has the same understanding we're not checking that everyone's got the resources we're not going over the pl again it's a constant cycle it's not a one-off so those schools and those communities say oh yeah we did the pd on that and what did you do after it oh no we didn't we did another payday on something else i can guarantee you that as terms of a whole school implementation success that's destined to fail there might be one teacher because and i use she because it tends to be a ladies a ladies profession the guys for some reason shy away and it's usually because the guys are lazy too the ladies get it the ladies make it successful because they are a highly effective teacher in the first place and they will make it work and you have all seen those teachers that could have kept the titanic afloat and you've all seen those teachers that would have sunk the ark because it's not the t it's not the program that's important it's actually the teacher and more importantly it's the processes that you as a school leader and leadership team have put in place to enable your teachers to be successful in bringing about their implementation it's not a one-off if you think bringing something in and it's going to be successful is going to happen you are absolutely kidding yourself absolutely kidding yourself you need to invest time and again if i bring this back to a classroom level because i know there's some classroom teachers out there and then there's even eas watching today if you want to be successful at something you have to stick with it and then you have to go and get the additional professional learning and the resources and the support to enable you to do that if you want the kids to do it what do you do you drill drill drill drill you keep going it's the same as a school leader i drill the staff in it we provide them with the support we remind them we go through and we do the checking we don't just say there it is off you go and hope that it works and the leadership team here i know they do and they did when i was here and something i did we're always in the rooms so we know what's going on we can come back to the standard you walk past is the standard you accept we can fix things up when we see them and i'll leave you with this one to open up for questions i think because i think i've gone over my time yeah the key one to this and i love this pond but the the most important for me is the strength of the pack is the wolf and the strength of the wolf is the pack which some sums up schools those schools that do things really well that have successful implementation of highly effective structures that are sustainable in the school those are the schools that understand that each teacher each player has an important part to play and that the strength of the individual wolf or the individual teacher comes from the strength of the collective or collective efficacy if you want to go to that level okay so you have to as school leaders ensure that you have built that collective efficacy so that everyone understands that they are not just can do it but they are capable of doing it and why do they have to understand that because it comes back to that initial statement i made that belief drives behaviour so endeth the lesson well ray thank you so much that i really got heaps out of that as a former school leader and um in a leadership position at the moment i learned heaps out of that today so i'd like to thank you personally and certainly on behalf of all of the participants who came tonight uh do we have any questions we've got a few minutes lots of nice comments hope i wasn't too much of a slinky brain people i tend to jump around a bit i haven't had my tablet take there you go anne sums it up i think right best arrow i've spent for a very long time and i totally agree that um i look i i hope people got something out of it michael the hard bit is it's um what i don't want to come across is this is the only way to do it it's about thinking it's about um the things you need to consider and give and give careful consideration to something's not work before you throw a program if it if it's aligned and you want the program before you throw the program out ask yourself why is that failing because you can always find a school that's been successful with the program and you can always find schools that fail with the program so you've got to ask yourself why is why is it working there and not working here what is it there doing that we are not doing um and if you get those structures in place even if it's bad and come back to what dylan williams said you know a bad curriculum taught well even if it's bad if you've got if you're doing it to the best of your ability and you're supporting your staff and you're giving them then that's got to be better than doing nothing at all surely uh thanks for everyone just a reminder that this presentation will be on our youtube channel in the next couple of days so look out for it there there's also you can go to our back catalog there and next week we have tessa de fern who is the director of literacy education solutions and the senior honorary fellow from the university of wollongong she's talking about assessment informed practices in teaching spelling so look out for that one next week ray also mentioned louisa moats we do have her coming up in a couple of months time so look out for that and thanks so much for everybody's time tonight hopefully i'll see you all next week thanks very much thanks ray it's a pleasure mike thanks for the invitation my my only question on on the way out and i'll i'll stop the recording as someone who