Christine Cawsey

• What is educational leadership centred around learning? Building leadership capacity and sustainability.
• First question – talk with your neighbours about why you go to work each day.
• If you haven’t told your story to other people in your school about why you go to work each, why should anyone else go to work with you? Need to talk about our purposes and why you and the others come to work.
• Why did we bother to become teachers and leaders? What is the legacy we hope to leave?
• Do some serious backward mapping – from the type of great teaching back to the kind of leadership to get that in the school.
• Showed the “what do you want to build?” slide. To understand Australian culture, need to know a bit about cricket – USA = baseball. That gives her the theme for the session. What do you want to build in your school? Check the list on the slide.
• She has 30/75 teachers in first 3 years and all her subject heads are in their first appointment. High staff turnover. So she has to build a climate of professional practice in her school.

We have to teach “poor kids” the skills “rich kids” already know – the skills that help them to succeed at school. The heart of the matter is that requiring solid, challenging, interesting work on a par with what excellent public and private schools demand works, with poor kids and all kids.  Anything else is insane.  Monroe (1999: 20)

• The heart of the matter (Lorraine Munro): her methods are not great; her philosophy is excellent. Poor kids are those who do not know how to succeed at school. Why would we not want to look after vulnerable children?
• So draw a tree. Or imagine the drawing of a tree that you would do if you had a pen. Share the tree drawing with your friend. Did it have a trunk? Branches? Leaves? Post-modern? But did it have roots? The tree as a metaphor (can’t use Schein’s iceberg) – half the tree lives under the ground – will blow over even in good times if no roots. So can see only half the things that really form the tree. Below are the values and norms that form the basis of the “thing”.
• Tree activity slide: why does a maths coordinator look the same in all schools – because of the very strong culture across schools. Have to be able to describe the way things look at your school, otherwise your school is dysfunctional.
• The Principal … slide: set of values for Principals in NSW.

• Ethical in developing and implementing a values-driven educational culture
• Visionary, whilst being realistic about what can be achieved
• Motivated, flexible and innovative, whilst maintaining high standards and expectations
• Responsive to the demands and implications of local, national and global change
• Oriented to improved learning outcomes
• Able to create learning environments and structures to meet students’ needs
• Active in promoting, modelling and sharing leadership
• Strategic in school planning and working within the political context
• Effective in working with human and material complexities
• Accountable to the school-community and key stakeholders.

• Rooty Hill values and beliefs - slide 7. Our school is not values-neutral in any way. Everything you do and say all day will tell people who you are and what you think – in school, at home, everywhere. So we “do” values all the time, even sitting here. Focus around the school motto = “Persist”. Committed to Choice Theory. Underpins everything they do.
• Have to start with values – need to know what yours are. Educational leadership slide = her reason for going to work each and every day. This is the contract with the parents of her school’s students. Goes to work about learning – hers and theirs.
• Some trends: We are doing very well at the top, but we have a growing gap between the top and the bottom. We are responsible for being the voice for those who have no voice of their own – our students and their parents.
• Sustainable learning focuses on the learning, not the performance of the learning.
• Figure 1 slide 10 – from a report buried by the NSW Dept of Education. Public students carry more than their share – we have more students with difficulties for learning. 
• Have to teach the students we have, not the ones we would like to have. So we have to teach the ones we have to be the ones we want to have – also for the teachers.
•  What changes would you make? Slide 12.
•  Strategic leadership is multilevel work (slide 13). Can have some things (e.g. uniform). Underpinning those things are the things we do (rituals, myths, processes, etc.) and under that are the things we want to be (focus on the main game, not stressed, etc.). So be what you want to be.
•  Next slide – the table with the 3 columns. Fill in the boxes for your school. 
• Strategy & innovation - the key to educational leadership - slide 15. Focus on how to build those capitals. David Hargreaves says that you can change at any of the levels – but if you change at one level, it will flow through to other levels. It takes 8-10 years to shift culture, if everyone is on side. So work at the strategic level – high leverage activities – that is where change happens. It means that some things will have to be dropped in order to focus the resources on the changed activities. 
• 5 pillars of learning - slide 16. Spend most time on the top two (instructional pedagogy). Those can be measured. But the bottom three (relational pedagogy) are the important ones. 50 years from being able to measure all of them. But as practitioners, we know when they are going well.
• Big educational ideas - slide 18. Have to give teachers the resources they need to do their job properly.

• Depth and/or breadth
• Concepts and big ideas as the basis of linking learning
• Explicit teaching of content and skills
• Literacy – what is it?
• Learning – curriculum, assessment & pedagogy
• Differentiation
• Personalisation
• Technology
• Quality Teachers, teaching & professional learning
• Rigour in a culture of inclusion
  

• Importance of what teachers do - slide 20. Write down the 5 features of a good lesson. 
• Slide 21 - the between class differences are greater than the between school differences. See the triangle. Difference between experienced and inexperienced teachers was a major one in her school. 
• The Challenge - slide 22. No time to waste while inexperienced teachers learn their craft. Need to deliver immediately. So need to develop programs that inexperienced teachers can deliver like experts.
  

• Research into student achievement and social skills in NSW indicates that students do best when they are taught by experienced teachers.
• The challenge is to create teachers who can teach like experienced teachers within 1 – 2 years because students only get one chance at any one year of schooling.
• The related challenge is to develop teaching and learning programs that allow inexperienced teachers to teach like expert teachers.

• Intellectual rigour - slide 23 – one of 6 elements in NSW.
• Quality learning environment - slide 24 – 2nd one of the 6 elements. 
• Significance (slide 25) = making the work relevant to the kids. Showed an improvement in connectedness. 
• So what do the teachers need to develop? Bill Loudon and John Hatty have done some great work that they have used at RHHS. 36 things that good teachers do well. (Part on slide 26) 
• Use the stages of learning model (slide 28). 
• Levels of expertise - slide 29. 
• 40% of secondary principals in NSW are in their first 3 years of their principalship. So can’t work on state policy – they are still learning their craft. 
• Building capacity in teachers - slide 30. 
• BBC tool (slide 31) – lesson outline of every lesson every day. List of sections in each lesson. Do now = connected to yesterday or their lives. 
• Building sustainable leadership - slide 32. 2 main points.

1. The leadership paradox is that everyone thinks school leadership is important but nobody can actually show that it is.
2. The moral and ethical coupling of teachers in schools around values and models of distributed leadership may be explanations.

• Want sustainability, not maintainability - slide 33. #7 is a great one – build on traditions, not throw them out.

1. Depth – sustainable leadership matters
2. Length – sustainable leadership lasts
3. Breadth – sustainable leadership spreads
4. Justice – sustainable leadership does no harm and actively improves the surrounding environment
5. Diversity – sustainable leadership builds cohesive diversity
6. Resourcefulness – sustainable leadership develops and does not deplete material and human resources
7. Conservation – sustainable leadership honours and learns from the best of the past to create an even better future.

• Levels of distributed leadership – neglect is not always bad, as long as you have experts, and if the neglect is benign.

1. Instruct – initiative and ideas come only from the top and can seem arbitrary and unexpected.
2. Consult – staff are given opportunities for input, even though decisions are still largely made higher up
3. Delegate – staff make decisions and exercise initiative within clear areas of responsibility and accountability
4. Facilitate – ideas are solicited, taken up and championed at every level
5. Neglect – people are forced to take initiative and responsibility because there is lack of interest or direction at the top. (Hargreaves & Fink, 2006)
   

• What do leaders do? Slide 35 – plan, coordinate, … (Viviane Robinson, NZ). 
• Loudon & Hatty’s work – Effect size slides 36 & 37. As leaders, we can protect instructional quantity and influence instructional quality. 
• Leaders establish goals … slide 38.

  • Leaders establish goals and set expectations (0.35 effect size).
  • Leader(s) have clear academic and learning goals.
  • Leaders get staff consensus about learning goals.
  • Leaders embed an academic goal focus in school and classroom routines.

• Blue squares (slide 39) – everyone is learning about leadership at our school. Learning, leadership and achievement is what we are one about. 
• Leaders ensure … slide. Lots of time on communication. Neuro-linguistic programming. When you can educate, you do and work from the inside out. Where you can’t educate, you have to regulate.

• Leaders ensure orderly and supportive learning environments (0.27 effect size).
• The leader protects instructional time.
• Leadership keeps faculty morale high while focused on learning.
• Staff conflict is identified and addressed quickly and effectively.

• Leaders are strategic … slide 43. Management supports leadership – self and other things that we responsible for.

• Leaders are  seen to be strategic in resourcing teaching & learning (0.34 effect size).
• Leaders are seen to be effective providers of teacher resources (even with resource constraints).
• Leaders have “appointed” more of their current staff.

• Leaders participate … slide 45. Double the effect size of all other factors. Get to be leaders because you are good teachers.

• Leaders participate and promote teacher learning & development (0.84 effect size).
• Leaders are active participants in teacher learning & development.
• Leaders are active participants in informal discussions with teachers about teaching.
• The principal is seen a source of pedagogical advice and expertise.

• Uses the Quality Management tools (slide 46). Individual capacity matrix – slide 47 – put some evidence in each box of a thing that has been achieved in the school. Example from an English teacher at RHHS (slide 48).
  

Strategic leadership is committed to stupidity prevention.

• Then watch the movie.