Vision and Values

The standard for Principals, the role in action.
Leadership requirements

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Cocooning Children

Once a boy  found a caterpillar. He carefully picked it up and took it home to show his mother. He asked his mother if he could keep it, and she said he could if he would take good care of it. The little boy got a large jar from his mother and put plants to eat, and a stick to climb on, in the jar. Every day he watched the caterpillar and brought it new plants to eat.

 One day the caterpillar climbed up the stick and started acting strangely. The boy’s mother explained that the caterpillar was creating a cocoon and was going to go through a metamorphosis and become a butterfly.

The boy watched every day, waiting for the butterfly to emerge. One day it happened, a small hole appeared in the cocoon and the butterfly started to struggle to come out.

At first the boy was excited, but soon he became concerned. The butterfly was struggling so hard to get out! It looked like it couldn’t break free! It looked desperate! It looked like it was making no progress!

The boy was so concerned he decided to help. He got a pair of scissors, and snipped the cocoon to make the hole bigger and the butterfly quickly emerged!

As the butterfly came out the boy was surprised. It had a swollen body and small, shrivelled wings. He continued to watch the butterfly expecting that, at any moment, the wings would dry out, enlarge and expand to support the swollen body. He thought that in time the body would shrink and the butterfly’s wings would expand.

But neither happened!

The butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shrivelled wings.

It never was able to fly…

The boy tried to figure out what had gone wrong and learned that the butterfly was SUPPOSED to struggle. In fact, the butterfly’s struggle to push its way through the tiny opening of the cocoon pushes the fluid out of its body and into its wings. Without the struggle, the butterfly would never, ever fly. The boy’s good intentions hurt the butterfly.

Struggling is an important part of any growth experience. Muscles don’t grow without be stretched. Our school values include resilience and persistence. TfEL (Teaching for Effective Learning) 2.4 is about Challenge and (appropriate) support. How difficult this becomes when (some/many) parents continually “rescue” their children. As the boy in the story, the parents might be well meaning but the result is children who cannot “fly”.

As part of the school’s Virtues program, we work with parents to enable children to develop resilience and persistence through struggling and embracing challenge. The following message to parents that I observed at Tapping Primary School WA (A Play Is The Way Lighthouse School) will soon be on posters around our school:

No False Rescues

Falsely rescuing children from emotional discomfort and difficulty weakens their resiliency and lessens their ability to persevere.

 We rescue when a someone is struggling to breathe, not when one is struggling to swim in a swimming lesson.Cocooning children will never allow them to fly.

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The Mouldy Mug

I am not writing this post to take the opportunity of having a cheap shot at Port Adelaide Football Club supports despite the caption on the mug clearly showing Port Adelaide Football Club which strongly implies that the mug was owned by Magpies or Power supporter. I say “owned” because after taking the photo I disposed the mug in the bin. What is not as obvious is that the coffee residue in this mug had dried thickly and a caffeine addicted spider had created a web above the foul, pungent stain. This mug had been sitting on a bench for months partly hidden from view by other jetsam which someone had discarded.

This mouldy mug illustrates a deeper issue that is the elephant in this case, our staffroom. What does it say when a mug is left for months in a public place and no-one deals with it? What does it say when after any break there are teaspoons or mugs left in the sink? What does it say when coffee rings are left on a table or bench, burnt cheese on the sandwich toaster or food and crumbs left on the staffroom table on a Friday evening? I could go on about papers left on staffroom tables, benches and floors, dirty trays in the oven and the stove top filthy… but I won’t.

In an institution which has a role in teaching values to children, why do we have such difficulty in modelling basic values such as respect and care to our colleagues? Dropping a spoon into the sink is actually saying that I expect someone else to do this for me. I do not respect my colleagues enough to wash, dry and put away a spoon. I am happy for you to clean up my mess left in the sandwich maker because my time is more important than yours. I will ignore the mess on the staffroom table and bench because I know that someone else will do it. Those wonderful staffroom fairies will magically make everything right.

My dear mum would always say to me, “Honest in a little, Honest in a lot.” Any value here can be substituted here.

I did not set out to Crow about the since departed Port Adelaide Mug. I simply want to state that for a school culture to be truly values driven, collaborative and supportive we need to get the little things right to enable the big things to happen.

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“All Wretch and No Vomit”

What if money was no object? (Youtube)

The day after I watched this inspiring Youtube movie, I had two troubling conversations. I spoke with a group of student teachers about my first year at teachers college when we all went out prac teaching in the first term. After the week of being in classes full time and even taking a few lessons, 3 of the group of 9 student teachers changed course because they realised that teaching was not their passion.

The second conversation was with the daughter of a close friend who was also studying to become a teacher. She said that she was not sure if she wanted to be a teacher. She said that she went into teaching because her father, relatives and friends were teachers or studying to become teachers. I asked her what her passion was and what she would do if money was no concern and she immediately responded that she would be musician, sound engineer and song writer.

My question to the student teachers was about their passion for teaching. Do we as a society want teachers who are not truly passionate about children and their learning? How many of us would remain teaching if we won the lottery – if money was no concern? Those who would remain are the passionate ones. They are the ones making the biggest difference. They are the ones making a positive difference to our futures child by child.

The role of a teacher is so demanding, complex, emotionally taxing and challenging. The rewards are intrinsic and may not be realised for weeks, months or years. For those who do not have teaching as their vocation, who are not passionate about what they do, then each day could be “all wretch and no vomit”!

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Being a Lead Learner

My first post was pondering was about the “apprenticeship by observation” being a reason for the slowness of change in the teaching profession. In this blog are some thoughts about how I as a leader can influence this.

Guy Claxton, in a recent seminar I attended, encouraged Principals to replace the sign on their door with “Lead Learner”. Being a Learning Leader I must model someone who can work successfully with uncertainty, admit failings, take risks and to admit that I do not have all the answers. I believe that I must be well read and to have authenticity and conviction in my views and expectations based on latest research and learning. I have to have credibility to be able to fail honestly and not fail because I don’t know my stuff.

How do the things I do as leader constantly display inquiry, risk taking and challenge? How do I encourage teachers rooms, lessons and language to constantly display the same.

Markeeta commented on the previous post: “As a new teacher, I know I am very wary of rocking the boat because whilst I *do* have new ideas and would like try a different approach the reality is that the ‘establishment’ isn’t particularly keen on change. So… I tread gently because I can’t affect any change if I don’t have a job.”

I believe a leader’s role is to encourage innovation, risk taking and creativity in teachers. How can we expect teachers to encourage this in children when they themselves feel stifled to model it themselves? Some of the most significant programs we have at our school have not come about through my leading but through me supporting those willing to take risks and to take the lead. I include such successful innovations at Hackham East Primary as the single sex classes and innovative learning spaces. It is my role to enable innovation by removing the barriers to it. People do not innovate if they feel they are being judged. It is necessary for a leader to ask the right questions, to examine and clarify purpose but in a way that supports and empowers the innovator..

If this attitude is constantly modelled by me, then perhaps teachers will be more willing to follow the lead from me, the Lead Learner when I need to lead out front.

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Eduthoughts – pondering learning

My first Eduthoughts post is pondering on why the thousands of hours and millions of dollars spent in Training and Professional Development of teachers has resulted in such little change in effective pedagogy and student achievement. Even the most current technologies are often than not wrapped in a dated pedagogy which does not redefine and transform learning but rather substitutes paper for digital.

I hear Peter Taylor use the phrase “apprenticeship by observation” when explaining why so many teachers teach the way they were taught and I have been pondering it ever since. It worried me deeply because the implications are significant.

As babies and then as children we make sense of our world through observation and make meaning through association. We learn language because we are absorbed in it – observation, listening and mimicking are our teachers. We learn our morals, ethics, eating habits in the same way and these are often very well developed before we enter school. Then at school we observe teachers daily for 12 or more years and make sense of what school is all about: we learn school. We learn that to be successful we must conform because that is what most teachers want us to do. We hear the importance of risk taking, of being creative, of being individuals but are never given authentic opportunities to do so because we are told what and how to learn. Our patterns of “doing school” are set through this 12 year apprenticeship.

A habit or pattern of behaviour reinforced for 12 years is extremely difficult to change as it becomes default behaviour.

The old put down, “Those who can do and those who can’t teach.” may not be the case but is there any truth in a “teaching natural selection”? That after the 12 year apprenticeship those who are attracted to teaching are those who learnt to “do school” successfully, those who conformed and those who were successful at what the teachers expected and valued? “The apple does not fall far from the tree.”

It is a minority of teachers who “think different”, who do not conform , who continually question and strive to transform their new learning into a new default. Evolution teaches that significant change takes eons. The kids of today cannot wait.

How do we disrupt the apprenticeship to make the minority the majority?