Jenny Cole: 1:02

Hello and welcome. Today I am recording on Cocos Islands because I was thinking about a number of things and thought you know what I'm just gonna plug in my headphones. Put down in words what I've been thinking about as I've been having my breakfast. So the audio quality on this is probably not what I would like. I'm in a quiet room but it's probably very echoey and there is definitely an air conditioner and a fan running, so please excuse me. So what have I been thinking about?

Jenny Cole: 1:36

This has been percolating for a little while now because, as you know, I work a lot with teacher leaders who are perhaps in charge of the SAIA committee or the STEM committee or even sort of heads of learning or heads of year. But today I'm talking specifically about those teachers who may be in charge of running a particular curriculum priority area where there might be business plan targets or outcomes that the school is trying to seek. But I'm also thinking about teachers who've been given additional responsibility or taken out of the classroom for parts of the week and have been given a role again a learning support role or a literacy coach role or a math support role. And while I think it is absolutely sensational that we are giving additional responsibilities and ownership and leadership to some of our gun teachers. I'm seeing some real challenges for them in particular, but some possible waste of resources and time and energy on the school's behalf. And it comes down to setting a vision. Now we know the importance of vision. We know that one of the roles of a senior leader in a school or in an organization is to set the vision. We really clear about the moral purpose and where we're going, and then to work with others in the school to develop business plans and targets, clear directions for what success looks like.

Jenny Cole: 3:26

But I think we miss a really key ingredient and that is the ability for teacher leaders doesn't matter if you're leading your PLC or the Literacy Committee to also have a very clear understanding of what it is that we are trying to achieve. And, importantly, if you've got a specialist role, if you've been released or been given extra responsibility to run something, what does it look like? If you're successful, what's the vision for your role? So what do we do? We choose our gun teachers.

Jenny Cole: 4:05

We find that person who is super keen on some element of literacy they might be doing structured literacy, or they might be the person who is super keen on IT and we've given them some responsibilities to lead digital literacy, and those people launch into that, doing the best that they can and, given that they've just come out of a classroom, what they think is their best is to make it easier for teachers, and I am all for making it easier for teachers, but one person spending a day a week creating new resources, building new things, buying your equipment, implementing new programs, is not making it easier for teachers. In fact, it often makes it harder. And so I see these really keen people who are working super hard to create 40,000 literacy texts that the year twos can use and then saying to their colleagues here use these, use these, use these. Or the person who's in charge of the new maths priority, who thinks that the best thing that they can do is to go out and research all the programs that are out there prime and Oxford Maths and goodness knows what else exists do all the research, work out which one is the best and then bring it to the committee and implement it. None of this makes it easier for teachers. None of this makes it easier for that fabulous young leader who thinks that they're doing the right thing. So let's take a step back.

Jenny Cole: 5:44

I reckon that running a focus area, a committee, even a PLC, in a school is like going on a holiday, and that is in order to have a really successful holiday. You need to have done quite a lot of planning and, in fact, sometimes the joy is in the planning, but that's a story for another day. So let's imagine that your phase of learning team is a family and that family is going on a holiday and you put one person in charge of loosely organizing the holiday, even though everybody else has a say. So that person who's in charge of the holiday has this vision that they should go to Disneyland, because they've been to Disneyland before and Disneyland is awesome, and so they are busy finding information about Disneyland, getting information about flights, checking with travel agents, looking online, joining Disneyland communities on Facebook and absolutely deep diving into what it's going to take to go to Disneyland. And then they purchase enough tickets for everyone in the family and they get to the point where they're trying to organize everybody to pack and they look around their family or their phase of learning team and some people have packed their snorkel and their flippers, other people have packed snow gear and fluffy hats and other people have got their very best hiking boots or packed. And that leader is like but guys, we're going to Disneyland.

Jenny Cole: 7:26

And then people say but I didn't want to go to Disneyland, I wanted to go swimming, I wanted to go snorkelling off the coral reef. Somebody else says, oh yeah, Disneyland's lovely, but we've done that before, I don't want to go to Disneyland anymore, I'm going to go hike up a mountain. The third person goes Disneyland I want to go to Disneyland. Well, Disneyland's great and everything, and I'll do a bit of Disneyland. But after we go to Disneyland, would you mind if we go skiing in Banff? Because I'm okay with Disneyland, but after that, would you mind if we just tweak that a little bit and like do a bit of my stuff while we're over there?

Jenny Cole: 8:01

What's happened here is that someone with keen enthusiasm has decided that they know what it is that needs to happen but somehow have not bought the rest of the team along with them. That person then gets very disenfranchised and disenchanted going doing all of this work and no one appreciates me. And then they go to their school leader and have a conversation and say I'm just really upset because nobody's doing the programs. And then the school leader says something very passive about oh, you're doing a lovely job, keep going. And there that fabulous, young often young, not always young teacher is stuck knowing how to get people on that plane or that bus that's going to Disneyland and how to convince them. So all of a sudden they're pushing a rock up hill. Let's stop this analogy before it gets too complicated.

Jenny Cole: 9:00

There's a couple of things missing here, and it starts with the very first question about what to success look like, and there's two parts of this. There's what does success look like for the person, that keen teacher who's taken on that responsibility Asking the line manager, the deputy or principal? If I am the best literacy committee coordinator this year, what would you like to have seen me do? What are the outcomes? Not what am I doing, but what will I have achieved and what will you notice in me? What do you want? And, in the words of Brene Brown, paint done so as a literacy committee coordinator. What does it look like if I have done the best job ever?

Jenny Cole: 9:48

And a good senior leader will say something like you have progressed the targets of the school business plan. You have led a change process whereby people feel like they have come along on that journey with you you will have established the best practice ways of meeting the outcomes for students. So you will have looked at some data. You would have got some evidence. You would have perhaps researched the best way to do literacy. You would have worked with your team to come up with some guiding principles and then perhaps trial those in classrooms bought it back. You know, run a beautiful change management process, particularly if you're at the beginning of the journey. Hopefully, what a senior leader will never say is I want you to have done this and done that and bought a program and got everybody on board, because this is what our new leaders do.

Jenny Cole: 10:48

New leader mistake 101 is to equate success with having implemented a program. We've bought spelling mastery and we've implemented it. Or we've bought prime maths and all classes have the books and have done all the PL. There's nothing wrong with that fundamentally, but have you led people through a change process that leads to better outcomes for students? We've all seen those fabulous, keen teachers in fact I've been one of them where I think that the best thing that I can do for teachers is to make lots of resources and share all the ideas and put a million things into the shared drive that people can access resources, resources, resources.

Jenny Cole: 11:38

When I look in schools, there are no shortage of resources. I understand some schools are the exception. Nor is there any shortage of expertise. What we are short on is good quality conversations that join those things together. How is our teaching going to improve if we use prime maths? How is our data collection going to improve if we use elastic? If we send everybody off to shaping minds training, how is that going to improve the outcomes for students? What do we want it to look like? When you go back and look at that analogy between Disneyland is getting really clear about where we're going first, so that we don't waste an awful lot of time. If you've been in my workshops, you'll know that I ask PLCs to consider the reason we exist.

Jenny Cole: 12:33

What is the reason that this Year 2 PLC phase of learning team exists? What is the reason why this electricity or STEM committee exists? Why do we meet as a student services team? Let's give this a go. I'm just shooting the breeze here, but the reason. A literacy committee might exist and it will change depending how long it's been in action, but the reason the Student Services Committee exists is to give kids the strategies they need to regulate so that they end up back in classrooms engaged and ready to learn Easy. The reason the literacy committee exists is to guide best practice, to ensure teachers are supported to provide high quality teaching and learning in literacy.

Jenny Cole: 13:17

The reason why those statements are important is because at the beginning of every phase of learning team, student services team, literacy committee, you want to be repeating the reason we exist so that you don't end up down some rabbit hole about the reason we exist is to buy a program. That might be one of the things that you do, so when you're made as a student services team. The reason we exist is to support teachers, to help kids regulate so they can return to classrooms engaged and ready to learn. That might mean one of the strategies is to investigate getting a program and a way of teaching that allows kids to self-regulate and therefore return to classroom ready to learn. But you're only investigating a program that's going to make that happen and then upskilling, training teachers and ensuring that they've got the skills to do that.

Jenny Cole: 14:10

The reason why your year two phase of learning team exists is to get clear on high quality, high impact teaching and learning at this year level, and so if you are spending time in those committees talking about whose job it is to bring in the toys at the end of the school day. That's not high quality, high impact teaching and learning strategies for year two, and the leader of that group has a role to say. This is not what we're here for. These are important conversations, but that's not what we're in this group for. That's not our remit. So getting clear on where we're heading and where you're heading should have a direct line to the school business plan.

Jenny Cole: 14:56

If you cannot see that what you're doing connects directly to the school business plan, then one of you is out of whack. So if you're the literacy coach and you cannot say that what you are doing has a direct line to something that is a target in the school business plan, then you might want to talk to your line manager about what your role is. If you're ahead of the STEM committee and there's nothing in the school business plan about STEM or there's not a clear vision of what STEM will look like in your school, then you might want to have a conversation with your line manager about the purpose of this committee, this initiative and so forth. And just a little word of warning to people who are super keen and running additional things in schools off your own bat, doing exciting and showing initiative. The best way to convince your line manager that this is worth doing, worth giving funding to, worth giving time to, is to show a link to the school business plan, the school strategic plan. If you can show that your incursion of some fantastic person that's going to cost a lot of money is actually going to help the school meet their school targets, then that's how you want to be selling it. So let's just go back a little bit.

Jenny Cole: 16:17

One of the key mistakes that a lot of beginning leaders make is that they use their expertise and classroom based knowledge and enthusiasm and apply that exact same model to leading in a school. But just a reminder that doing is not leading and sometimes leading is not about being the expert. It's about getting everybody else that you work with to know as much as you do and to be able to implement and follow things through in the same way that you do. If you've just been pulled out of a classroom to do all the things in the area of your specialty, then chances are you will just burn out and not leave any sustainable impact on the school, because anything that you've been running and pushing and anything that you know about that hasn't become a joint responsibility with everybody else. The minute you leave, that initiative falls into a heap.

Jenny Cole: 17:22

So the role of a leader is to grow the expertise and confidence of others and to lead change in a way that is sustainable. So make sure that you know really clearly where it is that whatever you're leading is heading. Where are we going? How will we know if we're successful? Who have we got on board? What are their strengths? What do they bring? Before you think too much about how you're going to get there, because if you think you're going to Disneyland, it's obvious that you're going to need a plane, but if everybody else thinks that they're going to Rottnest, they might be better off in a boat. A plane is an option, but a boat is more useful. So knowing where you're going, knowing how that fits, being really clear about the destination, helps you choose the how and it helps you get everybody else on board.

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