Minimise the Rhetoric and Reality Gap but get the Rhetoric Right!

The following is the edited case study written for an upcoming ACER Press publication, Digital Teachers. It was written in dot point form to conform to the editors' requirements.

Preface

Allan Shaw is Principal of The Knox School, an independent, co-educational ELC-12  in Melbourne, Australia.

This case study tracks the schools reinvigoration, its move to a digital operational base, its growth as a school during the COVID-19 pandemic and the lessons learned.

It highlights the multiplicity of variables heads have to address in going digital, their interconnectivity and why a quality head, able to integrate an evolving totality is so important

It reinforces the importance of a head willing to make hard decisions, to keep the school focussed over the years as it becomes a mature digital organisation.

Introduction

I see Knox, or any school, as a social and learning community where parents and staff come together in partnership to see children grow and develop into fine adults. It takes a village to raise a child.

These young adults are positioned for short term success (usually tertiary study) and long-term success with strong affective skills.

They can advocate for, and contribute to their own success, the success of their family and of their broader community through their adult lives.

The four pillars of The Knox School strategy of personalising the learning of each person are key influences on all thinking and planning. They are:

• Connect: real learning is relational.
• Shape: real learning requires expert teaching.
• Provoke: real learning is challenging.
• Position: real learning must be purposeful, aimed at a discernible outcome.
•  https://www.knox.vic.edu.au/our-vision/ https://www.knox.vic.edu.au/downloads/StrategicPlan.pdf

We use a narrative of three journeys through school for each young person:

• The traditional academic journey to develop literacy, numeracy, intellectual skills, and solid knowledge base.
• Woven through the first journey is the second, the development of four of the 6C’s - Collaboration, Critical thinking, Creativity, Communication, especially oral communication skills.
• The third journey is the development of Character and the Contribution made, the fifth and sixth C.

The role of principal therefore has five significant components (in no order):

• CEO of a small to medium enterprise, with the compliance, HR, strategy, and the general legal responsibilities of leading an institution.
• Educational leader of the school.
• ‘Mayor’ of the ‘virtual village’ that exists around a school.
• Guardian or steward of the history, culture, and values of the school.
• ‘Elder’, ‘confessor’, or ‘priest’, who is asked to assist at times of individual or family emotional crisis.

These are outlined in more detail at: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/surgeon-soldier-accountant-philosopher-architect-allan-shaw/

 Context

Appointed in late 2013, commencing as Principal in 2014

Knox is a second generation (1982) independent, co-ed, P-Year 12, day school in suburban Melbourne, Australia with 700 students.

Between 2011-2017 the school lost 200 enrolments, initially due to the ramifications of the global financial crisis and accelerated by a crash in Year 12 results in 2014

Staff developed the Knox Core Values: published, June 2015. https://www.knox.vic.edu.au/values/

Board endorsed Vision and Strategy developed with significant parent and staff consultation, first published, 2016 and formally endorsed 2017. https://www.knox.vic.edu.au/our-vision/ https://www.knox.vic.edu.au/downloads/StrategicPlan.pdf

Significant resources allocated by Board to support the strategy commenced in 2018 and is ongoing.

Knox strategic alliance (Leading School Based Change) with Monash Education, (Monash University) including the Digital Education Research Group with Knox a part of the Australian Research Council Discovery Project on Data in Schools. https://data-smart-schools.net/about-the-project/. December 2016 – ongoing

In addition, a range of other consultancy relationships have been developed to add value to staff professional learning, focusing on coaching and design thinking to develop projects and pilot schemes to further our strategy.

For many years we’ve concluded school a little earlier on a Tuesday and staff enter into 90 minutes of professional learning every week, which is a bespoke program where each teacher has a PPLP (Personalised Professional Learning Plan).

We used our home campus, continuous learning model for the COVID -19 shutdowns. This model was designed to meet our needs in this disrupted scenario, using good distance learning principles and to further our strategy. https://www.knox.vic.edu.au/continuous-learning/

‘What’ and ‘How’

Our documentation outlines personalised learning. This aligns with the ‘digital mindset’ as outlined by authors in this volume.

While taking time to develop and build widespread ownership through the staff and parent communities the documentation is easier than successful implementation, the ‘how to do it’.

Five years in, implementation remains a work in progress, though success is clearly discernible and the Covid-19 disruption, at first reflection, appears to have assisted.

The ‘what to do’ of designing an improved school education has been relatively clear for some years in broader school education discussions, albeit contested in some quarters.

The ‘what to do’ is relatively simple when compared to the ‘how to do it’ (implementation).

Successful implementation is a tricky and shifting balance of many contextual factors, which make a formulaic response across systems problematic. Some of the contextual factors include:

• history, tradition, and culture of the school
• staff skills, demographics, and mindsets
• parent demographics and expectations
• internal politics & personalities
• resource availability and traditions of deployment
• relative priorities
• support at governance level
• external assessment procedures, including real and perceived pressures
• building momentum & developing influencers and ‘champions’, etc., which in the early years is problematic as success is difficult to identify

 Insight into my thinking and that of the Deputy Principal can be gained from: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/allanjshaw/detail/recent-activity/

https://twitter.com/ShawAllanJ

https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/nicolakirkup/

https://twitter.com/KirkupNicola

This case study will focus on just two of the contextual elements of the ‘how’ listed above. They follow:

Culture

The shock of a significant drop in year 12 results at the end of 2014 assisted in the development of an amended staff culture.

This occurred through a range of measures such as:

• forced redundancies over several years
• key changes in senior staff: retirements and non-renewal of contracts
• building the capacity of all staff through focused professional learning
• clear staff influence in setting values, vision, and strategy
• significant improvements in operational effectiveness
• visitors from other schools and visits to other schools which
• develops external networks for a range of staff
• builds collaboration across schools as well as within
• gentle but very honest feedback and accountability.

These influences have adjusted the staff culture to an open, thriving culture focused on student learning and their own continuing learning, aimed at positioning students for both short term and long-term success, post school. 

The student culture was very positive when considered from an affective perspective in 2014.

The student culture in the secondary years, lacked academic focus, capacity for hard work, development of social agency (wider sense of connectedness and purpose) and high expectations from adults.

The articulation of the need for adaptive skills has taken root and the 6Cs are now commonly referred to as important, sitting alongside academic outcomes in student’s minds: Collaboration, Critical thinking, Creativity, Communication, Contribution and Character.

Greater detail on student character and leadership development implemented between 2017-20 can be  gained through this link to a podcast (and transcript) conducted by ACER’s (Australian Council for Educational Research) Teacher publication. https://www.teachermagazine.com.au/articles/school-improvement-episode-25-developing-student-character-and-leadership-capabilities?utm_source=CM&utm_medium=Bulletin&utm_content=30June

The parent culture has adjusted to one where parent’s reasons for choosing the school are met or exceeded in the eyes of over 90% of parents.

This shift has occurred through:

• consistency in operations
• accountability of staff
• listening to parent questions and concerns through regular community consultations and listening attentively to individual approaches
• explaining to parents, research in school education, best practice, and implementation of same, and
• All groups, staff, parents and students are explicitly expected to adhere to the school’s values.

As Principal I am also expected to adhere to those values, and model them as best as possible. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/leadership/how-centered-leaders-achieve-extraordinary-results#

Influences & Influencers (building momentum and developing ‘champions’)

Based upon the four pillars of the school’s strategy, every teacher has their own PPLP (Personal Professional Learning Plan) that they are assisted to design.

The school has whole school, sub school specific or smaller group projects and pilots. For example, The Cube is a blended model of learning design for student electives at Year 9, running in 2020 as a pilot scheme. Initial results and student engagement levels are positive, and the design will be considered for other curricular applications. https://www.knox.vic.edu.au/downloads/Year9_SubjectHandbook_Download.pdf

The Monash Education team and other consultants act as critical friends, advisors and/or coaches with specific individuals, formal teams, or other small groupings of teachers. The critical friends, coaches and advisors have ongoing relationships with the school and are expected to know, understand, and work with us to further our strategy of personalised learning within our values framework.

Since 2018, the school executive and in 2019, a wider group has received individual and/or small group coaching on leadership skills development and/or design and implementation of curricular and/or wellbeing innovations.

For the 2018 school year a new position of Manager: Strategy Implementation was developed to work with the Principal on strategy planning and working with the Deputy Principal on implementation of same.

This focus was expanded for the 2019 school year with the addition of five special projects each managed by a staff member. These are:

• Use of data to improve learning and teaching
• Development and use of a Knox pedagogical model
• Development and use of a Knox assessment framework
• Development and use of a scope and sequence for student character development, student agency and voice
• Development and collection of digital resources in common formats, warehousing of same and tagging to facilitate easy searching 

The Manager: Strategy Implementation, and Project Managers plan and implement programs to develop staff mindsets and skills required for where we need to be in three to five years.

• They are influencers and thought leaders in their areas.
• They are responsible for practical outcomes with pilots and projects that promote the strategy.
• They create dynamic tensions, mostly positive, with mainstream middle levels leaders whose prime focus is the effective running of the school in the here and now.
• This builds a nexus of influence and logistics to foster, empower and drive change.

Unbeknownst to us at the time, we created and implemented an example of a Helix Organisation, described by McKinsey and Company in October 2019. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/the-helix-organization

Covid-19 disruption

Actions and initial reflections:

Mindsets that have been challenged

• Teachers (or the ‘system’) controls time and place.
• Attendance and engagement equate to seat time.
• Seat time reflects status and equates to outcomes.
• “I cannot cover the content. I need more time.” Especially prevalent at senior secondary level.  (I have sympathy at the senior secondary level but always found this interesting in the F-10 context.)
• Students only learn when in ‘attendance’ with a teacher.
• Students (should) only learn what a teacher presents.
• Summative assessment is a default setting for many, albeit rhetoric is often different.

We didn’t allow the school timetable used in February 2020 to be migrated to our home campus model of continuous learning.

• Good distance learning principles were applied to the development of our model and framework.

 We carefully structured and refined through several iterations a model and framework that supported the different teaching and learning context because of physical distance. https://www.knox.vic.edu.au/continuous-learning/

• The model and framework of continuous learning can apply to this or another crisis and is applicable generically as it is established within the four pillars of our Strategy to ensure sustainability and assure continuity of focus and direction.

 Knox’s stance and communication for staff and to staff for students has been carefully designed to cover the following topics:

• Disruption can create anxiety and opportunity.
• Focus on wellbeing as number one priority as anxiety diminishes learning.
• Class teachers and home room tutors were encouraged to build relationships and were provided time to do so in our model of home campus.
• These extended opportunities resulted from our iterative development based on staff and student feedback on earlier versions of the model.
• Use the opportunities created to develop student agency and voice.
• Collaboration was built into the model and its implementation for both students and staff.
• Focus on learning not on summative assessment.
• Use formative assessment as an aid to learning.
• Use explicit teaching time in short bursts. Then set work, timelines etc. and be available to assist. The balance varied dependent upon the age of the child/young person.
• Ask them to check in with you and you check in with them.
• Use the quality and quantity of learning as a major indicator of ‘attendance’.

The challenges to mindsets result in the main from distance and lack of physical proximity, which digital skills and infrastructure mitigate.

We utilised MS Teams as our main digital tool, supplemented by Zoom. Our very young children (three- and four-year old students in the Early Learning Centre and the first years of schooling) also had some physical resources supplied to parents in a drive through take-away style operation.

Several senior staff made contact and stayed in touch with schools around the world, sharing experiences via digital infrastructure and skills.

• Principal and Deputy Principal made contributions to local and global webinars and podcasts. For example,
• https://www.theschoolconf.com/thankyou
• https://soundcloud.com/user-127023293/episode-3-adapt-and-iterate-nikki-kirkup/s-90VpEYdzGsH

Parent and student surveys were conducted by an independent third-party specialist.

Top 3 parent positives (P-12)

• Child's independence, organisation, time management & responsibility
• Teacher support & engagement
• Child's adjustment & enjoyment of continuous learning

Top 3 student positives (years 5-12)

• Flexible learning/Being able to work at own pace
• More available time/Not having to wake up so early/No travel time
• Being able to interact with peers/teachers

Top parent concerns

• Maintaining high academic standards
• Reduced direct supervision
• Too much screen time for recreation

Most difficult aspects for students

• Too much screen time for recreation
• Getting enough physical exercise
• Managing stress/anxiety

In crisis management, decision-making is usually the domain of a select few senior leaders. This is encouraged in the literature.

We followed this pattern for the first few weeks where agility, speed and focused communications were important.

As the crisis moved to an ongoing, slower moving event, we moved to re-engage staff in our more usual consultative decision-making processes.

The last iteration of our home campus model was designed to:

• support home campus and a return to onsite learning.
• Underpin our longer-term goals for time/place structures in the onsite school

The last iteration of our home campus model was:

• designed by an extended Learning and Teaching Team of 28 middle level leaders and influential classroom practitioners,
• facilitated by an advisor and the Deputy Principal, and
• undertaken successfully in a completely online environment via digital processes of video-conferencing and shared iterative documentation.

Conclusion

Knox is now five plus years into a significant development process and improvements are clearly discernible, although they were hard to identify in the early years. It was always envisaged the process would take 5-7 years, as the research indicates.

The disruption provided by the school shutdowns has provided an opportunity to develop our home campus with strong distance learning principles but also keeping in mind our ongoing vision of our future as a school. We’ve thus managed the unfolding crisis but continued to think strategically, to work to our strengths and work to our strategy.

We have taken the key indicators from our parent and student surveys outlined above. We have meshed some ‘flexible learning’ time into the school timetable from Year 6 upwards and removed bells from the school day, to the satisfaction of most students and staff.

At the time of writing, we are considering revamped time/place structures for 2021, looking to design a more flexible use of time in age appropriate ways to allow independence, responsibility, and organisation skills to develop, with a close eye kept on age appropriate academic outcomes. This will enhance the development of skills as per our strategy of a more personalised approach to learning and at the same time allow us to also develop strong intellectual skills and a solid knowledge base.