Supporting Teacher Growth within Change

Teachers and school leaders share many things in common; however, one thing that can make their lives challenging in a school context is that many people believe that just because they went to school, they understand how the classroom works and what leadership should look like in schools, while at the same time never really understanding the complexities involved in either.? As a result, and while they can be successful at creating policies, strategies or initiatives, and getting them passed or accepted into the system, many policymakers and researchers propose new teaching and or leadership innovations that may not be successfully implemented or have the effect that they had in mind because they simply lack the depth of understanding required to see how an ‘espoused theory’ differs greatly from a ‘theory in use’ at the coal face and so only a short-term effect on classroom teaching and learning occurs. Based on the literature, schools tend to reflect ongoing cultural, political, social, and economic changes in the larger society as school reform, societal transformations, and long-term institutional trends are interconnected. As such, educators have learned from school reforms over past decades that regardless of the motivation, schools still fall short of policy, initiative or strategy. That said, research has identified that training, guided development, organisational support, and critical reflection are all part of a framework required for successful strategic change. Again, despite knowing this, it does not guarantee successful change, because the supports identified within the framework need to be continual and refined within the various contexts, something that I have observed when supporting schools in bringing out their own changes in an effort to improve student outcomes. It is also something that Rachael Lehr and I have noticed when schools have attempted to adopt Dayton’s Playbook.???

Over past decades, professional learning in schools has been emphasised as a way to support strategic change due to the growing recognition that education is challenging and the stakes are high. Public schools are being held accountable for developing “highly-qualified” teachers despite the fact that this should be the domain of universities. Unlike the US system where, to the best of my knowledge, they receive funding from the federal government and are required to prepare, train, and recruit high-quality teachers, this is not the case in WA. While state schools are provided a small targeted initiative to cover the cost of relief for graduate teachers to attend mandated training modules, as well as a small grant to purchase curriculum materials and provide them with additional DOTT in their first year, the true cost of early career teachers is borne by the school, not the universities. Although we consider ‘qualified’ in terms of teacher certification through TRBWA and credentials through recognised universities, schools leadership teams must also ensure that early career teachers strengthen and improve pedagogy using research-based instructional strategies, which sadly (as is the case in a number of Australian universities), is not often occurring during their preparation. In fact, and not surprisingly, during our first preservice teacher induction we were told that what we were talking about and immersing them in was unfamiliar.??

A great deal of teacher professional development is done through traditional in-service, online or workshop training models, an approach that generally encompasses one or two-hour training sessions, or full-day workshops. Peixotto and Fager (1998) referred to this as ‘short-term training’, as the focus is generally on a specific topic and presented to the entire staff. In these models, the training does not take into account the teacher skill set, is fragmented, not relevant, lacks focus, and does not measure change in instructional practices. As such, and considering leading strategic change, school improvement for many schools/regions often consists of short-term training with few opportunities for follow-up or monitoring and, as we know, time is the enemy of memory given that we tend to naturally start forgetting almost as soon as we learn something new.

At this juncture I will digress a little as I recall a long conversation with Peter DeWitt, Ed.D. via Zoom a number of years ago about US schools and districts (and I should add that this is not unique to the US context) and how school leaders and district superintendents, after identifying a priority and investing time into teacher development, then moved onto another priority the following year without rconsidering staff who may not have come to terms with the previous training and adopted the previous year’s priority focus or taken the time to measure the impact (if there was any) on student outcomes or school improvement. It was this conversation, matched with ongoing professional reading that helped further refine my thinking around professional development, building teacher capacity, and improvement in the schools that I lead. While our ability to store new information isn’t limited, our ability to access that information is limited by various factors and working to reduce this forgetting is something that all leaders must be cognisant of.

More recently (and this can be observed in a number of current initiatives that exist within the education sector), we are seeing sporadic episodes of high-quality professional training that includes guided practice, coaching, feedback and reflection. In most cases, these school improvement and teacher and leadership development initiatives have been targeted at improved academic achievement, primarily in response to dropping PISA and NAPLAN results. However - and again I have seen this first hand - once the initial intensive supports were dropped, the improvement momentum fell away as staff, and in some cases leadership teams, floundered. Principals and their leadership teams play a pivotal role in any school improvement process in their schools. These teams must be able to guide their staff through the complexity of strategic change; they must understand where each of their staff sit in terms of both understanding the initiative and implementing it; they must work to modify individual staff's behaviour pertaining to the strategy and their belief system that drove their previous behaviours. In the case of the latter, Zmuda et al. (2004) suggested that to improve and transform school structures, leaders need to “assert the importance of changing minds, not just practices, through the messy processes of dialog, debate, and reflection.”? Only through this, as well as adding in the need for a conceptual understanding of the implementation dip and learning pit, can school leaders and their teams support staff to move such changes into the realm of? unconsciously skilled with the new initiative and or strategy.

While Rachael Lehr and I continue to develop our skills as school leaders, we understand the importance of reflective practice and improving student achievement, not just academically but within the social-emotional domain as well. We know, and have seen, the considerable benefits of reflective practice in building teachers’ capacity. Teachers gain, and you have experienced this first hand,? a better understanding of practices through individual reflection, reflection with colleagues, informal block conversations, discussion in small groups, and school-wide reflection that you can and are improving your effectiveness in the classroom and growing professionally.

Nothing that we do at Dayton pertaining to coaching, professional learning, informal walkthroughs, professional formal dialogue during coaching debriefs, the creation of our coaching framework, instructional playbook and pre-service and teacher induction books is incidental in nature, rather it is with deliberate intention that these occur and are created within the school. Everything is strongly aligned to our ‘why’ which staff would agree given they have bought into it, is a genuinely noble cause. This requires us “to lead others to do and think in ways that improve the impact we all have on our students” (DeWitt & Nelson, 2024). The power of the noble cause is that it gives us “a common vision that cuts across individual differences and makes leadership possible.” Further to this, “it is bigger than what one person can do alone…it requires people’s best efforts and passions” and it has the potential to “arouse so much excitement in a tribe that even if people fail, the noble cause was worth the effort” (Logan, King & Fischer-wright, 2008) - ubuntu.