The principal and the conditions for school improvement.

What started out as a set of four preconditions for achieving school improvement in 2008 is now a major framework that includes a further two stages linked to the teacher. We now know that leadership, along with its overarching influence, is what makes all the difference. 

Transcript

Loretta  00:03

You're listening to Loretta Piazza, experienced school principal, mentor, and coach. And together we're talking out of school. You will hear from leaders who have lived and breathed so many experiences, good and bad, agonized over decisions, and have tossed and turned through countless sleepless nights. These are the people who will help you stay ahead of the game.  

It was back in 2008 that I first came across a document prepared by Vic Zbar and some of his colleagues. It charted the experiences of eight low SES schools that were outperforming their more affluent counterparts. What emerged from this study was a set of lessons in the form of preconditions for any sort of improvement to occur. Further to this, there were other lessons identified. And these lessons build on the preconditions, so improvement can be sustained. Tackling school improvement is a bit like trying to solve world hunger. Where do you start? Vic Zbar's work in 2008 was certainly a good starting point. But a lot more is known today. In fact, Vic progressed and documented a further two stages that are critical to school improvement. If you've been following this latest series, you'd know that after listening to former regional directors, and academics, that school improvement is complex and takes time. It requires school leaders to be courageous, and to focus their attention on what matters most, which sometimes can be at odds with departmental timelines. There's no silver bullet here. And if you want to kick goals, you just have to get onto the field.  Oh, hello, Vic, thank you for joining me in talking out of school.

Vic  02:04

Yep, happy to do that. Thank you.

Loretta  02:08

You've got quite a repertoire of books and work behind you. Can you elaborate on some of that for us, please?

Vic  02:16

Oh, well, I guess I have written a fair bit over a period of time, which is codeword for saying I'm really quite old. And been around a long time. I guess the most significant things that I've been involved in writing of late, though, two editions of the book together with Pamela Macklin entitled driving school improvement. The first was subtitled A Practical Guide. And then we got commissioned to write a second edition. That from memory is subtitled practical strategies and tools, which we're very flattered to have had Michael Fullan write the foreword for and in which he actually said you will find no better book for sustained school improvement. So I guess that writing is the core for me, because what we've tried to codify the areas and approach that schools can contextualize, to their own circumstances to drive improvement through.

Loretta  03:20

Now, I do have a copy of your book, I actually bought it last year, when it was released. And you've come a long way from a lot of your earlier work. And I'm speaking specifically about... this is going back could be a good 10 years. And having been in the northern region and working on the AIZ,  Achievement Improvement Zones, I've got a feeling you did a fair bit of work in western region with Katherine Henderson.

Vic  03:57

More so actually in northern region on that, on that Achievement Improvement Zones project.

Loretta  04:03

Okay, the work you did around the preconditions, was the northern region or

Vic  04:14

Let me give you some background on it, Loretta might be the the easiest way to understand it. And I can see why you see the regional connection. Prior to about 2008 2009, there's been a lot of work done on what constitutes an effective school and the development of a range of models of school effectiveness. For example, you may recall, there used to be an octagonal yellow planning diagram that operated in Victoria about school effectiveness. It seemed to me and my colleagues, Graham, Marshall and Ross Kimber, that there were two problems. Would that work? The first is that it was dealing with schools that were already effective. Therefore, it assumed certain things and in that way didn't necessarily help a school. It wasn't effective. And the second problem was because they generally encompassed all the elements that described an effective school. It didn't give a school that was seeking to improve a clear indication of where do you start? So what we sought to do with the support of the Department, the Victorian Department in 2009, was to look at a group of disadvantaged Victorian government schools. That had all been high performing for a number of years, but had in the past been underperforming schools, because what we wanted to determine was not what they look like now. But how did they do it. And what blew us away when we did the study was that every single one of them did it in exactly the same way. Although they articulated it differently. That was, I guess, part of the value we could add. And essentially, what we found was that although they did a range of things, there were four things in particular that they did that constituted preconditions for whole school improvement to occur. A number of those schools were indeed western region schools. Subsequently, we went on to work with the northern metropolitan region where we took the whole process further forward, because getting the preconditions in place is necessary for school improvement to occur. But it's not enough, which is evident in the word preconditions itself, you then need to build on that, which led me to the view, which I've written about subsequently, that there are broadly three phases of whole school improvement.

Loretta  07:14

I came across your work around that time, and I had been in my school as a principal only for a few years. And that initial work that you did around the preconditions, it really did hit home, especially, you know, in low SES schools, you've often got issues around order and student behavior. And you really can't get any teaching done until you sort all that out and get the kids, you know, working, working well and engaged and so on. So I think that was a magnificent segue into the work that you're that you're doing now. I'm, I'm interested in, you know, the building capacity. And in that area, that that, that you explore, you talk about instructional models and collaborative teacher planning. How did you know to delve into this?

Vic  08:17

Well, let's go backwards a bit. I think we just better clarify a little about the preconditions. Certainly an orderly learning environment is central but not sufficient. Really, one of the touchstones for us is leadership. Essentially, leadership is the difference between pockets of improvement that you get in any school and whole school improvement. Whole school improvement does not happen without a leadership team leading it. And interestingly, although we originally wrote four preconditions, we now talk of leadership as the precondition of the preconditions because nothing else happens without it. In the schools we examined, they built their leadership around getting three other preconditions in place, which are all actually quite interlinked. They built it around raising expectations. Because often, particularly in disadvantaged schools that are underperforming, you will hear the argument put by some people, you've got to understand the sort of kids who come to this school, you can't really expect more of these sorts of kids. And of course, that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

Loretta  09:30

Well, that's the postcard mentality, isn't it?

Vic  09:33

It is, and the way in which leaders built their own leadership, and started to raise the expectations was by ensuring an orderly learning environment was in place, not just an orderly learning environment, but an orderly learning environment where students are well known by the staff. And it's important for two reasons, one of which is quite obvious, which is you can't teach effectively in a disorderly environment. Teachers are too busy battling discipline. But the other reason that's less obvious is the orderly learning environment is the easiest entry point for building consistency in the school. And once you start to build around that, you can start to say, look what we've achieved by being more consistent. Where should we be more consistent next? And the fourth if you like precondition, or part of the puzzle, is what we call a focus on what matters most. A lot of schools are very good at having clear statement priorities. Very often, they're not as good at sticking to them. The schools very clear about their priorities and relatively had very few that mattered: literacy, numeracy, VCE results, and they stuck to them. But you can't progress beyond a certain point, if that's all you do, you have to start building the capacity of staff. And this is where the northern region experience was instructive. Because that's where we started to take it to the next stage. The second stage, when I say stages, these are conceptual framework for thinking to guide discussion. Things are never lockstep and neat and schools and moving between stages, but they're are a frame for diagnosing where you're at. But the second stage broadly, which builds on the preconditions, each stage absorbs the one before it, is to get people planning better. By planning collaboratively, guided by an instructional, a common instructional model that reflects a view of what constitutes good teaching and learning in class. Now, interestingly enough, with that conceptual model, we found schools have really improved again. But again, it will only take you so far, because there's a third, final part of the puzzle if you like, which is that there's still a lot of people in schools, who operate on the basis of their beliefs of what works, rather than what the evidence shows us works. So in the third stage, what we do is start to really drill down not only into the instructional model and the planning, but what people are doing in the classroom to ensure that they are using evidence, informed practices. And the reason for all of that is the challenge in any school, the big improvement challenge is to support more teachers to work like the best, because we know this substantial variability in effectiveness. And the extent to which we can narrow that gap is the greatest source of improvement in any school. So you wind up with a three stage process that you're working through.

Loretta  13:01

But I wonder, though, you had worked through the preconditions.  You were very aware, you, you said you went into schools, you observed, and there were common elements and common themes progressing. With the second part about building capacity. Did you go again, go into schools and say to yourself, what is it now that we need to look at? Or did you just look at research and take work from Fullen and other people and say, Well, this is where we need to go? How did this eventuate?

Vic  13:40

No, that's a good question. Because certainly the preconditions came after observing the improvement journey that a group of schools had taken and the commonality between it so it was if you're like a codification of something that we knew worked. The second stage, if you like, related to the instructional model and collaborative planning was a bit more of a fusion between looking at schools that were doing good things, perhaps not as systematic as I'm describing it, but starting to do things and the research so that you then got the skills to test out taking it a stage further. So for example, in your own northern region, Hume Central Secondary College under the direction then of Glen Proctor, was using an instructional model. A very early phase instructional model predated the kind of diagrammatic forms we have today was arguably too complex but the point is, was something we could work with. Then we students

Loretta  14:57

sorry, would you say that he was maybe ahead of his time?

Vic  15:05

You could put it that way. Yes, probably. But equally, I would say that what he'd done, which is essential to the work that Pamela and I do with schools is he had diagnosed, where the school was at, and what its most significant challenges were, in order to then prescribe what was necessary, and had diagnosed the variability and prescribed a method to bring it together, which was let's start to plan collaboratively around a common instructional model, which we then were able to take a stage further working with a number of schools by saying, Okay, this one's quite complex, let's see if we can get a more simplified version. Let's see if we can resolve it into a graphic that then might be widely spread around the school and used by teams to plan with.

Loretta  16:03

Hmm. And the third stage is about drilling down into classroom practice and using the theories of action. 

Vic  16:14

Correct. 

Loretta  16:15

Your theories of action that you talk about in the book, were the ones that came through the AIZ in northern region. And they they're very, very succinct, for example, you know, connect feedback to data about student actions and performance. Just a little question, when we're talking about the theories of action, I decided to familiarize myself with the department's theories of actions associated with FISO. And it to me, the department theories of action are very, very verbose. And each theory of action contains two or three or more elements. And so in order to work through those, you would actually have to dissect them and analyze them quite well. I, I wonder how principals go, when they've got on one hand, the FISO or the department's theories of action? And then we have yours, on the other hand, so what what do they do?

Vic  17:27

Let me respond in a slightly different way, because I think this goes beyond questions of FISO. I have a general view, that a lot of what is written in education is too verbose. And often, what we do not do, is operate sufficiently strategically. One of the things without wanting to promote our book too much, but obviously, I've written it, and therefore it reflects my approach. One of the things that Pamela Macklin and I tried to do in it is to say, do less and do better, because the enemy of effective change is always trying to do too much. Because what happens is, nothing gets done properly. Poor implementation means that it's not embedded and consolidated in the school. And when it doesn't work, you've fed the naysayers who will say, See, I told you, it doesn't work. What we've tried to do instead, and I think this is the departure point, and then it probably doesn't matter what model you use, whether it's FISO, whether it's some other person, whether it's ours. We've tried to say the starting point must be to diagnose your own situation, the school, but in the context of an understanding of how change for improvement typically happens, and the stages through which it goes. When you do that, you can hone in on what's the major strategic challenge I have to pursue consistently through the school. It may well be that when we do our analysis, we find we essentially don't really have an orderly learning environment because it's inconsistently applied and some people are doing it. Some people are not. That's the case, you're going to have to drive that through, because it will mitigate against effective teaching and learning on a consistent basis in the school. It gives you a starting point. It may be the case that you do have a relatively orderly learning environment where students are wellknown but real patchiness about the quality of teaching and learning. Only because people are not really planning systematically, well, in that case that will lead you down the path of probably developing a common instructional model collaboratively in the school, most likely driven by learning intentions, which is starting to get you into the realms of your theory in action theories of action in any case. So I'd put it's more in terms of the centrality of that diagnosis, consistent with an understanding of the stages through which school improvement typically progresses, because that then guides you on the strategies you need to drive through.

Loretta  20:40

Vic, I'm really interested in that whole notion of evidence base, because we we talk about assessment, we talk about data. What's your view of  how teachers collect data or or the assessments that they conduct in order to find out where their kids are at?,

Vic  21:10

I think I'll go backwards just a little bit, because of this thing of evidence. I think I need to say just something about evidence. We need to have a sense of what it means to act strategically. And that's a mix of the diagnosis, the weighing up of the options, some sense of the likely impact of those options compared with how easy or hard they are to do, how you carry people with you, how you communicate at the overarching narrative and so on. Evidence is important. But we must use evidence wisely. I always give this example when I talked about it with groups of principals in particular, I was approached by a school in another state. That said to me, they want to,  really significantly had to improve, which they did, though, interestingly, they had an orderly learning environment, that was not their issue. And what they are interested in doing was John Hattie's top 10. Now, in evidence terms, you might say that, Yeah, makes sense. But think about it. First of all, neither you nor I would know what the top 10 are, without having to look them up, which of course I have done. They have no relationship between each other. They're all highly capacity dependent. There's no way John himself would ever suggest doing them all or trying to pursue them all. It's not a strategic way to operate. Instead, what we did was we focused on planning better lessons from learning intentions, with a planning framework and an instructional model and doing it collaboratively and backing that up with observations and feedback and so on. That school has gone from underperforming in its state to being an exemplar school in performance terms in five years. Now, that's not because of my work, it's because of their work. But we have to be very careful about evidence. And assessment is an interesting one, because I think Patrick Griffin has a very interesting thing to say on assessment. We often talk of assessment of learning, assessment for learning, assessment as learning as the kind of Holy Grail of assessment. Some years ago, actually, in the context of the achievement improvement science project, Patrick and I were talking and he actually said publicly and is happy for me to quote him on this. Fundamentally, assessment is for teaching. And I think it's a very interesting way to reframe. And when you adopt the view assessment is for teaching, then the data you collect must be the data that enables you to know whether kids are getting it or not, in terms of what you are seeking to teach. That's feedback for you, in order to adjust your teaching to ensure that they learn. Obviously, that will take a variety of forms, particularly in terms of the formative feedback in the moment in class, lots of questioning, but also, you know, various tools to gain instant feedback from students on whether they get it or not. But I think the assessment question needs to be reframed in those sorts of refund terms.

Loretta  24:59

And do you think in schools assessment is for teaching? Based on what you know and see?

Vic  25:09

Well, I don't think you can ever give an answer to any question in terms of schools because we know there's very substantial variability between schools. But what we also know from the research is there is even more variability within schools. Yeah. And so the challenge you see of any school leader, is to reduce the variability, increase the consistency get more working like the best. So yes, there are schools where there's assessment for teaching. Across the board? Probably not. But often, you have to, it's a question of, when is the time to introduce these things? And how you introduce it. One of the the pieces of work I really like is an article by Jim Knight whose work I think is terrific, who he wrote the book, the impact cycle, but he's written an article that is readily available online called something like dealing with teacher resistance. But the reality is the article, the headings, is a bit of a misnomer, in my view, it's not about dealing with resistance. It's about how you actually make things happen through people in your school. And Jim's got six pieces of advice. But one that always resonates with me, because I think we neglect it in schools, is you have to make it easy for people to do. We often leave people at the point of trying to implement a strategy to reinvent the wheel themselves. And instead of making it easier, saying this is what you could do, this is how you do it, here's problems that might have words that we can respond to, here are examples that you could draw on or even directly use, make it easy, I think, is a very good piece of advice. And it says readily applicable to having people seek feedback from students in class.

Loretta  27:17

If if you were in a room with a big group of principals, and possibly experience is not, you know, it's not great. What would you say to them in terms of how to bring about improvement in their schools? I know this is a very broad question. But what do you think? What sort of a message would you be giving to them?

Vic  27:51

Probably there'd be in a couple of parts, because I am often in a room with a lot of principals of varying levels of experience. One of the messages, of course, is that you have a lot of other experienced people around you in this room. And you can draw on their collective wisdom and experience that I think is really important. We, we have a tendency, in systems in particular to be searching for expertise, possibly gurus, I don't know if you're aware, but the Great, now deceased unfortunately, organizational thinker Peter Drucker said the reason people called him a guru was because the word charlatan did not fit in a headline. We often look to people and what we neglect is the sheer expertise we have in our own systems and drawing on that collective wisdom. So that'd be part of the message. But the other part is, I think it's important to understand three fundamental things. And in a sense, if you were to boil our book down into three things, this would probably be it. Leadership is fundamental because it's the difference between pockets of improvement and whole school improvement. The exercise of leadership needs to be based on an understanding of how change for improvement typically occurs, which starts with diagnosis of where you're at. And then the prescription that flows from that diagnosis occurs in the context of a general understanding of the stages through which improvement generally flows. If you understand those, then you can start engaging with okay, we can conduct our diagnosis and analyze what we most need to do based on an understanding of the sort of strategies aligned with the basic stages our analysis tells us we are in.

Loretta  30:05

That's absolutely wonderful advice. And, look, you've done some terrific work, 

Vic  30:13

Thank you.  You've really really, I think, set the scene. But it's a practical scene, I think, which makes, which makes the difference. And you're doing some work for the Academy as well I understand? Correct. At the moment, I'm delivering a pilot leadership for school improvement program that I led the development of, and I will pilot twice over this semester and next semester, and then it will, wherever the the academy takes it is then a matter of

Loretta  30:52

Yes, the academy is doing some phenomenal work around school leadership and building the capacity of principals. Vic, thank you very much for your time. Thank you, thank you really for also, you know, sharing your insights and going you know, deeper. The book looks great, but sort of understanding how certain things you know, progressed and how they come about, is also, you know, really interesting. So, thank you very, very much. Thanks for that great work because we need it. Principals need need to know this.  Thanks for listening to this latest episode of talking out of school, where we cover topics and dilemmas associated with the ups and downs and even the downright curious of the school leaders job. Want to know more? Then visit me at shaping leaders.com.au But for now, he is staying at edit again.