S1 E4 - Why Teachers 'Go Rogue'

In this episode, Jocelyn explores why instructional initiatives lose consistency during implementation, and offers a practical five-step framework to reset and strengthen practice across a school.

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

Hi and welcome back to the Leading Learning Podcast. My name is Jocelyn and I am pleased to welcome you here. Whether you are leading at a school level or a system level. I'd like to start today's episode with a story. Imagine you're a busy school leader (and I know you do not need to imagine, you are). You have far less time than you'd like to spend with teachers in classrooms, but you've been doing the work. You've been focused on an area of instruction, maybe maths, maybe literacy, maybe explicit teaching more broadly. You've organised and run professional learning, you've arranged classroom modelling, you've collected data, you've made sure that your team has every resource they need. You've checked in after school and in meetings, and your teachers have told you that things are going well. The students like the new programme or approach, they say, and you've allowed yourself a small sigh of relief. Then one day you do a walkthrough, and in one classroom after another, you notice that teachers have added their own spin to the lessons they are leading. They have taken you literally when you said, make it your own. In some classrooms, the changes are small. Instead of students answering with one voice, they are calling on students one at a time. In other classrooms, critical review practices have just disappeared entirely. Some teachers are racing through the content at breakneck speed with no time for student responses because the message they heard was, "make sure that you have a perky pace." Others have printed worksheets from teacher websites and students are completing them independently. The approach you thought had been implemented well is now just one of many resources sitting alongside whatever else teachers have decided to do.

Speaker 2:05

If you found yourself in this position, please know you are not alone. This is one of the most common stories our team hears from the leaders working at both the school and the system level. And today I want to talk about why it happens, how to prevent it, and what to do if you find yourself standing in the middle of an instructional muddle, wondering how it got the way it is.

Speaker 2:33

Before we get to the practical steps, it helps to understand what's actually going on here. Because if we don't name up the causes, we'll keep solving the wrong problems. There's also an emotional layer to this that we should acknowledge. When teachers are under pressure, when reports are looming, when system demands are stacking up, when classroom behaviours are biting, people default to what they know or what they think they know. So even when implementation appears to start strong, the new approach can just quietly erode as the term or the year gets heavier and busier. This happens to lead ers too, we are all human.

Speaker 3:16

Beyond that, there are three main reasons that initiatives go off the rails. And none of them are about teachers not being committed to their jobs, not understanding the need for change, or teachers having a bad attitude. So let's dive in to three reasons why we can find ourselves in the muddle that I've described.

Speaker 3:40

Reason one, we weren't specific enough about the problem we were collectively solving. There's a tendency in education to name a broad area and call that the plan. We are doing explicit teaching, we are doing maths, we are doing phonics, we are doing instructional norms. That kind of language gives us a big picture, but it skips the first critical step of growing professional practice, which is defining the actual problem we're trying to solve. That means we need to look at data. We need to look at the work from multiple perspectives. We need to get super specific about what will be different when we're on the right track. Not just we need to teach spelling or maths better. We need a clear, shared picture of what better looks like in practice.

Speaker 4:38

The second reason that we find ourselves in a muddle is we haven't actually defined what is and isn't ok moving forward. In the name of respect for teacher professionalism, we can avoid being clear about expectations. We hope that everyone will read the room and land in roughly the same place. Very often they don't. And again, that's not about teachers having a bad attitude, it's about many other things that we're going to speak about in just a moment.

Speaker 5:15

Regardless of the reasons, we end up in awkward conversations because the goalposts were never actually visible. I want to name this directly. Throwing people in the deep end of an instructional approach is not professional respect in action. Professional respect is giving people the clarity, the boundaries, and the support they need to do excellent work and giving them what they need to develop. When we leave teachers to fill in the blanks, we're not respecting their professionalism, we're abdicating ours. So if you are a leader who's been feeling tension in your common sense approach to put boundaries in place and give people clarity, please know that I actually think that's a good thing.

Speaker 6:10

In our work with schools and systems, we use a clear framework to define what practice does and does not look like. And this is broken up into three categories. We clearly define the not negotiables, the things that can be negotiated as the year level or team cohort with leadership, and things that each teacher can decide for themselves. Everybody knows where they stand across routines, resources, and responses. And critically, the framework includes a column for the why. Because teachers don't disregard instructional elements because they don't care about their students, they do it because they don't yet fully appreciate why those elements matter. They're not in the same place as you are.

Speaker 7:06

The third reason that we find ourselves in a muddle is that we underestimate how much support our team really needs to get going. And this is a big one, especially when our teachers are experienced overall. We assume that because someone has been teaching for 15 years or more, they'll pick up a new approach quickly. But experience in teaching generally is not the same as experience in the specific thing you're now asking them to do. There are predictable phases that we all pass through when we learn something new. The cycle starts over every time the context changes. In our Leading Learning Success work, we call the first of these phases grounding and applying. The second phase is called achieving because we believe we're achieving and are often unaware of how far we still have to go.

Speaker 8:10

Two parts of learning are doing work at the same time as we develop. The first part is understanding the context, which includes things like how well we know the students, how well we understand the school systems, how well we understand the instructional landscape and the lesson specifics. The second area is what we do in response to what we see in that context, how we make decisions based upon what we observe. Until someone has really had a chance to understand a context well and has built up experience in a variety of situations or contexts, they can't reliably make the in the moment decisions that we know are so important. Increasingly, we are hearing a call for teachers to respond in the moment to what they see in the students in front of them, and that's the right call. But it doesn't happen when we are new at something.

Speaker 9:19

Here's how this often plays out. Your team, even when they are keen and open and committed, become novices the moment you introduce a new program or initiative. They may not be novices to teaching, they are novices to this current initiative. And when novices hit something unfamiliar or effortful, they fill the gaps in their knowledge with what they've done before or what they've seen others doing. This is not a character flaw, this is how we all operate. So when we haven't been specific about the problem we are trying to solve, and we haven't set clear boundaries about what is and isn't part of the work at hand, we have essentially guaranteed that our students will fill those gaps with their existing kit bag. And that's how the intention of a coherent approach quietly becomes a patchwork.

Speaker 10:24

Let's say you've listened to the last few minutes and you've recognised this situation because it's happening in your school. If you're in a muddle right now, what do you do? The first thing is to be honest with your team. Acknowledge that implementation missed some steps and that this has led to some misconceptions. Do not get into a finger-pointing match, it is not that your team isn't intelligent, it's not that they don't know how to teach, it's not that they didn't implement well. It's that the foundations for the minimum viable system of instruction you were trying to build weren't fully built when we let everybody go and take the practice into their classrooms. What we need is to regroup. Now that conversation, handled well, can reset the work in a healthy way. It signals that you are leading this work, not blaming the people inside your school. From there, the steps to strong implementation can look like this.

Speaker 11:34

I want to be clear up front about what this roadmap is that I'm about to share with you. It's the same framework that our team uses with schools across a full improvement journey, whether the focus is literacy, maths, behaviour, or anything else. It's also what we come back to when something needs a reset. The roadmap doesn't change, the entry point does. So I'm going to walk you through the five steps of this framework at a high level, and there's a visual of the journey in the transcript on our website if you'd like to see it laid out at jocelynseamereducation.com.

Speaker 12:13

So step one is to build a shared purpose. This is the visioning work. It's the work we often miss. Specifically, we're defining what we're doing and why it matters for our students. This work in the visioning space isn't just about saying yes, this is about spelling. It's about often setting a big, hairy, audacious goal for where we want to go and giving a purpose for that goal that connects to the mission of the work we're doing.

Speaker 12:50

Step two is learn what strong practice looks like. This is where you define your non-negotiables, your team-level negotiables and your teacher-led decisions. Set clear boundaries about what will and won't be part of practice from this point on.

Speaker 13:06

Step three is learn specifically where your students are up to. Now you've probably consulted data in step one around the visioning, but step three is about getting into the nitty-gritty about each person's starting point for the instruction, about what the impact is that we are looking for.

Speaker 13:28

And then step four is about taking initial simple action. At this point, step four, this is where we implement the foundational instructional routines. One in, all in. No exceptions, no deviating, we just follow the plan. Teaching sprints can come in really handy here, where we have four to five weeks of instruction with frequent walkthroughs, check-ins, and review of lesson videos that show exactly what you want lessons to look like. If you have our Spelling Success in Action program, you have access to the leaders course that gives you all of the resources for this stage of implementation and, in fact, for your full 12 months of getting things going.

Speaker 14:19

Step five is about evaluating, refining, and repeating. This is the work of ongoing improvement and it never ends. It is also the step that most clearly separates a school improvement journey from a one-off professional development event. The work that our team does with schools and systems is built around growing the internal capability to keep evaluating, refining, and repeating long after the partnership ends. Because if the only way the work continues is with someone from outside your school in the room, you haven't actually built anything. That's a topic we'll come to in future episodes.

Speaker 15:04

Before I close, I want to address a wondering that you might be having. In this version of implementation, where is the room for teacher choice, where is the space for decision making? And if that's been your thought, I hear you and I think you're right to ask that question. Teachers are more than deliverers of other peoples' instructional decisions. Teachers must be empowered to respond to what they see in front of them in the classroom. They must be able to bring themselves to the work. Explicit teaching is not about cookie-cutter responses, but it is about consistency. And when students are learning something new, I often say first comes accuracy, then comes speed. The same is true for teachers. When they are brand new, when they are a novice, when they are grounding and applying, and if you're one of our Leading Learning Success schools, you will recognise that language from our responsive leadership model. When they are grounding and applying, we need to help them be accurate and get early wins before we start to have them spread out and respond in ways that may or may not be useful.

Speaker 16:26

So when we're grounding and applying at something, when we're a novice, we need the steps. We need to follow the steps, we need to become a little fluent with the steps, and then what we need from then on is coaching and support using data to respond to what we see. That data is then used as feedback about how well what we have done has reached our students and how we may need to adjust. But that adjustment is done with guardrails in place. It's done with the coaching and support of leadership. It's not, here's what I think when I don't have the experience to be making the decisions that are going to get students where we want them to go.

Speaker 17:12

Remember those two parts of development I mentioned earlier? That understanding of context and knowing how to make decisions in response to it. That's where that second part really needs strong coaching and a great deal of nuance because we have classrooms full of individual students with differing needs. And that part of the work is not done on day one. It's the work that becomes possible once the foundations are solid.

Speaker 17:45

We haven't come anywhere near to talking about the whole school improvement journey in this episode, and that was not the purpose of today. But I want to leave you with this. Frameworks and roadmaps, when they're followed appropriately, allow leaders to show up for their teams in a way that builds confidence in their leadership and gives teachers what they need to do excellent work. Those two things don't have to sit in tension, I actually think they're the same thing. Our goal is to work with people, not run professional learning at them or do things to them. Walking alongside our teams on a structured improvement journey that builds the internal capability of everybody in our environment is what keeps things going long after the implementation ends.

Speaker 18:47

If you're in the middle of an instructional muddle right now, please take heart, all is not lost. It may feel difficult to regroup at this point, but it is doable and you don't have to do it alone. If something in this episode resonated with you, please share it with a colleague who might need to hear it right now. And if you think, oh, I think I may need that a little bit down the track, you can bookmark it, you can download it, you can do whatever you need to to come back to the episode again and again and again and have it there as many times as you need. Remember, conversations are better when we have them together. So reach out to colleagues and your support network, ask for help, it's going to be ok. I'll see you next time on the Leading Learning podcast. Take care of yourself. Everything's going to be fine. Bye.