S1 E5 - The Real Work Begins Where the Program Runs Out

Jocelyn reflects on what happens when a well-built instructional program stops providing answers, and what leadership teams must do next. This episode explores the difference between building a minimum viable system and the deeper, more demanding work of continuous improvement, offering practical frameworks for diagnosing why a subset of students isn't progressing and how to design targeted responses grounded in evidence rather than chasing new programs. 

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

Welcome back to the Leading Learning Podcast, I'm Jocelyn Seamer. I want to start with a situation that if you've been around for a while, you'll recognise. It's a situation facing a school we've been working with for about three years now, and I have no doubt that they are not alone. And this is it.

Speaker 0:20

You've done the hard work of putting a program in place, and the system you've been building is starting to hold its shape. The data is moving, most of your students are growing and achieving. You might even have NAPLAN data that stands out from the crowd, like the school whose leader I was coaching this week. And for the first time in a long time, you can look at your literacy, numeracy, or behaviour data and feel like you are actually approaching the ambitious goals you've set. And then you notice something. There's a group of students for whom the data isn't moving the way you'd expect. It might be a small group in Year 3, or your students with the most complex learning profiles, or a particular cohort that you can't quite explain. You go looking through the program for what to do next, but the program doesn't have an answer for you. Or the answer that it does have, you've already tried and it hasn't worked.

Speaker 1:21

That's the moment I want to talk about today. The moment when the map that you've been using runs out. When that program, no matter how good it is, has reached the edges of what it can tell you and help you to do. I want you to know that that moment doesn't signal failure. It's actually a moment to be celebrated. Because it's a sign that you have done some serious work. You've built the minimum viable system for your school that is getting you real results. And now you're standing at the edge of what I think can be the most interesting and most demanding part of school improvement. The part where you can't outsource your thinking and where your team's knowledge, judgement, and experience really have to do the heavy lifting in the problem solving ahead of you.

Speaker 2:19

We're talking about this because the moves that you make at that point in your school's journey are different from the moves you make when you're building the minimum viable system in the first place. And if we don't notice that the work has changed, we end up doing more of what already worked and being surprised when we don't get further results. So let's get into it.

Speaker 2:44

I'm going to say something now that might sound a little bit awkward or harsh, and I don't want it to be. If it feels that way to you, just stay with me. There is no program that can do the instructional thinking for you. There is no resource, no scope and sequence, no scripted lesson, no framework, no piece of system guidance that can do the thinking we're talking about today on your behalf. I say that as someone whose organisation produces programs. Our team puts care, effort, and expertise into building programs that align with evidence about literacy and the evidence about cognition and how human beings learn. Good programs matter to us because we understand their place in building that minimum viable system, which is why we respond to real-world problems with real solutions.

Speaker 3:42

We also help schools with bespoke solutions and systems and help schools deeply understand instruction so that they can get the best out of the resources they have, even if they're not one of our programs. The foundations of instruction aren't limited to the program or a curriculum area. This work is about deeply understanding learning and building your role as a leader to be the leader of the learning that happens and to also help your team to be the leaders of learning in their classrooms. And this matters no matter what grade we're talking about or curriculum area we're exploring. High-quality programs are terrific, but even an excellent program has limits because we work as educators in complex spaces with complex humans where each context brings a unique set of circumstances and needs. There is not a single program that can account for every "if" that you will encounter. And no program can anticipate what will happen in your context that has a particular combination of students, staff, and circumstances at any given point in time.

Speaker 5:02

So part of a school leader's job as a leader of learning is to ensure that we and our teams deeply understand evidence and practice. This combination enables us to go beyond the surface level application of simple practices or elements. We have to grow our capability into the space of decision making. That way, when we encounter something the program developer hasn't accounted for, we can lean into that evidence and cross-reference it with the needs of the students in front of us. It is from that basis that we can make a professional decision.

Speaker 5:42

I want to head off a misunderstanding here because this is a common mistake that we see. That is, a program seems to have stopped working for some students. So the team starts looking for a whole new program and off they go into the next cycle of training, financial investment, and the next round of staff change fatigue. But, and I really need you to hear this, so if you're multitasking right now, or at least attempting to, come back to me. Finding the limits of a program isn't necessarily a call to change. But there's a caveat that we have to consider. If your current program has achieved measurable, consistent growth for students of all learning profiles that you can see reflected strongly in data, then you have what you need to support your minimum viable system. However, if you have been delivering a program with fidelity and consistency, you have been doing so for over a year or two, and your data isn't moving, then it might be time to make a change. If you will have to basically rewrite the thing to make it fit for purpose, because the way that it's constructed doesn't connect both the science of reading/writing/maths, and the science of learning, that's when you may have a conversation about changing a program. And if you're hearing this and thinking, well, we think that our phonics program is working really well, ask your Year 3/4 teachers if they agree. We are seeing schools where four years and more of phonics instruction is resulting in teachers in Year 3 and 4 having to start the complex code work in phonics from scratch because the students just haven't retained the learning. And unfortunately, this is really common.

Speaker 7:43

Similarly, we work with P to 12 schools. So if you work in a P to 12 school and you think your primary school approach is sound, ask your Year 7 and 8 teachers if they agree. Now, this is not about blaming the teachers of the grade levels before our own. It's about evaluating whether our system of instruction is doing what we think it's doing. Are we setting our students up for that long-term change in memory and capability that allows them to grow forward as they develop?

Speaker 8:22

But let's say that, like the school leader who I was coaching just recently, you do have evidence of your minimum viable system, and quite nice evidence, including NAPLAN growth. And you find that data for a particular subset of students isn't reflecting what we see for the majority, then it's time for strategic thinking. And for me, this is where the real and exciting work begins. And I do mean exciting. If you have built the knowledge and the experience and the team capability to engage with this work and find it exciting, then what you are looking at is a genuine, achievable professional challenge. You can define it, analyse it, put a plan in place, measure your progress along the way. And when things shift, the impact on the students you are aiming to help will be substantial.

Speaker 9:19

But the journey is only exciting if you have the knowledge, skills, and experience to do the work. If you don't, it can be discouraging, exhausting, and downright terrifying. And I get how hard that is and what it feels like to know that you are responsible for your team and the students in your school and to look at the data and see clearly that something is not right at the same time that you don't have a clear sense of what should be happening next. And that point, if you are there or if you have reached that in the past, that point is one of the lonelier ones in school leadership because we think we should know. But we, like everyone else, are learners. And that's why coaching can be so valuable.

Speaker 10:11

So one of the central questions for a leader at this point in a school's journey is the question of capability. Do we, as a leadership team, have what we need to engage with this work? If yes, fantastic, we get on with it. If not, then it's a really good idea to intentionally build that capability through reading, professional learning that develops us rather than keeping us busy or trying to give us cookie-cutter solutions. And by working alongside people who have done this work before and have gotten the results. So it's not just about doing more PL, it's about hearing from people and engaging with people who have the proven outcomes.

Speaker 11:00

Be really wary of just going to see what the school down the road did because they feel good about their implementation. The slow and deliberate building of a leadership team that can sit with complexity and think clearly about it is no easy task. Because this work is not just about teaching maths, science, or English. At its core, it's about deeply understanding cognition and what is needed for solid instructional design.

Speaker 11:35

This, by the way, is one of the ways that our work shows up with the schools we work with and partner with. We don't just want to give everyone a script to follow when that edge appears. The script and the highly structured is great when we're implementing and we're taking our first steps. But when you approach this point where there is no one size fits all answer, you need to have frameworks and the knowledge to work with so that when you're standing at that edge, you have somewhere solid to stand.

Speaker 12:08

So let's get practical now. We've done the work and you've built something, and you can see that for a subset of students the data isn't going where you would like it to. So what do we do? Firstly, ask which students are experiencing difficulty. If it's a small subset of students in one or two grades, that tells you where you need to hone in. This problem has a shape that you can work with, it has limits, it's therefore achievable. You can study it and plan for it without having to fully disrupt the rest of the system you've built.

Speaker 12:43

If it's the whole early years or the whole school or the entirety of a particular grade year after year, then you probably have some more macro work to do. Remember, if we aren't getting success across the board for most students, we have a tier one instruction issue. And that's the conversation about getting to a minimum viable system in the first place.

Speaker 13:06

So before you go any further, just sit with that distinction. Are you in your school right now at the edge of a system that's working for most students, or are you still trying to build the system itself? Both are legitimate places for you to be in. It's just that they need different leadership decisions to help you get great outcomes.

Speaker 13:31

So let's assume for the rest of our time today that you're at the edge of a system that's working for the majority. There are four guiding questions that can help. Let's go through them one at a time.

Speaker 13:45

Question one: Whose data shows us that they are being well served by our current approach? Always start with the good news and the strength. And this is not about not wanting to face a reality that may be uncomfortable. But when we start with a strengths-based approach and recognise what we were doing that was working so well, we can leverage that strength to achieve other goals. Where is the system doing its job? Whose growth tells you that what you've built is fit for purpose? Be specific about which students, which classes, which cohorts.

Speaker 14:23

Question number two: whose data indicates that they could be better served? These are the students who are growing, but not at the rate you'd expect. They're not in crisis, but they're not flourishing either, they could be a bit cruisy. They sit in that in-between space that's easy to overlook because nothing is on fire. This is often where the most accessible improvement work is. The students are already engaging, the system is mostly working, and there's room to lift.

Speaker 14:55

Question three. Whose data indicates that they are not being served at all? And these are the students for whom your current approach simply isn't working. Their growth is flat or close to it. And when I say served, I mean optimal growth is being achieved. Because showing up, joining in, and ticking off the lesson components, that's not the same as actually learning. And we have to be careful not to settle for proxy indicators of learning, like complying with requests or trying their best. When I sit down with a group of teachers and I ask them, how many students do you have in that spelling lesson or that maths lesson who you know are actually not getting anything out of this lesson because it doesn't meet their needs? Every teacher can tell me precisely how many students that is and tell me what their names are. Teachers are not unaware of this. So, yes, you need the data, but teacher observation and professional inclusion in the conversation is also important in identifying these students.

Speaker 16:07

Question four. Where gaps in data exist, what do we see when we drill down further into the data for this particular subset? Now, the school that I mentioned, whose leader I was coaching in this space, had already done some significant data analysis when we met. She had not only looked at the gap in the data they were seeing, but she tracked that back to the point at which it should have developed to be able to identify where the wheels had fallen off the student learning. Now that's some high-level stuff right there. And this person is absolutely, they're an amazing practitioner, I really enjoy working with them. But it's not to say that they have special skills that anybody else doesn't have. So you can learn these skills, and that doesn't happen overnight. So if what you're looking at is just basic diagnostic data to start with, then that's great. Start there.

Speaker 17:08

Having that diagnostic data enables you to ask the next questions, which are for that subset of students who aren't being well served, what patterns are showing up? What common experiences or learning profiles are most affected? Is this pattern seen across a whole class or cohort, or is it sitting inside one classroom? Is this a problem of teacher capability or a problem of the instructional system we have or have not created? Often it's a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B. Because both are possible, but the answer changes what we do next. If it's a capability issue inside one classroom, then our response sits in coaching and professional development for that teacher. If it is a system issue, the response is bigger and involves more people. And this could well sit at the level of how work is designed across the school. As I said, the leader I was coaching didn't just look at the data point that was of concern, she tracked it back to the point at which that learning should have happened and should have created a change in long-term memory, and it didn't to ask the question: ok, what's going on here?

Speaker 18:29

Once you've fully defined the problem you're trying to solve, and if you have not yet defined the problem you're trying to solve, please don't start making a plan. The first step in professional problem solving is to define the problem fully. But once you've done that, you can start to work on your solutions. And here's where we want to be a little bit careful because the response is not to go out and find something new and shiny. The response has to be grounded in what you already know about how learning happens and what you've already seen work in your school and what the students in front of you actually need. There are three questions to help you with this step, and again, we'll go through them one at a time.

Speaker 19:15

Question one: What other situation have we encountered where the context and conditions were the same as this one? So you may have encountered a data gap or a situation in maths where the circumstances were quite similar, but now you're seeing that gap show up in literacy, or vice versa.

Speaker 19:36

Being able to identify that takes you to the next question. If the answer is, oh, we have one of those, the question is, what did we do to get results? I don't want you having to start from scratch every time you have a problem to be solved. That solution may have happened in the school you're in, or it may have happened in a different school you've worked in. If it's the case of the different school you've worked in, be mindful that the context of that school and your school now are different. So don't assume you can just pop one full solution from one school into another and it will do everything, we have to account for the differences in the context of this school.

Speaker 20:19

Question three: What aspects of that plan could be useful here? Once you've got the plan, decide how you will know whether it's working because the goal isn't to do a thing, the goal is to evaluate the change that has been made and to be able to quantify the impact, which means we need to be able to look at the data in one month, three months, six months, and twelve months and know that we're on the right track. So we have to decide ahead of time what we anticipate the change in the data will be. In a previous episode, I spoke about the NICE framework for deciding if we need something else. N: do we need it? I was for impact, what is the impact we hope to have? The more specific we are about that impact, the better it is, because improved outcomes is not really your goal.

Speaker 21:17

If you put a plan in place without these measures, you will be flying blind. And that's a position no leader wants to be in for very long. And flying blind sounds like this.

Speaker 21:29

"Hey, how's that change going that you made?"

Speaker 21:31

"Oh, yeah, really good. The kids are really enjoying the lessons."

Speaker 21:35

And how often do we hear teachers say that exact thing? So being clear about what the impact is we hope to have, what are we specifically looking for in the data will help everyone have more robust, deeper, and more impactful conversations about teaching and learning.

Speaker 21:53

I want to swing back now in the last part of this episode to something I mentioned a little earlier, which was about that distinction between when we're beginning a journey in improvement in an area and when we are working on solving a problem. Because I think clarity about this is really useful. The first stage is about getting from not much really happening to a minimum viable system. Now, this can involve a lot of energy, a lot of time, a lot of money, and a whole lot of effort. You've got new training, new resources, new routines. Sometimes you have new staff in that, and the big lifts that come with building something where there wasn't much before, it's just intoxicating. The data starts moving, the team starts to feel like the work is paying off. And most school improvement literature is essentially about this stage. It's where we hear about the science of implementation.

Speaker 22:56

Continuous school improvement, on the other hand, involves the stretch of the journey beyond the initial work. It's the part of the work where most students are growing, but you can't move on yet. It's also the time when most schools do move on. Because we can't just focus on literacy for five years, there are other things we need to do. Or we can't just focus on math solely for an extended period of time. But it's this part where you're working at the edge of your system with the subset of students whose data isn't there yet, it's where you really don't want to let it go. These next wins require deeper knowledge, more careful diagnosis, and more disciplined thinking. So that we don't jump from one idea to another, hoping for the best, expending a whole heap of energy for not much result. And what happens, even though we don't mean it to, is we leave a trail of half-finished initiatives behind us. And I think if you've been working in a particular system for any length of time, you would be able to name the trail of half-finished initiatives that you have encountered in your time there. It is unfortunately the status quo of education, and we really want to challenge that.

Speaker 24:15

I do want to be careful because I'm not saying that the continuous improvement is harder than building the minimum viable system. I'm saying that it asks something different from us as a leader. It asks for long-term vision. But you cannot do it all on your own. And so building the capability within your team to be able to take some of this work and spearhead it and be able to lean into it is really important, and that's the thing that makes it sustainable. If the instructional leaders, the deputies, the principal are the ones always carrying all of the day-to-day responsibility for the improvement work, then it's inevitable that we're going to have to step away from something before we're ready because we can't do everything.

Speaker 25:06

So if you're a leader, listen to this, and you can see that your school has done significant work and most of your students are growing, but there's a group at the edge of the data that really isn't moving the way you'd hoped. I want to leave you with just a few thoughts. Be clear with yourself about where you are. From there, the work is to define the problem properly before doing anything else. Run that diagnostic, find out exactly who is sitting in that space where you're seeing the gap in the data and what their experience of school looks like before we write them off by saying, well, they're the kids with anxiety, or they're the students with a diagnosis of autism, or they're the students with the learning difficulty. Let's ask, what is it about our system of instruction that is not serving them?

Speaker 26:00

And then you can ask yourself honestly whether you have the knowledge and the experience as a leadership team to engage with what that diagnostic has shown you. If you do, just get on with it. If you don't, then we need to find some people or resources that can help us build our professional capacity. But considering that this work is often about slightly bespoke solutions that meet your context needs, you may not find what you're looking for in the standard professional learning that's been put together for the system level where the goal was to start to build the minimum viable system. So if you're not finding the answers you need in what you have available, don't assume you're asking the wrong questions. It's just that most of education and most of our profession is not anywhere near where you are right now.

Speaker 26:54

And the hardest part of all of this is staying in the work long enough to see the change. I've often heard it said that it takes about five years to really move the needle on instruction. And that school leader I mentioned, who I was coaching, who we've been working with for three years, she is there for the long haul to do the work, to not rest until that data shows that every student is being served.

Speaker 27:22

Continuous improvement is not glamorous. It doesn't produce lots and lots of new shiny initiatives to announce at the next staff meeting or put in the newsletter. But what it produces over time is a school that gets steadily better at meeting the needs of every student who walks through its doors. And that, I think, is what universal student success is all about in practice. It's the slow and careful work of a leadership team that has chosen to think for itself, to keep thinking long after the obvious wins have been claimed. That's all from me for this week. I'll see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast. Bye .