S1 E7 - We've Done the PL, but Our Team Can't Get Started

In this episode, Jocelyn explores why new teaching practices often fail to take hold after professional learning sessions, and how giving teachers one clear, concrete starting point - rather than open-ended freedom - better supports beginners in building consistent, effective habits.

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

Welcome to the Leading Learning Podcast, I'm Jocelyn. The topic of today's conversation is something that many of us have experienced. We've run our professional learning and we've done it pretty well. We've given good examples, we've given people time, we've answered questions, and everyone leaves the training and the staff meetings nodding. And then a few weeks later, we walk through classrooms, and the thing that we just trained everyone in isn't actually happening. I was coaching a school through this exact situation not long ago. They were introducing daily review as a consistent practice in their middle school. The school ran a session on it. The idea of daily review wasn't new to the teachers. They showed them some strong examples of what things could look like and then, sensibly enough, left the teachers to get on with it because everybody said, yep, we've got that. A few weeks later, when we met for our coaching session, I asked how things were going, and the leaders shared that the daily review, for the most part, wasn't happening yet. And when they had raised this really gently with the teachers, the most common response was, I just haven't had time to get it going. Now, a couple of teachers had made a start. They'd gone online, found a pre-made daily review slide deck, and they were kind of running those. But the practice was not in any meaningful way embedded. Now, picture that situation the leader is standing in. They had a willing staff, a good PL session, clear examples, but then almost nothing happening on the ground. And I think this can be really deflating. And if you've been a school leader for a little while, you will have had a moment like this. It's deflating because they did everything right and it still didn't take.

Speaker 1:56

So today I'd like to talk about why that happens and what we can do to make sure that a new practice gets off the ground. Let me start with an idea that explains exactly what's going on here. If you've listened to the Structured Literacy podcast, you may have heard me talk about my responsive leadership model. This model maps how people grow as they learn to do something new from being a complete beginner through to reaching mastery and sets out what kind of support a person would typically need at each phase of this journey. The first phase is the one that we're going to focus on today, and it's called grounding and applying. A person in the grounding and applying phase is new to the thing that they're doing. When we're in the grounding part of this learning, we're developing our initial understandings. We're learning about theory and getting an idea of what a practice looks like in reality. It's where we do our training. When we're applying, we have begun to use the resource program or an approach for ourselves. We are putting it to work.

Speaker 3:16

Now, this doesn't mean that we're independent and effective yet. People who are in the applying part of grounding and applying are looking for clear instructions before they act. They tend to follow steps fairly rigidly because they don't yet have the experience in that practice to know which parts matter most and which parts they can flex. Very often, people want confirmation that they're doing it right. And personality, when overlaid over the model, explains so much about why our people react the way they do.

Speaker 3:54

When we're grounding and applying, we can have that bigger picture of why a practice matters, but when it comes to the doing, we may well need the path laid out in very concrete terms in front of us. This phase tends to be a little exciting and maybe a little nerve-wracking at the same time.

Speaker 4:16

Now, here's the part that I think changes how we may lead an implementation in the future. When you bring a new practice or a new program into your school, all of your teachers are at grounding and applying for that practice, every single one of them, if they've not done it before. It doesn't matter that some people in our team are 20-year teaching veterans who are brilliant at their craft. In that specific practice approach or program, we are asking them to do it for the first time. They may not be novice teachers, but they're novices in the specific practice we are asking them to introduce. And that difference matters because it tells us what kind of support people actually need.

Speaker 5:07

My responsive leadership model is clear that the right approach for someone at this phase is training. That's the role of the leader, is to provide training. That includes clear steps, worked models and examples, explicit guidance, and a safe space to practice. What people at this phase are not yet ready for is a blank page and an invitation to make it their own. That comes later, and when it comes, it's wonderful, but it's not where we begin.

Speaker 5:43

This is where a lot of well-meaning practice in leadership and implementation can really come unstuck. And I'll include myself in thinking about where the wheels have fallen off. When we show teachers some good examples and then step back and leave the rest to them, it might feel like the respectful thing to do. People are professionals. We want them to trust their judgement. We don't want to be overly prescriptive or to insult anyone's intelligence by telling them exactly what to do. So we leave the how fairly open at times, believing that we're giving them room to move. To someone in the grounding and applying phase, though, all that room to move can feel like a burden rather than a gift. Choice to a beginner can be paralysing. Every open decision is one more thing they have to work out before they can start. So the whole task slides down the list until there's a more urgent fire to put out. And that I think is what's really going on when a capable teacher says, I haven't had time to get started. It's rarely about the minutes in the day, it's more that they don't really have a clear idea of the first move, so that task never reaches the top of the pile because they're already cognitively busy and potentially overloaded.

Speaker 7:17

The other thing about this is when we present this opportunity to do new things to an experienced teacher as an opportunity rather than a clear instruction, very often they think, oh, here's something I can fold into the way I already do things. Now that might be what you're after, and if it is, good. Everything's worked out as planned. But if we are trying to create a consistent whole school approach, it's the thing that can unintentionally lead us down a path of frustration for everybody. And I get how hard it is when this happens. It's difficult for the leadership team, it's difficult for the teachers involved because everybody looks at the list to do and says, we actually did all the right things on the list: we ran the session, we trusted the people, and we walked into classrooms expecting to see the version of instruction that we thought we were communicating and we just didn't find it. And we're then in the difficult position of having to go back to that experienced, well-meaning teacher and say, Oh, actually, that's not right. And as a learner myself, and we all are, there is nothing worse than having the thought of, why didn't you just tell me that in the first place?

Speaker 8:40

I want to be really clear about the school that I'm referencing here because it would be easy to hear this story and kind of think, oh, well, the teachers were resistant to change and dragging their feet. They weren't. This is a school that has been through our Leading Learning Success program. The team understands learning, they understand cognition, they get about skills, knowledge, and an emotional perspective to instruction. They were not resistant to new things. In fact, I think we'd be hard pressed to find a more committed and cohesive staff. They were simply beginners in this one practice, and they needed clearer direction and more concrete steps than they had been given. The teachers who did start tell us something useful too. The ones who found a slide deck online and got moving, well, they did better than freezing. But what they grabbed wasn't necessarily connected to what their own students were learning, and it wasn't shaped around what those students actually needed. It didn't dovetail into their existing practices. So they were running daily review with the box ticked of doing daily review, but they weren't actually making decisions to make it work for the purpose it was intended for. So we had activity, but not the decision making that needs to sit underneath it.

Speaker 10:08

So now that we recognise this challenge, what do we do instead? Well, we give our team one concrete move and communicate clearly. For the school I was working with, that one concrete move was something simple. There's a really lovely routine in the book Powerful Teaching that works a bit like a lucky dip. You build up a big box of questions over time and you draw from what has already been introduced in your lessons. Each day you pull out a handful of questions and that's your review. You've got automatic interleaving and space practice. Students never quite know what's coming, which keeps them on their toes, and the teacher's not reinventing things all the time. When a whole class does well with a question, you fold the piece of paper in half and it goes back in the box. If the content hasn't stuck, you don't fold it. So the smaller the paper, the smaller the problem. Combined with a document viewer, you can use this practice for maths and science or English or whatever else you're teaching, and there can be written questions there for students to answer, no PowerPoint required.

Speaker 11:16

The reason I suggested this wasn't just that it's clever, it really is. It's that it does two jobs at once. It's simple enough to break the beginner's freeze, because a teacher can start tomorrow, and it's really tightly connected to the work they're already doing. So the simplicity for the teachers was enhanced by handing the teachers the first couple of lots of questions or words so that they could just get used to the doing of the process. Then, when that had happened, they were going to all work together to do the planning. The process is connected by its very nature to what the students are learning because it's coming straight out of the class's own work. In this school, this process was already up and running in a Year 6 classroom, so the school had a nice worked example on site that people could go and see. The plan was to extend it into Year 7 and 8 literacy and tie it directly to the spelling focus those classes were already working on, nice and simple. So the practice wasn't floating off on its own, it was embedded in something the teachers were already paying attention to.

Speaker 12:34

And I really want to shine a light on the leadership team here and their thinking. Now they could have sat the staff down and explained in more detail the full picture of how they wanted it all to work and how to be responsive to the students and given the teachers all of the nuance and all of the decision points, and they would have overloaded everyone in the room. Instead, they embraced simplicity and they embraced well-being for their teachers as well. In choosing a single practice that would help people really create impactful instruction, and it was something that they could just pick up and work with, they set everybody up for success.

Speaker 13:18

Zooming back out from daily review to supporting new practice, which is the focus of this episode. It's important to recognise that getting teachers to do a new practice is only the first step in development. It is absolutely not the destination. When a practice is brand new, that first simple win is that it's happening consistently in the way it was modelled. That's the grounding and applying phase. But we don't want our teachers stuck there forever, just dutifully running a routine and ticking it off a list. The whole point of a pedagogical practice is the decisions we help our team learn to make to respond to the needs of their students. We need a process to help teachers connect with misconceptions that may need to be targeted this week. They have to decide when to revisit something that hasn't stuck. They need to decide when it's time to drop something and pick it up in a little bit because it's reasonably secure. And that's the shift from doing to making decisions.

Speaker 14:23

That shift doesn't happen on its own. And it doesn't tend to happen through just another whole staff PL session. It happens through coaching, through someone working alongside teachers as they begin to read the room in their own classrooms and make adjustments. And this is the part of implementation that we often miss and that we love helping schools achieve. The goal is to build capability in the long term, and that means growing on what happens when we first introduce a practice. Coaching is so incredibly important in all of this.

Speaker 15:03

The takeaway from this episode that I hope you get is: when you bring something new into your school, your teachers are beginners in that practice, however expert they are at everything else. The kindest and most useful thing that we can do is to give our team one clear, connected place to start, a first step that they can actually take that gives them somewhere to put their feet. We also need to have people understand the broader rollout process over the longer term so that they understand that this step -by -step approach is not where we're going to end, it is only where we start. Because that is the work and it's really well worth doing properly. That's all from me for this week. I hope to see you next time on the Leading Learning podcast. Thanks everyone. Bye.