S1 E8 - The Instructional Principle That Can Change Everything

In this episode, Jocelyn tackles one important question: Do your students have the prerequisite knowledge for this learning? The spread of answers reveals whether a school is focused on delivering content or ensuring students actually learn.

Key points include:

• Introducing content does not equal learning it.
• Overload drives behaviour issues.
• Reframing the teacher's role, from "deliverer of content" to "engineer of student success."
• Listening, not blaming.

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

Hi there, welcome to the Leading Learning Podcast, I'm Jocelyn. I'm so pleased that you're here with me today. I'd like to start today by positioning myself and you in a planning session because I spend a good deal of my working life in these sessions, sitting with teams as they map out units of work and think about instruction. And there's one question I ask in these sessions that tells me an enormous amount about where a school is sitting. And that question is a simple one.

Speaker 0:35

Whenever a teacher includes an element in an instructional design or in a unit of work, I ask the question: Do your students have the prerequisite knowledge and skills to be able to engage fully with this learning? The answers I get back are where it becomes interesting. Very often what I hear is, "Well, they should because it was in last year's curriculum," or, "Yep, we did it earlier in the year," or, and this one's probably the most honest one, "Gosh, I hope so." And then every so often a teacher will say, "Yes, definitely, we have been working on it, and I have seen them demonstrate it independently, even our strugglers."

Speaker 1:23

Now that spread of answers from they should to I hope so to yes, I have seen it, is what this whole episode is about. In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, we are going to focus on helping you answer the question: Are our teachers planning for the students in front of them, or are they planning to deliver content?

Speaker 1:47

So today I'm going to discuss what I think is one of the most important instructional principles there is. It's the thing that if everyone on our team really understood it, it would transform our outcomes. It is the idea that introducing content to students and students actually learning it for the long term are two different things. And that might sound like the most obvious thing in the universe. And as a leader, you might say, "Well, yes, of course, that's not rocket science, I don't need to listen to this episode at all." But stick with me because there's some things here that I think will resonate.

Speaker 2:34

We know how working memory behaves when we ask it to hold too much at once. When we build this year's content on top of schema that was never properly secured, we end up overloading the very students we are trying to help. And you know what happens when students are over or underwhelmed by the instruction in front of them? Negative classroom behaviours. I often say to teachers that students can be on task, engaging deeply with what you want them to be, or they can be off task. You get to choose. When students aren't engaged in the learning, we see it in our teachers' faces every time they walk into the staff room. If you're seeing your teachers becoming increasingly worn out from the effort of managing classroom behaviour, the culprit could very well be, in part, a mismatch between what students need and what they are getting. And by calling it a mismatch, I'm making a deliberate choice of language because I'm not about blaming teachers and I'm not about blaming schools. I'm about talking in unemotional terms about what we can do to help make our life easier and help student learning be stronger.

Speaker 4:03

So if introducing content is not the same as learning it, what does that ask of us as leaders? I think it asks us to change the thinking that sits right at the centre of just about every school culture. So much of teaching at the moment is about getting through a scope and sequence, teachers feel enormous pressure to work through the pacing guide as expected, ticking the boxes on hitting the right content by the right date. And when that is the organising idea, content coverage becomes the goal instead of student learning. That means we're probably moving a whole class on, while a good number of them have not actually learned the thing we just thought we covered. What do we mean by learned? Well, Sweller describes it as a permanent change to long-term memory.

Speaker 5:06

The shift I want us to think about is how we can move teachers from being a deliverer of the right content by the right date into becoming the engineer for student success. When our role is as the engineers of student success, it becomes the way we do things around here. The whole focus moves from instructional box ticking towards responsive teaching. This is the culture piece, and culture is something that we as leaders craft on purpose. It is that people like us do things like this.

Speaker 5:45

And I want to be really clear about something here, because none of this is about teachers not working hard enough or leaders not being committed or intelligent or up with the latest research. I know and I see how hard this work is, and I know what it feels like to be standing in front of a class or a team of teachers trying to make all of the pieces fit together. The teachers and leaders that we meet are working incredibly hard. What we're talking about is the foundations of the work, the assumptions we are building on before anyone even walks into the room. I'm talking about challenging the status quo of what business as usual looks like in education. And it doesn't matter if you are a leader in the primary space, in the secondary space, or at system level. This challenging of the status quo is a good thing, iIt's not about throwing everything we've done out, but it is about saying, you know what, we've taken these steps and we're really proud of those, and our job is not yet done, we have more work to do.

Speaker 6:57

So where does this leave us practically? The first thing is for you as a leader to start listening. Now, Brene Brown defines a leader as anyone who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes and who has the courage to develop that potential. And the courage bit is interesting there because it's not about declaring that I'm interested in developing the potential of the people and the processes we have. It's that I'm willing to make myself vulnerable, I'm willing for us to step outside our comfort zone. And I'm willing, maybe, that sometimes I'm going to get it wrong. And that's where the courage bit sits. You might be a classroom teacher, year-level coordinator, instructional coach, deputy principal, executive principal, or system level leader, if you are ready to take responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes, and you have the courage to develop that potential, you are a leader.

Speaker 8:03

Every teacher in every one of our classrooms should be a leader of learning, taking responsibility for finding the potential in students and then having the courage to develop it. So the first step here for leaders is to get clear in our own mind about what business our school is in. Are we in the curriculum delivery business? Or are we in the student success business? So often we are working with a defective system that operates like this. We declare that we have high expectations. We give teachers tools so that they can be deliverers of content. We hold them to account with quite rigorous timetables and calendars. The pace of instruction works for some of our students, who we then reward with certificates at evenings of excellence. And when we're asked why the other students didn't get great outcomes, we come up with a list of reasons why what we did really didn't work for them. And usually every one of those reasons is about everything except the instruction inside the classroom. From there, we end up with a culture of finger pointing and blaming others: the parents didn't make sure the child got to bed on time, the student came with significant issues, the student has anxiety, they needed more than we could provide.

Speaker 9:34

Now there are cases when that is true, and having come from working for many years in quite small schools, there's just a point at which you say we do not have the resources to do precisely what is needed, and usually that's when an allied health professional would be involved in some way. But to say that a student with no diagnosed or diagnosable learning difficulties had needs that were beyond what we could provide, that just doesn't make sense.

Speaker 10:05

Every leader I have worked with who has led their school or team to outstanding results has felt strongly that there is a moral purpose to the work they are doing. They take the responsibility for engineering success seriously, both for their students and for their teachers. That work is a vocation. They take responsibility for what happens. Where things can get tricky in working within a system, and what some of our leaders who we're working with are encountering, is that part that sits in the second part of Brene's definition, in the courage to develop the potential in others, especially when you are being advised or required by your system to do something that isn't actually sound. There are no easy answers there, but getting clear on what we do here and what business we're in helps us to recognise what we can do within the constraints that we have in front of us and do those things.

Speaker 11:17

Once we are clear on what business we're in, the next step is about listening. It's not conversations with the team or the rest of the leadership team, but it might be. But really, a good first step is listening and learning. So in the planning conversations that are happening with instructional leaders, in the staff room at recess and lunch, in the corridor, listen for language. When a teacher talks about what students have done or what we did or what they should know based on what they did last year, that's worth noticing. And I would suggest that the most useful audit any of us can run is a private audit of our own language first, before we go near anyone else's language. And what we might find is that what we mean and what we say are two different things. So it's a good idea to challenge yourself, and then later those around you, to say what you mean and mean what you say. It makes everything clear.

Speaker 12:26

This answers the question we started with. Are our teachers planning for the curriculum or are they planning for the students in front of them? Now, of course, we're going to use curriculum to plan for the students in front of us, but where is our major focus? Because where focus goes, energy flows. So if our focus is on hitting the right curriculum point by the right date, that's where we're going to give our energy. If our focus is on setting students up for success and engineering success for the students in that curriculum work, then that's where our energy is going to go.

Speaker 13:06

The next step is to help our team build a real understanding of how learning works. And this is where I want to be honest with you about the size of this task. Understanding how attention works, how we manage working memory so we're not overloading it, how learning consolidates over time so that it actually sticks. None of this is something a person picks up in a one-off PL day or a single sprint. It's a process and it takes time because we not only need to give teachers the academic understanding that they need, we also need to help them make connections to their own classrooms and their own students, if any of it is going to mean something to them.

Speaker 13:50

This is the work that our Leading Learning Success Program is built for. So over 12 months, we help every member of a team understand that they are the engineers of success for students and help them recognise that opportunities really do exist that make taking the risk of declaring "I am responsible for outcomes" worth it. Because nobody wants to lean into vulnerability and big audacious goals if they feel like they're being asked to do the impossible. Our teams need us as the leaders to be the leaders of learning for them, so that they can be the leaders of learning for their students.

Speaker 14:31

Now, this podcast is not one big ad for our Leading Learning program. What I'm suggesting in these episodes is sound and applicable, even if you never engage with us directly and never pay us a cent. That's the way that we in our organisation give back to our education community.

Speaker 14:50

The next step, once your team has a shared understanding, is to bring them into the audit of language and practices with us. This is collaborative work to look at where our school is actually sitting, to look at the language people really use and the practices that are in place, as well as the guidelines we work with. Because what we may find is that unintentionally, the way we've set up our structures and systems pushes us into that curriculum coverage by a certain date space rather than in the student success space, which is actually where we want to be.

Speaker 15:30

Acting on a gap we have uncovered is not criticising our team and it's not finger pointing. It is the vital ongoing work of school improvement. And the more we treat it that way, the safer it becomes for everyone to be honest about what they find. We need to build trust within our team that identifying a point of improvement is not going to lead to a wrap over the knuckles.

Speaker 15:57

The last piece here is to resource the change properly. Because one of the more unkind things that we can do as leaders, and we don't do this intentionally, but it does happen, is that we name a problem, provide some curriculum resources, and then leave people to it. Identifying that there's a need for change and then not providing what comes next, and not actually mapping out the longer-term journey sets people up for a whole lot of stress. So if we are going to ask our teachers to think differently about instruction, then we owe them proper, rigorous learning about it and a clear framework of instructional design that they understand that they can use to adjust what they are doing to meet the needs of their students.

Speaker 16:47

Many schools are doing or have done the work of introducing an instructional model that mostly lives within individual lessons. That is fantastic work and it needs to happen. However, it's not the end of the story. What I'm talking about when I say frameworks is that we need to help teachers understand an instructional model at the whole of unit level so that we are truly engineering success.

Speaker 17:18

And I just want to reassure you that I am not talking about going back to a system where teachers have to create everything themselves. That would be crazy. I'm not suggesting going back and redoing everything you've already built. Now, once you have some new learning about how to structure a unit, you may want to go back and tweak and refine over time to bring your existing practices and processes into alignment. But that is a long-term endeavour rather than something we declare we're doing this term and try and do it all at once.

Speaker 17:54

As you head into your next planning conversation, I would love for you to carry that one question in with you and really listen to the answers. Do our students have the prerequisite knowledge and skills for this learning? And how do we know? When the answer comes back as I hope so, or they should, that's worth paying really close attention to because it points us straight to where the real work of leading learning needs to begin. That's all from me for this week. I hope to see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast. Thanks so much, everyone. Bye.