LEADERS LEARNING FROM LOCKDOWN: Critical Decision-Making Models

Educators have been compelled to pivot swiftly in response to huge logistical and emotional challenges in support of learning and the diverse needs of students, families, and colleagues during the COVID-19 crisis. Their creativity, commitment and professionalism has been inspirational, highlighting the critical role educational institutions provide in our communities and the social wellbeing fabric of students’ lives.

Since January 2020 there has been a plethora of thought-provoking articles and reports released, detailing effective ways to transition quickly from normal school practices to remote or distance learning. Educators are thankful for the rapid publication of evidence examining existing research to support the conversion to remote learning (Education

Endowment Foundation, 2020a; Reimers et al., 2020; Reich et al., 2020). In essence schools did not close, their campuses closed; lessons and learning continued, albeit in a different format and in our lounges, kitchens and living rooms.

At the core of everything we do as educational practitioners is student learning. In his blog post Learning from the Students in Lockdown, Steve Boot, Associate Vice Principal for Curriculum at Big Education Trust, suggests we should “aim to capture these unprecedented times from the students’ perspectives” (Boot, 2020). This unparalleled moment in the history of education - an enforced global experiment in remote learning, in which we have a unique opportunity to listen to students and learn from their experiences, was reinforced by Professor John Hattie when interviewed by Stephen Cox in the Build Back Better webinar (Osiris Educational, 2020). This distinction is further exemplified in the position paper Remote to Hybrid Learning (Fullan, et al., 2020). The paper pilots the reader through three zones: The Unsettled Zone, The Learning Zone, and The Growth Zone (pp. 3-4), contending that the sudden shift to remote learning globally, while tremendously difficult, has propelled school leaders and educators to reflect deeply, make decisions on what works best for students, and to decide what innovations should be developed further or simply discarded. There is considerable similarity with the zones posited by Fullan and Hattie and the 3 Stages of Pandemic Response, namely: Survival > Acceptance > Growth, alternatively referred to as Thoughts > Feelings > Actions (Treanor, 2020).

LITERATURE REVIEW

Bangkok Patana School regularly uses publications from the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), established in 2011 by The Sutton Trust, as a critical lens to compare and contrast school management and leadership procedures. For example, their Teaching and Learning Toolkit (Education Endownment Foundation, 2020b), an accessible summary of the international evidence on teaching 5 to 16-year-olds, helps frame and evaluate wholeschool strategic objectives in our development plans. Their School’s Guide to Implementation (Education Endownment Foundation, 2019) is a useful tool for planning, testing, and measuring the impact on learning of projects we oversee. Therefore, as the impending wave of school closure progressed westwards from colleagues in China and Hong Kong earlier this year, the leadership teams turned to the EEF for guidance. Initially slow to respond, the EEF team gathered momentum with their Remote Learning: Rapid Evidence Assessment report (EEF, 2020a), culminating in the release in June of the Covid-19 Support Guide for Schools, designed to help teachers and school leaders support their pupils following campus closure. In the report, Professor Becky Francis’ forward was promising when asserting:

School leaders will need to make difficult decisions about what to prioritise in the coming months, recognising the tremendous strain the pandemic has already placed on teachers and children. This short guide aims to provide evidence and signposts to additional resources that support those decisions. (Education Endowment Foundation, 2020c, p. 2)

Scott McLeod, Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Colorado Denver, author of the popular

Dangerously Irrelevant blog, has been interviewing school educators and leaders to discover how they are responding in the wake of this global pandemic. Titled the Coronavirus Chronicles (McLeod, 2020a), Scott documents his series of ‘check-ins’, including one our school were part of, publishing them on his blog and YouTube channel. In a thought provoking post, titled What are Your School’s Decision Triggers for Closing Back Down Again?, McLeod challenges school leaders to be “very clear with their educators, families, and communities about what their ‘decision triggers’ are”, warning us that “If we don’t articulate what our decision triggers are… we should be prepared for all of the pushback that accompanies winging it” (McLeod, 2020b).

In the last week of August, the Education Endowment Foundation published its Guide to Supporting School Planning: A Tiered Approach to 2020-21 (Education Endownment Foundation, 2020d). It aims to support school leaders with their planning for the forthcoming academic year in early September. Both in the introduction to the guide, and a supporting blog post, Alex Quigley, The EEF’s national content manager, points out that there is “little evidence to steer many of the logistical challenges faced by school leaders” (p. 5). This is a refreshing acknowledgement that the focus of publications to date has been on pedagogy, of which there is “plenty of good evidence that can support and re-establish great teaching for all pupils”.

School leaders must have felt like desert explorers in recent months, trying to navigate an accurate course towards a hazy objective over constantly shifting sands. It is difficult to find your way if the surface beneath you is continuously moving. It takes great skill and resolve to stay on track; to stay focused on your vision and your values. (Gandy , 2020)

Whilst travelling within Fullan’s three zones (2020), or traversing between the boundaries, many daily decisions were made by our leadership teams in the transformation from a ‘bricks and mortar’ school to a ‘virtual’ school. They ranged in importance, from the mundane: should students ask for permission to go to the bathroom whilst on a live call? to radical changes to the whole school structure: should we collapse the whole school timetable to facilitate long-term project-based learning?

WHICH DECISION-MAKING MODEL?

The rise of flatter, distributed leadership structures decentralise decision-making. Instead of one or two ‘dot leadership’ teams making decisions, colleagues at all levels have the power to make more localised decisions, they are more likely to happen collaboratively within their own subject or year team ‘bubbles’. During campus closure normal leadership structures moved rapidly to these flatter models. Colleagues, students, and parents were in the Fullan’s Survival (Unsettled Zone) – they fell back on systems they are familiar with – leadership was distributed within their subject or year teams, within their homes! During this period of intense change, the quality of the decisions made within an organisation reflect the way it operates, they are a barometer of the health

WHY THE STINSON WELLNESS DECISION-MAKING MODEL?

Our whole school performance management strategic objective for 2019-21 is ‘how can we ensure that we promote, value and nurture Well-Being in our community to support student learning’? Our Guiding Statements contain three sets of values: Well-Being, Learning, Global Citizenship. During the remote-learning transition, focussing on the emotional well-being of every member of our community was our priority. Before we closed the campus, in whole Primary and Secondary meetings, the work of John Almarode was used to frame the collective efficacy:

“How we feel determines what we think about and what we think about prompts us to action so well-being at the social emotional and psychological level has a strong influence on what happens in our [virtual] classrooms” (Almarode, 2020).

Synthesising the above, a decision-making model with well-being at its core is the principal rationale for determining which one best fits the context of our school.

In many ways COVID-19 has provided a resilience test for the macro educational systems of the global community on a micro scale. We all will have seen our strengths, the areas that need development and our fragilities. We will have time, at some point, to pause and reflect, and use this knowledge to ensure that our strategic direction is underpinned by solid, strategic decisionmaking that is challenging and supportive, creating space and a framework for leaders to make a wise choices. There is a high degree of alignment of the sense of well-being in our Guiding Statements, the Stinson Wellness model, Fullan’s Remote to Hybrid Learning zones, and the 3 Stages of Pandemic Response (Survival > Acceptance > Growth).

Figure 1: The Stinson Wellness Model - Foundations, Pillars and Process Orientation (adapted from Lee & Stinson, 2014, pp. 5,8)

The alignment process allows for decisions to be personalised and owned by those that the decision will impact, rather than the ‘top-down’ decision making process that often exists in schools. All people within the organisation can progress towards wellness within their personal context - situational leadership of the decision-making process within their own organisational sphere of influence. During the analysis and selections process orientation stages, application questions based on the four pillars of the model - Purpose, Balance,

Congruence, Sustainability, are used to assist in making intentional and principled decisions. To summarise, the “Stinson Wellness Model provides a framework by which organisations can make wise decisions that align with their identity as well as their community.” (Lee & Stinson, 2014, p. 10); in other words, the mission and vision of Bangkok Patana School.

Editor’s note: this article is an adapted version of Brian’s Bath Masters essay submission for the Leading and Managing Schools and Colleges unit.

Brian Taylor

Assistant Principal, Campus Curriculum Technology Integration Bangkok Patana School

References

Almarode, J., 2020. Understanding the 3 Parts of Student Engagement: Dr. John Almarode. [Online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYkfSxnC6I4 [Accessed 3 July 2020].

Boot, S., 2020. Learning from the students in lockdown. [Online] Available at: https://bigeducation.org/lfl-content/learning-from-the-students-in-lockdown/ [Accessed 9 July 2020].

Education Endowment Foundation, 2020a. Best evidence on supporting students to learn remotely. [Online] Available at: https://educationendowmentfoundation. org.uk/covid-19-resources/best-evidence-on-supporting-students-to-learn-remotely/ [Accessed 30 April 2020].

Education Endowment Foundation, 2020c. Covid-19 support guide for schools: Guide designed to help teachers and school leaders support their pupils. [Online] Available at: https://educationendowmentfoundation. org.uk/covid-19-resources/covid-19-support-guide-forschools/ [Accessed 8 July 2020].

Education Endownment Foundation, 2019. Putting Evidence to Work - A School’s Guide to Implementation. [Online] Available at: https://educationendowmentfoundation. org.uk/public/files/Publications/Implementation/EEF_Implementation_Guidance_Report_2019.pdf [Accessed 23 June 2020].

Education Endownment Foundation, 2020b. Teaching and Learning Toolkit. [Online] Available at: https://educationendowmentfoundation. org.uk/evidence-summaries/teaching-learning-toolkit/ [Accessed 13 June 2020].

Education Endownment Foundation, 2020d. Introducing ‘The EEF Guide to Supporting School Planning: A Tiered Approach to 2020-21’. [Online] Available at: https://educationendowmentfoundation. org.uk/public/files/Publications/Covid-19_Resources/

The_EEF_guide_to_supporting_school_planning_-_A_ tiered_approach_to_2020-21.pdf [Accessed 23 August 2020].

Fullan, M., Quinn, . J., Drummy, M. & Gard, M., 2020. Education Reimagined: The Future of Learning. [Online] Available at: https://educationblog.microsoft.com/enus/2020/06/reimagining-education-from-remote-to-hybrid-learning/ [Accessed 10 June 2020].

Gandy , Y., 2020. Education post-Covid: Our principles of recovery. [Online] Available at: https://www.sec-ed.co.uk/best-practice-ezine/education-post-covid-our-principles-of-recovery-coronvirus-schools-re-opening/228664/494676/ [Accessed 11 7 2020].

Lee, M. & Stinson, D. D., 2014. ORGANIZATIONAL DECISION MAKING MODELS: COMPARING AND CONTRASTING TO THE STINSON WELLNESS MODEL. European Journal of Management, Volume 14, pp. 13-28.

McLeod, S. J., 2020a. dangerously irrelevent: Coronavirus Chronicles. [Online] Available at: http://dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2020/06/ coronavirus-chronicles-031-butler-tech.html [Accessed 18 July 2020].

McLeod, S. J., 2020b. What are your school’s decision triggers for closing back down again?. [Online] Available at: http://dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2020/07/ what-are-your-schools-decision-triggers-for-closing-backdown-again.html#comments [Accessed 28 July 2020].

Osiris Educational, 2020. Build Back Better: Webinar with John Hattie interviewed by Stephen Cox. N/A: Osiris Educational. Reich, J. et al., 2020. A New Reality: Getting Remote Learning Right. [Online] Available at: http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/summer20/vol77/num10/toc.aspx [Accessed 23 April 2020].

Treanor, G., 2020. 3 Stages of pandemic response. [Online] Available at: https://gabrielletreanor.com/3-stages-of-pandemic-response/ [Accessed 10 June 2020].

Critical Decision-Making Models