AISNSW Curriculum Leadership Conference 2022

Jackie Camilleri Deputy Head (Academics) – Senior School

“You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” (Jon Kabat-Zinn)

Reform is coming, and with it, immense opportunity. Keynote speaker and conference MC, Dr Simon Breakspear from UNSW, set the meta-frame, Deep vs Shallow Implementation: The Critical Role of Leadership. Breakspear noted that we all have the opportunity to, “lead a once in 30-year curriculum reform amidst the tail end of a once in 100-year pandemic”; to embrace the ambiguity, rapidly build knowledge, work through a phased journey, structure the complexity, empower leadership at all levels and build a culture that embraces agency as a collective learning.

Paul Martin, CEO of NESA, covered the context and intent of the new curriculum. Teachers, he noted, want flexibility to use their professional judgement and have more time to teach. Parents and carers want to meet the needs of their children. Students want authentic learning with real world application and connection to life after school and employers want strong foundations in literacy and numeracy and skills, teamwork, and communication. Nothing is more important for our society than the quality of teaching and learning in our schools. Students must receive an education that provides them with a solid foundation for life – preparing young people to make a productive contribution to our society. To this end, the NSW curriculum reform involves the rewrite of 141 syllabuses in NSW with an emphasis on building strong foundations for future learning, more time for teaching, and strengthening post-school pathways. Breakspear provoked reflection regarding how this curriculum reform might provide an opportunity to accelerate the work we, as educators, are already inspired to do in:

• enhancing teacher knowledge and use of evidence-informed practices, • developing teacher collaboration and collective efficacy, • building a culture of continuous improvement, • cultivating student engagement, agency, and confidence,

• lifting student outcomes and growth, and

• enhancing the use of data to differentiate instruction.

Dr Deborah Netolicky, from St Mark’s Anglican Community School, gave an inspiring presentation on Finding our Way: Adaptable, Sustainable, and Strategic Implementation for Deep Transformation. Netolicky described professional learning for collective efficacy and collaborative professionalism of “Harnessing your People.” She described the professional learning with the most impact on student learning as one that provides sufficient time to learn, engages with external expertise, challenges the prevailing discourses, and provides opportunities to interact in a community of professionals. Quoting from Schools That Learn by Peter Senge (2004), Netolicky noted, “When we respect teaching as an intellectual activity and give teachers the opportunities to raise serious questions about what they teach, how they teach, and the larger goals for which they are striving, they can play a dramatic role in transforming their institutions.”

Teacher professionalism, teacher expertise and continuous improvement is at the heart of transformational professional development: “It seems reasonable to assume that each teacher has a better idea of what will improve the learning of their students, in their classroom, in the context of what they are teaching them, than anyone else” Wiliam (2014, p. 33).

While collaboration enhances and sustains teacher learning (Fullan & Quinn, 2016), the agency of the individual in the self-direction of their own learning is important (AISTL, 2014; Wiliam, 2014). Self-reflectiveness, self-directedness and self-efficacy are fundamental.

Effective school leaders develop a shared vision, have high expectations and clear accountabilities, develop an environment of trust, empower others, and allow them autonomy, space, and support to lead. They solve complex problems, engage with the wider community, act as a storyteller and sense-maker, and balance instructional and transformational leadership. “Wayfinding leadership” is described by Netolicky & Golledge (2021), as being an approach that:

Brings order while accepting dynamism and disequilibrium. It considers soft data with hard data, the celestial balcony view with the grounded perspective of people’s daily realities, the human with the technological, gut feel with clear frameworks and policies. It draws together systematisation and clarity of process and purpose, with intuition, improvisation, and adaptive responsiveness. (p. 92) Leading schools means we make constant decisions, find our way from where we are to where we want to be, evaluate environments, conditions, and next steps, and navigate tensions and complexities. To bring about sustainable school change–one that energises, sticks, and engages critically with research, evidence, people, and context–we need a focus on improvement for the betterment of students, community, and humanity; not change for change’s sake. Kotter (1996) describes change management as a process that:

• creates a guiding coalition (a group with energy and influence to lead the change), • develops a vision and strategy for the change, • communicates the change vision (why, what, and how), • involves people in the change effort – solutions not problems, • generates short-term wins and celebrates the positive, • consolidates gains and produces more change, creating momentum, and • anchors new approaches in the culture. My framework for sustainable school change involves knowing one’s foundation and knowing one’s students in order to engage in future thinking, research, and evidence. We need to contextualise, plan the roadmap (the long runway!), create the conditions, and anticipate the challenges. We also need to ask: What do we value (purpose and values)? Who are we (mission and identity), and Where do we want to be and what do we want to be amazing at (strategic direction)?

Our students at King’s are values-driven individuals who seek independence and are integrated with technologies. They seek to live a life of passion and purpose, but face uncertain, volatile, and shifting futures. Thus, we need to know our students, their families, their goals, and their challenges (pressure, wellbeing, isolation, uncertainty about post-school opportunities).

Leading curriculum reform, professional learning (or any change) requires:

• compelling, shared, and a coherent vision, enacted into practice, • shared, school leadership. leading over leaders,

• focus on school context and relationships, including trust, rapport, and emotion,

• belief in the capacity of teachers, and a focus on positive, collaborative, and self-authored learning experiences, • a safe, non-judgemental school culture based on continuous improvement, which embraces errors as learning moments (chicken or egg?), and • investment of time and resources.

AISNSW Curriculum Leadership Conference 2022

CONTINUED

Professor Bill Lucas, from the University of Winchester, described assessment, curriculum, and pedagogy as intimately connected. If schools want to create opportunities for deeper learning, then their curricula, their approaches to teaching and learning, and their choice of assessment methods need to be aligned. In his keynote, Bill explored the deep nature of learning, examples of the kinds of signature pedagogies most likely to cultivate deeper learning, and ways of better evidencing depth and authenticity in learning. Drawing on his research on rethinking assessment in the United Kingdom, Bill described some key trends globally, explored promising assessment practices from across the world, and suggested ways in which schools can move towards strengths-based assessment while providing greater opportunities to strengthen student agency. He noted: Without a focus on mastery of generic capabilities, assessment and teaching practices tend to privilege memorisation, essay writing, individual mastery of set content and solving problems with formulaic solutions. The risk is that schools create students dependent on direct instruction, cramming, drilling, and coaching, reliant on expert instruction by teachers who are expected to guide learners through a carefully prescribed body of knowledge, assessed in predictable ways.

The future of assessment is multimodal. Students should leave school with a Learner Profile that incorporates not only their ATAR score (where relevant) together with their individual subject results, but that also captures the broader range of evidenced capabilities necessary for employment and active citizenship that they have acquired in their senior secondary schooling. References

Australian Institute for Teaching and Leadership [AITSL]. (2014). https://www.aitsl.edu.au/

Fullan, M. & Quinn, J. (2016). Coherence:

The Right Drivers in Action for Schools,

Districts, and Systems. Corwin Press &

Ontario Principal’s Council.

Netolicky, D. & Golledge, C. (2021).

Wayfinding: Navigating complexity for sustainable school leadership. In

D. Netolicky (Ed.). Future Alternatives for Educational Leadership Diversity,

Inclusion, Equity and Democracy (Ch. 3). Taylor & Francis.

Wiliam, D. (2014). Developing creativity and innovation in teaching. In J. Hallgarten, L.

Bamfield & K. McCarthy (Eds.), Licensed to create: Ten essays on improving teacher quality (pp. 21–26). https://www.dylanwiliam.org/Dylan_

Wiliams_website/Publications_files/

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