'Seer High School' (Tasmania) – Engaging teaching staff
‘Seer High School’ is an ‘alias school’ where the real school identity has been withheld to maintain confidentiality. The story is from research interviews undertaken at the school for this Guide.
Seer High School is a government secondary college with almost 100 students. It is located in a mid to low socioeconomic area close to another high school, which, until recently, attracted families from the mid socioeconomic range. At the time the new principal started, the two schools were co-located while a new building for Seer was under construction. The co-location lasted twelve months and meant that the two schools ran staggered timetables, creating a student-free day per fortnight over this twelve-month period. Most Seer staff had been at the school for a number of years and many felt some disquiet about both the co-location and the new building. Seer was a traditional school whose long-standing staff were not keen to embrace change, even though the school numbers were in decline at the time the new principal started in 2001.
Throwing out the challenge
When I arrived at the school I was aware that we were losing students. The first day on the job I had 27 students lined up outside my office waiting to be 'dealt with' by the 'new principal'. It was clear to me in that moment that teachers were disengaged and that even though the school had developed a vision in the previous year this was peripheral to what was actually going on at Seer in a real sense. Here we were, about to spend department money on a new school yet people had no clear idea of where we were going. I started my first staff meeting by putting that very question to the teachers. I asked them to think about the school vision – which talked about values as the core organising purpose of the school and talked about student wellbeing. And I asked them to think about where we were, in a school that had razor-edged barbed wire running around its perimeter and some significant student behavioural issues. I told the staff at that first staff meeting that values underpin everything we do as teachers and that our vision statement said that. But then I asked staff to think about whether there was evidence from what they saw around them that we were really a school based on values. Maybe we could say that we were a school where values were happening, but could we really say, hand on heart, that we were a values-based community?
That was a confronting moment and the teachers were very uncomfortable about my comments and the challenge I threw out to them. After all, Seer High was a traditional school and no-one had suggested that the whole school culture was up for grabs.
For me, the issues of behaviour management, student thinking and success, teacher thinking – all come back to values. From the outset I wanted Seer High to become a truly inclusive school and felt that to achieve that I would need to flatten out the hierarchical organisational structure and find a way of really involving staff in thinking about values as the core of what they do.
Values – at the core of what we do
This sounds simple and it was very clear to me. Not so, however, for most of the staff. They were about helping students learn, not about helping students be. I could see at that first meeting that the way to develop and shift the school culture was through working with the staff in a way they'd not worked before, getting them to think, feel and talk about what they valued, why they were teachers, what they really wanted education to achieve. Again that sounds simple. It wasn't.
So I started from how teachers felt about the ethos of our school. What they valued, what they wanted students to value, where the disconnect lay. I changed the format of our staff meetings so that we could spend time talking about these fundamental questions. Leadership means leading: when I arrived at the school, I inherited my team, some of whom were as bewildered and confronted as the teachers by my suggestions. I could either wait until I had the right team around me, or start the process of raising teacher awareness myself and then build on that as my resources to dig deeper increased. So I just jumped in. We had a number of staff meetings where teachers sat in random groups talking about what they valued, which values they thought underpinned our school, and which values they thought should define Seer. They looked at the values in the National Framework, and in our state Essential Learnings. They came up with eight values for Seer through an iterative process using, of all things, sticky notes placed around the staffroom. We simply tallied up the 'votes' for each of the values staff had noted, until we could distil to eight values which were linked to interaction, the three R's – relationships, relevance and rigour.
We started with the existing vision statement and spent some time in teams talking about what that meant in terms of the values of Seer. We used the co-location and the timetabling that resulted from that to our advantage. The fortnightly student-free day became a professional development day. I flattened the leadership structure and set up teams which were voluntary.
Joining in the conversation
However, any teachers wanting to participate in the discussions had to buy into a team. Before too long, many so-called resistors realised that they were missing out on choice and on new possibilities so they came on board at that point. Of course, it's impossible to bring everyone on the journey. At some point, teachers have to be told that this is the direction in which the school is headed and that if they want to remain at the school, they have to embrace that direction. It's important not to make teachers feel bad about rejecting the cultural shift; it's equally important to be transparent with teachers that you will facilitate a move to a new school for anyone who is really opposed to taking on the changed direction. When I first arrived, there were many teachers who were loath to focus on values rather than on literacy and numeracy because of our student cohort. They didn't like the conversations. However, when the opportunity arose for them to transfer out later that first year, only four teachers – two of whom retired – left the school.
Very early on I introduced protocols around meetings. This meant that a range of teachers got a voice and every staff member became an active participant in the conversations in some way. On one hand I was modelling what teachers would be doing in their interactions with students. I was also sending the clear message that we were all in this together and that robust discussion, debate and working through these big questions would result in us developing strategies that teachers valued. The flatter leadership was a big shift in giving power back to the classroom teacher, who then had clear procedures and structures matching the values. The protocols were also a useful tool in dealing with the blockers and resistors.
Then we looked at creating time for teachers to talk, reflect and plan. As a leadership team we considered bringing in consultants to lead the professional development and we realised that an hour after school once a week would not provide the solution we needed. During that first twelve months we had the luxury of the fortnightly student free day. When we moved into the new building we looked to reorganising the timetable to buy us time. We moved to 3 x 100 minute blocks so that teachers could work collaboratively for twelve months refining and developing their own understanding of values and how to embed these consciously in all they did – in the yard, in the classroom, after school, in interactions with other teachers. We talked about respect and social responsibility and about showing by example. We ran professional learning every fortnight by removing the 'nuts and bolts' staff meetings and replacing these with learning programs. Initially these were 'off the shelf' programs. However, we realised that we were working on our school culture and the final product needed to suit our environment and our community.
So we engaged an external facilitator who worked with the leadership team and the teachers for about another twelve months. We also developed our own internal facilitators who have continued working with staff over the past two years. Our focus stayed sharp and we made sure that everyone was on board by 'saying it, saying again and then saying it one more time'.
Understanding into action
Teachers identified three areas as core: valuing teams, valuing time for learning and valuing relationships. We used these, together with the eight values and data from staff, student and parent surveys to direct the professional learning. Teachers were encouraged to take risks within and outside the classroom and we focused on the quality teaching model to guide the development of teaching and learning resources, accountability and setting up the appropriate structures to support the professional development. Gradually staff realised that this was the direction in which Seer was headed and they had a marvellous opportunity to really engage with the core of education, rather than focusing on the fixed structures which inhibited their responsibility, willingness and capacity to take risks. The professional development was multi-layered. Initially it was about helping staff understand what we meant by a whole-school values education approach. This took about 18 months. Then the practical task of translating that understanding and those beliefs into actual programs, curriculums, activities and structures, took another two years and is still ongoing. This year, for example, we are looking at ways in which to integrate the values curriculum with the thinking, scope and sequence aspects of curriculum. I regularly demonstrate to staff through data that the quality of the teacher has an impact on student outcomes, across the board. If students hear teachers speaking disrespectfully to each other, it conflicts with the values we are imparting about tolerance or a fair go. So the professional learning, especially in the first phase, focused deeply on teachers understanding their own behaviours and expectations of others, and getting them to pay attention to how they lived their own values within the school.
The key point is that as the leader or principal you can't afford to take your foot off the pedal for too long. You have to live the process, either as the principal alone, or if you have a strong and committed leadership team working with you. Another way of making it real and persuasive for staff is to join in with other schools in your area to form a cluster. That kind of cross-fertilisation of pedagogy and teachers sharing their concerns and ideas helps them develop conscious discussions about values and draw the link between kids connecting emotionally and better academic performance. When you go through the data with staff and can demonstrate that values are the lynchpin for improvement, you win them. That's how it happened for us at Seer. It took four years, but now we have a school without razor-edged fences and it's a place where students, parents and teachers connect with each other and where kids and teachers take risks and try new things. This place has changed remarkably. Teachers share more. Competition has gone. We talk up the values all the time.
A multi-pronged approach
If I had to sum up what has happened at Seer in terms of getting teachers on board and in giving them the tools or the skills to work through a values education approach, I would say that the first step was to listen and observe. Then start from what teachers say about what works and what doesn't work in your school. These can be quite informal comments which are then referred to in staff meetings. Make sure that you allocate time for the PD – preferably in 'chunks' and not at the end of the day squeezed between the last period and sport. Put staff in teams so that they can collaborate. If you don't have a big staff, you might be able to link into a school in your area and form a cluster. Focus the PD on discussions about values – what we want for and from our students and how we could possibly be the very best for the students we teach. Use the data and adopt a multi-pronged approach. Link teaching and learning with the development of affective/emotional intelligence. That's what we found worked best – conversations about values combined with working on developing a teaching and learning curriculum.