Principals in conversation – Developing a shared vision
The following excerpt is taken from conversations with principals and school leaders about values-centred schools. Sally is the principal of a 6–12 government school in South Australia. Anne was the principal of a large K–12 Christian school in Victoria, and Michael's school is a leading independent school in Western Australia. In this conversation, they highlight shared experiences of developing a values-centred school.
Sally: Someone said to me the other day that schools are 'messy organisations' and that the principal's job is enabling the school population to make sense of that mess. While I don't quite agree with that, it is certainly true that schools are complex. Maybe that's why they haven't changed much in the last 100 years – shifting the culture and structure of a school is a bit like turning around the proverbial Titanic. Perhaps it's harder in a large school like ours, which spans K–12.
Sally, Anne, Michael: Or perhaps it's in the nature of the beast, so to speak. I'm not sure about that. What I do know from our experience of the values journey is that unless you tackle every element of the school, from the toilet block to the curriculum, to your staffing and organisational structure, no deep change can be sustained. It's taken five years for us to be able to say with confidence that we are a school which practises a values approach to all we do. This is not a story of instant change.
Anne: We started our process through conversation with the staff. I suppose I fundamentally believe that everything in the end depends on what individual teachers do. You can change the structures, introduce a new curriculum and expectations of staff. They will comply but unless you win their hearts and minds, nothing will really change. I had a very dedicated staff who got on well with students and who put in a lot of extra time to support individual students and the school co-curricular program. Before I started challenging them with explicit questions about values, I am certain that every staff member at that school would have told you that values are at the core of what they do and that our school has a strong values base. However, they would not really have been able to articulate what that meant, how it was demonstrated in relation to student outcomes, how it affected relationships across the school, where it was explicitly taught and whether students shared that respect for values. Now, five years later, if you were to put the same questions to the staff, and indeed to the parents and students, you'd get a very different response.
All: The effect of the values journey for us has been a calmer school, with a shared sense of where we are going, what we are doing and why; and a community that thinks about those core values which make a decent society. And that in turn, seems to have led to an improvement not only in student attitudes but in their academic performance.
How did you get the leadership team together?
Sally, Anne: I said that we started the conversations with the staff but there was a step before that which is probably even more critical – getting the right leadership team together. They were good people but their focus was administrative – making the school machine work. We undertook some intensive professional development together with an external facilitator. I could have led it myself but felt that if I was doing it together with them, I was modelling the essence of a values approach, which is working collaboratively and developing relationships. Within three months we were on the way to thinking about our strategic plan around values. That gave us the foundation for the conversations with the staff. The leadership team not only served as a model but as additional facilitators and implementers, urging the process on because we were united and consistent in our approach.
Michael: After our professional development program we came to the staff. The process of change management is probably universal. Changing a school to found it on values basically follows the same process as any major change. That was the benefit of the Fullan program. The difference with values though, is the kind of conversation and the depth of stakeholder involvement that is needed to make the change real. It's not just changing curriculum. It's about changing the way we speak to each other, to students and the way we interact with our parents. It's personal and that has to be kept top of mind throughout the whole process. Changing your school to view the world through a values lens is very personal and, for that reason, quite challenging.
How did values tie in with a strategic plan?
Sally, Anne: Schools are systems and a strategic plan juggles those systems to make the best fit. Developing a strategic plan around values has its own peculiarities as practitioners note. This is partly because of the complexity of the school as a system. The compartmentalisation that is generally part of school planning has to be put to one side if a values-based whole-school approach is going to succeed. We spent the better part of a year developing a set of core values. This included extensive surveying and discussion across the school community about the values people perceived as 'important in our school'. The process was quite exhausting and some staff complained that we were wasting time. They groaned when they saw me coming into the staff meeting with coloured notes. But we knew that resistance was a stage we had to work through or give up. And the leadership team was not about to give up!
Sally: We were surprised by the consistency between parents, teacher and students. Through an iterative process we whittled down thirty values to five. We compared these with the National Framework values. Sometimes our language differed from the Framework, but we were reasonably aligned with it. We were ready to start our strategic planning and we also developed a new vision statement around the values. In fact we had a two-tiered set of statements. We identified four strategic priorities for the three-year period and under each of those four statements we developed a values connection. So we had four priorities, each one based on a values statement. That was one clear distinction between general planning and values planning. The values were part of the conversation and the priorities for what we would do in key learning areas were predicated on those values statements. We also made sure that one of the four priorities targeted staff professional development. If it was in the strategic plan and we had tangible outcomes, we were confident that we'd implement it. And we did. Staff professional development became one of the key organising parts of the framework for the first twelve months. We sent staff to observe other schools and report back in teams about what they'd seen in 'hard data' – that is KLA programs or specific co-curricular programs like resilience or the performing arts. And then we asked them to explain and explore those programs in relation to our values agenda. In other words, it might be a great program, but did it further the values intent? If so, it went into the mix. If not, we would set that exemplar aside and say that it was not our core business, which was organising the school community around values.
How did you/does one include the parents?
Anne, Michael: We had to make sure the parents were included. In a school like ours that is not so difficult as parents are generally very involved and keen. However, we did challenge them. We invited parents in for focus groups to talk about what they valued and what they wanted for their children. And we also talked curriculum to parents in a different way. We workshopped two of the new values programs with them – they sat in their children's seats and went through the process. Our reason for doing that was so that we could engage them in the deep conversation too. We demonstrated to them that one can teach music, art and maths through values and still be rigorous and get through a 'syllabus', which is always something parents are concerned about.
So gradually through these processes, we were drawing together quite a few threads of school life – by linking the parents in to our educational conversations and by linking teacher professional development to the strategic plan always focusing on how values contributes to quality teaching, action research and deeper student engagement, we were getting into quite deep change waters. Teachers realised that they had to develop a different vocabulary if they wanted to explicitly acknowledge the values component of their practice. Over time their pedagogy changed. In order to engage students they had to develop constructivist classrooms – there are rarely answers to values questions in textbooks!
About 18 months into this process the conversations about the timetable started. I don't recall now whether I introduced it or whether it came from a small group of staff who had visited a school working in 100-minute blocks. We were back to the sticky notes, debating and discussing whether and how a new timetable structure might work. The timetabler developed three models and staff discussed them in teams. Eventually we settled on a 75-minute timetable but as we designed it in blocks it actually meant that classes could go for up to 150 minutes. We learnt a lot from our primary teachers, who spoke of integrated learning, students working in little groups, study posts and corners, and it was a real eye opener for the secondary teaching staff. We sent some secondary staff to the Junior and Prep schools to observe lessons and the style of interaction. They came back excited and daunted. Excited by the kinds of conversation and connectedness the children had with each other and with their teacher – like an extended family. And daunted because this was so different from the discipline 'silos' secondary teachers often feel comfortable in.
A life of its own
Anne: This kind of mix and match interaction – staff with parents, staff moving out of their comfort zone and being exposed to different ways of doing things, students being encouraged in classes to talk about values and even to write down what they meant by 'respect' or 'consideration' – developed something of a life of its own. I was surprised one day when a group of students came to see me to ask whether they could organise a large map of Australia (which would include every student and teacher in the school) for Environment Day. Watching those Year 11s move through classrooms explaining what was needed and how the event would operate, listening to them present to our staff at a meeting to persuade them that all students would benefit from thinking about the environment even if it was a disruption to formal classes – reinforced the deep change in culture that comes as a result of the values conversation.
Sally: The student leaders were integral to development of the co-curricular values focus. The environmental project spawned other student-led initiatives. Together with the student leaders, staff developed a set of protocols for co-curricular projects, which included students presenting a case to staff, a budget, a rationale for the project and how it linked to values in action, and, where relevant, suggestions for linking it back into the formal curriculum. So the Environment Day project for example, could be linked to SOSE, geography, science and maths, as well as being time out on the oval lying down and forming a huge map of Australia. This was clearly, in my view, evidence of higher-order thinking and a higher level of students' critical analysis in learning. They were making the connections between what they learned in formal classes with a world view, with connection and relationship and could see purpose in what they were doing in class. We even considered negotiating curriculum with our students but to date have not moved that far.
In this way, by integrating all the bits and pieces that make up a school system and especially tying it in with plenty of learning for staff, the whole thing started to come together. Because continuous improvement and quality teaching are important indicators of the success of our endeavours, we regularly evaluated what we were doing through surveys – staff, students, parents – and also collected hard data. That served a purpose for the sceptics too. It's hard to argue against something when it produces improved student outcomes. Students reported feeling more comfortable with their teachers and their peers, more willing to take risks and express their opinions and more interested in school and learning. We still monitor and reflect on the changes. And we are still working on improving what we have. It has to be worked at all the time. The sceptics and negative elements especially within the staff can destroy the best strategy. That has been a tough nut to crack, and our solution has been to work with resistant staff as much as we can, but, if it's not working, we help them move somewhere they feel more comfortable so that the work we've done is not undermined.