This article was first published in Leadership Ed, Issue 10, Term 1, 2020 under the title, Designing for change.
As educational leaders, we are likely to agree that we have a responsibility to prepare our students for their future place in the world, through the school education we provide. We might also agree that the world for which our students are being prepared is changing at a rapid pace. If we agree on that, we may be aligned further in a belief that such a rapid pace of change will mean that we are not truly able to predict what such a future world will really be like for our students. We may consider that we are not truly able to know how to prepare our students for a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous future, and we might also be unsure of the specific skills, knowledge and understanding that our students will need to thrive in this different and rapidly evolving world.
It is clear we are faced with a dilemma: if the world is changing rapidly, what specifically can we, as school leaders, do to keep pace? How do we position ourselves and our schools to adequately ready students for this changing world?
We have a substantial challenge to meet. However, when it comes to considering these questions, we’re in good company. The recent Australian Learning Lecture report, Beyond ATAR: A Proposal for Change, and the interim report of the New South Wales Curriculum Review each speak to the role of schools in supporting students’ movement towards a future in which they are equipped to thrive. The Australian Learning Lecture report’s implication is that thriving is realised through building on students’ “unique interests, capabilities and aspirations” and providing opportunities to guide students in directions which will draw value from those attributes. The NSW Curriculum Review highlights the role of school curriculum to “help prepare [students] for a lifetime of learning, meaningful adult employment and effective future citizenship”. In its The Future of Education and Skills 2030 project, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is exploring on a global scale the question of the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values that today’s students will need to be able to shape and thrive in their own world. The OECD has considered how specific approaches to teaching and learning can develop these knowledge, skills, attitudes and values effectively.
As senior leaders, what can we glean from these national and international explorations to inform how we might drive this agenda for change in our schools? What role might the Deputy Principal play in navigating such a journey for our students, our schools and the teachers within?
The many voices driving the narrative on students’ preparedness for an unknowable future align on the important role of student agency in assisting young people to be ‘future-ready’. The OECD defines agency as the “sense of responsibility to participate in the world and, in so doing, to influence people, events and circumstances for the better”. These students are aware that their complex and changing world is highly networked, and that in order to establish one’s own place in the world and sense of personal wellbeing, one must also understand the needs and desires of others. Students who are permitted agency over their learning are being equipped with the skills needed to be change agents in their world.
As leaders in schools, we must seek out ways to give students opportunities to lead change in their school, local and broader communities. We have a responsibility to provide our students with safe exposure to diverse perspectives and personalities, all the while supporting them to stay true to a set of uncompromisable core values.
In preparing our students for the future, we have to be clear on the attributes we wish to see our students develop. We then have to plan for the fostering of these attributes across all aspects of the school: through our classroom practice, the extra-curricular programs we offer, the ways in which we support our students’ wellbeing, the opportunities we offer to develop students’ leadership capabilities, the ways in which we encourage social action and awareness and, not the least, the ways we support our teachers to continuously improve and grow as professionals.
Once we consider together the specific knowledge, understandings and ways of thinking we wish to enable in our learners, we have to intentionally design for that change. As senior leaders, we are likely to be in the position to have influence on many aspects of a student’s school experience. We have the opportunity to reinforce and support the change we wish to see through opportunities designed to build the attributes students need to thrive in the future.
We have to be specific and intentional about change and how we’re enabling it. The change we wish to see must be modelled, enculturated and embedded to have long-term impact. Guy Claxton writes passionately that pedagogical change initiatives cannot be ‘bolt-on’ programs layered on top of ‘business-as-usual’. He argues that a school “has to be an incubator that develops and strengthens the desired qualities of mind through everything it does”. As leaders, we need to engage our whole community as partners in the change. We are all learners together.
In a previous contribution to this publication, I wrote about the role of the Principal as lead learner in a school community, accepting the responsibility to be a model for others. As Deputy Principals, we share that mantle. Our actions and interactions with others shape the discourse and the culture within our schools and it is our students who are the ultimate recipients of this. According to Claxton, school students are in a “protracted social apprenticeship” in which they absorb, through “the minutiae of daily interactions with teachers and older students”, the values and attributes of the dominant culture.
What does the ‘way we do things around here’ say to your student learners about what is valuable and worth learning in your school context?
This leads to an important provocation: what does the ‘way we do things around here’ say to your student learners about what is valuable and worth learning in your school context? Beyond that challenging question, though, as leaders we must also be considering what the ‘way we do things around here’ says to our teachers. To enable our teachers to drive authentic change, we must ensure that we are offering real, structural support for that change. The interim report from the NSW Curriculum Review outlines that such educational reforms as it proposes, and as discussed here, are “more likely to be realised in practice if teachers are given time… for appropriate professional learning; time to collaborate with colleagues… and time to identify and address the specific learning needs of individual students.”
Within our schools, as leaders we must endeavour to build amongst our staff a shared commitment to and understanding of the case for change. If we wish to see authentic engagement from staff for whole-school change initiatives, we need to have staff involved in not only the eventual implementation of the initiative, but involved as valued participants throughout the entire process that led to the case for change being articulated in the first place. The OECD report highlights that we must embrace “a shared responsibility to seize opportunities and find solutions”. It is certain that inviting such a collaborative approach to working towards a shared understanding will be more complex, more time-consuming and more likely to follow a circuitous path. However, it is also likely to uncover a more diverse range of perspectives, enable richer conversation and discussion, and be more able to engender a rich sense of staff ownership of the outcome.
As leaders, we should look to embrace grassroots support for change. While ‘at-the-coalface’ initiatives may be messier and less easily quantifiable, a staff comprising many individual teachers passionately committed to driving single, small changes within their classrooms will have a far more significant effect on shifting school learning culture than a single top-down directive for pedagogical change.
Consider another provocation: in the development of the roadmap which guides the direction of your school’s priorities and programs, is strategic direction decided upon and handed down from above, or are the teachers who will ultimately be responsible for rolling out the changes in their classroom practice engaged as key contributors throughout the process?
The need to ensure that our schools are adequately equipped to prepare students to thrive in a complex, changing future relies heavily on the investment we, as leaders, make in our teachers to engage with and take ownership of the case for change for our schools.
References
Bridger, Eleanor. “Beyond ATAR: a Proposal for Change.” Australian Learning Lecture, 1 Oct. 2019, http://www.all-learning.org.au/programs/beyond-atar-proposal-change.
Claxton, Guy. “A Life of Tests Is No Preparation for the Tests of Life – Guy Claxton: Aeon Essays.” Aeon, Aeon, 2012, aeon.co/essays/a-life-of-tests-is-no-preparation-for-the-tests-of-life.
Masters, Geoff. “Nurturing Wonder and Igniting Passion: Designs for a Future School Curriculum.” NSW Curriculum Review, NSW Education Standards Authority, 2019, http://www.nswcurriculumreview.nesa.nsw.edu.au/pdfs/interimreport/chapters/NSW-Curriculum-Review-Interim-Report.pdf.
Schleicher, Andreas. “The Future of Education and Skills: Education 2030.” Organisation of Economic Co-Operation and Development, 2018, http://www.oecd.org/education/2030/E2030%20Position%20Paper%20(05.04.2018).pdf.
Adam Majsay 