Tag: Deborah Netolicky

Bookmarked Key concepts for leading professional learning (the édu flâneuse)

This week I presented to a group of school leaders about leading professional learning. Part of my preparation for the presentation took me back to the roots of my work in this space, and those concepts I have come across that have stuck with me, become part of my thinking, and continue to anchor my work. I explain some of these below, in addition to others I discussed on the day, such as trust, context, teacher expertise, and teacher agency, self-determination and self-efficacy.

Deborah Netolicky shares her thoughts on the key concepts associated with professional learning:

  • Holonmy – “each person is both an independent individual and an interdependent part of the larger system”
  • Holding Environment: “culture of high care and high challenge”
  • Meaningful Collaboration – “clear shared purpose, collective accountability, collaborative norms, a focus on data to inform, and protocols for collaborative ways of working”
  • Semantic Space – “Talk defines and drives emotions, relationships, belonging and action”

It is interesting to think about this against a framework like Modern Learning Canvas and its discussion of strategies, culture and pedagogical beliefs.

Bookmarked Staff wellbeing: Time and money (the édu flâneuse)

Trust, too, is key to the wellbeing of the teaching profession. Schools need to cultivate cultures of trust. Teachers need to be trusted by parents, the media, and government. Trusting teachers to be the professional experts they are allows teachers to focus on their core business of teaching and supporting the students in their care. Looking after staff is key to retaining them within positive cultures of people working together for the good of their community. Nuanced attention to staff wellbeing takes intentionality, thoughtfulness, a framework for decision making, time, and often money.

Bookmarked School leadership during a pandemic: navigating tensions by Deborah Netolicky (Journal of Professional Capital and Community)

This pandemic has shown us that we are one society, one humanity and that leading is for us all. This is a time for us to consider what leadership means, regardless of title or position. We can reach out (from a physical distance) to others and support one another as best we can, even though isolation feels like it goes against our biology. We can consider carefully where we get our information and how we respond to that information. We can all lead by example, by clear communication with one another and by clarity of purpose and cohesiveness of action. There is no more important time to be kind to ourselves and each other than right now. We are in a time of adaptation and evolution, by necessity. When we come out the other side, society, work and education may be reformed for good.

Deborah Netolicky unpacks some of the challenges associated leading during the pandemic. She discusses the need to act both ‘fast and slow’:

In a time of crisis, leaders must act swiftly and with foresight but also with careful consideration of options, consequences and side effects of actions taken. They must communicate with clarity and purpose but also with empathy and humanity.

The culture of autonomy that has arisen out of necessity:

Leadership is not a title but an action, a behaviour, a practice, a doing and a way of being, and the current scenario has provided a crucible for teacher agency, agility, resilience and innovation.

With a sense of autonomy has come a culture of sharing and generosity:

There is a feeling that around the world, despite our different contexts, we are facing similar challenge and are “all in this together”. This is resulting in generosity of sharing and of support.

This situation has brought back a reminder of the human at the heart of education:

At this time more than ever, we must consider humans before outcomes, students before results and well-being before learning.

Liked Distance Learning 3.0: Ready to launch (theeduflaneuse.com)

Wellbeing is at the centre of our distance learning model. We have deliberately built in a focus on the wellbeing of our students, parents, and teachers by integrating the following.

  • Shortening lesson times and increasing break times during periods of distance learning.
  • Including one Student-Directed Learning Day per week for Years K-10. This day is a ‘non-contact’ day of learning in which students organise their time to complete set work, and teachers prepare, mark and respond to student queries. The day will be cycled through the days of the week, depending on when distance learning begins (e.g. Monday one week, Tuesday the next, and so on).
  • Paring back content to the essentials and rethinking the way students can engage with content.
  • Reconsidering the ways in which students can show their learning, and redesigning or rescheduling assessments where appropriate.
  • Continuing to act with kindness, compassion and empathy.
Liked Educators: Being better together (theeduflaneuse.com)

Leadership is not a position, but behaviour, action, a way of being. Focusing on the practices of leading is something I explored in my recently-published chapter ‘Being, becoming and questioning the school leader:  An autoethnographic exploration of a woman in the middle’ in the edited book Theorising identity and subjectivity in educational leadership research. I wrote the following.

“A focus on leading over the leader allows the work of leading to be considered beyond the domain of autonomous individuals, focusing instead on ways of leading throughout organisations (Grice, 2018; Wilkinson & Kemmis, 2015). This enables a focus on the doing of leadership rather than on being a leader. … Considering leadership as practice rather than person encompasses the deliberate choices of anyone participating in the act of leading; it opens up leadership theorising beyond the individual or the principal to anyone behaving in leaderly ways.” (Netolicky, 2020, p.105)

Liked Week 1 of Distance Learning (the édu flâneuse)

In this time of physical distance, our students and staff are keen for a sense of connectedness. We’re finding that video and audio are humanising distance learning for our students. This includes live video and audio meetings with groups of students, pre-recorded screen casts, and PowerPoints with audio or video.

Seeing teachers’ and peers’ faces and hearing their voices can help to bridge the isolation we all feel, and bring some of the connectivity and relationality missing when we are teaching and learning remotely.

Liked In education: To whom should we listen? (the édu flâneuse)

So when I think about the question – To whom should we listen? – the answer is manifold.

We should listen to researchers who interrogate what we know about education. We should talk with policymakers who oversee the big picture. We should listen to parents. We should listen to students who are the core of our work and our why. We should certainly listen to teachers.They are experts whose professional experience and judgement should be a key part of education discourse.

Replied to Innovation in schools (the édu flâneuse)

For me, innovation in education is about interrogating where voice, power and agency reside. It is worth asking: who has power and influence? Who has control of measures, expectations, systems, norms and processes? Who has autonomy, voice and ownership? And what can we each do, now, that is productive and meaningful for our students?

Deborah, I really like your discussion of innovation and ecosystems:

An ecosystem is a complex community of interconnected organisms in which each part, no matter how seemingly small, has an active, agentic part to play in the community. There are constant interdependent relationships and influences. The notion of an ecosystem of education resonates with Bob Garmston and Bruce Wellman’s third Adaptive Schools underlying principle of what they call ‘nonlinear dynamical’ systems: that tiny events create major disturbances. This principle reflects the way change often happens. The little things we change or do can have unexpected, chaotic, incremental effects that are difficult to quantify or not immediately noticeable.

Working as one of those ‘little things’ that come into the school it can be easy to bring in a script when arriving at a new school. The problem is that each school is made up of many other ‘little things’. I have therefore found it more useful to gauge as much about the school’s context as quickly as possible and then re-framing my message to fit.

Tom Critchlow describes this as ‘client ethnographies‘:

Every time you’re on-site with a client’s organization you’re studying the people, the behaviours, the motivations. You’re asking questions of as many people as you can.

While Doug Belshaw talks about the dangers of dead metaphors and failed frameworks:

So although it takes time, effort, and resources, you’ve got to put in the hard yards to see an innovation through all three of those stages outlined by Jisc. Although the temptation is to nail things down initially, the opposite is actually the best way forward. Take people on a journey and get them to invest in what’s at stake. Embrace the ambiguity.

Although it can be a challenge to find the time and resources, without it change is often frustrating to say the least.

Liked End of an era (the édu flâneuse)

Finishing up at a school community is such an odd feeling, especially as I am now on long service until the end of the year. It’s great to have a break between leaving this position and starting my next one, but my identity is so caught up in work—in being a productive professional who makes a difference in my school—that stepping away from that for a couple of months feels strange and even difficult.

👍
Liked Keynote: Key coaching concepts from the perspective of a pracademic (the édu flâneuse)

My presentation explored key concepts that, in my experience, underpin the use of coaching in schools. I drew together insights from my reading, research, practical and personal experience of coaching in schools, with a particular focus on the organisational conditions necessary for coaching, and the effects of coaching on individuals and schools. I interrogated the complex interlocking elements that schools need to balance when working to build a coaching culture, including context, trust, rapport, way of being, differentiation, holonomy and semantic space.

Replied to Education is not broken. Teachers do not need fixing. (the édu flâneuse)

Education is not broken. Teachers do not need fixing. There is outstanding work going on every day in schools around Australia and the world. We should focus on trusting and empowering the teaching profession.

I find the ‘broken’ mantra interesting to reflect upon. Sometimes it feels like such narratives are used as a foundation for some other argument. Personally, I have always been intrigued about Matt Esterman’s discussion of a renaissance. If there is anything ‘broken’ it is equitable funding, but I assume that Mark Latham does not want to talk about that?
Bookmarked How to study (for English) (the édu flâneuse)

Spending time during our revision week on explicitly teaching and supporting students in their use of study skills resulted in: clear study plans over a period of time (not cramming!), clear individual goals and actions to prepare for the exam, and increasingly productive use of students’ study time.

Deborah Netolicky shares some strategies and suggestions to support the study process.
Replied to Success indicators of a professional learning model (the édu flâneuse)

I have been reflecting lately on measures of success of this model. How might we know that our approach to internal professional learning is having a positive impact? As part of the model’s implementation, we generate ongoing honest feedback from staff in order to refine the model each year, including via focus groups and anonymous surveys. For instance, in the annual staff survey, the pathway options, especially the Professional Learning Groups, were rated highly by staff. Additionally, our staff satisfaction with professional learning is above the national benchmark.

Great to hear how you have distributed the leadership for the different groups. Look forward to reading the book Deb.
Liked Pause by Deb Netolicky (the édu flâneuse)

Pausing is difficult but what is even more difficult is prioritising it as important rather than ‘nice to have’. What seems so possible during a holiday is challenging to bring into the busyness of everyday working-parenting-living life.

Where do you, or where could you, find a pause in your day, your week, your month?

Replied to What do activism and power look like? (the édu flâneuse)

I have wondered before about activism and the forms it takes. Who can be an activist? Is it only those with secure, late-career jobs? Can the early career teacher or researcher really challenge the system in which they work when that can put them at risk of unemployment or further precarity and uncertainty? Does an activist have to look, act and speak a certain way? Can an activist use the apparatuses of power in order to undermine that power, or does she need different tools?

I feel that what is often missing in this discussion is not the point in the career, but the support around you? To stay the journey I feel that one needs authentic voices around them who help to maintain the vision of change in light of any pressure and pushback.

Also on: Read Write Collect

Replied to Consolidation is not a dirty word by Dr Deborah M. Netolicky (the édu flâneuse)

Consolidation doesn’t mean there is no work to do. It doesn’t mean standing still or stagnating. It means doing better what we are already doing now. It means connecting in with one another to learn from each other, celebrate, challenge and share our expertise. It means continuing to develop shared understandings and shared practices, and looking back occasionally to remind ourselves of how far we have come.

I really like this focus on celebration and consolidation Deb. We can become so wedded at times to the notion of transformation, yet transformation comes as we consolidate bit by bit. To me I think this is what Richard Olsen was trying to get at with the Modern Learning Canvas. It is about the small things, doing them well and going from there.

Also on: Read Write Collect

Bookmarked Redefining School Leadership by Dr Deb Netolicky (the édu flâneuse)

The Cheshire Cat provides a creative reimagining of the school leader as someone who makes careful decisions about how to best serve their communities, how to foster trust, and how to distribute power and agency, including when to appear and disappear, when to step forward and step back, when to direct and when to empower.

Dr Deborah Netolicky discusses the metaphors for leadership focusing on the Cheshire cat. This is a summary of her article ‘Redefining leadership in schools: the Cheshire Cat as unconventional metaphor’.
Liked Teacher voice to flip the education system: ACEL 2018 panel presentation (the édu flâneuse)

Our book is a microcosm of what we would like to see more of in education, although we regret not including student voice in the book. It is one drop-in-the-ocean attempt to amplify, elevate and value the voices of teachers and school leaders. We hope that in our Australian context it will lead to politicians and policymakers seeking out the views and expertise of those in schools. Flipping the system in this way is about building networks and flattening hierarchies so that we can all work together for the good of the students in our schools.