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A School Leadership Perspective on the Plans to Pedagogy Project
Abstract
The Australian Professional Standards require both teachers and school leadership staff to collect, use and evaluate data. These practices are particularly essential for leadership staff as evidence-based planning and policy-making is a critical part of the Principal Standard (AITSL, 2011). Whilst all schools generate and use data, working with researchers is another avenue to generating knowledge that complements existing data generated by everyday school practices. This chapter draws on the perception of an Education Department’s leadership expert about how an industry, school and university collaboration was undertaken to inform school-based decision-making. It provides one leader’s personal perspective on the benefits and challenges to engaging in formal research projects within a school and provides a reflection on how to navigate the process along the way.
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In order to support professional development of their teachers 14 Dutch secondary schools developed and implemented a series of interventions. The concept of School as Professional Learning Community was used to frame these school interventions. Data were collected through project documents, interviews with school principals and project leaders, group interviews with teachers and focus groups with project leaders. Interventions can be grouped into five clusters: 1) Shared school vision on learning; 2) Professional learning opportunities for all staff; 3) Collaborative work and learning; 4) Change of school organisation, and 5) Learning leadership. Interventions aimed at teacher-leaders, team leaders and school principals were relatively rare. Interventions belonging to the clusters Professional learning opportunities and Collaborative work and learning were the ones most frequently mentioned including formal and informal teacher groups working and learning together. In general, we conclude that the more embedded an intervention was in the organisation and culture of a school, the more sustainable it appeared to be.
This Australian case study explored the implementation of strategies to support the development of a positive school culture among whole school staff. A participatory action research approach was used to involve leadership staff in the development of a mixed method assessment of the school organisation. Baseline data from the School Organisational Health Questionnaire ( n = 28) and qualitative data from focus groups ( n = 15) were collected and presented to the leadership team who identified four foci for the study: appraisal and recognition, participative decision-making, professional growth and supportive leadership. After a range of interventions, findings from both post-test surveys ( n = 22) and qualitative data ( n = 30) suggested a change in leadership style was a key factor of school cultural change across all factors. The case study highlights a number of visible strategies that were employed to increase morale and improve staff wellbeing.
This paper explores issues of social justice in relation to the practice of two principals from two Australian public schools. The stories of these principals are set against a policy backdrop in Australia that has seen renewed emphasis on school autonomy reform, on the one hand, and heightened external accountability and compliance, on the other. Drawing on interview data from a small-scale study, we highlight some of the tensions for redistributive justice arising within this context. We examine the ways in which the principals’ efforts for redistributive justice at the local school level compromise redistributive justice more broadly. We highlight the ongoing significance of examining how principals are framing their decision-making in relation to social justice. Within the freedoms of the present climate, the paper draws attention to the enduring imperative of centralised equity-focused accountabilities.
Data-informed decision making is considered important for school improvement. Working in data teams is a promising strategy for implementing data use in schools. Data teams consist of teachers and school leaders, who collaboratively analyze data to solve educational problems at their school. Studies show that school leaders can enable and hinder data use in such teams. This study aims at exploring what types of leadership behaviors are applied to support data use in data teams. The results of this study point to five key building blocks for school leaders wanting to build effective data teams in their school: (1) establishing a vision, norms, and goals (e.g., discussing vision, norms, and goals with teachers); (2) providing individualized support (e.g., providing emotional support); (3) intellectual stimulation (e.g., sharing knowledge and providing autonomy); (4) creating a climate for data use (e.g., creating a safe climate focused on improvement rather than accountability, and engaging in data discussions with teachers); and (5) networking to connect different parts of the school organization (e.g., brokering knowledge and creating a network that is committed to data use). Not only formal school leaders, but also teachers, can display these types of behavior. Finally, it is important to stress here that all these building blocks are needed to create sustainable data use practices. These building blocks can be used in a new wave of data-informed decision making in schools, in which teachers and school leaders collaboratively use a multitude of different data sources to improve education.
An international movement has focused on identifying evidence-based interventions that were developed to change psychological constructs and that are supported by controlled studies. However, inconsistent findings within individual intervention studies and among multiple studies raise critical problems in interpreting the evidence, and deciding when and whether an intervention is evidence-based. A theoretical and methodological framework (Range of Possible Changes [RPC] Model) is proposed to guide the study of change in intervention research. The authors recommend that future quantitative reviews of the research literature use the RPC Model to conceptualize, examine, and classify the available evidence for interventions. Future research should adopt the RPC Model to both develop theory-driven hypotheses and conduct examinations of the instances in which interventions may or may not change psychological constructs.
This unique and ground-breaking book is the result of 15 years research and synthesises over 800 meta-analyses on the influences on achievement in school-aged students. It builds a story about the power of teachers, feedback, and a model of learning and understanding. The research involves many millions of students and represents the largest ever evidence based research into what actually works in schools to improve learning. Areas covered include the influence of the student, home, school, curricula, teacher, and teaching strategies. A model of teaching and learning is developed based on the notion of visible teaching and visible learning. A major message is that what works best for students is similar to what works best for teachers - an attention to setting challenging learning intentions, being clear about what success means, and an attention to learning strategies for developing conceptual understanding about what teachers and students know and understand. Although the current evidence based fad has turned into a debate about test scores, this book is about using evidence to build and defend a model of teaching and learning. A major contribution is a fascinating benchmark/dashboard for comparing many innovations in teaching and schools.
Data-driven decision making has become increasingly important in education. Policymakers require educators to use data to inform practice. Although the policy emphasis is growing, what has not increased is attention to building human capacity around data use. Educators need to gain data literacy skills to inform practice. Although some professional development opportunities exist for current educators, fewer formal courses and opportunities for data literacy development in schools of education have been developed and implemented. This article explores issues around the growing need for data-driven decision making in programs in schools of education. The issues are complex and the actors needed to bring about change are multiple. A systems perspective to explore course and programmatic implementation is presented.
This study explores the relationship between self-awareness of school leaders and variables related to school culture and change. We used the self-other rating agreement model of Atwater and Yammarino (1997) as an indication of school leader self-awareness. Based on the difference between their own leadership rating and the teachers’ rating, school leaders were grouped in 4 categories: over-estimators, under-estimators, in-agreement/good leaders, and in-agreement/poor leaders. In 3 independent studies on school policy, we analyzed the relation between the self-other rating categories and school culture and change variables. Data revealed that mainly under-estimators were associated with higher levels of school culture and change. No differences were found between under-estimators and in-agreement leaders. The analysis of school leaders’ self-awareness – defined as agreement between self and other leadership ratings – is an important perspective. As for practical implications, especially over-estimators should become more aware of how their teachers perceive them.
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