Half-day Conference on
Meeting the Challenges
of Change –
Leadership for Learning
11th June 2010
Education Bureau – Quality Assurance Division
Programme
Time
Content
Speakers
08:45 – 09:00
Registration
09:00 – 10:00
Keynote Speech:
Meeting the Challenges of Change –
Leadership for Learning
Professor John MacBeath
10:00 – 10:20
Experience Sharing (1)
Mr Lin Man Sheung
(Headmaster of Pui Kiu Primary
School)
10:20 – 10:40
Break
10:40 – 11:00
Experience Sharing (2)
Sister Agnes Law
(Principal of Sacred Heart
Canossian College)
11:00 – 11:30
Leadership for Learning in the
Local Context: Reflections and
Recommendations
Professor John MacBeath
11:30 – 12:00
Panel Discussion
12:00 – 12:30
Open Forum
Professor John MacBeath
Mr Lin Man Sheung
Sister Agnes Law
Mr Hui Chin Yim, Stephen
The three questions
What do we understand by effective
leadership?
How does it contribute to learning
for all?
What is the role of self-evaluation
in addressing these questions?
HOW WE SEE OURSELVES
The way we see
leadership, learning and
the quality of our school
is ultimately a product of
how we see and think
about ourselves
Who am I?
The hero rescuer
The dutiful manager
The orchestrator
The intermediary
The innovator
The team player
The risk taker
Flying below the radar
An extra-ordinary generation of school leaders who have
bucked the trend, who are not intimidated and
oppressed by ‘the centre’ because with imaginative
leaders and committed creative teachers they follow
their best professional instincts, who don’t say I’d love to
do innovation but I can’t afford to because of ……..
They’ve just got on innovating, or should I say,
transforming, doing exciting things and running very
good schools - exciting places for teachers and kids to
be in.
(David Hargreaves, 2009)
THE POWER OF ONE?
School leadership is often taken to mean
headship. Such an outlook limits
leadership to one person and implies lone
leadership. The long-standing belief in the
power of one is being challenged. Today
there is much more talk about shared
leadership, leadership teams and
distributed leadership than ever before.
(Southworth, 2002)
GREEDY WORK
The task of leading a school in the twenty first
century can no longer be carried out by the
heroic individual leader single-handedly turning
schools around. It is greedy work, all consuming,
demanding unrelenting peak performance from
super-leaders and no longer a sustainable
notion.
Peter Gronn, The New Work of Educational Leaders:
Changing Leadership Practice in an Era of School
Reform, 2003
THE DILEMMAS OF LEADERSHIP
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
Unrelenting change
Stress
Workload
Social factors
Accountability
Bureaucracy
Teacher recruitment
Salary
Lifestyle balance
Intensification
(MacBeath and Galton, 2002,2004, 2006, 2008)
ORGANISATIONAL LEARNING DISABILITIES
‘It’s a great idea but it wouldn’t work here’
‘There simply isn’t the time in the day, or week’
‘If we just had the resources….’
‘There’s no room in an overcrowded curriculum’
‘Yet one more initiative for an already
overstretched staff’
‘Not this year, perhaps next year’
11 KEY FACETS OF LEADERSHIP
• Seeks out opportunities to learn
• Acts with integrity
• Adapts to differences
• Is committed to making a difference
• Seeks broad based knowledge
• Brings out the best in other people
• Is insightful - sees things from new angles
• Has courage to take risks
• Seeks out and uses feedback
• Learns from mistakes
• Is open to criticism
COLLABORATIVE
LEADERSHIP
Leadership is
exercised not at the
apex of the
organisational
pyramid but at the
centre of the web of
human relationships
(Joe Murphy 1996)
OR
Mediated effects
 School leaders improve teaching and learning
indirectly and most powerfully through their
influence on staff motivation, commitment and
working conditions
 School leadership has a greater influence on
schools and students when it is widely
distributed
 Collaborative patterns beyond the school
strengthen the quality of teaching
(Leithwood, 2006, Mulford, 2003, Carmichael,
2006)
Making the
connections
Leadership and management
Ethos and culture
Learning and teaching
“School is a house of
learning. It is a place
where diversions and
mistakes are allowed, but
where evaluation in the
form of feedback gives
you a sense of direction”
Human capital (OECD)
The past
Principals who manage ‘a
building’, who are accountable
but not empowered
Attracting teachers from the
bottom third of the graduate
distribution and offering
training which does not relate
to real classrooms
The best teachers are in the
most advantaged communities
International Best Practice
Principals who enjoy
continuous professional
development empowered,
accountable and learning
centred
Attracting, recruiting and
providing excellent ongoing
CPD for prospective teachers
from the top end of the
graduate distribution
Incentives, norms and funding
encourage a fair distribution
of teaching talent
Human capital (OECD)
The past
International Best Practice
Seniority and tenure matter
more than performance; patchy
professional development; wide
variation in quality
Expectations of teachers are
clear; consistent quality, strong
professional ethic and excellent
professional development
focused on classroom practice
Wide achievement gaps, just
beginning to narrow but
systemic and professional
barriers to transformation
remain in place
Teachers and the system
expect every child to succeed
and intervene preventatively to
ensure this
FROM SINGLE LOOP TO.......
assess
set
targets
measure
progress
DOUBLE LOOP LEARNING
assess
set
targets
measure
progress
Build capacity
Evaluate learning
Create and
share
knowledge
SMC: from single to double loop







Set school goals and performance targets
Ensure smooth operation in school
Prepare annual school plan & budget
Pilot & evaluate educational initiatives
Promote education to pupils
Establish effective channels of communication
Plan professional development of teachers
 Evaluate school effectiveness
Appreciative inquiry








Protected learning time at meetings
Story telling sessions from invited guests
Participation in lesson study
Shadowing a class
Shadow a School Review Team
Consultancy on OLE
Focus group with students
Co-teaching
WHAT IS THE CAPACITY OF YOUR SCHOOL?
Conducting a knowledge audit
Where does the knowledge lie as to:








What motivates and engages students?
The effectiveness of teaching?
Uses and impact of assessment
The value of homework?
Learning in home and community?
Other Learning Experiences?
Agency and change agents?
Qualities of leadership?
Evidence from the Impact Study
In schools where SSE is more strongly embedded:
Membership of the team covers a cross-section of
staff with high credibility among their colleagues.
The School Improvement Team enjoys scope to
exercise initiative and creativity.
There is a willingness and capability to ask hard
questions and to instil an ethos of accountability.
Evidence from the Impact Study (2)
 Teamwork exceeds and synergises the
professional capacities of all its members.
 Initiative and ownership create confidence and
shared leadership throughout the team.
 There is a vision as to what SSE can achieve
and how it can feed into school improvement.
DEVELOPING THE INNER EYE
Leadership acts are most likely to occur when
attempts are made to understand the circumstances
of teachers’ work. This means starting with the
practicalities of teaching, developing a language for
talking about teaching, and assisting teachers to
collect evidence about the contradictions, dilemmas
and paradoxes that inhere in their work. This
consciousness raising amounts to developing an
inner eye so as to penetrate accepted assumptions
and, in the process, isolate viable ways in which
transformation might occur.
(Smyth, 1986, p. 3)
Leadership for Learning –
making learning visible
The task of leadership is to make visible the how, why
and where of learning. It achieves this by conversations
and demonstrations around pupil learning, professional
learning and learnings which transcend the boundaries
of the school. The challenge for leadership is to nurture
the dialogue, to make transparent ways in learning
interconnects and infuses behaviour. It promotes a
continuing restless inquiry into what works best, when,
where, for whom and with what outcome. Its vision is of
the intelligent school and its practice intersects with the
wider world of learning.
OECD’s PISA assessment of the
knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds
Extrapolating learning
Every three years, OECD tests roughly half a
million of children in the principal
industrialised countries, and that’s not
simply about checking whether students have
learned what they were recently taught, but
we examine to what extent students can
extrapolate from what they have learned and
apply their knowledge and skills in novel
settings.
How the demand for skills has changed
Mean task input as percentiles of the 1960 task distribution
Economy-wide measures of routine and non-routine task input
(Levy and Murnane)
LEARNING IN THE UNFAMILIAR
tasks/
problems
familiar
unfamiliar
novel
problems in
familiar
contexts
unfamiliar
problems in
unfamiliar
contexts
familiar
problems in
familiar
contexts
familiar
problems in
novel
contexts
contexts/situations
LEARNING IN THE UNFAMILIAR
unfamiliar
tasks/
problems
familiar
novel
problems in
familiar
contexts
unfamiliar
problems in
unfamiliar
contexts
familiar
problems in
familiar
contexts
familiar
problems in
novel
contexts
contexts/situations
Learning Science in Informal Environments
There is mounting evidence that structured, nonschool
science programs can feed or stimulate the sciencespecific interests of adults and children, may positively
influence academic achievement for students, and may
expand participants’ sense of future science career
options….. Many academic achievement outcomes (1) do
not encompass the range of capabilities that informal
settings can promote; (2) violate critical assumptions
about these settings (3) are not designed for the breadth
of participants.
Learning Science in Informal Environments: People, Places, and Pursuits,
National Research Council, Washington.
PLUS CA CHANGE?
In the job I’ve just left I got the chance to go to ministerial
meetings in so many places, from America to Australia, to China
to India, to Egypt to Scandinavia, where Ministers would
unfailingly stand up and talk about how the world is changing, its
uncertain, technology, global sustainability, rich and poor,
economic challenge, movement of people, threats to our
civilisation, etc. Then they all say, therefore, what youngsters
need to be is adaptable, flexible, ever to cope with change, and
words like that. Then, within an hour, all of them are marching to
another drum which is about how we hold on to tradition and how
we don’t let things that we have traditionally tested drift away
because they’re fearful of their electorate thinking that they’ve
lost what they thought the electorate matters.
(Mick Waters, Former Director, The Qualifications and Curriculum
Authority)
Archbishop of Canterbury's Christmas sermon
Friday 25 December 2009
In the case of children, we shall do our level best to turn you into
active little consumers and performers as soon as we can. We shall
test you relentlessly in school from the word go; we shall do all we
can to make childhood a brief and rather regrettable stage on the
way to the real thing - turning you into a useful cog in the social
machine that won't need too much maintenance.
The Children's Society's Good Childhood report or the Cambridge
Review of primary education. There has at last been a wake-up call
about the ways in which we are crushing and narrowing children's
experience; and there is a long and significant agenda there for
debate in the months ahead.
Entre les murs
‘its naturalistic portrayal of
the energy and high tension
of the classroom’
the chaos, the challenges to,
and idle assertions of
authority, the clashes and
power struggles, and, the
tedium, a wholly absorbing
microcosm of human
interaction.
The tyranny of being right
What we do know is if you’re not prepared to be
wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.
And by the time they get to be adults most kinds
have lost that capacity. They have become frightened
of being wrong. We stigmatize mistakes and we’re
now running educational systems where mistakes are
the worst thing you can make.
(Sir Ken Robinson, Chair of Government Task Force
on Creativity, 1997-2001)
Children come into the
classroom to be taught
Children come into the
classroom to learn
REFRAMING
from individualism to professional community
from teaching at the centre to learning at the centre
from technical and managed work to inquiry and shared
leadership
from prescription of curriculum to capacity-building of
teachers (Liebermann and Miller, 2003)
Learning teams as initiators in discussion of ‘tough
problems and deep mysteries of teaching and learning’.
(Mitchell and Sackney, 2000)
Surface passive
Individual
detached
View
of
person
Social
and
relational
View of learning
Deep active
Individualised learning
instruction
Personalised inquiry
construction
Personalised community
co-construction
Who assesses the quality of
learning?
Others
assess
student
learning
Students self assess
Teacher assessment
is final and definitive
Teacher and
student
assessment
coincide
Others
assess
There is little or no
formative assessment
Students self
assess
Self assessment
is final arbiter
Teacher assessment
is final and definitive
Teacher and
student
assessment
coincide
Others
assess
There is little or no
formative assessment
Self assess
Self assessment
is final arbiter
Observing learning
 What are they doing?
 What are they learning?
 What am I learning?
 What will I do next?
What combination of
experiences best promote
the learning of different
people?
Knowledge in the head
Vulgar and
useful
Pure and
useless
Knowledge in the world
The singular fallacy
Learning and development are frequently
presumed to be the result of individual effort
and accomplishment, rather than the product of
communities, groups, and families. What is all
too commonly framed as individual
accomplishment is better understood as the
result of the coordination and strategic use of
learning resources.
(Lauren Resnick, 1987)
NESTED LIVES
Children and young people live nested lives, so that
when classrooms do not function as we want them to,
we go to work on improving them. Those classrooms
are in schools, so when we decide that those schools are
not performing appropriately, we go to work on
improving them, as well. But those young people are
also situated in families, in neighbourhoods, in peer
groups who shape attitudes and aspirations often more
powerfully than their parents or teachers.
(David Berliner, 2005)
The nesting of school
performance
The ‘family’ and neighbourhood context
The social and economic context
The national cultural context
The global policy context
The school context
Measuring what we value?
We couldn’t find a mechanism to show we valued the
things we didn’t test. That was the problem. We
always valued the other things but we couldn’t find a
way of showing it, that’s the problem. We need to get
to a situation where there’s a way of showing how
much we value dancing, music, sport and PE; how
much we value how much improvement children make
in the widest sense and that really gets into the public
consciousness.
(Estelle Morris, Secretary of State for Education, 2001-2002)
Synergy or compromise?
The ‘line of best fit’ – to get as near as
possible to everybody, but not too far
from anybody.
No matter the colour of government,
there’s always going to be a concern what’s your average parent going to
think about this?
(Mick Waters, ex Director QCA)
Self-evaluation: a question of
purpose
 As preparation for inspection?
 For practitioner professional development?
 To enhance student learning?
 To build school capacity?
 To raise standards?
 To encourage pupil voice?
In d iv i du a l
P up il
M e a s ure d
Atta in m e n t
Re p ro du c tio n of
th e c u rric ul um
W HO
Pa s s iv e
Con s u m p tio n
W HY
W HERE
HO W
T he S c h o ol Da y
Opp ortu ni s tic
L e a rn in g
W HEN
W HEN
HO W
W HERE
T he Na tura l a n d
S oc ia l W o rl d
T he Cla s s ro om
Se a t
W HAT
W HAT
W HY
W HO
L e a rn in g Ho w to
L e a rn
M u ltip le Av e n ue s
o f I nq ui ry
L ife lo ng
L e a rn in g
Com m u ni ty of
L e a rn e rs
The players
Middle managers who act as intermediaries between
senior leaders and school staff, encouraging teachers
within their departments to step outside of their subject
to adopt a commitment to whole-school improvement.
SITs who share leadership, take the initiative in
supporting their colleagues and assume responsibility
for the successful embedding of SSE practice.
Teachers who are the ultimate gatekeepers and
champions of SSE, through promoting continuing
reflection on the quality of learning and teaching in their
classrooms and beyond
The players
Parents who are the first and most important educator,
have a responsibility to take every opportunity to
maintain a liaison with teachers in a joint commitment
to support their children’s learning.
Students who will only become effective lifelong
learners when they are self-evaluators, play a role in
constructive critique of school life and contribute to
school improvement.
Front line and auxiliary staff who present the school to
the outside world, who support the mission and vision
of the school and its day to day operations
Seeking external assistance
 A sign of vitality (Fullan)
 Essential for success in school improvement
(Baker et al.)
 Assistance seeking a sign of intelligence and
strength, not weakness (Louis and Miles)
 Making use of consultants should be the norm
rather than the exception (Fidler et al.)
 The school cannot ‘go it alone’ (Stoll and
Thomson)
Schools need critical friends, individuals who,
at appropriate times, listen and help them
sort out their thinking and make sound
decisions, who are not afraid to tell them
when expectations for themselves and others
are too low and when their actions do not
match their expectations. They also help
schools raise their expectations because
critical friends care about schools and want
the best for them.
(Stoll and Thomson, 1996, p27)
WHO?
understands your work yet is a little removed and so can
offer a different perspective?
Asks questions that make you think, reassess your
assumptions, helping you to see things in a new light?
do you trust and know to be on your side, even if they
sometimes present challenging critiques of your actions?
helps you make sound decisions, challenge expectations,
and helps shape, but never determines, courses of action?
alerts you to issues perhaps only half perceived, whilst
being sympathetic to you as a person and to the bigger
tasks you face?
UNICEF 2008
The true measure of a nation’s standing is
how well it attends to its children – their
health and safety, their material security,
their education and socialization, and
their sense of being loved, valued, and
included in the families and societies into
which are born.
(An Overview of Child Well Being in Rich Countries
(2007 p. 3).