Development of the Morningside School Vision

I have a quote that I used to have attached to the top of my laptop.

“Vision without action is a dream. Action without vision is simply passing the time. Action with Vision is making a positive difference.” Joel Barker

In most settings where I taught there was a vision statement usually followed by a mission statement. My expectations were that these statements are what drove a school forward and were the foundation upon which all was developed, as is very much the case in successful businesses, and in successful schools. It always puzzled me as to why in the settings that I found myself in that the vision was never referred to. I solved this puzzle. The answer was poor leadership.  A lack of understanding that a vision statement is the glue holding so much together and that it is a powerful reference for direction, for school community purpose and a reflection of the aspirations that the school community has for its children.

As shared in my first post, the vision statement at Morningside School had outlived its use by date. As a leadership team my AP and I recognised that in order for us to make a significant difference in raising student achievement we needed to challenge ourselves as leaders and to challenge our staff. We needed a plan. As is the case with all plans we knew where we needed to start, but intrinsic in this was knowing where we wanted to get to--in essence the vision.

The Final Version

We began our process by consulting our staff with a draft vision document. We had the staff work with this document and had them pull it apart. This was an excellent process. It really tested my ability to be able to speak with clarity to key elements in this document--my beliefs, my expectations, and showcased my passion for ensuring that I was able to deliver a clear and precise message about what I believed was important for our children.
The first thing that staff gave clarity to was the statement on the top of the document. This was edited with the staff understanding that as a community of learners we all have to be competent, curious and independent. This also showed a clear link to the expectations for how we wanted the curriculum to develop from Years 1 through to Year 6 as can be seen on the right hand side of the above graphic.

We had done enough in-house professional development for me to be able to bring clarity to pedagogy. In essence this was to have the key competencies as its base, be formative in its approach, child centred and led and support authentic learning contexts.

We had done extensive work as a staff in promoting our values and rules over the last three years for all of us to have good clarity on these and the way in which they support our school community.

Teaching as Inquiry was essential in examining all aspects of our practice, especially for our at risk and cause for concern students. My vision for this is that Teaching as Inquiry can only be truly effective in making sustainable changes in teaching practice and better student outcomes if it is done collaboratively. Quite simply two heads or even three heads are better than one in achieving high impact and enduring outcomes. This can only happen in a collaborative team teaching environment--the ultimate aim for the start of 2014. Which happened.

The circular arrows around the outside of the body of the graphic used to contain the words self review. My study and research on self review convinced me that it would be better to talk about a process. When we start a self review process we reflect first. In this reflection process discussions take place, baseline data is gathered, a timeline may be discussed and outcomes are may be established. It may also be that through a process of reflection it has been determined that the status quo is acceptable at present. So to reflect is to either assist a process of action or not. The second part of the process is to review. A call to action. All necessary data is gathered, examined and desired outcomes and the necessary resourcing put in place is identified and sourced. The third part of the process is to refine. This means to put in to action the desired outcomes, monitor these and refine and tweak where necessary. For my school this three step process is in constant motion. This gives me an excellent oversight over all areas of the school. I am very fortunate that my principal and my AP are strong communicators. We work hard at making sure that we are all aware of what is happening and consult everyday. We also encourage this with our staff. I will talk more about this later.

To give more relevance to this document I knew that there needed to drivers moving us forward and elements of school culture that we needed to embody. We just couldn't pluck ideas out of thin air and implement them. The real core of this document is working towards a Morningside School curriculum for our students so that they become competent, curious and independent learners. On the right hand side I placed the words "Guided By". At all times we need to be guided by our school vision-an obvious point but one that I am well aware of that becomes lost. We need to make sure that our school values that support all aspects of school culture are there to support and provide good professional and community boundaries.

Beliefs cover all aspects of the implementation of the vision and also provide good depth to any rationales that we may have. For example, I believe that the best professional development that all staff have the opportunity to grow in and to best meet the needs of the school, is in-house professional development. By gathering data from class observations, conversations with students, parents and staff, tracking and monitoring unit evaluations, reading school progress reports, keeping up to date with my professional readings and taking on board the views of others such as those in the Virtual Learning Network, I can form beliefs about what I think will make a positive difference and also support the school's strategic overview. In believing this I must also give further depth to this by highlighting research that can support this.

Going Deeper

Looking back on the work that we have done over the last three years, it is satisfying that what I have envisaged is now starting to bear some fruit. A positive school culture with staff that have been carefully managed and lead is leading to many positive collaborative outcomes for our children. But work still needs to be done in two significant areas. The first one is pedagogy and the second one is our curriculum. My AP and myself started a conversation that was borne from the observations that we are noticing in teams who are experimenting, taking some risks and are now aiming to make changes to team programmes. I asked the following questions, "Why are teams changing existing programmes? Is it because existing programmes are not raising student achievement?" This lead to the prompting of further discussion and more questions. We decided to meet with our teams and have look at their programmes in reading, writing and maths. We have issued the following questions that we required them to answer and provide evidence for from their Term One programmes:

1. What is your programme in reading, writing and maths?
2. How does it work? Unpack this for us.
3. Explain how your programme is raising student achievement.
4. Provide evidence for this.
5. If you were to change anything, why would you change it? What's your rationale?
6. How are you tracking student achievement?

These are challenging questions, but will provide us with good baseline data on planning and programme delivery, our teams' awareness of the impact that their programmes are having on student achievement, identify gaps in planning and for us to target specific professional development to assist and to endorse and celebrate where good practice is happening. At no stage of this process will we be making judgments.

My AP and I reflected on our time as full time classroom teachers and recognised that at no stage of our growth did anyone ask us these questions. Changes to our classroom programmes were usually driven by a number of surface features such as the latest and greatest idea from a professional development workshop, or seeing a colleague implementing a new idea and seeing fantastic classroom displays and book work, or not fully understanding the intent of one or more programmes that we implemented or seeing children not engaged and then making changes all over the place to remedy this.

Further into this conversation I also prompted that if our intention is to become more formative in our approach to assessment then we have to look to see if we are providing good structure, tools and time for our staff. This has prompted another look at the robustness of our indicators, our look at how we can effectively coach our staff, identifying points in the week or term to meet with teams to have them evolve to a point where formative assessment tracks student progress and then assist in the the changes required to  individual, group or classroom programmes.

In essence what is being shared here is the starting process of teaching as inquiry, especially the start of the process-Focusing Inquiry. The above questions are excellent prompts and ensure that the conversations begun and examined evidence and data showcase that excellent planning tied in with good formative assessment practice form the basis upon which to further examine the true intent of the direction that I believe our school should be heading in. See my next post for an explanation of our vision document.

The Results
We received excellent feedback from all staff about the questions we provided. It really made them think in their teaching teams about their approach to making the decisions they were making.  It was especially pleasing to see that our senior staff, like us, were surprised and also acknowledged that they had never been asked or challenged by these questions in their careers in different schools as well. All teams appreciated the opportunity to meet with my AP and myself to discuss these questions and their responses to them. The discussions were rich, allowed us to share where we want pedagogy to move towards, highlighted strengths and challenges. It was also a real celebration of how well everyone was collaborating. Key words such as seamless and transition started to appear as we discussed with individual teams what we believe needs to be happening with programme evolution as children transition into new teams at the start of every year. For example, we need consistency in spelling programmes across the school, we already have this in maths which is seeing children starting the new year with a math programme that has familiarity. This also needs to continue with our new inquiry model, reading and writing.
This planning review was prompted by a simple discussion about why teams or teachers believe that they need to change their programmes. This review has seen my teams sharing their answers after only one term of being together. I have included the email that I sent after our staff meeting presentation to staff about our findings.

Planning Review Major Themes

·         Research and Reading

Our vision is guided by research and beliefs that inform best practice. We have identified that in maintaining and growing our rationale for the maintenance and development of our programmes-then we must be challenging ourselves, maintaining our intentions and keeping current. This also supports our growth as professionals.

·         Transitions

More evidence is being provided by teams about the need for us to be transitioning data on children between teams as children move into new teams at the start of the year. We need to continue with documentation that highlights indicators achieved and hotspots identified for children so that teachers have a better baseline to start with.  The classroom description has been identified as one document that can assist with this, as well as classroom visits by colleagues in Term 4 who may be shifting to a new team in the new year. Seamless is a key word identified us. We are also starting to make some forward movement with discussions in how some core programmes e.g. spelling, inquiry can also transition well between classrooms. (It is interesting to note in discussions that the apparent divide that existed between junior and senior schools continues to lurk in the background.)

·         Communication

Communication is strong across the school and is evident in the excellent reflections that teams are showing. This is also evident in the way in which planning information and expectations are being shared with our Teacher Aides. It is pleasing to see that Teacher Aides are being utilised to their fullest capacity as they too continue to adapt to significant change.

·         Planning

Continuing reflection is seeing all teams continuously evolving and taking risks with planning—this is great to see as it shows that none of us are ever satisfied with the status quo—Teaching As Inquiry is playing a major role here. As shared, planning is more efficient when all teachers are collaboratively planning together so that each colleague knows what they should be doing-this leads to consistency with teaching programmes. If we want a seamless approach across the school, this can only happen if it is happening in teams. It is pleasing to see that all teams clearly understand this. We are mindful that single cell approaches are hard to shake off. It is great to see that continuous reflection in this area is seeing some teams working very efficiently and other teams developing excellent systems to support continued growth in this area. Well done.

·         Data

The what, the why and the how.  The gathering of baseline data, the tracking of it and the consistency of tools relevant to year level cohorts requires that we “work smarter and not harder” with this. We are all very conscious of making that each child is well tracked and has their needs identified and then taught to. But this cannot happen for all subject areas and for all 60 children every day. There is a need to tidy up indicators in writing. A big thanks to A-- for extending the reading indicators for reading and for taking a lead in meeting with teams to firm up our writing indicators.

General Responses to the Questions

Maths continues to shine brightly across all teams. As Ali shared, we believe in it, so we are confident with it-we get it and have the available rationale, tools and teaching and learning programme to support all that we do.

Reading is solid. There is continuing reflection in this area as well as the adaptation and evolution of programme delivery to meet the needs of our children in this new collaborative context and of tools-e.g. reading rockets with specific indicators for each level.

Writing for all continues to be our Achilles heel. We have identified this as a professional development focus. A--- has done well to start a journey of discovery in this area with his writing team-J-, Ali and myself.

Next Steps

We will hold a staff meeting—most likely in Term 2 week 8—to have each team present the tracking tools that they are using—why they are using them, what data this gives them to inform about progress or achievement or next steps or change to programme and how they are being used in reading, writing and maths.

Lastly and as shared at the meeting we want to acknowledge that we are thrilled with the work that is happening-being mindful that all of the above is a reflection of Term 1 work. We need to celebrate this very loudly.