Professor Simon Leonard and Katherine Adnett discuss chapter 1 of the book “Pragmatic Adaptive Leadership – Tools for Guiding in Complex Educational Systems”.
This is Part 2 of Episode 1 of the “Teaching futures Book Club” and explores further ideas that underpin Pragmatic Adaptive Leadership.
Transcript
Narrator:
You’re listening to the Unlocking Education Futures podcast, your key to discovering the science of learning and its success in the classroom.
Katherine:
Could you just share a brief story or example where a school has used one of these practices or a combination to really understand a challenge that they have in their school in a new way?
Simon:
Yeah, look, I’ll go back to a project that actually got, it sits at the start of my thinking that led to this book, and it’s years ago, so we weren’t using explicitly the models. We were going, but yeah, it’s the genesis story, or what do they call it in the superhero movies? It’s not genesis, it’s the…
Producter Dan:
Origin.
Simon:
Origin story. Thanks, Dan. Thanks, Producer Dan. I’ve always wanted to say that in a podcast, when they break off and talk to the producer. So yeah, it’s the origin story.
And there was a project being run by a guy named Mark Westwell, who’s now the CEO of the South Australian Department for Education, but this is back when he was working at Flinders Uni. And he was looking at a project where they were looking at the impact of cognitive executive functions on the learning of mathematics. And without going too deeply into all of that, well, that’s really cool. Cognitive executive functions, go and read Diamond if you haven’t. It’s important knowledge.
But the design to what he’d done was essentially a professional development activity, but they weren’t going in and saying to the teachers, this is how you do it. They were going in and giving the teachers examples. They had some project officers who were a couple of great teachers who would go and run a lesson and let the teachers watch. And then they were doing some unpacking. So there was some elements of this reflective practice and the things that have ended up in this model that we’ve found created.
But what they really ended up needing to do to make this innovation work was actually get the teachers to move to a different understanding of the purpose of their mathematics lesson. And when the teachers were coming into their mathematics lessons in the primary school context mostly, that they’re going, so the purpose is obviously to improve students’ mathematics, right? We can measure it with things like the NAPLAN test.
But the approach that was actually taken in this project in the end, having had a look at the realities of the interaction of the elements, was to ask teachers to think about the purpose of the mathematics lesson being to improve the students’ cognitive executive function skills. Now cognitive executive functions are things like switching attention, things like working memory, and things like impulse control.
And what they were doing was actually teaching the kids to start using strategies like stop, think. Now that’s actually a big thing in terms of the emotions because a lot of kids, if they’re struggling with mathematics, they look at something and go, I don’t know how to do that. And at some level they panic, right? As soon as that happens, you’re not doing any mathematics.
And so actually moving to, well, how do we help the teachers explicitly teach the students how to deal with that emotion, give them a strategy, how to deal with prompting the use of the executive function that able learners use really well, but less able learners don’t use as well. That was key.
And what was outstanding as we looked at that project was that the mathematics scores of the students just rose dramatically and far more dramatically than any other intervention that we’d seen that was more traditionally based on this is how you learned the mathematics.
So the decision that came through was shifting from a focus on learning mathematics to learning how to be a learner and turning the mathematics into a context of how to be a learner. And the results were impressive.
A different example I could give is one of my PhD students at the moment has been looking at the process that students at senior secondary in their SACE are going through to make decisions about which subjects that they choose. And there’s been a lot of assumptions about how that works and schools implement all sorts of processes to support students to make those choices. When they choose in year 10, they choose what they’re going to study in year 11 and then again year 11 into year 12. But what isn’t often done is actually going and getting the evidence, building the model on what is actually occurring there.
And when we do that, we find that students are on the whole absolutely seeking advice, that they do engage in a lot of conversations with a lot of people. What doesn’t seem to have much impact is the presentation that a school leader gives to a class or to an assembly or whatever. What does seem to have much more impact is the more low key conversations. But that’s not necessarily conversations with a year advisor or a pastoral care teacher. It’s with a range of teachers and it’s with a range and much more importantly, it seems with parents or other members of their world outside of school. And that world outside of school probably has more impact on the final choice than anything that the school does.
There’s lots of implications of that. But certainly as soon as you start to look at design of how do we best support students to make choices that are in keeping with the child’s best interest. The school actually then starts to need to look at, well, how do we support this complex process that we actually don’t have control over? And that’s a big switch for schools because schools often think, well, the solution to everything is you control it. You can’t control a complex system. And this is a complex system where students are making decisions where the primary influence is probably not lying with the school.
Now, this is a project in action, so I can’t give you the nice outcomes of it. But as a way of just thinking through the kinds of problems that we can tackle, it does go from the very basic, how do we teach year three mathematics through to how do we help teenagers make decisions about their SACE choices and therefore their post-school destinations and probably their careers? It never works in that nice linear reductive system. It’s always we go to think about where do we put the efforts.
And so, yeah, and in this later one, well, the efforts might be, well, how do we actually start a conversation with our parent community? And that’s actually not an easy thing to do, but it’s such an essential thing for schools to do.
And so when we start looking at what’s the job for teachers or the job is to teach kids, well, yeah, but the job is to engage in the life world of that child. And it’s a non-trivial thing. It’s not just, you know, goodwill to the school. If we’re trying to actually get to the outcome for the child, it’s essential.
Katherine:
So I think you said in a conversation outside of this podcast earlier this year that PAM, so Pragmatic Adaptive Modelling, helps us to see complexity and Pragmatic Adaptive Design helps us to work with it. But first we need to see the complexity and trying to engage with it and understand it and then we design for it.
So selecting the right practices to test our assumptions around these sorts of things are quite useful. So together they offer that really kind of responsive approach to understanding and engaging with complexity, which is, of course, a difficult thing to do if you don’t have that understanding and those practices to support that.
Simon:
Yeah. And it’s funny, I’m just so steeped in that, you know, traditional reductive approach to making knowledge that I always want to start with, let’s do the modelling and then let’s make a decision. It just seems where we’re supposed to go. But as we do it more and more, it’s just not how it works. Teaching is a design activity. We’re always going, I think that if I get this group of students to do this activity,this set of resources in this context, and they’re all design decisions. They’re decisions that teachers make in every single lesson, in every single. interaction. We’re going to achieve this outcome. And so I do think that sometimes, yeah, we’re starting with the design is where we really start in most cases. And it’s actually, it’s just the normal activity that teachers do.
But yeah, what we’ve done here is just provide a, and again, the technical term is we call it a heuristic. It’s an approach to how do we make knowledge, how do we organise knowledge that is good enough to work in practice. That’s what we mean by heuristic. And yeah, this sets the practices. They’re not things that we’re looking for anyone to follow rigorously. The protocols, if we come into research, sometimes the protocols need to be clear enough that we get confidence around things like validity. But in a pragmatic approach, it’s a scaffold. Think about scaffolding students, but what we’re trying to do here is basically scaffold teachers and leaders to sit back, think about all the things that are going on that surround any decision that they’re making about a child’s learning, about the organisation of a school, any level.
Katherine:
One of the most powerful ideas in the framework is teachers as leaders of change. And you make the point that leadership isn’t just about formal roles, that everybody’s influencing or whether it be through relationships or informal roles that they hold in the school. Everybody’s a leader. So in your view, how do you think classroom teachers can take up this notion of adaptive leadership, even if they don’t hold formal roles?
Simon:
Yeah. Sort of metaphor years ago that we sometimes imagine the nature of a school being that teachers do work on students. But you can switch that metaphor. You go, well, actually, the students are the workers. The students aren’t doing work on themselves and their own development. The students are doing work on knowledge. The students are creating knowledge. And that the role of the teacher is actually much better understood as a leadership role within that workforce.
It’s something that we do in the way that we do our pragmatic adaptive modeling is we often question what’s the object of transformation, we call it in the book, but what’s the thing that we’re doing work on? And what’s the actual objective? And I think a lot of the problems that happen in the way that we think about schooling is we get a confusion of those things, that we mix up the long-term objective and the thing that we’re actually doing work on at the moment. And I think that goes on here. Sometimes we go, hey, we’re trying to do work on the children, but no, we’re trying to do work on the capabilities that the children develop. And ultimately, the children are doing that work themselves.
There’s nothing that you or I can do to a child that develops their capability. What we can do is influence the tools that they have available to do the work themselves. What we can do is give them a context in which that work can happen, in which they can thrive. What we can do is create the community around them with which they can share information, which they can share activity. And this is largely what we draw. And you’ll see lots of triangles in our book where we’re trying to map what are the tools that are available to use, what are the communities, what are the social and cultural background pieces.
And so I think the idea of teacher as leader is at that level, at the level of student learning, it’s actually really obvious as soon as you start to change the metaphor a little bit and start to see that the child, and in our modelling system we call that the subject, the subject, the person who is actually doingthe activity. And then I’d take that at another level too. I think at the level of the way schools operate, the staff on the school are highly qualified. All our teachers have university degrees. All our teachers have experience and expertise that is hopefully complementary.
And the ex officio leadership roles, the named leadership positions, are a kind of leadership that we talk about in a later chapter of the book as administrative leadership. And it’s really important. The mechanics of a school and the logistical operation of a school is actually complicated rather than complex. There’s lots of things that go on, but the difference between complicated and complex is that those ideas like feedback loops and emergent properties. The administration of a school doesn’t show that. It’s complicated and it’s absolutely essential because if it doesn’t happen, yeah, you get chaos.
There’s another kind of leadership that we have there that is really about managing the chaos. And we’ve all got visions of that. There’s that principal who comes in and she or he takes on the chaos and solves it. And that’s the sort of thing that gets valorised in the Hollywood movies. And again, it’s essential. Sometimes the systems that underpin what happens in a school do break down. And sometimes it is chaos. And chaos is about pushing out past complex. There’s simple and there’s complex and then there’s chaos. And we don’t want chaos. And we do need leaders who can bring us back from chaos when that happens.
And that can happen at a large level where a school just has an endemic problem and is in chaos. Or it can just happen because of a critical incident. And we’ve sit in a school and it goes into lockdown and something that has a big emotional effect happens within the school. And those critical incidents, we need the skills to deal with that.
But somewhere in between there is what we call emergent leadership. If the capability that we’re looking for children to build, to develop through their engagement in school is an emergent property, we need the leaders who create the contexts. And that happens at a whole school level too. How do we actually work with our colleagues? How do we work with school policy? If we go back to that idea of that engagement with the school community at that level of helping young people make decisions about their futures is an essential thing. Well, how do we do that? And teachers are always going to have a role in all of that.
It’s been complex work that needs the engagement of many that can never be done by a principal, however good that principal is, can never be done by the one person who gets the named job. So, yes, I think there’s at least two levels of leadership that is just part of the fact that teaching is a profession. If it was just a technical skill, then maybe we don’t need that leadership. But any professional is leading stuff.
Katherine:
So, I guess it’s about schools creating the conditions for them to be learning organisations that learn and support teachers to be adaptive to the needs of their own school communities.
So, in terms of the hallmarks of those leaders, whether they be middle leaders in formal roles or principals or deputy principals, that enable teachers in this environment that you’re talking about, what would you say some of the enabling qualities of those leaders would be?
Simon:
Well, I’ll start off by going, yeah, I think the things that we need to really pay attention to are things like:
- How is the performance of our teaching staff measured?
- What is valued?
And that would be both through the formal performance management systems, but also have a look atwhat do we give prizes for or who gets noticed in the things that are promoted, what gets mentioned at the staff meeting. So there’s all sorts of ways that we can signal. And again, we talk about the value of creation, but people do respond to the kinds of value that get measured. So I think we need to be paying attention to that. I don’t know if I’m talking about the hallmarks. I was going to actually throw that back to you. You’ve spent more time in school leadership than me. And you’ve seen some great leaders that aren’t this kind that I’m describing that do the emergent leadership. I’m wondering if you’ve got any good examples of what you’ve seen and people doing that work.
Katherine:
Yeah, lots of examples. I think in terms of the qualities, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly common themes. But I guess it’s around leaders that are always, and it sounds a bit cheesy, but they’re learning and they’re wanting to really, truly understand the needs and wants of the people that they lead. I think they are at the coldface. They’re at the school gate. They’re watching the language that’s used with children, how they’re talking about their learning. They’re reading the room constantly to see how people are. I think they’re highly collaborative and they’re wanting to share that power, I guess, of the leadership across their teams. They’re understanding the solutions to some of the complexity they’re dealing with are found in engaging with all of the stakeholders involved in that complexity. So they’re listening to what the students have to say, the parents, the teachers, the community. And ultimately, they are enabling others to lead at whatever level that is, whether it be students, whether it be teachers.
So it’s a lot of listening and there’s a lot of empathy required, I think, to truly connect with the local learning needs of that organisation and then use the information that they receive to work with. I guess it’s the same as the understanding the situation and then it’s designing for but designing with the community to create local solutions to some of the issues that they face. And I think that way you develop agency across the entire school and ultimately we want agentic, we want people to feel like they are agents of their own learning and that they can have a say and take action in their own community. So yeah, that’s my initial thinking. That was what comes to mind.
Simon:
I think you asked about the hallmarks of that leader. And the one thing that I really notice is the people who are able to keep asking for that next, what else is happening? And it’s a disposition towards something we get in the leadership training in this place, the yes and. And to be able to always go with the and. Because one way we can deal with the management of a school, like research, is a reductive approach. If we pretended the problems that we face are simple problems with simple solutions or technical solutions, we can do that. And that will address some of the problems that schools deal with. And they’re often necessary but not sufficient, which is where the and comes in.
So I think it’s often the leaders, whether they’re an early career classroom teacher or a 20-year veteran or a principal, to go, well, yes, that thing that we’re doing there has value. And what next? It’s always the what next. I’m thinking of a teacher we’ve been working with recently who has been looking at the role of goal setting in motivation. And started off with that sort of idea in the ascendancy of the SMART goals. Goal setting, we’ve kind of gone down this pathway that this is how you do goal setting. it’s useful within a particular context. And going, so yes, that’s useful to do goal setting for this purpose, which is generally where it’s useful once we’ve got really clearly defined short term goals.
If my goal setting is about how do I improve for that test in three weeks, smart goals probably quite useful. If my goal is about,c I want to improve my sporting performance on this particular measure, SMART goals are quite useful. But once we get into more nebulous goals, like I want a better future, SMART goals don’t work for a start.
And the other thing that we can start looking at with SMART goals is they often get used by schools to tell students what their goals should be. So they’re not used in a way that actually builds agency. And there’s the and. So yes, we want the student to do well in that test in three weeks time. And we want them to develop agency and to be able to take control of their own learning and become lifelong learners, like it says in the Australian Declaration for Education.
And I think those two things are antithetical. But even if they’re not counterthetical, one is certainly not sufficient. And so yeah, I’m going back to the thing about that teacher that I’m describing here and how she’s moved from looking at SMART goals to go and well, what other approaches to goal setting are there?
Because the SMART goal approach is probably not building agency and therefore you go through different approaches to understanding how motivation works. But they’re generally not actually motivational in that deep intrinsic sense or in the long term sense.
So yes, I think the leaders who can take that sort of approach of going, it’s a re-problematisation, the solution that we’re doing here is the solution to some of the problems we’re facing but we’re always facing other problems, other challenges. The education, the challenges never stop, they just morph. Or we take a more expansive look or we focus in on particular bits and it’s that capacity to go, yeah, I’m prepared to deal with uncertainty and not have a solution to everything and to explore options to be part of a learning organisation, as you say.
Katherine:
Well, I could talk to you all day, Mr Simon Leonard, but I’m very conscious that we need to wrap up. So that’s all for this episode. Thank you, Simon, for joining us and offering us such rich insights into pragmatic adaptive leadership. I’m sure we’ll get you back on a future podcast.
And thank you to our listeners. Join us next time as we explore further ideas that underpin pragmatic adaptive leadership and how these can be used to design with and for complexity and also how these ideas take shape in schools through stories of adaptive change in action. Thank you.
Simon:
Thanks, Katherine.
Narrator:
This podcast was produced by the Education Futures Academy at UniSA on the traditional lands of the Kaurna people. We pay our respects to Elders past and present.
