5 SIMPLE STEPS TO SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT

Lately, I’ve been a bit quiet on the blogging front and it’s mainly due to the fact that I’ve been putting into action what I’ve been learning about implementing the science of learning and have been working with schools and teachers from around the country. On my latest return flight from Melbourne, I jotted down some thoughts on school improvement.

1. Schools need a razor sharp vision of what the main thing is

Every school has an outward facing vision that pretty much looks exactly the same from school to school. However, very few know precisely what they are working towards and even fewer have alignment in vision across the various stakeholders. This vision needs to be the driver behind every decision moving forward. Yet, creating the vision is the easy part, knowing where to start is the hard part!

Working out what the main thing needs to be

Often, schools will choose the main thing based off what everyone else is doing or something that they have recently heard about. Another thing schools will say is, “We’ve been focusing on literacy for two years, so now we will shift to numeracy.”

In reality, schools need to actually deeply know the current state of practice, what the persistent problems are and how the vision moves things forward towards the main thing. There’s no point choosing a starting point if you don’t know where the gaps are in the first place.

What does the data tell us? Do we have the right data (I’ve written about using data effectively here)?

Leaders need to be observing classroom practice and reporting on what is working/not working. We can use checklists of different instructional techniques to tick off what has been observed and record things like opportunities to respond, correct/incorrect responses and time off task.

2. Leaders need to prioritise the main thing

Once the main thing has been defined, it needs to be prioritised. From resource allocation to messages to the community, it should be clear to all stakeholders as to what the focus is.

What does this look like?

• You might be trying to implement a behaviour curriculum and you cop parent complaints. Rather than being reactionary towards the complaints and trying to keep everyone happy, you decide to hold a parent information session to get everyone on the same page.
• Instead of giving into “enthusiastic Emma” with her latest idea, you slow down the decision-making process and take it to the next meeting with school leaders. You explore the idea and examine how it fits in with the “main thing”.

3. The main thing needs to be sequenced in small steps

Ridden with guilt, we rush into wholesale changes and skip steps in the implementation process (see below). Rather than thinking about what change looks like at the granular level, we jump into things with only surface level knowledge. This leads to a lack of fidelity in the implementation because people get left behind due to insufficient knowledge.

Problem Probe Protocol

An activity (see below) that I do with schools to gain clarity over what their focus should be, is getting staff to write down what their persistent problems are and then categorising them into curriculum, teacher practice and student behaviour. This allows us to see if there are themes across the school.

Following this, we then place them on map with low to high effort on the x-axis and low to high impact on the y-axis. A great place to start is with the things that fall in the “high impact, low effort” quadrant. We then unpack it by thinking about the possible reasons are as to why this is a problem (“Proposed Provocations”) and what the potential actions could be (“Possible Ploys”).

We can then sequence other things based on the direct links to the main thing.

In Practice

A school might work out that the “Persistent Problem” is that students are forgetting what they have been taught. The “Proposed Provocation” is that content is being taught and then teachers move on without the knowledge transferring to their long term memory. So, the school decides that they want to implement Daily Reviews (the main thing). To sequence the learning for this, teachers need to have:

• conceptual understanding – the research behind desirable difficulties (retrieval, spaced and interleaved practice)
• procedural understanding – how should a Daily Review run (quick and snappy, lots of opportunities for students to respond, actionable and specific feedback)
• responsive teaching skills – knowing what questions to ask, how to provide effective feedback, what checking for understanding techniques to use and what a good response looks like.

4. Teachers need to have a concrete understanding of what the main thing is

Whether it’s through coaching conversations or professional learning presentations, teachers of teachers need to provide concrete examples of what it is that they are talking about.

We are programmed to be lazy thinkers. As the late great, Daniel Kahneman has told us, our default is to use our System 1 thinking which is fast, intuitive and requires little effort. However, this means that when new ideas are presented to us, we “pattern match” and try to find connections even when they are not there. This is why checking for teacher understanding is so important. This can be achieved through doing things like:

• Literally checking for understanding as if you were teaching young people e.g. mini-whiteboards, gesturing, turn and talk, cold calling
• Having teachers write up scripts and rehearse them, this allows them to practice what they have been taught and you can see how they have interpreted the messages

However, we can get to a concrete understanding a lot faster if we can start with as close to a concrete model as possible. This could be through an observation (live or video), presenter modelling to the group as if they were a class or doing a think-aloud and running through the decision-making process of an expert.

5. Understand that the process (this) can be simple, but the implementation is complex.

While these five steps may seem simple enough, each step brings its own layers of complexity. To put all of this together requires a deliberate effort from school leaders to pause and plan. Often, this step can be the biggest stumbling block. Schools are busy, messy and complex environments where there are constant distractors pulling our attention away from the main thing. However, that’s also why knowing what the main thing is can be so important.

School improvement can happen overnight, but it happens in smaller incremental steps than you probably hoped and wished for.

So, use this knowledge to pause and plan your way to school improvement by knowing what the main thing is and honing in on precisely what this means for teachers.

Key considerations

• Get really good at the main thing before moving onto the next thing.
• Know how the main thing will be sustained over a period of time
• How will you know if the main thing is/isn’t working and what will you do?

In a nutshell

The five simple steps to school improvement are:

1. Schools need a razor sharp vision of what the main thing is
2. Leaders need to priortise the main thing
3. The main thing needs to be sequenced in small steps
4. Teachers need to have a concrete understanding of what the main thing is
5. Understand that the process (this) can be simple, but the implementation is complex.

Learn More

If you want to get in front of your school plan and find out what your school needs to do next, join me in this course: