1. Half-day Conference on Meeting the Challenges of Change – Leadership for Learning 11th June 2010 Education Bureau – Quality Assurance Division

2. Programme TimeContentSpeakers 08:45 – 09:00Registration 09:00 – 10:00Keynote Speech: Meeting the Challenges of Change – Leadership for Learning Professor John MacBeath 10:00 – 10:20Experience Sharing (1)Mr Lin Man Sheung (Headmaster of Pui Kiu Primary School) 10:20 – 10:40Break 10:40 – 11:00Experience Sharing (2)Sister Agnes Law (Principal of Sacred Heart Canossian College) 11:00 – 11:30Leadership for Learning in the Local Context: Reflections and Recommendations Professor John MacBeath 11:30 – 12:00Panel DiscussionProfessor John MacBeath Mr Lin Man Sheung Sister Agnes Law Mr Hui Chin Yim, Stephen 12:00 – 12:30Open Forum

3. 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?

7. 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

8. The hero rescuer The dutiful manager The orchestrator The intermediary The innovator The team player The risk taker Who am I?

9. 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) 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)

10. 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) THE POWER OF ONE?

11. 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

12. THE DILEMMAS OF LEADERSHIP 1. Unrelenting change 2. Stress 3. Workload 4. Social factors 5. Accountability 6. Bureaucracy 7. Teacher recruitment 8. Salary 9. Lifestyle balance 10. Intensification (MacBeath and Galton, 2002,2004, 2006, 2008)

13. ‘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’ ORGANISATIONAL LEARNING DISABILITIES

14. 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 11 KEY FACETS OF LEADERSHIP

15. 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

16. 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) Leithwood et al.

17. Making the connections Leadership and management Learning and teaching Ethos and culture

18. “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”

19. Local responsibility and national prescription Schools today Detailed prescription of what schools do Schools tomorrow? Building capacity The challenge Every school an effective school Towards system-wide sustainability

20. Human capital (OECD) 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 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

21. Human capital (OECD) The past Seniority and tenure matter more than performance; patchy professional development; wide variation in quality Wide achievement gaps, just beginning to narrow but systemic and professional barriers to transformation remain in place International Best Practice Expectations of teachers are clear; consistent quality, strong professional ethic and excellent professional development focused on classroom practice Teachers and the system expect every child to succeed and intervene preventatively to ensure this

22. FROM SINGLE LOOP TO....... measure progress set targets assess

23. DOUBLE LOOP LEARNING measure progress set targets assess Evaluate learning Create and share knowledge Build capacity

24. 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  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

25. 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  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

26. WHAT IS THE CAPACITY OF YOUR SCHOOL? Conducting a knowledge audit Where does the knowledge lie as to: What motivates and engages students?  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?

27. 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.

28. 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.  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.

29. 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)

30. 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. Leadership for Learning – making learning visible Leadership for Learning – making learning visible

31. OECD’s PISA assessment of the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds

32. 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. Extrapolating learning

33. How the demand for skills has changed Economy-wide measures of routine and non-routine task input (Levy and Murnane) Mean task input as percentiles of the 1960 task distribution

34. LEARNING IN THE UNFAMILIAR tasks/ problems contexts/situationsfamiliar unfamiliar familiar problems in familiar contexts novel problems in familiar contexts unfamiliar problems in unfamiliar contexts familiar problems in novel contexts

35. LEARNING IN THE UNFAMILIAR tasks/ problems contexts/situations familiar unfamiliar familiar problems in familiar contexts novel problems in familiar contexts unfamiliar problems in unfamiliar contexts familiar problems in novel contexts

36. Learning Science in Informal Environments There is mounting evidence that structured, nonschool science programs can feed or stimulate the science- specific 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.

37. 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)

38. 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.

39. 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.

40. 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)

41. Children come into the classroom to be taught Children come into the classroom to learn

42. 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) REFRAMING

43. Individualised learning instruction Personalised inquiry construction Personalised community co-construction Surface passiveDeep active View of learning View of person Social and relational Individual detached

44. Who assesses the quality of learning? Others assess student learning Students self assess

45. Teacher assessment is final and definitive Self assessment is final arbiter Teacher and student assessment coincide Others assess Students self assess There is little or no formative assessment

46. Teacher assessment is final and definitive Self assessment is final arbiter Teacher and student assessment coincide Others assess Self assess There is little or no formative assessment

47. Observing learning  What are they doing?  What are they learning?  What am I learning?  What will I do next?

48. What combination of experiences best promote the learning of different people?

49. Knowledge in the head Knowledge in the world Pure and useless Vulgar and useful

50. 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)

51. 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) NESTED LIVES

52. 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 The ‘family’ and neighbourhood context The social and economic context The national cultural context The global policy context The school context

53. 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)

54. 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)

55. 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?

57. 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

58. 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

59. 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)

60. 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)

61. 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? WHO?

62. 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).