[MUSIC] Here we are at week six and our final lecture for this course on Planning for Teaching and Learning. Linda and I have really appreciated the opportunity to work with you and to be part of the discussions, and to be thinking with you about what planning and teaching looks like in different contexts. We just want to share this image with you. If ever you come through the Vancouver airport, one of the things that you will see are some beautiful aboriginal artworks. This particular piece on the slide is a work by Susan Point, and it's called Inspiration, and it's a series of interconnected swirls. And we think that when we think about networks, it's how do we create those interconnections, those swirling together of ideas and people that create inspiration for our learners. So, we hope that we have introduced you to some ideas that are important and useful to you, and in this session, we're really going to focus again on mindsets, we're going to talk about trust, and we're going to talk about how networks can really support teachers in changing practice and having a huge impact on their learners. Let's just think about the notion of mindset again. We know that in the introduction to this course you had a look at a youtube clip by Hans Rosling and he said, let my data set change your mindset. And he used powerful data sets to interrupt and disturb our ways of thinking. We think that's a very powerful message for us all to hold onto. We also know that you can't argue somebody out of their beliefs, or argue them out of their mindsets. What we need to do as teachers is to change the experiences of our learners, change the experiences of our colleagues, of the parents and the communities that we serve, so that over time they will change their mindset. So, if we're thinking about the fixed and the growth mindset again, we need to provide repeated opportunities for learners to experience a new way of doing things, for them to see themselves differently as learners. There are many useful resources on trust and lots of different studies on the impact of trust in schools. One of the ones we found particularly useful, even though it's now ten years old, is the work of Tony Bryk and Barbara Schneider in Chicago. Chicago is a large complex urban system and they did a longitudinal study of the impact of relational trust in schools. We'll talk a little bit more about what the components of relational trust are but let's take a first look at what the impact was of that they found. So, in the schools that they study, schools that were low in relational trust at the end of the study had only a one in seven chance of improving outcomes for learners. One in seven. That's not very good odds. In contrast, half of the schools that scored high on relational trust were in a strongly improving group. On average, what they found was that the improving schools recorded increases in student learning of 8% in reading and 20% in Mathematics over a five year period. So, let me summarise that again. Schools with low trust: very low chances of improving academic productivity. Schools with high degrees of relational trust: significant increases in both reading and mathematics over a five-year period. So, relational trust, what does that mean? Simply speaking, it's about the connection between the adults in the building, the relationships between the parents, the teachers and the formal leaders, the principals, vice principals, head teachers. And they also say that there are four aspects of relational trust. The first is respect. So, respect is the extent to which we listen to different points of view and we acknowledge different perspectives. Linda referred to this in the last week when she was talking about open to learning conversations. Do we set up the conditions in our schools that we listen actively and respectfully to each other? So, respect is number one. The second one is personal regard, and this is the extent to which we know the people that we're working with. We know what's going on for them in their families. Do we care about them as individuals? Do we have some idea of who is facing personal challenges in any point of time, or do we just say it's one size fits all? Clearly, that doesn't work, so we need to say, to what extent do we invest time and energy in getting to know and care about the people that we work with? The third is integrity, and simply speaking, this is doing what you say you're going to do. So, as a classroom teacher, if I'm talking to a parent and I say, I'll be in touch with you at the end of next week to let you know how Tony's doing, I better be in touch at the end of next week or trust will be eroded. It's very simple. Do what you say you're going to do and follow through. And the fourth one is competence in core responsibilities, and simply this means that if there's a situation that is damaging to learners about which the adults do nothing, trust will be ruined. So, if there's a situation in our schools where we know that kids are being hurt, where they're not being treated respectfully, and we stand by quietly on the sidelines and do nothing, the degree of trust will be eroded, and the impact on learners will be negative. So, we need to think in our planning for teaching and learning how are we building in the opportunity to listen to different voices, to know that both the children that we're working with and the other adults in our building, to demonstrate that we're reliable by doing what we're saying we're going to do and by being competent in our jobs. The other key thing about trust and I, you know, as a principal, I found this particularly challenging. It's that the person who has the most power must make themselves vulnerable first. I'll just say that again, the person with the most power, real or perceived, must make the first move in building trust. So, if you're in a situation in your class where the relationships aren't particularly positive, as a teacher, clearly you're the person with the power and you need to be the one to make the first move to repair the relationship. Within a department or in a grade group, as teachers, there is always some teachers that seem to have more power than others. And so we need to say, if I'm in that situation how am I going to make myself vulnerable first? How am I going to make that first move? We really like it that at the end of professional learning where principals and teachers have been working together, for the principal to say, "Hey Judy I've been working on this, thinking about this. Could I come into your class and work with your learners for five minutes and just see how it goes?" So, the principal is coming to me as a teacher and saying, "I'd like to try something out", as opposed to saying, "Judy, you've been at a professional learning opportunity, I'm going to come in and see how you're doing". It's very different. So, let's think about who has the power in a situation and how we can make ourselves vulnerable as a way of building trust. One of the statements that Linda and I say over and over again is that meeting the needs of all learners is simply too difficult for any one teacher to do it alone. That's why we have been so adamant about finding a reflective partner, finding somebody that you can talk to, find somebody in your community that you can count on. And for us, we teach together all the time because the work is just too hard, really, to do it effectively alone. So, we want you to be thinking about how you can find those networks, whether in your own school or across schools. We've been working with a network of inquiry and innovation for the last 13 years in British Columbia and we've learned a lot from the schools that have been involved in that. At any time, we've had half of the schools in the province, that's about 800 schools, thousands of teachers, and probably 100,000 students have been involved in the network, as well as working with, you know, 300 to 400 graduate students. So, we have got a fairly big picture about what makes the difference within networks of teachers. The image that we use is from Martin Hill, he is an environmental photographer from New Zealand, and the image is called Floating Stones. We think that this image is really an important one for us as educators to hold on to, because if you look at that picture carefully, you'll see that the stones are actually floating on the water. I'm not sure about where you live, but stones don't float on the water in Canada. So, what's happened is something has been provided underneath the surface to create the image of those floating stones. And as we found this image reading the work of Rosabeth Moss Kanter from Harvard in a book called Confidence, and she said that, leadership is not about walking on water. It's about creating the foundations under the water so that others can. And we think that that's very much a metaphor for teaching as well. That teaching is not about us walking on water as teachers, but as creating the foundations so that our learners can. So, this is the image that we used for our network, and you can say that the ripples go on and on, and you never know where they're going to go. And we've been deeply impressed by the power of when teachers get together and have an opportunity to develop sustained relationships, how it opens up creativity and imagination. We worked with our colleague, Louise Stoll, who was working with a network of schools in Ealing, outside of London, to take a look at what are some of the key factors in creating effective networks of school-to-school networks. And so, here they are. This is in a book that was published in 2012, and we'll provide the reference for you on that. As you think about forming networks with other teachers, being clear on the purpose and the focus of your network is really, really, important. Having a framework for collaborative inquiry deepens the work. That's why we introduced you to the spiral of inquiry because we've seen the impact that that has when teachers are working together using a similar framework. The importance of trusting relationships which we've just touched on briefly in this lecture. The importance of leadership, and remember we are talking about that as leadership by contribution, so, who steps up and helps make things work? Also, the notion of coherence, that there is a coming together of ideas in a coherent way that is not just a random series of activities in the network, but it's connected to our purpose and connected to their shared focus. And then the last one is persistence. Will we stick with it? And again, Linda and I have been working in this area for 13 years. It has not always been easy. But because we've relied on each other and relied on the people that we're working with, we have persisted and we are seeing improved outcomes for learners as a result. So, just to recap then, what have we been thinking about through this whole course. We started with the notion of mindsets, mindsets for teaching, mindsets for learning and mindsets for individuals. We introduced the idea of hard goals and really want you to be thinking about the big moral purpose in your setting. And the notion of hard goals as heartfelt, animated, required and difficult - really being much more motivational for teachers, and for all of us than incremental goals. We've talked about the importance of having a learning model that you're working from and learning principles so that really our planning is grounded in what we know about learning. We've talked about the importance of assessment for learning and feedback, and this is going to be a repeated theme throughout this course - that assessment for learning is something that we need to be thinking about in a variety of ways. We've introduced the idea of forms of inquiry, and also a framework for inquiry as a way of deepening professional knowledge and improving the experiences of our learners. We introduced you to the idea of four key questions, and why they matter and hope that you're working with these questions now in your own setting, and we're looking forward to hearing what you're learning as a result of getting the feedback from your learners. We've introduced some of the principles of teacher professional learning and the idea that our learning needs to be tied to the learning needs of our students. And finally, we took a look at what some of the innovative practices from schools around the world and focused on the importance of trust, relationships and networks and networking for system change. So, as we connect, extend and challenge ourselves, we'd like you to be thinking about how are the required activities and readings that we're providing you, how are they helping you deepen your understanding and extending your thinking about your planning and challenging you to think in new ways? And we'll also provide some additional resources that you can consider if you're interested in exploring any one of these ideas in greater depth. Again, it's been a privilege to work with you over the last six weeks and we wish you all the best in your work and your schools. [MUSIC]
