- Image by Getty Images via @daylife
As it is the new academic year in Australia I have been busy over the last week setting up two schools for full implementations of our upgrade to their performance management systems over the coming year.
Both sets of interventions have been exciting and energising as gradually people have understood what we are trying to do and then bought into it.
It is through explaining to whole school groups who are suspicious of change the reasons why we are doing this upgrade and what the upgrade entails where I find real understanding emerging for me. Nothing beats explaining what you are doing to people who do not know what it is and are not that interested in finding out.
The narrative we have developed is very compelling now. It explains how we as people develop to be at our best and how the institutions in which we were educated and, largely speaking, in which we now work, limit this development. Explaining this successfully to teachers who are at the heart of this is a touchstone of how successful we are being.
Listening is moving to the heart of what we are doing. It has become apparent that if a child learns early on to listen in a profound way (what in earlier posts I have called empathic and emergent listening) then that child will be a lifelong learner. Meaning that in each and every situation they find themselves in that child and later the adult will learn. By learning I mean that the child’s brain will make new neuronal connections and their capacity to process information will grow.
It was moving to see a whole staff of teachers realising that this was true and that the only way the child was going to learn to listen in that way was if an adult, a teacher or parent, modelled it to them i.e. listened to them at those profound levels.
Yet the upgrade to their systems does not demand them to change their behaviour, how they listen to children. Instead, it creates the conditions in which each teacher develops clear learning goals, aligned to the schools over-riding goals, and the means to meet those goals by learning from their colleagues. The process that develops those goals involves middle leaders coaching teachers and in the coaching sessions those leaders model the listening behaviours that are needed.
Middle leaders are trained in coaching and then almost immediately coach 4 – 6 teachers for one hour each to help them gain clarity and commitment to learning individual goals. After each session the teacher provides feedback about how well the coaches have modelled the behaviours.
In this way leaders learn to model the behaviours and teachers gradually adopt the behaviours that are being modelled to them by their leaders. In this way we get the behaviour change that we are looking for in the classroom. Indirect, but our action research has shown that it is the most effective way to get behaviour change.
I am really excited by these developments and how they are being taken up!
