Collective Leader Efficacy with Peter DeWitt

Transcript

JUSTINE MACKEY: So, welcome, everybody. My name is Justine Mackey. I am one of the Principals in Residence here at the Victorian Academy of Teaching and Leadership. It is our privilege to be here with you this afternoon, and thank you so very much for taking the time for your own professional learning to be here with us this afternoon to enjoy this webinar with Dr Peter DeWitt. I would like to start this afternoon by acknowledging... the traditional owners of the many lands throughout Victoria that we are joining from today. I'm joining you from the land of the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation and I pay my respects to elders, past and present, and any Aboriginal people who may be joining us. As we work and learn together today, may we recognise the valuable contributions of First Nations people to our society and their ongoing spiritual connection to the land, the water and the sky. We are here together today to learn with Dr Peter DeWitt whose areas of expertise include instructional leadership, developing collective efficacy among leadership teams, and fostering inclusive school climates.

Peter coaches school-based leaders, directors, instructional coaches and teacher leaders, as well as school-based leadership teams both in person and remotely. He also facilitates professional learning here with us today. So, he's going to be sharing his expertise to focus on fostering collective teacher efficacy. Thank you, Peter. It's an absolute joy to have you here with us this afternoon, and I'll hand it over to you.

PETER DEWITT:

Oh, thank you so much. Welcome, everyone. It's good to be with you virtually. I look forward to the next time that I can get to Australia. I was telling the team that it's been since before COVID that I've been able to come. It has not worked out over the past couple of years, but I am joining you - I'm typically from Albany, New York, but I'm actually in Hawaii, so I'm in Hawaii for work doing some coaching. So, I have some success criteria, and I'd like to share that with you. And then we're going to actually quickly put you into a breakout room, and I'll explain all of that in a little while. But so, when we're actually focusing on this, by the end of this presentation, you're going to be able to define and analyse your team's ability to develop collective efficacy. OK? You're going to analyse which drivers are necessary for this. You're going to consider how your school leaders can use the cycle of inquiry to develop a theory of action. So as middle leaders, I want you to consider collaborative inquiry.

I know many of you probably use that already, but I'm going to talk to you a little bit about that. And then the whole idea of building coherence between school leadership, team meetings and what you practice within your schools. And then, of course, consider your next steps. Those actions that you leave with are really important. So, that's my success criteria. You know, collective leader efficacy, for those of you that maybe don't know the term, is really about a leadership team and the ability for them to engage in joint work and develop a common language and then ultimately engage in actions that are going to have a positive impact on student learning. And that's a lot of, you know, a lot of verbiage there, but collective efficacy is something that's really important because when we can come together and engage in kind of this reciprocal transfer of learning where I walk in with one idea but I walk out with a better one because of the collective conversation, that's what collective efficacy is all about - how we can use those moments and have a deeper impact on student learning.

We know that lives are complicated. We know that people have huge workloads, and collective efficacy is the vehicle that we can use to get there. So that's my success criteria for our time together. But what we're going to do is actually put you in a breakout room for about six minutes, and I want you to consider a couple of things. As somebody who runs professional learning, one of the things that has kind of stood out to me over the past few years are people that come to sessions but they don't necessarily know why they're there. Maybe they were tapped and they were told that they had to be there. We call that voluntold. Other times, maybe they're signing up for something for professional learning, but they're not quite - they haven't quite made the connection to how the learning we're going to be doing together is relevant to what you're focusing on back at school. So this is your opportunity to actually think about the success criteria that I showed you here and get into a smaller group in a breakout room, and you're going to have six minutes to do a couple of things.

Number one, introduce yourselves. We want to create a network. We want you to meet people that you might not necessarily know. So, introduce yourself. And then we want to talk about what are your learning needs for when you're coming into the session. So what might that success criteria look like when you leave here after the time we are done? What are you hoping you have learned? What are you hoping you have walked away with? So six minutes in a breakout room. Introduce yourselves, talk about your learning needs, and talk about what would success look like when you walk out of here in 1.5 hours. What are you hoping that you will have learned or actions you will have thought about engaging in when you leave? OK, so six minutes in the breakout room, please. To take the start to build collective leader efficacy, especially when moving into a middle leader role at a different school, and to be able to identify CLE effect both up and down from middle leaders and seen in dialogue, evidence used and impact on student learning.

So those are really good ones. In the chat box, would you please share what your success criteria are so I can look at those quickly and embed those into the rest of the session? What is your success criteria? Ashley, new to leadership and just want some help, tips and ideas. That's perfect. Who else? Also new to leadership, Leah, OK. I hope to learn how to communicate effectively in the leadership space. This is something in tonight's session that I can take away and implement with my new leadership team. Build a strong, healthy culture through leadership. Sarah, how to change the mindset of those that are stuck in their ways. Julie, how to create a collaborative culture. Scott, as a new principal, I'm looking to develop CLE with my new team. Lena, to understand the first steps to take to start to build collective leader efficacy. Alright, establish a new leadership team, Michelle. Looking for ways to maximise impact when time-poor people come together for change. Yes, same to me as Ashley, Kathy.

I'd like staff to have buy-in, and using a cycle of inquiry building on data, Bernadette. Thank you. So, a couple of things to think about. When I hear buy-in, sometimes it makes me feel like I have an idea and I want everybody to agree with me. And what we have to look at when it comes to collective efficacy, and for some of you looking for the first strategy to use, the first strategy to use to develop collective efficacy is exactly what I just did with you. Co-construct success criteria. How many of you at the beginning of your meetings actually co-construct success criteria with the people at the table? As you probably have experienced as a teacher, you go to a lot of meetings where you're not quite sure why you're there. Collective efficacy and what we need to do with our leadership teams and our spaces that we facilitate meetings is have purpose. What is the purpose for being together? I'm in Hawaii. I was with a leadership team at a high school this morning, and they were talking about their meetings, and many of their meeting spaces lack purpose.

So, co-constructing success criteria gives purpose to the people around the table. That's going to help with the buy-in that you're looking at. So that would be strategy number one to use. I know we did it quickly here, but how often do you do that in your spaces? Just a few of these, so massive frustration due to lack of workforce. And so, how to help maximise the capacity of the team that we have. Yes, And also minimise the workload. Don't double up the work, right? Megan, I've read your book and think the concept of CLE is important. I would like to know how I can encourage the leadership team to explore this. Caroline, to build collective leadership and a team that is growing. I have moved to a new school so I'm wanting to increase my knowledge. Curious to take the principles of collective efficacy. So thank you. Let's do that. Let's move on. So during the session, there's really going to be three chunks that we're going to be talking about. One is going to be the research behind collective efficacy.

And the reason, the purpose that I actually looked at in the first place is because that might help you with some of the success criteria that you have. Number two is going to be the drivers. Somebody mentioned mindset. What I'm going to do is actually talk through eight drivers, and those drivers are what we need to consider about how a team comes together. So I want you to think of this. Whether you're new to leadership or you're trying to develop a team or you have a team, there are really a couple of fundamental things that we need to be able to look at. Number one is, how does the team come together in the first place? And then, what does the team focus on? We often look at what the team focuses on because we're looking for actions and we have priorities and all that stuff, but we don't always talk about how the team comes together in the first place. And that is vitally important because Bandura's research on efficacy shows that if you feel anxious, it diminishes your self-efficacy, the confidence you have in your own actions.

But if you are excited and engaged, that's going to increase your efficacy. So how we come together is equally as important as what we're coming together around. Yes, Katie, like a learning intention for students is a perfect way to talk about that. That's what it is. So many of our meetings lack a purpose. So what I want you to think about in this session with me are two things. Number one is, how in my role am I connected to today's learning? And number two, how in my role am I a contributing member to our team? What I have found in the ten years that I've been running professional learning, facilitating as a consultant and a coach, is that many people don't even know why they're in the room. So we need to take time to process first and talk about, how are you going to be connected to today's learning. That's why I had success criteria. But number two, how am I a contributing member? Because you're not just responsible for sitting there and taking in what I'm talking about. It's about connecting it to the work that you are doing, right?

Being an active participant. And I'm going to try my best to be able to do that through this virtual session. Now for collaborative inquiry, many of you know that there are really four steps. There's a problem of practice that we need to focus on. What problem are you trying to solve? Number two is implementation. How are we implementing this work? Number three is evaluation. How are we evaluating our impact? And number four is going to be reflection. In the work that I do, 75% of my work is coaching, whether it's leadership teams or individuals. Everybody I work with gets this, which is a placement. It's a collaborative inquiry placement, and they have to go through collaborative inquiry with me. That's what I'm doing here in Hawaii and meeting with teams for three hours at a time over five days. So the problem of practice is, what are your three main priorities that you're focusing on as a school? So in the chat box, I want to know that. When you think about whether you're new to your school or you're new to leadership or you're with a team, what are your main priorities that you're focusing on?

And I'll give you an example. Here, I had a meeting this afternoon with a team, an elementary team, and their number one priority is what they refer to as tier-one instruction. They're focusing on tier-one instruction with all of their teachers because they have a 35% proficiency rate in ELA. And there are other school districts that I'm working in that have the same thing. Sometimes the priority is establishing more impactful PLCs. So when you think about the problem you're trying to solve at school and the priorities that you have to do that, whether it might be an academic plan or a strategic plan, what are your priorities? I see Tracy wrote, 'developing a new instructional model'. Perfect. In the chat box, tell me, what are one, two, or three of the priorities that you're working on right now? Improve student numeracy results. So let me ask you, Elena, is that a priority or is that an outcome of a deeper priority? Right? Something to think about. Whole school literacy to improve student outcomes.

Establishing a positive team culture, Michelle. Rebecca, strengthening data literacy skills. OK, very good. I want people to read what your colleagues are putting in the chat box because these are very good. Improve students' self-belief as a learner. That's huge. Oh my gosh, I love that one. Embedding a whole school pedagogical model. Collaborating to articulate the curriculum vertically and horizontally. Developing PLC team facilitators. These are wonderful. Planning to utilise a UDL framework. Building staff trust with me and with each other. Using data to inform targeted teaching. Auditing the curriculum. Building student agency. Embedding a new approach to mathematics. These are wonderful. Thank you for putting these. Inclusive practices. Increasing rigour in the curriculum. So thank you. So those are the things that I want you to think about as far as, you know, those are the priorities. What would success look like? Now, we can't do this now because we don't have the time. But for those of you in a new leadership role, or you're at a new school or you're trying to establish trust with your team, part of what you need to be able to do is physically go in and think about your meeting, where you're meeting with them, and co-construct success criteria around the meeting.

You can co-construct success criteria as far as, what do we want out of our instructional leadership team? And then each meeting, co-construct success criteria to talk about what do we want out of this meeting that's going to connect with that overall focus of our team? Those priorities. But one of the most important things you can do too to develop collective efficacy among your team is to also develop success criteria around, what would success look like if we actually engaged in these priorities and we were successful? It's the process that we would go through. What would success look like, and then what are the intended outcomes? Would that be where we see an increase in numeracy? And then we have to think about something like implementation, our theory of action. So if we were going - I'm going to use Nathan's - if we were to improve student self-efficacy, what - then what is going to happen, right? If we are going to build greater differentiation in the classroom, then what should we see?

Right? And those are the things that we have to do. Some of you will look and think, we develop collective efficacy like it's a magic thing where we just come in and we kind of, you know, do the I Dream of Jeannie. That's not how we're supposed to do it. It's through this work that we develop collective efficacy together. So we have to think about our priorities - I love the ones you put in the chat box - and then we have to develop, what would success look like if we did this work correctly? And then, what would be the intended outcomes? And then it would be that theory of action. If we do this, then this is what's going to happen. And then we can start talking about evidence. I know one of you put in your success criteria to think about evidence. What is the evidence that you would collect? And you can see on this placemat that it could be demographic data that we are using. It could be perceptions data, which are surveys. It could be student learning data which are like common formative assessments, or it could be school processes data, like our PLCs would be a school process.

It's an organisational thing. So I'm hoping that makes sense. In the chat box, could you put... Yes, what I just said about collaborative inquiry makes sense. Or MI for, I need more information. Or N for just No, that didn't make sense at all. In the chat box, do that. Tracy, thank you for being the first. Don't be afraid to put more information, because sometimes we think we're being intentional, but we might not be. OK, perfect. So, thank you for that. So, we talked about what your main priorities are Katie, yes, it makes sense, but you still need to bring your team along on this journey. I wanna hear Katie, I would like you to unmute because I would like to know more about why you just said that.

KATIE HULL-BROWN:

So, I'm just wondering, my first response is how can we build the time in to do this at the start of a meeting when everybody's quite keen to get through the agenda and get out the door. So, I think it's about how do we place value as a whole team on this process?

PETER DEWITT:

Yeah, so that's a really good question. It's actually something that came up today, because what happens is we have a mindset that we have an agenda that we have to get through. And the reality is what we have to do is look at that agenda, just like we would look at the lesson that we're going to teach to our students and decide is our agenda really appropriate for the time we have together? And whose voice was in that agenda? Because if you create an agenda that other people are showing up to, then really their voice wasn't valued within that right at the beginning. They're supposed to sit there and take it. Success criteria might give you the opportunity to have the agenda and then say, what would success look like for the end of this meeting? And co-construct it that way. Yes, it's going to take some time and yes, you're going to have to decide that something might have to come off your list, but if you truly wanna get people on board, and if you truly wanna elevate the voices of the people around the table, then you have to take some time at the very beginning of each meeting to actually co-construct success criteria.

I do it for every coaching session, every workshop, because it's that important. Does that help?

KATIE HULL-BROWN:

Yeah, I mean I absolutely agree with you. I'm just thinking sort of devil's advocate I guess, (LAUGHS) and I guess it's also about building a culture of working in that way. And I think once the culture is established, you know, it would be really great. And I think, you know, it depends on how you work. Like we send our agenda around, you know, days before the meeting for people to contribute to ahead of time because we don't want people bringing up things in the meeting that are not on the agenda because then the meeting runs over time. So...

PETER DEWITT:

No, I think that's great. And what I do is before I run a workshop, I actually send a letter out to all participants with the success criteria because I have content that I need to cover. There's a reason why people wanna hear for about collective efficacy. So, I actually will send out with the success criteria on there, and then I ask people to consider your own success criteria, which is exactly what I did with all of you. And that's a very smart thing to do because the reality is I know that there are people that show up to meetings or workshops and they don't necessarily have the efficacy to be able to talk about these things. So that part is important because it's the pre-learning that happens. Katie, I know that you said how much time? It really depends because, you know, I'm working in a complex in Hawaii right now that they have faculty meetings every other week or every Wednesday they have a faculty meeting, so they have four faculty meetings a month. I work in other school districts where they have one faculty meeting a month and teachers can choose to only go to six out of ten faculty meetings.

So, that time thing is really, you know, to me, I'm going to look and say, if I have an hour and a half for my leadership team meeting, which is what I had when I was a school principal, to me the hour and a half was good. We can remove all content that can be shared by email that dramatically increases the time for doing and working together. You're absolutely right, Sarah. Megan, it sounds really good what you were saying, but I would love to see some different exemplar as to how people have co-constructed the place placement info. Sure. Actually Megan, would you unmute and talk to us a little bit about that just to make sure I need a little bit more information?

MEGAN LOUREY MILLS:

Oh, hi, how are you?

PETER DEWITT:

I'm doing well. How are you?

MEGAN LOUREY MILLS:

Good. One of the ways that I find with something like this, I find it really nerve wracking to get started and putting things down and is this the right thing? So, being able to see different ways that people have put information onto paper sort of goes, ah, now I can see the possibilities rather than being restricted by just what I'm thinking of at the moment.

PETER DEWITT:

Yeah, So, that's a good question. So, there are a few different ways that I go about it. Like, I will train school leadership teams and in the state of Arkansas, I'm training school leadership teams from across the state. We spent two days going through the priorities and the success criteria and the theory of action. Two days doing that because they didn't know what their priorities were. Sometimes in a coaching session, which is an hour to two hours, we will go through the priorities, and then when we're talking intentionally about the success criteria and the intended outcomes, people decide that the priorities that they had we're not necessarily the correct priorities and they refine them. So, it really depends on the conversation that we can have. I have people that do a Google intake form with these questions on there, and sometimes when they're doing the Google intake form and they put the priorities and then they go into write their success criteria, they realized while they're writing success criteria that they need to refine the priority.

So, there are kind of a few different ways that people will go about it. There are other times, like the group in Arkansas that I was recently working with, and I'm gonna see them in a couple of weeks. When it came to the priorities, I used a protocol called 5 whys. And the 5 whys protocol is really about... So, you develop the first why, which would be, so why is this a priority for us? And then you have to go through a series of four more why questions to take you deeper into whether this was the right priority or not. So, those are a few different examples of how we've gone about the work. Protocols in this case can be really helpful. And the 5 why's protocol, if you haven't seen it, you can find on Google for sure. But those are a few different ways that you can go through. Does that help? Oh, Rebecca says great protocol, but it takes time and you have to be intentional and you have to focus on that, right? So, collective leader efficacy is this, it's developing the, you know, shared understanding.

We often have a common language, but we don't have a common understanding. And then we have to engage in what Judith Warren Little talked about back in 1990, which is joint work, which means that we have voices, you know, we have a quality of voice here. And it also involves evaluating your impact. So, when I showed you the place, Matt, and then I talked about things like a Google intake form. When I meet in a coaching capacity with the people I'm working with, and this is every month I progress monitor with them, what evidence have you brought? Is it school processes data? Is it student learning data? What have you brought? What are you learning from this? What reflections do you have from it? And what action steps do we need to take next where this is concerned? So, an important part of collaborative inquiry and developing collective efficacy is that progress monitoring part around evidence, and it takes work. Some of you actually said that in the chat box and also in one of the conversations early, it has to become a habit.

I just read a book by James Clear twice called 'Atomic Habits.' It's about making sure that this becomes a habit. So, you have to commit to doing this work when you're meeting up. That means you have to be willing to let go of maybe what was on your agenda or the way you've operated over the past year or two. You have to look and say, if we're gonna progress monitor and we're gonna use collaborative inquiry around understanding our impact in these priorities, that's gotta be the core part of the work that you're working on. And then you have to look at the other things that are on that agenda and you have to look and say, am am I trying to do too much? Are some of these double talk meaning I'm saying the same thing three different ways. So, you have to be able to manage that time that way as well, which takes work. Now, motivation, what we know is that through Ken Leatherwood's work, why this is important, why I am talking to you about not just the content that we focus on, but how we come together in the first place.

It's really important because we know that in order for people to be motivated, they have to have a a sense of agency. And in order to have that sense of agency there, it really comes down to two things. Capacity beliefs and context beliefs. Capacity beliefs is our self-efficacy. Do we have the self-efficacy to do this work? Context beliefs is about whether we believe we're working in a school that's gonna support us when we're trying to be innovative. So, when I see things like words like buy-in, sometimes I worry about that because it means do people actually believe that they work in a place that's going to support them when they're being innovative? Or do they think they're supposed to buy into something? And what I would rather do is look and see what the priority is and then get an understanding about what teachers are doing around that work already, and then start to elevate their voices by what are the next steps that we need to be able to do. Sometimes buy-in doesn't happen because people think it's a brand new initiative coming in.

Part of our role as leaders is to look at how people are doing this work already and not make them feel like they haven't done this work at all. For those of you that are new to leadership, one of the things that happens is we come in, we feel this pressure to change things. What I would prefer that you do is actually look to see what are the good practices that are happening in your school, and then where do you fit in? What's your entry point into that discussion? Why do you think, and this is where our second and also our final breakout is going to be. Why am I caring about motivating people be important to the work we do in leadership? So, in a breakout, I would like you to do two things. Number one, you can unpack what you've heard already, what's resonating with you, what questions you might have. But number two, very important. Why might caring about motivating people be important to the work we do in leadership? So, you're gonna get six minutes for this breakout, and it's gonna be the last breakout that we do.

Alright, welcome back everyone. So, in the chat box, why don't you put one of two things. Number one, what's resonating with you, what question you might have, but also why am I caring about motivating people be important to the work we do in leadership? Take a moment to put that in the chat box please. OK. So, Sarah, we motivate so that our team is on the train, alright? And makes more positive work in climate. Yep. The word care here is vital. Absolutely. People feel valued and will perform at high levels. You are absolutely right. Helps you with cultivating resilience, for sure. Thank you for that, Jennifer. You know, my friend Mike and I, Mike is based in Washington State. We have written a book that will come out next year on developing human interconnectedness and intentional leadership. What we know is that we have teacher attrition issues. Wherever you are in the world, people are leaving the profession. They feel burned out, they don't feel cared for. And that's something that we have to really look at because if we wanna keep teachers, if we wanna keep you in leadership, we need to really have a deeper discussion about this, which I'll talk more about when we get to the eight drivers.

Shelby, we had a good discussion about the external motivation coming from leaders trying to push an agenda versus co-constructing goals. So, the motivation is intrinsic. Yes. You know, the co-construction of goals the co-construction of success criteria is so important. And yes, it's hard to do at first and people will give you kinda surface level success criteria or they're gonna say things like, oh, I don't know, but that's because they haven't been asked to do it before. And what I found is over time that success criteria gets deeper. So, if you start co-constructing at the beginning, just know that some people are gonna look and they're gonna be like, well, I don't know what to say because they haven't been asked to do that before. But the more you model it and do it with them, the deeper they get with that work. Positive outcomes are more sustainable when there's shared moral purpose. Yes, absolutely. Nathan, you know, Michael Foland has talked about that for years. People feel valued and wanna contribute when they're motivated.

So, the staff members feel like that what they think or have to say matters and feel connected. The efforts of the team are not being negated by the unmotivated. That's right. Once we have motivated people around us, we have extra voices and ideas and our practice belonging, caring builds a climate of trust, intrinsic motivation. If staff understand the why and had an input in constructing goals and the intrinsic motivation should be there, thank you for that. So, part of it too is just a research based David Susan, Caroline Tomlinson talked about emotions associated with the learning environment. And this is for adults and for kids. You know, one of the things Mike and I have done when we're developing workshops is we do a Google intake form before the workshop even begins. We ask people what their favorite drinks are, their favorite snacks, and we have those at the workshop because we know a positive environment leads to endorphins, right? And we use a lot of protocols. We give people time to process information.

It's not just me talking at them. And we know that negative environment leads to cortisol in the bloodstream. It raises environment or anxiety, right? Katie, some are negative because of the past. That's right. We pay for the sins of the past, been there, did the work, but nothing came of it. So, they feel it wasted their time. And what we have to do is create a positive environment where people have that voice, right? And that's going to take time if they haven't been able to do it before. I love this quotation, so I just wanna share it quickly. A learning community, what I'm asking you to do here is about the purpose of advancing collective knowledge, but it also supports individual learning. So, for those of you looking for different exemplars, I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about my principal's advisory council. And that was from when I was a principal and I was a principal school principal for eight years in upstate New York. And one of the things that I wanted to do is have principal's advisory council, but I didn't wanna be the one who facilitated the meeting or ran the meeting.

So, I had co-chairs that did that. The reason why collective leader efficacy is different from collective teacher efficacy is because with collective teacher efficacy, yes, it's about developing a shared understanding and engaging in joint work. But typically collective teacher efficacy is done at a grade level or a department. When you're in a grade level or a department, you don't have that system view of what your school needs. So, for those of you that are new to leadership, what you are finding is that your perspective as a classroom teacher has to expand because now you think about how the system works, right? And that's something that is really important for leaders because as a middle leader, you're kind of stuck in that middle. And so when I was a first grade teacher and we you know, we had a grade level meeting every week, I only cared what was happening in first grade. I didn't care about what was going on in fifth grade because I was only concerned about first grade. Collective teacher efficacy is really about being concerned with your grade level or department collective leader efficacy is different.

Collective leader efficacy is a sys is a school team. And why it's complicated is as soon as you have somebody like a school principal on that school team, people default to that school principal. People defaulted to me. When I was on my principal's advisory council, I had two co-chairs that would create the agenda and we would get together and define success criteria as a group. But very often at the beginning, people would look right at me and say, Peter, what are we supposed to be doing? That's where collective leader efficacy can be complicated, because as a principal, I had status that the rest of the people around the team did not have my job as a leader was to lower my status and raise the status of the people around. When I'm running workshops with Mike, and we have name badges, we make sure that people just have their name and the city or town that they're coming from, they don't have their position on there. And the reason why is because as soon as somebody has a position on their name badge, people look at them differently.

So, how can we do these simple things to lower our status and raise the status of the people around us? You'll notice that even you... When I got introduced as Dr DeWitt, I don't like being called Dr DeWitt, I want to be called Peter. And why? Because as soon as somebody hears doctor, they instantly think, either one, I can do surgery, which I can't. I'm not that kind of doctor. Or number two, that somehow, I have this perceived status. I don't, I just happen to have my doctorate, call me Peter. Right. So those are the things that we can lower our status and raise. Yes, Katie. Vertical relationships. I love that. That's so much more articulate than what I said. So collective groups should create opportunities for reciprocal learning with one another. I have an Instagram page. I have a company called the Instructional Leadership Collective, an organization that I just started a couple of months ago, and we have an Instagram page, the Instructional Leadership Collective. And I actually just put a Canva picture up there because it was in a collective.

We go into a meeting with one idea, but we walk out with a better one. Too often we think we supposed to walk into a meeting with one idea and walk out with the same one. That's not a collective, that's not collaboration, that's control. What we want to be able to do through developing success criteria. And, you know, vertical relationships, as Katie said, is that we want to be able to walk into a meeting with one idea, but walk out with a better one because of hearing from people, even alone, like when I'm looking at Katie, say, vertical relationships, I know that's something I'm going to take away from this webinar and be like, I love that, when I talk about lowering my status and raising the status of the people around, Katie in Australia called it vertical relationships. Develop each other's leadership mindset. For those of you that are new to leadership, you have to kind of keep in mind that you are not teaching necessarily anymore. Now you're in a leadership role where people are going to be looking to you for guidance, right?

And I've always been a big fan of servant leadership. How can I serve you, right? Understand the necessity for sense for wellbeing and the skills to work in a collective. And we're going to talk about these things when we get to the drivers. But before we do that, I want to give you some practical information. Many times people feel anxious when they come to this meeting. And remember, collective efficacy is where we're supposed to develop a shared understanding and engage in joint work and have an impact on student learning. But many people show up to a meeting and they're not quite sure why they're there. I've done a lot of research, and there are teams where I've had people say, Peter, I've been on this team for two years and I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be doing. So one of the ways to deal with that is to engage in roles. I told you before, I had two people that were co-chairs. But what about a facilitator of learning? We need to look, talk about mindset. We need to look at our leadership team meeting as professional learning.

It's not just a meeting, it's a place where we're going to learn from one another. What are some visual representations? What about those quiet people that don't always want to speak? One of the things that we need to be able to do is kind of value how do they go about it. Do they do a visual representation where maybe they do sketchnoting? I'm a big fan of, you know, I have a remarkable two notebook, an interactive notebook. And I like to write notes and doodle in there. Those are things that are really important because when people do sketch notes, that's a brain map of what they were learning, what's sticking out the most. Like when I'm looking at a lot of things that are coming up in a meeting, I start developing, what are the common themes in what they're saying? Right. When I'm looking at the priorities and I look at the Google intake form, and I have an Excel spreadsheet that gives me all of the priorities that everybody I'm working with is focused on, I start to develop and look at what are the common themes of what they're focusing on as priorities.

So a visual representation, when somebody is actually doing sketchnoting during a meeting, that is a great space for you to be able to look and say, those are the things that are really surfacing to the top for that person. Who's the researcher? And I'm not talking like they have to go and do their doctorate. I'm talking about who's going to find that one page article or that protocol, you know, that is going to help us, that's what a researcher does. Who's the note taker? We had a note taker, old school job, but she wrote great notes. I sent everything out to the whole entire staff the next day. They had complete transparency when it came to our Principles Advisory Council. Who's a critical friend, or sometimes I call them an accountability partner, but who is a critical friend, who's going to be that person on the team that doesn't mind challenging my thinking, even though I'm the principal, who is that person around the table who is going to have a different perspective than the one you have?

And then last but not least, innovator. Who is going to be the person who doesn't just see what is, but they see all the possibilities of what could be? They're the people that don't just see the way a meeting has run for the last ten years, they're going to see the possibilities of co-constructing success criteria and developing a shared understanding and engaging in joint work. So when we think about this, we have to think about what are the roles that people can play. In the chat box, talk to me a little bit about do you have roles on your team or would roles be beneficial for you? Put that in the chat box for me, please, before we move on. Would roles be beneficial or do you already have roles or what might be a question you have around roles? And that was like three different questions. But keep in mind, I'm just like, I'm in Hawaii on East Coast time because I've only been here for three days, so, you know. Alright. So let's see. Julie, roles would be excellent. I have suggested rotating the chair.

Absolutely. Katie, roles keep everyone accountable and engaged for sure. We have roles and user rotation and data wise meeting structure. Good. Would people be assigned to roles or would they self-select based on their natural comforts? Great question Leah. You could do it either way. I think getting people to self-select would be a really nice way to give them voice. But you might also like in my case, I chose the two co-chairs. So I think it depends. You can do both actually, it doesn't have to be one or the other, it could be both. Joel, in our small leadership team, we rotate chair minutes and writing the agenda. We have roles, but I like the addition of roles that challenge thinking rather than process driven roles. Co-chairs work so well and then the transition to person AB then person AC. Yep. Yes, the meeting wise approach ensures that everyone participates and protocols within the meeting ensure equity of voice. We don't have roles on our team. I like the idea of this. I'm definitely the note taker, but only for myself, Megan.

Oh, you have to share Megan. David. We do not currently have roles, but we'll implement in our next conference. OK, we have limited roles, but a very large leadership group. I found myself moving in and out of roles like this informally for one of my contexts. Innovator is great to have the other side. Our critical friend reviews our norms, which is very operational. Did you rotate the roles you shared? Yes. Kathy, we did. Co-chairs though were the same. They were the same for the whole year. And the reason why I did that is they were also the union reps for the building, and I wanted people to know that I was willing to work with people that might have a different perspective than I do. I prefer your description of critical friend, Bernadette. Thank you. Yeah. Critical friend, like, you know, and sometimes I'm the accountability partner. There's somebody I'm coaching here in Hawaii. She wants to do walkthroughs on a consistent basis. So we've made an agreement that I'm going to text her every Wednesday and say, how did your walkthroughs go?

So even like that accountability partner could maybe be a different role on there. Thank you. I love, I love what you have been doing in the chat box. So I know some of you wrote this already, but just quickly in the chat box as I move on, what roles might you consider out of the ones that we just talked about? I know somebody mentioned innovator and you asked a bunch of questions, but what's a role on there that you might consider? And I'll tell you a little bit more about the accountability partner. My friend Mike, who is a retired superintendent in Washington state and somebody I worked with. He actually, he's going to do an accountability partner. He's running a workshop soon, and he designated one person who is a participant who he knows who's going to be the accountability partner. And in every break, that person is going to come to him. And Mike is going to say, so what did you learn from that section? What did you think I wanted you to learn? And he's going to do it that way to make sure that his teacher clarity is there.

I do enjoy taking the minutes, being the role-taker, however, note-taker a much more passive role. But it's still important because people want to read those notes, right. A devil's advocate. Yes. Visual note-taker or innovator. Another role we have here in Australia, Shelby, is acknowledgement of country. Yes. Absolutely. And you know, in the United States, there are few states where they do that very well. And then as you can imagine, because you probably hear about the political stuff that happens here, there are other states that would never do that. So it kind of depends. I'm currently a critical friend. I would like to be the co-chair. Alright. Very good Julie. OK. So the rest of our time is going to be made up by going through the eight drivers. And I specifically use the language drivers because it came from Michael Fallon. Michael Fallon actually wrote the foreword to the book. I've known Michael for many, many years, and one of the things that Michael said, and I use this as the criteria for the drivers, is that a driver is something that fosters intrinsic motivation.

It engages educators and students in continuous improvement. It inspires collective work or teamwork, and it impacts all teachers and students 100%. And you might look and say, well, how is that going to happen? Well, when you think about the priorities that you put in the chat box, those are priorities that impact 100% of your students. So keep that in mind. The first driver is that of mindset. And actually one of you, at least one of you wrote about this in the chat box because you said it's a change in mindset. And you're absolutely right. Now, Carol Dweck actually wrote a testimonial for the book. I have had Carol on my Ed week show called a seat at the table, and she's somebody whose work I really admire. But for this particular slide, you can see that I used a quotation from Rhinesmith. It's a predisposition to see the world in a particular way. And when we talk about mindset, it's not just the growth versus fixed, it's also the whole idea of what is their mindset for when they show up to your, let's call it an instructional leadership team meeting.

Do they show up with the mindset that they're going to be talked at? Or do they show up with the mindset that they're going to be engaged through co-construction of success criteria and roles, and they're going to be a more active partner than in other meeting spaces that they've been in? People don't necessarily hate meetings. What they hate is not understanding the purpose of the meeting or being talked at at the meeting. What I want you to think about in your leadership role and in order to develop collective efficacy, that's shared understanding and engaging in that joint work is that people have the mindset that they're there to engage and learn and share. Now quickly, I had done things and I do this in workshops, like what is the you know, when you think about an individual and a leadership team, think about the individual team coming, the individual coming with a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset, or the leadership team, which is the top one, having a growth mindset or a fixed mindset.

And these are examples. An individual who shows up to your team meeting with a growth mindset understands the important to be present and, you know, mindset and what they focus on as a team is also beneficial for them as an individual. I once had a teacher in an elementary school say, Peter, you know, I couldn't do a role because if it's going to take away from the work I'm doing in my classroom, I can't do that. And I said, the problem is you don't see the work that you're doing as a team to actually be something beneficial for what you do in the classroom. You see, there's a disconnect between what you do in the classroom and what your team focuses on. Where you focus on as a team should have definite impact on what you do within the classroom. A fixed mindset would be that there are people that are individuals that show up to your team meetings, and they don't see the connection between what they do in the classroom and what you're doing at the team meeting. And then you have to think about the leadership team, you know, do they come in and they develop roles and do they engage in professional learning together?

So the growth mindset one is really important. So instead of focusing on change, focus on improvement. Right. Viviane Robinson out of New Zealand always talks about we change all the time, what we need to focus on is improvement. Instead of feeling improvement in your gut or the anecdotal stuff, collecting evidence to understand your impact, right. Those are things that we have to, instead of focusing solely on Covid learning loss, understanding where students are in their learning. So mindset is number one and it's a big one. Number two, wellbeing. When I was writing this book, I was very frustrated because there were a lot of articles where people were saying, teachers just need to give ten minutes to breathe. I practice meditation every day, so I felt like it was unfair to meditation to say that. The important thing about meditation is not just the ten or 20 minutes that I spend doing it in the morning, it's how that bleeds into the rest of my day. How do what I learn from those ten minutes of silence and being focused on the present, how does that impact how I coach?

Wellbeing is the same thing. What do we do in practice within our schools where it impacts the whole day? You know, giving teachers the, you know, ten minutes to breathe is great, but it's also about looking at things like, what about their workload? How about honoring their time when they're at a meeting? Roles are about honoring your time. Yes. Proactive wellbeing, Katie. Right. Those are the things that are really important. Setting boundaries around emails and those kind of things are important. And for those of you that are dealing with teacher attrition issues, one of the ways too is to actually engage in what are referred to as empathy interviews. They're one on one conversations with teachers. We do this with students, but in this particular case, I'm talking about teachers one on one conversations to talk about the specific experiences, but also, what are your needs? What are the challenges to doing the work, right? And having those, those are our strategy we can use with wellbeing, because when we do empathy interviews with our teachers and we start to see what the same challenges are, those become the common themes that we can look at and address as a leadership team.

Alright. So what specific actions do you take to focus on the mindset and wellbeing of others and yourself? So in the chat box, what specific actions are you taking back at school right now to focus on the mindset of well being of others in your school, but also yourself? Do you set boundaries? Do you tell people that they don't need to check email after they leave work every day? What are the things that you're doing? Put that in the chat box for me. Schedule send emails. Yes, Julie, that's absolutely wonderful and something that I try to do too. That's a wonderful one. You know, wellbeing is even how we talk to each other. (UNKNOWN) parking lot. OK, Shelby, I need you on mute for that one, please. What is a (UNKNOWN) parking lot?

SHELBY STEWART:

So when participants or staff members come into a meeting, give them, say, five minutes time at the start so that they can get out all of the things that are ruminating on their mind, and then they've got that. So, you know, I need to email this person, call this person, they need to park it, and then that allows them to be present in the meeting.

PETER DEWITT:

Oh, I love that. Thank you. Totally going to try to steal that one too. You guys are... I'm learning more from you than you're probably learning from me. Jennifer, I need you to talk to me a little bit about what are walking discussions.

JENNIFER CROWLE:

Rather than sitting because, you know, like, we can sit and have a chat, but we can walk and check the fences and chat at the same time. So sometimes not having that direct eye contact helps some people, you know, how do we differentiate for all the adults that we work with. So just yeah, and it's good exercise too. Like you've got to get up lots and lots of steps, so you might as well walk and talk.

PETER DEWITT:

Yeah, when I run workshops I try to do at least 50/50, like 50% processing time and 50% content. And giving them time to get up and move is so important. So that's awesome. I love that. Walking discussions. Connect with someone different every day in the staff room. Connection and belonging. Thank you for that, Katie. Joel, random times of the term I will drop-kick cats to my staff to remind them to have a break. No emails outside of work emails unless I reply to the request. Consider what we use meetings for, collective work rather than the transmission to detailed items for email. That's right. Stop apologizing for not working out of hours, both myself and others. Yes. I got to tell you, we judge ourselves hugely. Part of my coaching role, I just, talked to a high school principal today. I said, do you realize that you've judged yourself several times in the meeting that we just had? That self-judgment thing is crazy. And I talked to him about you're focusing on what you're not doing.

Focus on what you are doing. Focus on. And he was like, you know, I made a big mistake and I never going to do that again. No, that's learning. Learning what to do and what not to do. But that self-judgment piece is something that we have to consider. Nathan, be flexible around people's commitments. Trust them to meet the demands of their work over time, but give freedom if they need to go to an appointment or leave a bit early. Yes, Bernadette, we have a signature on all emails that says the hours of talking and responding, 8:30. That's awesome. Catch up with people having a bad day. Acknowledge others. Jennifer, that's right. And yes, Katie, taming the inner critic. Tomorrow we have a newsletter going out. It's, we call it Unreasonable Leadership. Unreasonable or good leadership stories. And I'm talking about gratitude. Our focus is gratitude. The inner critic piece is something I talked about in there. Respect people's boundaries. Very good. Ask what is useful to you. You guys are awesome.

Alright, the third one is professional learning and development. I don't really like to call it training. And where this comes from is the work of Andy Hargreaves and Michael Folan. And I've loved this since I read it in 2017. Professional learning like student learning, where we're talking about something that is deliberately structured and increasingly accepted, but it's linked to measurable outcomes, right? We're talking about strategies, but not just the strategy, but how it impacts student learning. Professional development is when we talk about developing mindfulness and team building. Those are things that are really important. When we talk about how we come together and then what we come together about, this is professional learning development. And that's why mindset, these are all interrelated, right? All these eight drivers are interrelated. Having the mindset that we're not just showing up to a meeting, we're showing up to a professional learning session, is important. And that's why using protocols and having a facilitator of learning, there are just so many ways that we can get people into these smaller discussions, and then they can share in a bigger stance too.

You know, Lefevre Helen Timperley out of New Zealand, what they talk about is really effective professional learning has an inquiry stance. I talked to you a little bit about collaborative inquiry at the beginning. Valuing and using deep conceptual knowledge. That's why I have researcher as part of that. That role, and facilitator of learning. Being agentic means developing agency in others. You saw that Ken Leathwood slide. Being aware of cultural positioning, meaning the culture of your school. Being metacognitive. I've talked a lot about giving people time to process, and I've tried to do it with you here. And then bringing the systemic focus. Something else I talked to you about. The difference between collective teacher and collective leader efficacy is that collective leader efficacy is really making sure you have that system focus. It doesn't mean collective teacher efficacy is not important because it is. If you can develop collective teacher efficacy in every grade level or department, that's outstanding for your whole entire school.

It's just that the leadership team is going to look at that whole systems view. Number four is working conditions. Working conditions, really important. And you know we can talk about job benefits. And we're talking about pay scale, but we're also talking about the happiness factor. Do I feel happy to come into work? As a principal, I met all my teachers at the doorway. And I wanted to make sure that they were kind of laughing when they went into school each day. It did me no good to actually make them angry in the beginning of the morning and then have kids come in, right? So it was about starting their day off well. And then I went to every classroom every morning to say good morning to the kids. So working conditions are like that. But it's also, you know, it's also workload. And I'm going to talk about that a little bit more in just a minute, about school disciplinary environment. People, the research actually showed that if the school discipline rates were high, principals were more likely to leave the job.

And then, of course, principal influences on school matters. When you're a new leader, you have to feel some sort of sense of influence on some of the school matters, or you're going to feel like you don't have a voice at all. What I'd like to talk to you about a little bit with workload is that of de-implementation, and this is a book that I published last year. De-implementation is the abandonment of low-value practices. Here's the thing about workload that's really interesting. Helen Temperley and Vivian Robinson in 2000 wrote a paper on workload from a study that they had done. And what they found is that teachers contribute to their workload more than any initiative does. And why? Because we don't let things go. When I wrote de-implementation, I talked about five ways we over-implement, and one of them is emotions over evidence. We don't like to let things go because maybe it's something we've been using for years, even though it might not even make sense. So when we talk about workload, part of what has to go into that conversation is de-implementation, which is what are those practices that we need to abandon.

It's kind of like the conversation, the beginning of our time together. At the beginning of our time together today we talked about, well, we have an agenda. How can we develop success criteria? Maybe what we have to do is be able to look and say, that agenda doesn't have to be as so many things on the list. And Shelby, keep adding extra to the Christmas tree, but never taking anything off. You're absolutely right. So part of what you can do as a leadership team is say, so if we're going to do this, what's one thing that we're not going to do? Or what I've started to do with teams is say, what's on your not-to-do list? You talked earlier about your priorities. Then I'll start talking about what success criteria is. And then I'll ask them about their action steps. And then I'll say, so what are you doing that needs to be on your not-to-do list? What are the things that are getting in the way of you reaching your priorities? So that's right. Start, stop and continue. So what's on your not-to-do list?

What are the things that you can take off that list? So, how are professional learning and development and workload interrelated? I'm going to give you a minute, because we don't have a lot of time left. But how might professional learning development be interrelated with workload? And as you're doing that, I'm going to read David, can you unmute? I love your question and I want to hear it out loud.

DAVID:

Hi there, Peter.

PETER DEWITT:

Hi, David.

DAVID:

Hey. So in a situation where you've got some implementation programs that people have spent significant amount of time implementing over maybe several years and then in that de-implementation process there's quite a bit of grief that comes from the loss of that, I'm curious as to how you might suggest managing that situation.

PETER DEWITT:

Well, there are a couple of things first that I would need to know, right? So in de-implementation work I do, I created a de-implementation checklist. And it's really about why are we going to de-implement it. Like, why is it not working? Is it not working because of the way we're implementing? Or is it not working because we don't need it anymore, right? Because there is that concept of we can replace an existing practice with a new practice. But sometimes we have to de-implement because it causes harm or we find something that's better or that we just don't need to do it anymore. Like contact tracing from COVID, we just don't need to do it anymore. So my first question to yours would be, what is it you're de-implementing that people spent several years working on? And are you de-implementing it because you just don't need it anymore? Or are you de-implementing it because you found something better? And then I also think your focus on grief is really important. You do have to allow people time to grieve.

And I think part of that is where it's the Pollyanna in me. I'm going to look and say, what did we learn during that work that we were doing? Like over those several years, it wasn't just about implementing that. What is the bigger picture as far as what we learned when we were implementing it. Did we develop collective efficacy? Did we come together closer as a team? When we did that, did I change practices within my classroom that I still can use, even though we're not going to be using that thing anymore? So I think there are ways that you can go about that conversation as well. And I think it's an excellent question, David. Tracy, ensuring improvement measures are evidence-based. Incremental gains, not new quick grabs. That's right. One of the other reasons why we overimplement what I put in the book is, what is it? Thin content, nice packaging. Publishers do that all the time. People who feel overworked don't feel like doing the PLD. They're not in a receptive state. You're absolutely right.

So let's move on to the last four. So there's organizational commitment. This is a really easy one. When I look at your priorities, it gives me an idea of what your organization is committed to doing. So when you look at those priorities, what does that tell you about your organizational commitment? Is your organizational commitment to kids? Is your organizational commitment just to adults or is your organizational commitment to both? Do you focus on learning or do you focus on adult issues? Organizational commitment is about what your organization is committed to. And there are lots of times, including this morning, where I had to ask questions because it seemed like the organization was committed to just the adults because they weren't talking about student learning. And I needed to ask clarification questions. That's what organizational commitment is. The sixth one is context beliefs. And you've already seen this actually, because this comes from Ken Leathwood. It's a belief about whether when we're going to be innovative, that our school is going to support us.

And Edweek Research Center, I write for Education Week, they did a study a few years ago. They found that 86% of principals completely agree they support teachers when they're trying to be innovative. The problem is, 46% of teachers completely agree that their leaders support them when they're trying to be innovative. So context beliefs is really important. Because if I don't feel like I'm going to be supported, then I'm probably not going to try to be innovative, because I'm just going to go back and do whatever I think is going to be valued, as opposed to me stepping outside my comfort zone. So context beliefs is that. The second to last one is the skills to work in collectives. When your team comes together, what is their emotional intelligence, right? That's where we focused already on things like wellbeing and mindset. What are their communication skills? How do they talk to one another? Do they make sure they put their phones down. Sometimes, you know, when I'm working with people, I can see them looking at their Apple Watch because they're getting an email, right?

So how are we communicating? How are we being present in the meeting, in the learning. Social sensitivity. How are we communicating with people in a way that I'm communicating to David in a way that I know David will be receptive. Sometimes as new leaders, what we have to find is some people need us to be really blunt and cut to the chase. Others need more kid gloves. We need to differentiate our communication just like we differentiate our teaching. So part of the social sensitivity is the whole idea of understanding how to talk to one another. And you're right, Katie, group norms need to be co-constructed. Absolutely, right? Ability to contribute to the collective responsibility. If we value voices and we've done that work in the other drivers we've talked about and we've developed that shared understanding and we're engaging in that joint work, then people are going to contribute to the collective responsibility. It's not going to be I'm doing this because Katie is making me. I'm doing this because this is what the team co-constructed together.

And with the roles that I talked about, that's the ability to contribute ideas, right? We have to feel valued so we can contribute ideas. So the skills to work in collectives is the second to last. What we also know is that if there's an absence of trust, this comes from Patrick Lencioni work, there's going to be a fear of conflict, there's a lack of commitment, and then there's an avoidance of accountability. So trust is at the heart of all of this. Michelle wrote, in some teams I've worked with and these skills have been foundational piece of the work, right? Expected behaviors for adults. Absolutely. Last but not least is the confidence to work in collectives. And this is actually a book end of Michael Flynn's drivers, because the confidence to work in collectives comes from the work of Albert Bandura, who introduced self efficacy to us. And what he found is that there are four experiences that help increase our level of efficacy, both self efficacy and collective efficacy. Number one is a mastery experience.

When we go through a challenging activity, we come out stronger on the other side. Vicarious experience, when we learn from others. That's why I talked about roles and professional learning. Vicarious experiences are huge because we can learn from other people and use that. Verbal persuasion, how we provide feedback and how we talk to somebody. And then physiological and affective states. And it's something that I talked about three times in this time together. When people feel anxious, it diminishes their efficacy. When they feel excited and motivated, it increases their efficacy. So those are quickly, the eight. Now, last but not least, I want to share this with you, my friend Mike, who is in the picture. I have the Instructional Leadership Collective. We have a newsletter that goes out every month, and we focus on different things. This month in October or I'm sorry, it's November for you already, and it's going to be November for me in a couple of hours, we focused on women in leadership.

We use Padlet because just like developing collective efficacy, what we do is we have a link in every newsletter because we want readers to share their voices on the topic that we're focusing on. So the newsletter goes out again tomorrow. So if you're interested in being a part of our newsletter, the QR code is up on the screen. And it's really just unreasonably good stories of leadership because we want to focus on the positive. Besides that, I want to thank you all for taking the time to be with me. I hope that it was helpful to all of you. And if you have any questions, you can put them in the chat box because we have a couple of minutes left. But besides that, I can turn it over to whomever.

JUSTINE MACKEY :

Thank you, Peter. I'm imagining that there will be a few things coming there in the chat. I just want to pay my appreciation and acknowledge the high level of engagement, Peter, that you have generated this afternoon, the level of engagement within the chat and through the breakout groups, and also people sharing when they're coming off mute, is really indicative of the level of efficacy that you have actually shown here today. And, you know, when you've said that when people feel excited and motivated, it increases their efficacy, I think that you have actually created that for us here this afternoon. We thank you so very much for sharing your expertise. And really was very much conscious of how many notes I was taking, and I saw others doing that as well. And thank you to everybody for being here this afternoon. Thank you. And we wish you a safe time in Hawaii. And for everybody who has joined us here today, enjoy your evening and have a fabulous week.