5 March 2024

In this episode we sit down with Chief Executive Professor Martin Westwell to discuss where to in 2024 following the release of last year’s public education strategy. Professor Westwell says it’ll be a year of educators putting things like the areas of impact into practice but not being too judgmental of themselves in the process.

Show Notes

• Helen Timperley – Leading Professional Conversations
• Michael Fullan

Transcript

Dale Atkinson: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education. And it must be the start of the school year because I'm sitting across from Professor Martin Westwell, our Chief Executive. Thank you very much for joining us.

Martin Westwell: Oh no, it's an absolute pleasure, Dale.

Dale Atkinson: Now, we were sitting here last year. We spoke a lot about what your plans were for 2023. 2023 was a pretty big scene-setting year with the launch of the Purpose Statement, the Department Strategy. So they're out in the wild, where to now?

Martin Westwell: Yeah, it was such a great year and we started off with all that input from our students and then saying, 'well what does this mean?' and the Strategy and then coming out with the Strategy. And as I've said lots of times, it was a "strategy" and it wasn't a "strategic plan". And we did that absolutely on purpose because strategic plans so easily just become plans like stuff to do.

So you end up with a lot of initiatives and then what you do is you congratulate yourself for going through the initiatives and getting to the end of them. And that can be impactful, but really what we want to do is focus on purpose and what we're [00:01:00] here for. Why are educators signed up to be educators in the first place, whether that be preschool, primary, high school teachers?

So we've, we've kind of really sat in that, 'let's get to grips with the Strategy and what was meant by the areas of impact and the guiding principles, how we're going to use some of the levers'. So we talked about that a lot.

And at the beginning of last year, you know, Leader's Day, we used a lot of international experts to help inform the conversation. And I think this year we're really now turning to say, 'well, what does that mean? How are we putting that into practice?'

For lots of our sites, they were already looking at the areas of impact and really now building up momentum, saying, 'well, I'm kind of getting this out.' It wasn't being as recognised before, as much before as it is now. And so we're really kind of saying, 'so we were already putting into action and we're going to double-down on what we were doing because we could see that it was working for our kids'.

For others, it's going to be a year, I think, where they're going to say: 'well, I'm going to try out this area of impact. I want to put focus in on this. This is in our school. This is going to be our focus'. And then grappling with [00:02:00] the, "how are we going to do it?"

And, you know what? Sometimes we're going to be really successful and sometimes we're not, and it's not going to be successful. So we're not going to see improvement as this kind of lockstep series of things to go through.

That improvement cycle we've had in the past is a really good improvement cycle, but you've got to be able to have the human beings in it and know that it's a bit messy and sometimes it's going to work, sometimes it's not. Try some things out a particular way, and then if that's not working, well why is it not working? Do we need to do something differently? So it's a year of putting things into, into practice, but again, not being too judgmental of each other, not being too high-stakes about this. Really think about it as a year of learning how we together and in our individual sites are going to approach the Strategy and put it into practice.

Dale Atkinson: So it sounds like the message is one of being brave and trusting your professional judgment.

Martin Westwell: Absolutely. So the professional judgment is a really important part of our Strategy and the Strategic Plan. The, the planning for how we're going to put the Strategy into [00:03:00] place.

Because, again, I've talked about this quite a lot before, I don't think there's any such thing as "best practice" in education. That suggests that everybody's the same, education's simple, it's really well-established what to do and everybody should just do that. There may be one or two parts of education where we should do that. But really, what we know is that teaching and learning is just not that simple. And so to deal with the complexity, we need to rely on the professional judgment of our educators.

They're going to make decisions and choices that are in response to the students that they've got, the context, what's going on, the other staff at the school, the supports that they've got, a whole host of things to make those choices. And I want to empower our leaders, our teachers to be able to make some of those choices in their classroom, in their school, to make the biggest difference they can to our students. And that they can make some, you know, they can have some failures as well, that they can have those praiseworthy failures that we talk about: 'give something to go and if it doesn't work, well, that's okay. We can learn from it, take a step back and move [00:04:00] forward and be even more successful'.

Dale Atkinson: Now on a weekly basis you go out and visit schools and preschools, and so you're hearing them talk about this, and you're seeing how they're engaging with the Strategy and the Purpose. Have you seen anything that exemplifies the direction in which you want our system to head?

Martin Westwell: Oh look, so many things. You know, one of the things about the Strategy was, it was actually quite a reflection of what was already going on in, in many of our schools. So many of our schools with a focus on wellbeing and making sure that our students are able to regulate, are able to work with each other, are able to work well in classrooms. That all the things that need to be true for that classroom experience to be a good one put in place.

But you know, some of the places that I've been to when I think about other areas of impact, like being an effective learner, for example. Just watching students do things like self-differentiate. It's amazing!

So just pick out one example, I was at Mount Barker South Primary School and there they've got two classes, two teachers. And they got the two classes together [00:05:00] and it was a particular piece of maths work and they said, "so if you're", they had this particular language about, "if you're looking at this in the", I think it was "surface" that they were using.

"If you're just, if you're just getting into this and you're just starting and you're not so confident, you're just getting going, you can do this task in there with this teacher. If you, if you're going for deep and you've got an understanding of this and you're going a bit deeper and you really, you know, you think you can do these kinds of questions, stay here with this teacher. And if you're doing transfer, so if you're taking this idea and you think you can go with it, pair up and do this particular piece of work. No teacher, just get on with yourself".

And then I watched these kids sort themselves out. And I saw the teachers like intentionally looking across and like seeing some of the kids who had gone for the surface and going, "uh, not sure you're in the right spot. Go next door and see if you could, if you can give that a go".

And I talked to some of the kids who were doing the transfer piece, so they I could see them, they'd negotiated whether they were going to do the transfer bit or not. They talked [00:06:00] about it, they decided they were, sat down, they got on with their work. And I went over and said to them, "Why have you chosen to do this? Because, you know, if you went into that other class, the deep one, you'd be able to be really successful. Why don't you go in there and show everybody what you can do?" They looked at me as if I'd grown two heads. They said, "But we can already do that. You know, why, why would we, why would we go next door and do that because we can already do that. We're here trying to do this thing that we can't already do and we're grappling with it".

And so just fantastic to see. And that doesn't happen overnight, right? The learning culture the, again, the aspects of wellbeing that have to be in place. And then the kids are able to kind of do this differentiation, feel like they're in the right place and then just lean in and engage with their learning. It's an absolutely beautiful thing to see.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, and I think what goes for the kids there at their primary school goes for the schools and preschools within our system. That success looks very different for different settings and in different settings, doesn't it?

Martin Westwell: I think that's a really important point, right.

So, you know, so I [00:07:00] say this thing, but what I, what I don't want anybody to do is to kind of rush out and go and do that, you know, because it might not work in your site. That might not be the way that we get the biggest difference for the kids in every site. So there is something about, yeah, again, that teacher judgment. Having a good sense of what's going to make the biggest difference for these students with the staff that you've got, the students that you got and so on.

And so, you know, that's that difference between "best practice": everybody do this; to, you know, through to good practice and even emergent practice: these are the things we're trying so that we can make a difference for our students. And I think we see that again, we see that all over our system. And of course, some parts of that that are really important, you know, we've invested heavily in phonics.

And so clearly phonics and the phonics check that we've got really helping people to make decisions around what, when kids have got it and we can carry on and when we might need to put a bit more effort into that. But the way that people are doing it are different in different places. Just, again, making sure that it's, [00:08:00] we're having the maximum impacts that we can through good practice based on teacher judgment.

Dale Atkinson: Can I turn to the corporate office. What are your expectations around how the department's corporate services are going to orient themselves in light of the Strategy?

Martin Westwell: Yeah, you know, so for all of us, we've got, you know, we've got this purpose in education. And when you think about it, we're all having an impact on students.

And so we talk about them learning and thriving. We talk about them achieving and prospering. And how do you achieve that? That almost only happens through the interaction between a student and the people in a classroom, teacher or the students. Most of the time that's where that change occurs. So really everything we do, it's got to be focused on that moment.

And yet, because we need our systems in place and a whole host of things to really kind of focus down on that moment, those moments, that space in between. The student, child, an, an educator, whether that be in preschool or schools, focusing on that moment because that's where it makes the difference.

So there [00:09:00] is something about making sure that we are always operating in service of principal or a preschool director, their staff, in order to make the biggest difference to students.

Sometimes it feels like we ask people to do things to serve the system. And wherever we can, you know, there are some things where we have to do that. There's some national requirements for data collection, you know, even things like our finances. There's some requirements that we should have. But really asking all of us to say, 'is what we're doing really serving as best it can the people in schools and preschools to make the biggest difference they can to children and students'.

Dale Atkinson: Now at a meeting of principals recently you flagged a book by Helen Timperley, 'Leading Professional Conversations' I think it was called, as a, it's a bit of a touchstone on what leadership should look like and feel like under the Strategy. Can you talk us through the key learnings from that book?

Martin Westwell: Yeah, I think the reason why I was talking about Helen's book, and it goes back, I mean, this has been Helen's work for a long time, right? And she wrote a piece for the, for AITSL back in [00:10:00] 2015, 16, which was along the same sort of lines.

And really it's about the kinds of conversations that we have as leaders. And when I say "leaders", I kind of mean all of us, right? So in almost regardless of our role within public education, we're all leaders. You might have a formal leadership role or when we're providing a service and, of course, educators interacting with kids being leaders of learning and development. So we're all leaders. And what do those conversations look like? And Helen's book is particularly about kind of school leaders and people in that kind of leadership role.

But what she's saying is that the sorts of conversations that we need to be having. And much more of those kind of coaching conversations. And of course, when you're having coaching conversations, you're not telling someone what to do. That's, that's not what we're doing in coaching. You're kind of asking questions, you're prodding, you're getting people to think. And I definitely think that in a learning organisation, the way that we should be leading is through learning. We should see leading as a learning activity.

And so those conversations are kind of a prodding conversations they're [00:11:00] bringing out people's thinking. They might be putting two ideas together that just don't go together. So that natural tension that then kind of comes out of that, again, to stimulate thinking. The conversations have to be those kinds of conversations.

Anytime in leadership where we're using our positional power, things have probably gone wrong to a certain extent. Where we're using the kind of hierarchy of the organisation, things might have gone wrong. And you know, don't get me wrong, we have to have some structure to just get things done and there are some things, you know, some requirements.

So we've got NAPLAN, so we need to be communicating through our system when the NAPLAN test window is and this and that. That shouldn't be our starting point, that should almost be the kind of footnote of information that needs providing. The sorts of conversations that we should be having should be the conversations about the, it's the human conversations.

And Michael Fullan talks about systems having, you know, being in danger of having a kind of "bloodless paradigm". It's all about data, it's not about people. It's all about a transaction. It's all about training teachers to do this thing and do it in this way. [00:12:00] And he calls it the "bloodless paradigm". And he's calling for a shift to a human paradigm.

Where we're recognising the, kind of, the motivations that people have, what they bring to this social enterprise of learning. Because it is a social enterprise. Because it's a, it happens because of social interaction. You can, you can transfer information online, you can, that's quite easy to do. But when we know that, you know, we want to encourage somebody who's struggling with something, we want people to grapple. You want people to kind of look into each other's eyes and go, kind of, 'yeah, I trust you. I'm with you on this. We can do this thing together'.

There's a social interaction that's, that's going on there. So those coaching conversations that Timperley talks about, I think really helped with that. Recognising that this is a human paradigm, these are human beings interacting with each other, working together, grappling with the same sorts of things. And it's those conversations that we need to be having rather than more kind of compliance conversations.

Dale Atkinson: You touched in there about becoming a learning organisation and the importance of learning as an individual. What [00:13:00] have you personally learned from the process of developing the Purpose Statement and the Strategy?

Martin Westwell: So much. So much. Where to start?

You know, there's been some things. So some things about kind of, you know, just us as a system and the human system. Let me try and pick out a few. Some of the things I already knew, but have just been reinforced, just about the kind of, the commitment. You know, we talk about the moral purpose of educators and just how much that kind of shines through. And when it does shine through, the joy that comes from that, about, you know, letting educators be educators, letting teachers teach.

And, you know, when you do that the joy that comes with it. That's been really great learning. That was something that we'd intended through the Strategy. You know, we'd really come at it from that point of view to create a bit of space. And there's loads more work to do to create space for educators and leaders. But to create a bit of space to allow that joy to come through. And I think we're starting to see that happen now.

So it's, one of the learnings is it's doable. You know, there's this latent joy, you know, alright joy that's already [00:14:00] being expressed, but there's more of it that can be released in our system. I think there's something there.

One of the things I've seen as well is, you know, like we talked about before with the Strategy, we're setting out the choices that we're making as a system. This is the direction that we're going in. This is what's important to us. And you can criticise that and say, 'well, if you're not going to tell educators what to do, it's either a thousand flowers blooming, or it's just confusion for people'. Well, what I've learned is that that's not the case.

Some people need some support. Some of those coaching conversations we're about, you know, to draw out some of that thinking. Some people, you know, want to try this thing out but perhaps just need a bit confidence, a little bit of nudging along. But what I have seen is so many of the responses at a site level when people have taken that time to stop and think about where we're heading, how this connects with where they are as a school and as an individual professional and as a team of professionals, when people have done that and stopped and thought about it, there has been so many different responses. Almost all of them have just been fantastic, you know. [00:15:00] Really different action, but really bringing out the kind of heart and soul that we'd intended from the Strategy.

Again, I think there's still a distance for us to go. There always will be. There'll always be changes. There'll always be something that happens in the world, the students will, they'll change, the demands from society on educator and educators will change and we'll need to respond to those. But I do think we're in a, you know, a really positive place in South Australia. And, in fact, getting more and more national and international attention because of the work that we're doing.

Dale Atkinson: Flash forward a year from now, what do you want us to be talking about?

Martin Westwell: I think the conversation that we would need to be having would be about the impact that we see. You know, the road to impact. So, you know, so if last year was kind of looking at the big picture, getting the international thinking into our thinking, bringing all that together, this year being about us taking control of that story.

This is our story. It's South Australia's story. The introduction of some of the Australian curriculum, the adapted Australian [00:16:00] curriculum subjects this coming year. I think, you know, we really need to be saying, 'this is the impact we're starting to see. This is the change that we're seeing'.

And so if you take that kind of good and emergent practice notion, in a year's time what I think where we'll be as a system is we'll be able to see the things that we really want to amplify across the system. Might have been occurring at site level in some of the pilots and things that we've been trying out and saying, 'well, how are we going to amplify those things?'

We'll be clear about some of the things that are not working for us and we'll have to dampen those things down. So I do think we'll start to see almost kind of the output of the evaluation. Yeah, we've had some successes, we've had some things that have not been so successful and then building on those and, and make sure that the system can take those on and we can grow and learn further together.

Dale Atkinson: Grow and learn further together. Professor Martin Westwell, thanks for your time.

Martin Westwell: Thanks Dale.