Reflection of the Year

The year has been primarily about teaming and learning design. Both have been a huge success for Pounamu.

The team has been through many forced changes of mentors and every time the team have coped professionally and personally, by looking after each other. Tetli's growth in teaming has been down to her determination to succeed and through the support of the team. The loss of Rachel for a term was a blow, but we fortunate to have Amy who slotted in superbly and brought her own positive energy and honesty to Pounamu. Towards the end of the year was particularly difficult with Roanna finding life at school difficult, but again the team supported personally and professionally to ensure that she settled sooner rather than later.

The creation of the BPP's on teaming and powerful learning were integral to our success. By the end of term 2 there was a genuine trust within the team which was down to myself deliberately building relationships with team members and also strategically organising mentors to work together. Although Rachel's constant coaching for me around understanding and respecting the personal side of the team was essential. Even though I have improved and I am not convinced I would be able to bring her natural ability to a new team by myself. We complimented each other really well and we respected each other's strengths and weaknesses.

We are very proud of our 'Priorities.' For lots of reasons. It took a clear vision to keep us on track, we knew if we could create this - it would be a game changer for us. The entire term 2 was building the capacities of the students and then activating all the different types of priorities so they could complete them independently. Once we were clear with the why and finally had the how sorted, the creation of the clipboard and organiser was the final piece of the puzzle. By eventually jumping in and setting up priorities from the beginning opened a climate of possibilities. We have never looked back and are still tweaking it to perfection.

Joint Accountability (as a team)

Leadership Video - Jan Robertson

Jan talks about our everyday practice as leaders helps coach others and how we develop in other people the responsibility of taking ownership of their own development. She also talks about encouraging others to take accountability and develop creative thinkers through our own leadership practice. She discusses the idea of partnership as entering a relationship where we can step into the space of someone else and model that we are willing to have our beliefs challenged by hearing other people's perspectives. Show that we are willing to learn from the people we work with. 

Jan talks about the most important part of leadership is relationship and building strong relationships around us. She discuss the importance of modelling the mindset of avoiding the status quo and asking the question of what's possible here. 

After watching the video it made me realise that coaching is not confined to the scheduled coaching sessions where we discuss our goals and whether we achieved them or not. It is the everyday modelling around taking accountability of our kaizen. This idea kind of explained why we have been so successful this year.  Even though each mentor had their own kaizen focus, they were part of our team kaizen and we all took responsibility of them all! The everyday discussions around environment, engagement and student voice ensured that mentors were permanently thinking about them and asked to talk about them in one way or another - they couldn't escape them!

As a leader/coach, if it wasn't raised by a team member (it usually was!), I would model challenging our design to ensure we were using the environment effectively or can we improve our engagement in other areas of our learning. I/we were not putting up with the status quo. What epitomised this approach was our discussion for term 4, we could have easily seen the year out as we have achieved so much, but no... Tetli spoke about engaging students with mini-mentors, Roanna spoke about designing a quiet space with the students and Rachel was still wanting to collect more voice to ensure our priorities were supporting the students from their perspective. Fantastic. 

Coaching - Kaizen

"Coaching is an art, and it's far easier said than done. It takes courage to ask a question, rather than offer up advice, provide an answer, or unleash a solution. Giving another person the opportunity to find their own way, make their own mistakes, and create their own wisdom is both brave and vulnerable. (Brené Brown, author of Rising Strong and Daring Greatly)

This quote captures a lot of my development with coaching this year. Over time, particular questions got to the point and moved our discussions in a purposeful and honest way. Every mentor created their own journey with a little of turn here and there based on evidence in the habitat.

The key elements to our success was having the kaizen focused on what was needed for the habitat and that provided constant feedback on how effective there ideas or plans were. 'Necessity is the mother of invention' when the need for something becomes essential,' you are forced to find ways to achieve it. This was the definitely the case for all our kaizen. Many times there were tweaks and adjustments or even a complete new approach was needed because it was essential to meet a goal.

Another key element was the clarity of our vision and what we were trying to achieve. By having the Simon Sinek 'acid test' to compare it against kept the discussions on track. The honesty of the mentors was crucial, but also being able to trial things and reflect on them, they made their own mistakes and were quick to acknowledge them. Through discussion we both grew in the areas of the kaizen and we were able to have informed discussions which were crucially based on our agreed shared vision.

Also, a key element was accountability. The mentors agreed to meet every 4-5 weeks knowing their short term goals would be discussed. In most cases, every mentor made a small but decisive step forward. It became the norm and having three kaizen's moving us forward was incredible.

Kaizen Reflection Term 2

• Grow the capabilities (leadership, teaming and practice) of others through a clear coaching process
• Be an integral part of other mentor's teaching as inquiries (Roanna - environment, Tetli -engagement) through creating clear goals every 4-5 weeks

Key things implemented

Weekly timetabled kaizen meeting

Linking kaizen to Stonefields visit

Creating goals to be reviewed in 4-5 weeks

Crucial Conversations individually and collectively

What is my Desired Reality?

• To grow the capabilities of team members in leadership, teaming and practice
• My coaching process becomes clear and effective
What am I wanting to develop my own capacity on through this inquiry?

• Build knowledge around coaching techniques
• Develop skills/questioning around having difficult conversations
• To articulate my/our values and beliefs through coaching to inspire the team to bring them to life

Term 2 Team Reflection

As a team we have made a lot of changes and have made a lot of progress regarding our design for learning. We made a real shift towards creating purposeful agency so students can impact their learning. The use of deliberate scaffolding with clipboards and a organiser was crucial. Learning from watching Emma teach reading recovery ensured we do not lose sight of the importance of explicit teaching, in our case it was phonics and handwriting. The focus on finding out student's interests ensure they were engaged and this had a huge impact on them staying on task and completing them effectively with purpose (this was provided with a question).

The biggest concern was the complete lack of balance in my life. This has been by far the most challenging term in both teaching and leadership. It is incredibly hard to get the balance between teaching and leadership in the current Team Leader role. In fact, you can't. Without this flexibility, when the teaching becomes overwhelming, you can't control it as much as you want to without effecting the team and this leads to stress. This has lead me to rethink many things personally and professionally.

Mark Treadwell advises, we must focus on ourselves as much as the students. We must ensure mentors have a balance in life and our motivated to work. There are a few factors I can control and influence, and I will make attempt to make change to ensure I get balance as I will not be able to sustain my career at SPS.

Summary

Agency/Capacities - Bingo, Clipboard and organiser Explicit Teaching - observations with Emma Engagement - based on inerests, questioning Formative Assessment - Pebbles (awareness of goals?) Balance - students and team (us), setting up a nightmare, Relationships - WaRM preso came up often, important to us - can we design our learning to build on that (particulary with WAVE expectations (ie every two weeks - the thought of this terrifies me - something needs to be changed to make this doable and not a problem) Oral Language - Inner Voice develop self awareness - MT Use of Data - tracking reading (ensures our teaching is targeted) Looking after the environment - more agency for students and nature of learning has made this a challenge - but giving students time to pack away etc is vital - we cannot do it ourselves

Kaizen Question/Focus

What am I wanting to focus on?

• Grow the capabilities of others through a clear coaching process
• Be an integral part of other mentor's teaching as inquiries (Roanna - environment, Tetli -engagement) through creating clear goals every 4-5 weeks

What is my Desired Reality?

• To grow the capabilities of team members in leadership, teaming and practice
• My coaching process becomes clear and effective
What am I wanting to develop my own capacity on through this inquiry?

• Build knowledge around coaching techniques
• Develop skills/questioning around having difficult conversations
• To articulate my/our values and beliefs through coaching to inspire the team to bring them to life

Battling the 'Always On' Culture

I have had a terrible start to the term regarding disconnecting and looking after my well-being. I am particularly frustrated as I felt I had begun to create a decent balance of work and family. 

The article has really reminded me that I need to be more conscious of disconnecting on the weekend. I need to create a definitive time of disconnection, whether it be an entire day or separate my leadership reading to a Saturday - which, interestingly,  I particularly enjoy and not see that is a necessary disconnect? Is that wrong in regards of disconnecting? Is all of it purposeful?

As Shotover, thankfully, does not have an Email culture - my 'addiction' is SLACK, Twitter, Facebook regarding education. I have myself wasting time wandering in and out of articles without any real purpose when there is a lot more things I should be getting on with.  I have been pleased with how I have cut out Twitter, I feel a lot better and more focused and productive - but I can do better. 

Cognitive Overload can lead to becoming distracted and be drawn to things that we prefer for a short fix, rather than putting our time into more productive areas. I have definitely find myself avoiding deeper thinking work and justifying work with simpler tasks. I have found myself doing a lot more housework? :) It is a distraction as an avoidance of a deeper thinking work.

"But people prefer reading an email to thinking about a problem more deeply. We don’t have the reflex anymore to spend three of four hours on one project. It is a constant distraction.”

In most cases, we are in the position to be able to manage our work schedule, but can teachers manage this successfully without any support? Teaching in a flexible learning environment is incredibly complex and there is a lot more to contend with than teaching in a single cell. Scheduling 'technical' tasks requires management skills which can be taught and develop quickly, 'adaptive' tasks are the opposite. Every adaptive problem requires a new solution and an approach, as much as we try to find one, we can not deal with it in an efficient systematic way. You can have a framework with questions etc, but they are totally dependent on knowing people and background etc. Ultimately, they always take time and it will have unknown variable (s) and can be incredibly frustrating. This adds another variable of frustration which leads people to not want to deal with the problem in an efficient way ie give it the time to be fully dealt with. In our environment we have to deal with both issues of dealing with management work as well as relationship work. Tony Burkin described it as 'relentless' and he is spot on, particularly in relation to the daily 'adaptive' problems we have.

As a team leader, it is essential the management side of our habitat is totally sorted and under control for all mentors. It is something we can manage and ensure its one thing less to worry due to the daily 'adaptive' problems. If you add to problems that are already there it can lead to cognitive overload and mentors becoming stuck. 

Action: Spend more meeting time on the management problems ie Communicating Learning and gathering data for OTJ's.

Action: Teaming skills will be dealt with during mentor meetings and a short time in our team meeting too.