Student-Centered Leadership by Viviane Robinson - A summary of what stood ut for m

A few things that resonated with me when reading: (my thoughts are typed in blue)

What is meant by leadership?

A common judgment of leadership is: 

1. the quality of school management - children are happy and behaved, school is orderly and how the property is looked after.

2. the relationships with adults in the system - staff, parents, district officials

3. to equate it with innovation - however, innovation practice is not necessarily predictive of student learning. Some innovations don't work and schools engaged in multiple innovations can burn staff out, create incoherence in the instructional program, and make things worse for students.

So what is leadership correctly measured as? How much formal authority you had, attraction to personal qualities (e.g. dedication, selflessness, ethic of caring or courage), and relevant expertise (offering knowledge and skills that can help others).

Not only those with formal authority over others, but also people leading from a basis of expertise, ideas, and personality or character. In summary: people who influence (which means in a school setup that could be anybody).

Being a student-centered leader is not about how qualified you are or how high the grades were that you obtained when studying, it is about using knowledge about effective teaching, teacher learning, and school organisation to make high quality administrative decisions in a school.

This made me realize that leadership is not only about the status of your appointment, but how you can use your experience and expertise to help others, demonstrating good qualities such as professionalism, dedication to the needs of the students, and selflessness.

Solving-Problems: 

If a leader wants to implement a new innovation, introduce it at a staff meeting and learn from the ensuing discussion what is important to colleagues/teachers. Through the discussions, the leader will get answers or ideas that have tension between them. Therefore it's important to critically scrutinize each idea so if for example one person sees that a new assessment will add to be a burden and overassessment, it's important that the leader asks if others feel the same way. If the claim of over-assessment survived the scrutiny, the proposed requirements stay on the table or on the list of solutions which means that something else needs to go. Leaders need to scan and encourage all participants to take responsibility for the whole problem by keeping the list of requirements in front of everyone and insisting that suggested solutions are evaluated against all of them.

This reminded me of all times I heard that you can't help people by doing things to them, I have to get them to do things with me. Implementing an idea because I think it is going to solve a certain problem and just throwing it at my colleagues, will not bring change. It is important to bring an idea to a table, get the input of my colleagues by scrutinizing it and then collaboratively decide if it is worth implementing.

Trust

Trust is built by respect (valuing ideas of others), personal regards (caring about personal and professional lives of staff e.g. meeting with a teacher for career planning and professional development purposes is likely to build trust as it signals that the leader cares), and competence (people are reliant on others to succeed in education. It's often easier to discern incompetence than high competence because signs of incompetence are more public and less ambiguous).

 Leaders are often judged on how they handle incompetence for example teachers and parents make negative judgments about a principal's incompetence when buildings are not orderly and safe and when individuals interact in a disrespectful manner. Judgment of leaders' competence is often based on how they deal with perceived incompetence in the staff for whom they are responsible. Allowed to persist, gross incompetence is highly corrosive to trust and undermines the collective effort. Leaders who are conflict avoiders or conflict escalators are unlikely to deal with competence issues in a timely and effective manner. Because school Improvement requires sustained collective effort, teachers may reduce their commitment if they judge that their leaders cannot deal with those who will wittingly or unwittingly undermine the group's effort. Integrity teachers make a judgment about whether their leaders walk the talk keep their word and resolve difficult conflicts in a principal and even-handed manner. Integrity demands resolutions that reaffirm the primary principles of the institution. Actions must be understood as advancing the best interest of children. 

To build trust leaders have to deal effectively with breaches of trust including perceived poor performance, disciplinary matters, and failure to keep agreements. Yet it is these situations that leaders struggle to deal with because they feel caught in a dilemma between addressing the issue and taking care of relationships. 

This was such an interesting piece to read. The author hit the nail on the head when she says that some leaders struggle to address issues of incompetence or non-compliance as they are caught between addressing the issue and taking care of the relationship.

We often talk about having those hard conversations, and even though I have improved so much in this regard, I still find myself postponing these conversations to the latest stage possible. However, if we had the conversations earlier, changes for the better could have been made earlier and progress could have been made. The author gave some good examples of how to approach problems in an Open-to-Learning Conversation. Avoid Soft Sell of Hard Sell conversations, as they are closed and won't lead to improvement in teaching and learning. 

The effect of quality teaching:

How instructional coherence promotes achievements. We know that exposure to multiple representations of the same idea over a relatively short period of time so a unit of work spending 10 days promotes their learning. Learning opportunities that meet these conditions are more likely to be found in instructional programs that are planned around the progression of learning objectives that are mapped onto an instructional calendar. A common instructural framework means that teachers reinforce the same ideas, use similar vocabulary for communicating those ideas, know how to make links with it with what has gone before, and are guided in their efforts by common assessments. If students learning opportunities are integrated and cumulative, rather than fragmented and rushed, students are more likely to be engaged and successful. The second reason why students learn more in coherent programs is that the teachers are learning together about how to teach the things that are supposed to be learning. 

This emphasized to me how important our collaborative planning is and managing the timeframes around it. I am often told to slow down, and sometimes I'm not 100% sure what slow down in a full-on curriculum looks like, but what the author said makes 100% sense. (see bold sentence)

Opportunities to learn: TIME

The first idea looks at is how teachers use the time allocated to particular subjects. Time can be lost waiting for the learning activity to start because students or the teachers are late, because resources are not yet available or because the transition between activities is badly managed. One indicator of quality teaching is that routines are in place to minimize such wait time.

The biggest challenge in our collaborative space is the transitions. On top of the above-mentioned reasons for time wasters, I could add, in a collaborative space, if teachers are not on the same "page" transitions can be hindered as all of a sudden some teachers are confused as to what is happening next, or time allocations are not treated with respect. Confusions around which spaces they are working in and who is Learning Couch adds even more tension in the space and wastes time.

Secondly, time can be lost through misalignment between important intended learning outcomes and the lesson activities. In a unit of work on insects for example a teacher provides multiple opportunities to learn the characteristics of insects, including an art lesson in which students are asked to be creative and use their imagination in painting the insects. The teacher provides positive feedback on this basis and makes no comments about paintings that depict creatures that are not insects. At a more mundane level, lessons activities can be misaligned because learners spend their time drawing headings, colouring diagrams, and guessing the correct answer on worksheets rather than developing the intended conceptual understanding.

Yes, I agree. If the follow-up activity is not aligned with the learning attention, the opportunity to deepen students' understanding has been missed.

Thirdly, even though the wait time is minimized,  and lesson activities and teacher feedback are carefully aligned to the outcome, students may not be engaged with activities. Students are cognitively engaged when they are actively thinking about the material. It is important that being behaviorally engaged or on task is not taken by teachers or their evaluators as equivalent to be in cognitively engaged. The latter is best assessed by asking students what they are trying to learn and how they will know when they have been successful. Cognitive engagement may be low because the material may assume prior knowledge that the students do not have, or conversely, may present ideas that students already know. Learners may be disengaged because they do not feel emotionally connected with the material, with the teacher, or both.

This is where I want to put extra focus during my planning this term. I want to make 100% sure that the students in my groups are cognitively engaged not just behaviourally engaged. Even if the initial time for cognitive engagement is short compared to being behaviourally engaged.

The fourth way in which time is lost is through persistent lack of success. Quality teaching provides learning opportunities that are not only aligned to important learning outcomes and well-matched to students' prior knowledge and interests but also designed to promote success. This doesn't mean that all failure is to be avoided, because mastering important learning outcomes often requires considerable intellectual effort and persistence, and these are qualities that teachers should nurture. A key to promoting success is early detection of student's misunderstandings because such misunderstandings subvert the learning the teacher intends the students to gain from the lesson activities,

It is important that students get the opportunities to be successful. They must experience a sense of achievement, which means that tasks should be well thought off. Will the student be able to complete the task in the allocated time frame? Will they be able to do the task by themselves or at the max with the help of a buddy? How will his/her success be celebrated or acknowledged? The student must feel that his/her work is important, somebody will be looking at it, and he/she can take pride in their efforts.

In summary, quality teaching involves maximizing the time that students spend engaged with and being successful in the learning of important outcomes. This means that leaders' judgments about the quality of teaching are based on the four aspects:

1.  the importance of the outcome being  pursued

2.  alignment of the activities and resources with the outcomes

3. The behavioral and cognitive engagement of students

4.  the student success on the outcomes.